12. paisa.com

Paisa is the first product out of a Pune startup. Paisa is like moeny.rediff.com or moenycontrol.com. It may look a me too in the crowd but there are key differentiators i.e. it's uber cool UI and interaction. It has taken a leaf out of Apple's interface and applied it successfully to the web. How this product will make money is also a question but that may not be the target area right now.

There is a lot of scope in this area as other websites in this field are quiet run-of-the-mill web 1.0 websites with irritating banners and pop ups. I think Paisa has clearly differentiated itself from the crowd in terms of UI and should look for differentiating in terms of content, social features and data presentation. This field is almost a virgin territory when it comes to new features. Almost every site has the data in the same form without any differentiation! Same news, same graphs, same tables. I wish paisa.com best of luck and hope they can make it big!

11. Flipkart.com

Flipkart is an already successful startup which is into selling books, games, movie CDs and mobile phones. Books market remain their primary target. Flipkart has done it well: it has a nice interface, huge collection, good SEO/SEM and most important of all they have managed to crack the timely delivery problem really well. Nothing kills a business more than delivery/logistics problems. Customers hate to wait once they have paid. They also have a pay only when you receive model!

Flipkart is going to 1. either be acquired by Amazon or 2. become really big in Indian market

10. Dialajob.in

I had commented some time back about the clutter in job search sites , with little diffrenciation. Dialajob.in struck me as a fresh of breath air - dramatically different model of operation than other sites - you call in a number and provide your details and their database finds a job. Probably will find the going tough inititally as they will have larger costs on call center , as well as in gathering the user profile . But just for thinking out of the box and implementing a different online-offline model they get my vote of admiration.

(Will call 'em up morrow to see if I can get a better job , that doesnt leave me with plenty of time to laze around blogging :P )

9. Lootstreet

Lootstreet.com is a platform to buy and sell things by bargaining. Started by two IIMA grads, this site has got fair amount of press off late. I tried it myself and I think Lootstreet is a nice idea but terrible execution.
First of the site design is pathetic. It is as if it's founders were in a great hurry to launch it without perfecting it. A site like this cannot/should not be launched in beta/alpha like stage. It either works or it doesn't.
For instance, I was not able to book after successful bargaining as at first on the payment page address bar was not editable! and amount to be charged was zero. After I complained, on an email ID which was hidden away in about us, they did reply in a day. Points to note are that though the phone no. is present on main page which I find weird as I don't like to call. It wastes time and is expensive for both the customer and seller. Their reply however was not useful. I was able to edit my address(which is a text box pathetically small) but money to be paid was still zero and paypal refused to accept payment.
Their are many elementary design mistakes on the site. Stupid technical lingo like "view log" to see what all has happened on your bet. Extremely stupid payment page. SMS gateway not working resulting in non-delivery of registration code. I can go on and on.
It pains me that an idea this good has been wasted like this. They should have spent a few weeks testing their site. People think if they make a bad implementation of a good idea it will still work. I don't think it works that way. Most of the time a good idea in a bad implementation dies very very fast.

8. Carwale.com

Carwale helps you to do your research about cars before you actually make up your mind and step into a showroom. It is very comprehensive and accurate. I have used it quiet a lot in last few weeks. It is not only easy to use but also quiet addictive if you are interested in cars. Almost every car that is sold in India is on this site complete with all the versions of it. They have very detailed information (both technical and commercial). You can calculate actual on road price of the car in your city and EMI+downpayment instantaneously. In my view that is very very useful information for people thinking of buying cars. All the information at one place.

As it becomes more and more popular and visible to the car buying junta it would become a very good value for money for city distributors to place advertisements about deals running in their showroom. These distributors have a lot of money to spend on ads and I think this is an idea very well executed and would rule automobile information marketplace in years to come.

Wheres the Shine in HT Media ?

Yet another website by HTMedia- Shine.com

I personally think , HT's newpaper - Mint was an excellent concept. Amongst the other pink financial papers , the newspaper was indeed revolutionary - great design , great writing - a truly readable paper! Even livemint.com , the e-paper is excellent.

However , the rest of the forays , have only confused me on the HT strategy. Sometime back , they bought out Desimartini , to be in the social networking space. Now they're in the crowded online recruitment space ,jostling for room with naukri , monster , timesjobs , jobstreet ...
I created a profile on Shine today , but was struggling to find the wow factor in the website. Is this going to go the clickjobs or ndtvjobs way too ? And what exactly is HT Media headed for ? I guess any entrepreneur who wants to make a quick buck must concentrate on a popular space that HT Media isnt in already , create a half baked copy of an existing website. (tip for name - hindustanishaadi / hindustanimakaan anyone? you are requested to make a payment to the authors in case you flick the idea from here ;))

Comments anyone ?

7. Vakow

Vakow is really cool. It started as a sms forwarding engine and is slowly transforming into a microblogging engine like Twitter.

There are a few things about Vakow that strike me as remarkable like the design, attention to detail, feature completeness (without being too bloated), witty system messages. Design of this site is pretty funky. There are some real gems in the design for instance the vertical tab on the left margin of the screen(in middle of the page) which says feedback. A very simple yet effective design.It shows they are serious about feedback and want to hear from their users. They use a normal 10 digit mobile number so smses to the system are cheap. With mobile penetration being so huge in India, I think there is a big market for microblogging.

However they could have done somethings better like recently launched a V2.0 of the site and added microblogging platform which in my view seems patch work and they should have a clean separation between SMS forwarding and blog stream. Marketing also needs some effort and a little more viral elements and ease of use would make it more popular. Things like not allowing forwarding of SMSes until it get 2 hands up is too restrictive and should be done away with. Similarly, option to allow users to register via mobile is a must have. They should also lookout for scaling issues as it has started to feel a little sluggish these days.
Anyhow, with around 500 posts a day the site is becoming popular by the day and soon should start making waves in Indian youth community.

6. Slideshare

Slideshare is by far the most visible startup from India(actually funded by valley guys but dev team operates from Delhi). It is the youtube of slides. Lets you upload and share your slide very easily. About an year back they had this best presentation competition which got lot of attention. They have scaled the application quiet well which runs on Rails, Amazon EC2 and S3.

Slideshare has around 15-20 guys in their Delhi office. Their founders operate from Bay area and Delhi team is in the able hands of Amit Ranjan. There is almost zero competition in this space and they seem to be playing it quiet well. However there is no sign of Slideshare caring about business and profitability. They may be looking at a takeover from Google or others. Ads are one way to monetize it. Contextual ads inside PPTs is also not a bad idea. Corporate accounts for storing private PPTs on the net/lan for sharing can also be on cards. For now they seem to have deep pockets and looking to mature this platform with lots of APIs and users.
Good luck Slideshare!

5. Guruji

Guruji is Indian search engine. One year ago when I first about them I asked myself why would I use any other search engine than Google(or yahoo). But I was wrong. They are not competing with Google. They are more like Baidu(the Chinese search giant). Baidu is huge in China. It is much bigger than Google there. They just launched a music search engine like controversial Baidu music search and it rocks!
I use Guruji just for the music feature alone.

There is definitely a need for a search engine which gathers data that Google doesn't bother to pickup or removes them from it's search index. Music is just one of such things. Things like traffic data, court cases, movie schedules, historic weather data, realtime(or almost) stock market data, local search and plethora of such things could be better done by a local search engine. It is not as if Google cannot do all these things. In fact they do all these things in USA and elsewhere but an Indian search engine can combine local domain knowledge with local information and serve specific needs better. For instance they launched live cricket scores.

Last time I checked they were hiring good people and thats a good sign. Business model is non existent right now. In my view instead of just cloning Adsense in India a more targeted and direct business model would be much better and profitable.
Best of luck to Guruji.

4. AskLaila

AskLaila is like Burrp a local search platform. They have movies, events, pubs, eating out places, shops, churches, schools, beauty parlours and what not! The more you research this site more you like it. Their "about us" shows they quiet experienced and fun. "Careers" sections shows they are very concerned about the data on their site and it shows. They have huge amount of data and are much more comprehensive than Burrp(who only aim for eating/drinking out places).

One thing that I noticed about AskLaila is that the community is not as strong as Burrp, at least in Mumbai. Their site design could have been MUCH better. Name AskLaila also sucks big time.

Comprehensive data, not so good presentation!