Christening horizons for Indian dot coms widen, and the door opens wider for Indians aiming at dotcom heaven: Silicon Valley. Skumars.com becomes a DoT-enabled ISP, while careermosaic touches down.

e-lead

• The Internet Management Group has added three new categories to the .in domain. They are .firm.in (for partnerships, proprietary concerns); .ind.in (individuals); and .gen.in (general category). At a broad level, the realignments make sense: it is easier for search engines to locate vertical domain sites. However, the it's well-known that .co.in has been a failure, thanks to the stringent conditions (a registered business for 7 years or a registered trademark). "Less than 1,500 .co.in names have been registered in the last 6 years," laments cyberlawyer Pavan Duggal, 34. The new categories will thus dilute the registration mechanism, and be attractive to foreign companies hamstrung by an inability to show a legal presence in India (like Amazon). However, adds Venkatesh Prasad, 27, Attorney, J. Sagar Associates: "The new categories are not watertight as yet." For instance, the differentiation between .firm.in and .ind.in is still .unclear.in.

e-news

• Aptech Internet is planning to set up 99 city-specific horizontals, to be branded Mera City under the umbrella of tringtring.com. The company will also kick off its ISP operations in eight cities this month, after Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore.

• The American Senate has voted to allow almost 600,000 skilled foreign workers into the US over the next three years. That's 250,000 more than what would have otherwise be granted. On the flip-side, the fees that companies pay for visas will be doubled (currently, it's $500).

• Skumars.com has become the first firm to attain a license as category-II infrastructure provider by the Department of Telecom.

• Jaldi.com has launched 'Jaldi In A Box,' a one- stop solution for companies setting up e-commerce sites.

• Deploying NTT's iMode technology, training major NIIT will develope a B2C portal for the Japanese systems integrator NTT data.

• BPL Innovision will pump $35 million into high-speed fiber-optic networks over the next 18 months in different parts of the country.

• Talisma Corporation, the ECRM solutions company incubated by Aditi Technologies, has sealed its first round of VC funding of $31.5 million.

e-alliances

• Quantum Information Services has tied up with Hutchison Max Telecom to offer equitymaster.com and personalfin.com on the Orange platform.

• Careermosaic.com, a leading on-line recruitment firm, announced the launch of its services in India by tying up with careercommunity.com, a knowledge and networking forum for professionals.

• Citibank and GE Capital have picked up a 33 per cent stake in b2b software provider, EzeeNet.

e-findings

• ICRA Information Services has projected that the internet subscriber base in India will expand from 0.85 million (users: 3.97 million) in 2000 to 8.3 million (21.52 million) in 2005. Mobile connections will account for a 15 per cent share five years down the line. In keeping with other projections, ICRA is more than upbeat on the growth of ecommerce in the country: from Rs 470 crore in 2000 to Rs 25,200 crore in 2005. As expected, B2B ecommerce takes the lion's share. In contrast, b2c commerce is expected to increase from Rs 50 crore at present to Rs 1,880 crore in 2005. Finally, online advertising spends are projected to increase from Rs 7 crore in 2000 to Rs 86 crore five years later. The maximum growth will be between 2001 and 2003. All said, ICRA feels that online advertising will not "catch on in a major way" in the next five years. That's bad news for the many pure-play sites depending mainly on advertising revenues.

-Aparna Ramalingam & Praveen S. Thampi

Loud, Not Clear

Is the internet ceasing to be Chaplinesque? Well, The Gold Rush of netpreneurs has abated. Now, even the screen-to-screen silence is fading out. So, for a nation that loves to talk, it's hardly surprising that a host of Indian players are tuning into an emerging domestic internet voice-services market. Voice-portals and audio e-mails are not the flavour as yet, but from Sabeer 'Hotmail' Bhatia to an unheard of (literally) Hyderabad-based company Ved Webtech, all have voiced ambitious plans.

Bhatia for one is setting up base in Mumbai to launch an international roaming two-way voice mail service. Ved Webtech plans to launch a 'talking mail' service on the heels of 'Baba Mail', a proprietary intelligent talking e-mail facility. Philips Speech Processing, part of the Philips Consumer Electronics division, has reportedly been selected by DSQ World to develop a voice-portal service for the Indian market. And while zeenext.com is advertsing its voice mail ('Don't type. Talk.'), it's just a matter of time before desi giants like Rediff also get on track.

''Everyone seems to be in an evaluation mode now,'' cautions Amit Khorana, 24, Manager, Convergence Technologies, Sharekhan.com. But no one is underestimating the potential. ''There is a huge potential, as messaging constitutes a big portion of internet activities and voice is a naturalised way of messaging. The implications, therefore, are huge,'' says Sukaran Singh, 30, CEO, Broadcastindia. Singh's company is set to launch a voice-mail service, 'Zingmail'.

Everybody's talking English-for the moment. Technically speaking, thanks to the speech-recognition software from global majors like Lucent, Nuance, and Speechworks, it is now possible not only to understand a wide range of accents and diction, but even languages such as Voicexml. ''Edge in the voice services market,'' feels Khorana, ''will still lie in the ability to provide localised content and language.''

There are, of course, the usual problems. Says Sanjiv Agarwal, 34, Head (Internet Group), Ernst & Young: ''While there is good scope, some bottlenecks remain in poor voice-recognition on the telephone and mobile phone lines. The software still needs to get more robust to handle this.'' Then, there's the perennial issue of poor bandwidth. And costs-text to speech and vice-versa require great effort in coding and therefore tend to be expensive.

Too much distortion, did you say, before one could even grab the mouth-piece? But then, as the poor Jewish barber says in the climax lecture in Chaplin's first talkie, The Great Dictator: ''To those who can hear me, I say: Do not despair.'' Hear this space.

-E. Kumar Sharma

The Wire Burners

It was but natural to expect a cottage software industry to spring up around WAP-enabling websites. As the major mobile phone manufacturers continue to push WAP into the any3 (anytime, anyplace, anywhere) culture, a clutch of players are finding it worthwhile to convert html content to WML, which is used by WAP-enabled phones. Here's why it's hot: making five pages of a website WAP-enabled costs around Rs 50,000. On the other hand, everyone may be barking at the moon.

For now, it's automatic for the cellphone: there's Hyderabad-based Krisn Information Technologies, barely a year old in software development, whose 'Coollie' does hands-free conversion of an entire website to a WAP site. The price tag: Rs 25,000. Says Krisn's Managing Director, L.V.S. Raju, 45: ''Coollie has near-equivalent components for html tags that do not have equivalent WML tags, like frames, HR, images, checkbox, radio, buttons, and text area.'' Or there's the Bangalore-based Integra Micro Systems, set to launch Zap2wap, an automatic html-to-WML conversion service. Integra plans a limited, but free service. ''If the client needs more, he can buy the software,'' says Mahesh Kumar Jain, 45, Managing Director, Integra Micro.

But not everyone's following the one-size-fits-all model. Another Hyderabad-based company, Visual Quest India, is also offering HTML-to-WML service-as a customised solution. Says its Managing Director Birad Yagnik, 32: ''Customisation is crucial as it is necessary to analyse the html content and optimise for making it WAP-enabled.'' The firm intends to charge on an hourly basis; working out to around $17 per hour.

The problem is that there are only a limited number of WAP-enabled handsets available for the html-to-WML business to thrive. Many observers also feel that WAP is an intermediate technology and will be eventually replaced, though it is too early to predict by what. In the interim, wherever big transactions are involved, companies tend to prefer foreign collaborations (for instance, Airtel's recent tie-up with Phone.com). Small players in the WAP-enabling business should take heed.

-E. Kumar Sharma

Do You Mind Not Smoking Here?

You know how life is. You smoke, and they get the flak (plus fortune). But can a beleaguered and desperate tobacco industry seek salvation on the internet? Now, consider this: global major Phillip Morris goes gaga about its non-tobacco products on the internet, but not on you know what. Yes, indeed, tobacco is there, but more like a remorseful soliloquy. Indian giant ITC, for that matter, hasn't even put up a portal.

Pussy-footing is the word that describes the tobacco industry's approach to the internet. Drag on this. ''Our voluntary code forbids us to do anything which would appeal to the minors,'' says S.H. Venkataramani, ITC spokesperson. But cccigarettes.com, a Mumbai-based site, sells popular ITC brands on-line (not surprisingly, the site was taken off soon after BT quizzed ITC about it). Says Burzin Billimoria, the company proprietor, blandly: ''We have been selling ITC products on the internet since February, 2000. But, anyway, the on-line sale of cigarettes is quite negligible.''

Legally speaking, there's nothing wrong in advertising or selling tobacco on the internet, at least as of now. The reason: there is no specific code. Says Pavan Duggal, an expert on internet laws: ''There is no way you can impose regulations on the internet. So, there has to be strict self-regulation.'' In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec) has come up with a code on internet advertising.

Here lies the catchword-self-regulation. Says Amit Sarkar, Chairman, Tobacco Institute of India: ''In India, the tobacco industry has a self-regulatory code on not undertaking advertisement in any media that is proscribed by law.'' (Read: with cable television now out of bounds, we're being very careful). Sarkar's refrain is granted an air of authorisation by Sam Balsara, 49, Vice-Chairman, Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI): ''Our members believe in self-regulation which is in the interest of the consumer.''

The reality, as both sides on the tobacco divide perceive, is that selling smoke on the internet does not hold any great business potential. What matters is the branding. Take into account the predominant age-group of the surfing community and the internet emerges as the branding Valhalla of Big Tobacco.

As in real world, there's surrogate advertising on the internet too. It happens through sponsoring adventure sports, or manufacturing sportswear, or a fashion site-all in the name of the flagship brand. But very, very gingerly. The tobacco industry knows it is dealing with a medium that can sting back (unlike some others: post 1990, Hollywood movie characters light up a cigarette every three-to-five minutes). In keeping with a first-time smoker's fear of getting caught, cigarette companies are lurking on the terraces of the internet.

-Mily Chakrabarty & Rakhi Mazumdar

Beam Me Back, BT!

In this regular feature, travel back in (Net) time to somewhere in October, 1995.

HTML gets its due with Dave Raggett sparking off the html Working Group. Apart from the w3 Consortium, it consisted of Netscape, Microsoft, Spyglass, and Sun. Microsoft rolls out Internet Explorer 2.0 at a time when Netscape Navigator was the de facto industry browser. Thus begins the Great Browser War.

As VSNL links up Pune to the internet, the fifth city in its fold, a first take at a framework for the internet shapes up in India. The Computer Society of India unveils a National Information Technology Policy-intent (Information Technology for National Transformation). It called for a national standard for it education and promoting venture capital for software development.

Cyber Cash Inc., US-based developer of an electronic payment system, sets up a software development centre in Bangalore. The cyber cash system promised to offer both authorised and peer-to-peer services on the Net using credit cards, debit cards, and electronic cash payment methods.

Lotus Notes introduces Notes Pump and cc:Mail for the Web. India catches up, with Datapro launching a WAN backbone for interconnecting cc:Mail sites.

Not quite anticipating a voice-based internet boom, Infinite Technologies announced Connect2Voice, a software that would read e-mail messages over the telephone to a remote user. The charge: $3,499 for a 50-user system.

Enter the internet consultants, a rare breed then. In a report 'CIO Meets Internet', George Colony, Director of Forrester's Computing Strategy Services predicts that WWW will be replaced by a 'World Wide Transaction Web' that would link users computers to web servers in a true client/server computing model. Colony's take: interactivity is the key to the future. Sure it is!

Q&A

BT's Venkatesh Babu has an on-line chat with Dr Rohit M. Bhojaraj, Director, Indegene.com

Q. There's an epidemic of medical portals. What's the difference, doc?
A. Indegene.com is very different from other portals, primarily because of the audience it's targeting. We are a medical resource centre for doctors, focusing on developing innovative continuing medical education solutions for the fraternity. Currently, information available to the Indian medical community is all focused on the West. There is no comprehensive repository of medical knowledge relevant to the Indian setting.

Why not focus on the consumer?
The Indian system is still very physician-dominated. We are targeting the large 6,50,000 clinician base in India and West Asia. Consumer information is an area that Indegene will be looking at in the future.

What's Indegene's P2P?
On-line medical education solutions for clinicians will provide the initial thrust. Relationships with clinicians and institutions will be leveraged to enter consumer-care, which will the ideal transaction platform for insurance companies to plug in. In the next fiscal, Indegene will generate revenues from applications that facilitate healthcare transactions, with emphasis on mobile computing.

The competition...
Relationships hold the key to success in the healthcare sector. At Indegene.com, we nurture relationships very carefully. That is the only way to build up credibility.

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