Indians are making it big on Web 2.0

Alok Kejriwal, pioneer of online gaming in India, and also a pioneer in making brands use online medium, thinks otherwise. Speaking at a media forum in Bangalore recently, he reeled out a list of names of online businesses that are doing very well and is confident that brand managers are beginning to leverage Web 2.0. Here’s a sample of the success stories of innovative companies that have made an impact globally. Of course there are dozens of domestic online businesses in travel, auto and matrimony sites that are catching up.

Scrabulous: Scrabulous was created by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, from Kolkata and hosted on Face book. After not finding a decent online environment to enjoy word games, the brothers decided to create their own website so that users from all over the world could enjoy.

Launched in July, 2006, Scrabulous is an amazing game and is enjoyed by millions of users from all over the world. At Scrabulous, you can play in real time inside the game rooms, with people from all over the world. You can also invite friends into a room and match them. The site has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and other major news publications across the world for its innovation.

The brothers attract around 700,000 players and earn $25,000 to $50,000 per month.

iRead: Started by Harish Abbot (Stanford Business School) and Krishna Motukuri (IIT Kharagpur). iRead is housed on Facebook. Here people review and rate books. They also discover new books. The site has been able to draw one million installations with 30,000 daily users.

Rediff iShare: Rediff recognized the importance of user-generated content and therefore introduced a music and video sharing platform. This has resulted in greater time spent on the site and as well as consumption of more content.

Games2Win: Started by Alok Kejriwal, it receives 2 million plus visitors per month from 200 countries indicating that Web 2.0 enables you to become destination agnostic. “We encourage our visitors to shoplift our content,” he says.

ZOHO: AdventNet, which owns Zoho, is a new on demand office produtivity suite competing with the biggies such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com. It’s a brainchild of Sridhar Vembu of IIT Madras and Princeton PhD. ZOHO has a 600 engineer team, $40 million business with $1 million profit per month. Founded in 1996, AdventNet focuses on building affordable software for businesses.

Alok Kejriwal believes that web 2.0’s benefits which are participative for consumes, transparent and open, involving, always on, portable and community centric - will be a great breeding ground for newer applications.

Contest2win.com: It is one of the oldest 1998 and is the most well known online brands in India. Founded in 1998, C2w is now one of the richest UGC (User Generated Content) Web 2.0 sites in India. Users can not only play thousands of contests and win hundreds of prizes but also create their own contests. The Crossword engine is the 7th contesting engine rolled out by C2w recently. The earlier ones include Quiz, Polls, Faceoffs, Rate Me, Twister and an immensely popular Hangman engine. Users can use these various engines and create their own contests share it with friends, embed it on their blogs or facebook profiles etc. Prizes of course continue to remain a key element at C2w.

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