Monday, Nov 01, 1999
US Roundup
Simha |
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Sanjivini Butti
The internet has long been touted as a free resource for all our information needs. Why is it that we have never known it to work that way, though. Try getting some information out of a search engine? What you get instead is a volcanic eruption of data that will send you scurrying from one cyber morass to another till you are pretty sore in your back. If it is gems that you are looking for a volcanic eruption is not the best place to be at. Try XpertSite.com instead, a website launched by an internet startup company founded Ramesh Parameswaran.
Ramesh Parameshwaran, a 29 year old former Microsoft Manager, founded XpertSite with former Microsoft software developer Digvijay Chauhan and MSI Internet consultant Udai Shekawat. Now employing 23 people, the company aims to apply E-bay's paradigm for people-to-people exchange of goods to an analogous exchange of knowledge.
XpertSite.com is enrolling a large number of volunteer experts to answer questions that anyone may care to post on their site. Unlike search engines that perform the Hanuman trick of retrieving the whole damn mountain when all you want is the Sanjivini Butti, at XpertStie.com your question will be given careful consideration by a volunteer expert who will post a single to the point response to your query. What is best is? You guessed it! The service is free. Ramesh Parameswaran is planning to dip into, not our pockets but those of advertisers. If you are wondering what is there in it for the volunteer experts the answer is pretty straight forward too - self-promotion, in some cases simple satisfaction.
We, the Sawf team, wish XpertSite.com god speed and happy landings.
Indian Born Billionaires in the US
Ramesh Parameshwaran is typical of the Indian techno-managerial talent that is doing so well in the US. Forty percent of the startups in Silicon Valley typically have Indian managements. The fact that some of these startups make it to the big league is evident from Forbes magazine's listing of three Indians in the billionaire category! Rajendra Singh, a board member of Teligent Inc. and Sanjiv Sidhu, founder of i2 Technologies Inc both are estimated to have assets of $1.1 billion each. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems Inc, is estimated to have assets of $1.0 billion.
Indeed, since the Forbes magazine listing we have a new entrant who has vaulted right over the heads of the other three Indian billionaires and has us now counting in billions of dollars. Sycamore Networks recently listed on Nasdaq and ended the day valued at $14.4 billion. It had the fifth-best first day of trading based on percentage of change in recent years. Gururaj Deshpande is the founder of Sycamore and his personal assets are now valued at over $3.27 billion!
Online Brokerage in India
TD Waterhouse and the Tata Group are reportedly going to launch a joint venture to bring online trading to India. TD Waterhouse will control 49 percent of the new company, while Tata Finance Securities Ltd. will hold the majority share.
Hopefully, the joint venture will bring quick and clean stock trading to India which has nearly 25 million investors. Admittedly, the Tata Group has the image to inspire confidence in Indian investors who will need both time and some amount of persuasion to make the switch to online trading.
The joint venture will have to plenty to contend against. Though India has 25 million investors, it barely has a million internet connections! Most of those one million connections rely on noisy and expensive telephone lines. Besides, I wonder how many of the 25 million investors currently pay the taxes that they should be paying.
More than the Indians in India, it could be Indians abroad who may initially throng to the online venture. Indian technical companies are doing exceedingly well and growing at an annual rate of 50%. Some of them, like Infosys which recently listed on Nasdaq and drew a breathtaking response from US investors, have already made their way to the American market. Others will take their time to grow and make it to the US. In the meantime they would present and an attractive investment opportunity to US investors of Indian origin.
The above roundup is based on news stories that appeared in inernetnews.com and zdnet.com
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