Cyberwave: start-ups or upstarts
The surf’s up in Hyderabad. The surfboards are small, surfing is dangerous, many have foundered, but this does not deter the surfers. The stakes are as high as the surf. Indeed, it adds to the thrill and the challenge in the game. No, we are not talking about the sea and sand surf, but the silicon and cyber variety.

Enter the world of netpreneurs, of wild dreams, of wild ideas and of streets dotted with dotcoms. The cyberworld, where a large number of ciphers are there waiting for the 1 with the right idea. The buzz words are portals (generic, horizontal and vertical), niche segmentation, online everything and the biggest of them all, e-commerce.

Armed with degrees from US, Australian and top Indian universities, these brash, aggressive 25-somethings with hard drive are preparing to hook the new to cyberspace.

Leading the pack of netpreneurs in Hyderabad is Prashant Jain, a 25-year-old MS from an American University, whose indiadomain.com has been ranked fifth in terms of e-commerce transactions in India. In the small apartment converted into a office in Begumpet area, Prashant looks like an unlikely person for running a website with his almost kiddish looks. But let him do the talking, then it is revelation time.

“I must have done something right for being here. I chose to come back to India two years ago when the Internet boom was underway in the US. In India, this is just the beginning.”

Having junked a job in Netscape, Jain has four websites, all of them targeting Hyderabad and Andhra. His idea of a successful site is one where the browser is suckered into sticking onto the site. “The number of portals that we have is sickening. The people who are starting these sites don’t have a clue as to what they are doing.

Once they get into the site, they get kicked out to some other links,” says Jain derisively. The flagship website hydonline.com, started about two years ago, gets about one lakh hits per week. But Jain is wary of venture capitalists and is waiting for the day when there is an Internet connection in each home to make it more lucrative than a career in the US.

“Internet is the most defining thing of this century, there cannot be anything more defining than this. And I am at the heart of it all,” says Jain. He started the website with Rs 10 lakh. But unlike most other netpreneurs, Jain has not put all the eggs in one basket.

He offers a package of services including web hosting, design, promotion and maintenance of websites. This is where most of the money is coming from right now. As it does for reachouthyderabad.com started by three netpreneurs. In the one-room-two-computer office in grey Chikkadpalli area, Maju Kuriakose and brothers Anil and Ananth recount how they set up the site and what keeps them going without a single banner ad on their web page. “We are not interested in making money.

Money will come after some time once we make it big,” says Maju. “One day, I was chatting with Ananth, who was studying in Melbourne and the conversation veered round about lack of information about Hyderabad.

With so many people like us looking for information, we decided we will start one as early as possible. Money was not the criterion. Starting a website does not require much money or machinery, it is ideas and we had the idea,” says Anil, an MBA from DePaul University Chicago.

“The maximum number of users of Internet are from Hyderabad, that is why we did not think about starting a website on Calcutta or Bombay. But the speed of net access is very slow which is deterring a large number of surfers,” says Anil Babladi.For the e-commerce part, the transactions are taken care of by a partner Y Vikas, who is based in the US.

But the sites are nothing to write home about. Type out any URL (pronounced earl) with Hyderabad, Cyberabad or Andhra in it, you will land up at a website about Hyderabad and Andhra. But with no maintenance and not many new ideas going into the creation of the site, the sites look drab when compared to the original city portals of New York, London, Boston or Los Angeles.

Creating quality content requires both time and money. Money is no problem for most of the start-ups, it is the dearth of good content and maintenance that is the drawback.The one yardstick that all the start-ups swear by are the number of hits. “Primarily we are concentrating on getting a large number of hits,” is the mantra. But hits can just as well be misses in cyberworld.

Accessing each link in a website is recorded as a hit. This brings in the stark dichotomy in the claims of these netpreneurs. If a site claims 50,000 hits, either these many people accessed only the index page and moved away to other sites or one dedicated individual accessed all the links. In either scenario, the netpreneur cannot claim success for his site.

And the market is also in such a nascent state that nobody knows where the money is going to come from. And can you really sell to 45 million people on the Internet? Is advertising allowed? Is anybody making any sales? Can customers find you if you set up a World-Wide Web site?Media reports on Internet commerce are conflicting and often confusing. Myths abound.

Many business people have suffered disappointment after investing money, time, and high hopes based on over-hyped legends of riches to be made in cyberspace. Others hold back from getting involved in Internet marketing because of the dark warnings of the doomsayers and their mythology.But, in Hyderabad, all are biding their time for the big wave, a wave that is there at a distance but is surely going to hit the shoreline.

A day when web kids with big disposable incomes, wide Internet bandwidth and good computers sit at home and browse the net for hours together. Right now, it is not the web kids that the netpreneurs are looking at. What is luring these men with hard drive from the lucrative pastures of the West is not home or sentiment. It is the mouth watering demographics of the Internet revolution.

Chief Minster N Chandrababu Naidu put it in so many words when he said, “28 per cent of the software programmers worldwide are from Andhra.” Prasad Koka quit as EID executive with US energy major Southern California Edison in October to pursue his dream in Hyderabad. A green card holder, Prasad does not have any blinkers about Hyderabad.

“Most of the websites here have only sketchy information about Hyderabad, whereas my site will have equal amount of information on US cities,” says Prasad, an MBA from CalState University of Fullerton. Operating from his terrace two-bedroom block with four computers in Gandhinagar, Prasad shows the site and its host of features on an IBM Thinkpad with Kishore Kumar singing the eternal favourite from Aradhana, Mere sapnon ke rani kab ayegi tu. The site is set for a major upgradation and relaunch with a host of features, he says.

The song in the background is what is luring the Hyderabadis to cyberworld. With 28 per cent Andhra diaspora spread all over the world, everything about Andhra is lapped up with relish. And the pockets of the people who are away in US are really deep. One site has a rate card: muhurtam $15, horoscope $50, 3 questions $20 and matrimonials $25. Business is brisk.

This is one service which most of the sites are offering. But each site has a niche target and a dedicated audience, if not, they are trying to carve out a niche.In one of the offices of the start-ups, on a white board, the aim of the company is marked out in digits. The number of zeroes that follow a million, the number of millions that make a billion and the zeroes in each of these mind-boggling numbers. This netpreneurs are chasing these numbers.

B S N Suryanarayana is an unlikely candidate in the netizen bandwagon. Being a CA and CS, Suryanarayana set up niharonline.com, a bilingual portal targeting the business community, conceived only 10 months back and implemented seven months back. Though focused on Hyderabad, the site has visitors from 40 countries.

Till date the site recorded eight million hits. Suryanarayana has eyes set on e-commerce and converting it into a multi-lingual portal. With two NRI directors on board, Suryanaryana is planning an IPO of Rs 2.5 crore soon. Why nihar? “Nihar in Telugu means dewdrop,” says Suryanarayana, waiting for sweet success.It was not just lucre that lured Krishna Kishore to junk a lucrative job with ICICI and plan his website targeting Hyderabad.

“I found a world of opportunities waiting as none of the sites was doing any justice to the city. I wanted to start a world class city portal which is a few hundred times better than the existing ones,” says Kishore in the rented three-bedroom apartment in Masab Tank, converted into an office with five computers and five employees.

“Risks are inherent in any business, but here I plan to break even within three years,” says Kishore having staked Rs 40 lakh of his own and his friends’ money.An IIM and IIT alumni, Kishore says he has a strategy lined up for the making the site a success.

But success does not mean sticking to the site forever, it means selling it off and moving ahead. “New people will come in with new ideas,” he says.What separates the boys from the men is the lasting power. Most of the netpreneurs have chalked up plans that includes breaking even only two years later and no profit and hard work during that period.

Another angle to the story is that, excepting a few, most of the netpreneurs are looking for buyers when they hit big time, particularly a city-based software major which is reportedly scouting for content providers.Another pair of unlikely netpreneurs are Nitya Rani and K N Prasad. In their 5th floor Parklane office with the map of North America spread out in front of them.

The duo relate how they started the website, which is nearly four years old. “When we started , there was no content about Hyderabad. With a dedicated server and a host of services which we are providing, we will surely be the number one site,” says Prasad who has plonked down nearly Rs 1 crore on his dream.

Wary of venture capitalists, Prasad plans a pre-issue placement before planning an IPO. The USP of Prasad’s site is its comprehensiveness, he says reeling out statistics to show how the headstart has ensured that the company is six months ahead of the competition in Internet time. Prasad believes the time is now for Internet companies.

“Look at the way we are communicating today, we don’t write letters anymore. Similarly, the way we transact business will also change,” says Prasad visualising a success story charted through e-commerce.E-commerce is not a stumbling block for these netpreneurs. Most of them have partnership or other deals with friends in the US or at other places for mercantile account necessary for making e-transactions.

So, a packet of sweets at a well-known sweet shop costs Rs 600 for a man in the US. This is sweet money considering its local cost and this keeps other netpreneurs coming in. As so many websites are in the reckoning, is a shakeout imminent?

Yes and no. The shakeout is a long way off as most netpreneurs are prepared for the long haul and are ready to dig deeper into their pockets. The other side of the story is the Nasdaq soaring to new high everyday and infotech stocks booming this side of Arabian Sea.Prashant Jain’s site offers an email ID with Hyderabad in it. This, he believe is the USP of the site.

“People love Hyderabad, especially those who are away from it, their sentimental attachment can be seen from the fact that we have about 5,000 people having e-mail accounts with us,” says Jain. The gameplan is clear. Advertisers and e-commerce companies want the websites they support to show a regular clientele. “Once someone has an email account, we have hooked the brand-savvy bunch, we have a lifetime customer.

This bunch is web-centric and Internet savvy,” says Jain.Kishore, Jain, Kuriakose smelling success with their city-specific portals, now have plans for a string of portals targeting metros. It is all made to sound so simple. “If you have created one successful city portal, the success is easy to duplicate.

Today, Hyderabad is happening, Internet-wise. Tomorrow every other city will have a similar Internet growth, when that happens we will be ready with our site,” says Kishore. It is all hunky dory world, in a world of email promises of dollars, the moolah can disappear just as easily. But now, Hyderabad is the portal destination of the world.