They are sites with an accent-and a penchant for smelling NRI dollars. But to survive, they will have to continuously innovate to meet the demands of a fickle, high-stakes market.

By Pooja Garg with Additional Reporting By Aparna Ramalingam 

Take a prosperous serving of ethnicity, pepper it with nostalgia, wrap it up with services, and wash it down with news from home. On the fourth of July this year, the desi diaspora toasted the fireworks in Frisco's Bay Area with salted corncobs (sorry, bhuttas), courtesy thinkindia.com. In nearby la, eIndia.com offered T-shirts and other hand-outs. A Summer Of Chai is how chaitime.com dubbed its branding exercise, which involved going out to the colleges and meeting up with Indian students, and even organising Chaisingles, a singles' party. Closer home, sify.com recently picked up indiaplaza.com, an India-specific on-line shopping mall. And so on.

Call them sites with an accent, or the non-resident Net phenomenon, the non-resident Indian, or NRI, is being wooed with a vengeance by basic information hubs to community-building arenas to e-commerce sites, be they based at home or in the US. Their holy grail is to become the Indian version of starmedia.com for Latin Americans, and china.com or sina.com for the Chinese. The stakes are high. ''There is a niche area, but only one US-based NRI site will survive. It'll be a bloodbath,'' deadpans Mohanbir Sawhney, McCormick Tribune Professor of e-Commerce and Technology, Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

While there are 18 million NRIs the world over, most of the action is focused on the five million-strong US diaspora. It's a prosperous-and Net-savvy- segment. According to Forrester Research, 69 per cent of Asian-American households are on-line, compared with 43 per cent of the general population. Though most US majors did talk about plans to set up UK offices, Cool Britannica is a low priority. Avers Dhruv Sharma, 40, CEO, 123india.com, which claims NRIs account for 45 per cent of traffic: ''The internet has been US-driven. The Net in UK is not much older than in India.'' Traffic from the Middle East has been disappointing, but some see great potential in Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Be it in the US or elsewhere, the challenge for these sites is to meet the implicit needs of a diaspora. That's easier said than done when, the target audience begins its day in another land. An information overload makes it tougher, considering most NRIs are not compulsive Indian news and information junkies. So, these sites have to innovate to meet the needs of a community. And make money while doing so. BT looks at how domestic and US sites are facing up to the challenge.

A Community For Content

Par for the course: local community news, information on prominent NRIs, immigration, India-specific events, shows and, of course, Bollywood. Most sites claim they have a USP. For instance, eindia's ethnic content is uploaded thrice a day. Chaitime focuses on community and finds its main draw in the chatroom. ''We offer the NRIs an interactive area to reach out to others in the community through chat and other activities like story-telling,'' says Jayesh Vaidya, 36, MD, chaitime.com. Apart from offices in the US, most big US-based sites have a small office in India, from where they source local content. For instance, thinkindia, with offices in San Jose and New Delhi, has a eight-member team in Delhi, and 12-plus stringers in the US for local news.

Mirroring the industry, content arrangements are not an issue for these portals. But it's not that easy the other way round. Rediff.com's ambitious plans to hire journalists from Columbia University came a cropper; the US edition is manned by a few stringers. Now, Rediff is planning to acquire a US-based website in order to get the infrastructure and content providers to feed the edition. Sify.com, on the other hand, has the advantage in samachar.com, which it claims 2,50,000 NRIs have made their homepage. Another early mover, 123india.com, is building on its India search engine. ''The NRI is a more content-driven segment,'' says Dhruv Sharma.

There is no end to useful and innovative content. Thinkindia.com, for instance, has a section, new to US, which informs immigrants how to get a social security number, or how to open a bank account, and so on. ''We help NRIs get adjusted in the new environs through useful information and NRI-concentrated city-specific news,'' says Gopal Krishna, 32, CEO & Co-Founder, Thinkindia.com. Similarly, 123india.com has tied up with Janu Corp, prominent immigration lawyers, in a conscious effort to tap the NRI segment. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Says Sawhney: ''Sites should focus on identifying content that will help in, say, how we bring up our children, language education, even religious education.''

There are other possibilities. Studies reveal that a large number of NRI housewives surf from home. Some sites are looking at introducing employment placement services. Then, of course, there are the numerous match-making avenues like matrimonials.com, indianmarriages.com, suitablematch.com, and so on. While there is a niche area in this segment, and the attractions are obvious, these sites can only play a secondary role to the newspaper classifieds, be they at home or abroad. ''Some 35-40 per cent of the traffic comes from NRIs. Of our 29,000 listings, 25 per cent are those of NRIs,'' says Amit Tandon, Director, 37, Jeevansathi.com. Even so, it's not a big need, and it's not unmet.

Most sites targeted at NRIs list advertisements as their key revenue source, followed by e-commerce. ''NRIs are easy to reach since they are in small pockets in the US-and not scattered like in India. So, advertisers see great potential in reaching them through us,'' says Vaidya. Though the US on-line advertising market is mature compared to India, advertising tends to sites that have traffic. Admits eindia's veep (Worldwide Operations), Sonu Malhotra, 29: ''Advertising is not a viable enough revenue stream. And e-commerce is still a couple of years away.''

Yes, And Now To Commerce

Most e-commerce on Indian portals has its genesis in the NRI community. After all, they are well-to-do and seek desi products. At one level, they buy desi products like Tanjore paintings, sweets and Indian groceries, sarees and embroidered kurtas. There is also the element of gifting to relatives and friends in India, with electronic gadgets, watches, and books topping the list.

Is ticketing a viable alternative? Recently, eIndia tied up with Maazda Travel, an Indian travel agency in la. This has helped the site offer what it claims is the lowest fare to India-$899. Then there's event-management. ''We also offered tickets for the hugely-popular Shahrukh Khan shows. The first day itself, we sold some 25,000 tickets for the show. Now, we've got rights for the A.R. Rahman show, and recorded sales worth $30,000 the very first day,'' says Malhotra. Event-management could drive revenues for sites in the short-term.

Then there's flowers. Yup, flowers. Dikshagifts.com, a gifts site based in Calcutta, promises to deliver cakes and flower all over the country through its franchisee network. ''Priced at $17- $25, flowers yield a large margin of up to 25 per cent,'' says Vidul Prothi, 26, CEO, Dikshagifts, adding that they have broken even. Similarly, Chennaibazaar.com-which says 95 per cent of its traffic is NRI-based-says that 75 per cent of their revenue comes from flower delivery. Started about two years ago with an initial investment of around Rs 20 lakh, the site broke even some six months ago. Music is another popular category, with sites like india-today.com and saregama.com leading the way; the latter has warehouses in the US and UK.

There is a lesson to be learnt here. With customer experience being the key to success, the problem is that the supply chain is all 'mucked up'. Adds Sawhney: ''The biggest challenge is to build direct relationships with suppliers in India.'' He should know, being on the board of namaste.com, which is working overtime to build bridges with Indian suppliers and to make to supply chain more efficient. Until that happens, the NRI sites will not be able to aim for a bigger market: in this case, one not divided by ethnicity. After all, all things considered, Victor Menezes eats as much saag as you do.

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