Orkut has an estimated seven million users in India and although it offers a plain vanilla networking service, it has a pull factor other Indian sites envy. “Orkut is a traditional service; we have added on a host of user-generated features such as blogging, photo sharing, video uploads, and chatting,” says Pahwa. The site has more than 20 active blogs and claims over 100 photo uploads a day. But what Indian users like the most is the chat facility, with a new message coming in every few seconds at the DesiMartini chat room. “Social barriers that stopped Indians from sharing their thoughts and personal information online are fast disappearing. This was unthinkable even two years ago,” says Pahwa.
His eight-month stint in steering discussion forums and moderating interactions on DesiMartini has given him an interesting view of the way Indians socialize today. “It is not just dating that people are logging on to social networking sites for. More traffic is generated by people wanting to discuss views and opinions, and to meet new people.” As technology helps dissolve distances between people, online networking will clearly attract more traffic. “This is a business that requires scale, and instead of spending more money to acquire new users, social networking sites will soon consolidate existing user bases,” says Pahwa, predicting a wave of acquisitions in the sector.
KAVITA IYER, 34
CEO, minglebox
Started: August 2006
User: 1,000,000
When Kavita Iyer raised $7 million (about Rs29 crore) in venture capital funding for her social networking site, minglebox, in May, she was the envy of India’s Internet fraternity. Minglebox is the only Indian social networking site that has raised venture capital till now, a fact that has made it the first among equals. The investor, Sequoia Capital, has a history of picking hot new Internet start-ups. The firm’s US portfolio includes such heavyweights as Yahoo!, Google Inc. and YouTube.
Striking it rich: (from left) Minglebox co-founders Kavita Iyer, Sanjay Aggarwal and Sushma Abburi
A site that focuses on college students, minglebox was unveiled in the middle of 2006 and hosts communities from India’s top-ranking educational institutions. Minglebox claims it has over a million registered users, most of whom spend half an hour on the site on every visit. A statistic which, Iyer says, places her site above peers which report an average time per user of 20 minutes.
Iyer and her founder partners, 34-year-old Sushma Abburi and Sanjay Aggarwal, 35, have always swapped ideas, from the days when they were batchmates at IIT Delhi. Their camaraderie paid off when, at the height of the start-up wave in 2006, they pooled resources to go online with minglebox. “Indian consumers were looking for new services on the Internet, and social networking as a product was right in the sweet spot,” says Iyer.
As a young recruit to the elite TAS, formerly known as Tata Administrative Services, Iyer had worked on launch campaigns during her stint at Titan Industries Ltd. Brief stints at ICICI Bank and Wipro Technologies helped her gain an understanding of consumer needs and the use of technology to address them. But with minglebox, she has had to rely more on blue-sky ideas than on the tried and tested formulas of the pre-Internet age.
For instance, “scraps” on a social networking site are messages that users send each other. But if you are in the middle of a group chat and want a message to be scrambled, so that only one particular member can view it, minglebox can do it for you. It’s the equivalent of a private conversation between two people, even as they chat with the group at large.