Later this year, he plans to launch a new campaign, a contest to choose a student as chief executive of Bharatstudent.com, to run the social media site for three months, while Indhuri steps aside.
“This is a business for young people, and I want to see what innovations a student CEO will come up with,” he says.
A media buff, Indhuri also runs a TV production company with his wife Brinda. The couple begins each day poring over market research data on Bharatstudent.com generated internally as well as data drawn from Google Search and Alexa.
“User generated content is the future of the media business, it is a space that Northgate Technologies is very focused on,” says Indhuri, who describes himself as an “intrapreneur”, a person who builds a new business for a corporate employer.
“There is no way a self-funded entrepreneur could have built Bharatstudent.com in the time span that we did it; it takes an average burn rate of Rs1 crore a month to run an Internet business, you cannot do it without financial backing,” he says.
Kalyan Manyam, 29
Founder, Indyarocks
Started: June 2007
Users: Data Unavailable
In a world that worships youth, Kalyan Manyam is happy to be the contrarian. Indyarocks, the social networking site that went live in the last week of June, does not allow anyone below the age of 15 to register, and includes members aged 60.
Age does matter: Kalyan Manyam’s Indyarocks does not allow anyone below the age of 15 to register
The site also keeps an eye on kids up to 18 years old, making sure they are not the target of harassment. “We don’t want to be another orkut; that is not the space we are looking at,” says Manyam. Along with co-founder Vishnu Vardhan, a medical doctor based in Silicon Valley, Manyam is looking to build an online platform where Indians can engage in social, political and cultural debate in addition to socializing as they would in the offline world.
“It’s not just kids who are on SNS sites; the target age group these days is 20 to 35 years. These are the people who are articulate, opinionated and have money to spend,” says Manyam. Within a month of its launch, Indyarocks had roped in social reformers such as Jayaprakash Narayan of the Lok Satta party to blog on the site.
And in a bid to move away from the purely advertisement-driven revenue model followed by other SNS, Indyarocks enables job postings, but with a social reform element. Companies such as the GMR Infrastructure Group and Heritage Foods are picking up blue-collar workers through listings on Indyarocks by NGO groups that source workers from rural areas.
Manyam aims to build a social tool that can keep users connected while on the move. Integrating mobile with Net content has helped the site throw up services such as the free two-way SMS scrap, which allows a user to send a message, at no cost, to friends online that reaches their Indyarocks accounts and is also displayed on the mobile phone.
“Technology enables greater freedom of expression and that is what Indyarocks is aiming to tap,” says Manyam, who trained in information systems at the Eastern Michigan University in the US.