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“The changes which have brought India to the forefront of the world economy are momentous and irreversible. Interest in India is increasing. Yet information on India—its business, culture and people—is not easily available. The Internet is the distribution medium which makes possible rapid access to information anytime and anywhere. We are riding on this network, with a focus on digitized content on India.”
Explaining the objective of IndiaWorld in blog “IndiaWorld Story Part I” (17 Dec 1997)
“It took me many months to recognise that the current businesses we were in then (image processing solutions and custom software projects for Indian companies) would not be the ones which would be getting us too far....I started reading various magazines trying to spot future trends. It was then that I came across the Internet as the new information highway. The summer of 1994 was when I put together my first ideas for an electronic news and information service. It paved the way for IndiaWorld, an Internet-based news and information service primarily focused on Indians outside India and others interested in India.
From blogs “When Things Go Wrong: Dealing with Failure” (18 April 2005) and “A Tale of Two Summers: 1994” (2 Aug 2004)
“This is where a significant opportunity in India lies. Unlike abroad where there are many sources of information between 9 am and 7 pm, in India there are no practical ways to get information while you are at work. You still wait for the 9 pm news to find out what happened during the day and the morning newspapers as to what happened in the world over 12 hours ago. India needs an information service delivered over a phone line to the corporate network and delivered on the desktop via the Web front-end.”
From blog “IndiaWorld – The Future” (14 Jan 1998)
“Setting up a business in India is non-trivial. There is little help from venture capitalists or from banks. Being small is almost a bane. So, it is very important for a business to be profitable at an early stage. We built our systems mostly from public domain technology—Linux and Apache. This minimised the starting cost, and also enabled us to implement projects rapidly...Because we had little or no access to external funds, we had to ensure that each activity we took up was profitable. This ensured a very good base for the business. In our case, the home pages business generated the shortterm revenues, while the investment in a network of websites offered a longer-term opportunity for building up page views to target advertisers.”
From blog “The IndiaWorld Story Part III” (7 Jan 1998)
“Right from the beginning, our focus was on daily updates. This simple philosophy of offering something of value every day ensured very good repeat traffic. We spent a lot of time creating a daily newspaper and news headlines from the Indian media, updated twice daily....One smart thing we had done was to ensure quite a lot of archived content: this way, when people came in, they had plenty to see.
...IndiaWorld began with content for NRI audiences, went into website development, and then created more sites for a growing domestic audience and an international audience which wanted more than just news. The domestic audience is the key to the success of a Web service, and that is something which few web masters seem to realise...This group does not want to go online to read newspapers and magazines, which they can buy for what they’d pay to read a story online.”
From blog “The IndiaWorld Story Part I” (17 Dec 1997)
Jain sold IndiaWorld.com to Sify in November 1999 for Rs 500 crore. He is currently working in the areas of mobile phones, broadband and digital infrastructure. His blog: www.emergic.org.
