Can This Early Bird Fly

Aparna Ramalingam

It's a portal of pedigree. In 1996, brothers Arvind and Sharad Kajaria, set-up an India-specific search engine. They dubbed it 123india.com because the early generation search engine results picked up the 1 in 123 and pushed it to the top of searches for 'India'.

It's USP was, and continues to be, an India-specific search engine focussed on Indians worldwide. How does it stack up in the portal race for Indian eyeballs? Well, like the French say, 'comme ci, comme ca'. Which means, OK, but not OK. Well, in an effort to change that, the search engine is shifting its focus to the area of broadband services and e-Commerce. Will it work?

The company initially started out of Calcutta in September, 1996, but has now shifted its operations to Mumbai. ''Net maturity is maximum in Mumbai,'' explains Dhruv Sharma, 40, CEO of 123india.com. The total investment so far has been between Rs 12-14 crore.

123india.com has had two--fairly unconventional--rounds of funding. In the first round, about 60 angel investors took a stake of 10 per cent of the equity. In its recent second round of funding, it placed another 10 per cent of equity to private companies, including Williamson Mega, Park Hotel Group, Surya Roshini Group, and so on.

123india.com says it will have more than 100 million page views by the end of 2000. ''It's a business of hype, this dot.com thing. Dot.com companies essentially create and market a hype,'' warms up Sharma.

Where does 123india.com plan to go from here? ''Our basic philosophy is to improve our number substantially right now. Our main aim is to double our traffic by a series of acts,'' says Sharma. To start with, the company plans to offer a series of value-added services. ''By end-July, 2000, we will launch broadband services, WAP-enabled services like WAP-enabled e-mail, and instant messenger.''

123india.com is also working on providing broadband services in news and entertainment, which should be uploaded by the end of July, 2000.

''Strategic alliances is very inherent to the Net,'' adds Sharma. 123india.com is firmly on the strategic alliance bandwagon. Talks are on an advanced stage with women portal icleo.com, career and education site buckleyourshoe.com, egurucool.com, besides unnamed sports and travel sites. ''We are targeting to enrich the content of our site by tying up with exclusive vortals. This is a strategic partnership,'' says Sharma.

"We don't want to exclude any customer from our focus area. We want to have self-generating traffic'' explains Sharma. 123india.com is, thus planning to set up regional-specific content on its site, apart from content in regional vernacular languages. Hindi-specific vernacular content in Delhi, to be followed by Kannada content in Bangalore, Bengali in Calcutta, and so on.

The site also has ambitious plans for e-Commerce. ''A lot of development is happening in e-Commerce, which will change the social fabric of the country,'' says Sharma. The company is also planning to have an IPO early next year. However, Dhruv is quiet as to what route--the BSE or the NASDAQ--the company will choose to tread.

While 123india.com has a lot of ambitious plans, it still has a long way to go. Like its portal counterparts, the site has not yet reached break-even point. Moreover, it earlier had competition only from search engines, like 'Khoj' and 'India Times'. But now, with the change of focus, it will now compete with well-entrenched biggies like Rediff.com, Satyamonline.com, and a host of e-Commerce sites.

In many ways, 123india.com's decision to enter new spaces is way behind the times. Search engines migrated to full-blown portals in 1996 and 1997, light years away in Net time. It has, thus, lost valuable time in building a brand. A portal's ability to survive depends on brands, rather than the technology. ''Only those who have management depth, strategic partnership, and deep pockets can survive,'' says Sharma. That's a prophetic statement. 123india.com has to quickly start putting up its act together. Otherwise it will no longer remain the 123 of the Net.

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