Rajesh Jain (the founder of Netcore and the mobile VAS startup MyToday) reflects on the decade since his Rs. 500 crore sale of Indiaworld, and speaks of his plan for the future:
A politically right-of-centre site that will use Facebook and Twitter across a variety of devices, feature strong opinion-laced stories (like the Drudge Report or Huffington Post), float ideas and get people from middle-class India to create a politically aware community, passionate about education, technology and change. He believes it can ride what he sees as the Net’s biggest opportunity, a “direct-to-consumer mobile value-added service”. Indeed, many entrepreneurs see India’s 700 million mobile connections and forthcoming 3G and 4G telecom services as the great, new hope.
Rajesh, like several others who’ve seen India’s tech industry this last decade, are disappointed with the lack of Internet penetration and (consequently?) the lack of large-scale Internet-based companies of the kind that grew in the US in the 1990s and in China in the 2000s. There’s a near-universal hope that such firms eventually will be founded this coming decade, built around Mobile. What they will be like is anyone’s guess.