Venture Capitalists in India are likely to chase the Social Networking startups in the next 6 months. With the rise of Social Networking in the US – MySpace, FaceBook, FriendSter etc, VCs have been busy counting cash after several high profile buy-outs.
Indian market is not lagging behind. Orkut India already has substantial presence however, it lacks some of the localizaton features as rightly said by Yaari.Com founder, Prerna Gupta,
“Why should Orkut be the biggest social network in India, when it doesn’t address Indians’ specific needs?”
MSN India Marketing Chief, Rajnish said,
“There is competition among funding companies to invest in the Internet space and social networking sites are the seasonal flavour”
MTV’s Meet or Delete and Fropper.Com are other two high profile startups which help you network mostly by the concept of dating. IMHO, Social Networking is not about Dating, its plain simple networking like in your daily life, but the medium is Web. MingleBox seems to have grasped this concept well.
All of these sites lack localization which will be a critical factor for their success after 4-6 quarters as folks from smaller towns get hooked to the web. Oho! Well, Isn’t startups all about dynamic environment to tweak yourself to the needs of your consumer 🙂
But we have to wait and see how many survive
rk
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is the time right for more focused online communities? sample http://www.ishopd.com, a social shopping site launched recently in india. it looks very cool, with a twitter style approach to online shopping.