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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (10007)	12/11/1999 8:26:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Respond to of 12475

Up Close & Digital with Sabeer Bhatia,"The Hindu Robot". The next 'adventure' arzoo.com Driving Ambition (How a Bangalore whizkid became a Silicon Valley posterboy. Up close and digital with Sabeer Bhatia, the man behind Hotmail) Hotmail has sizzled in India (the seventh-largest market) and not only because the boy from Bangalore invented it. In a country where there are more than 50 people for every handset, sending e-mail is easier than using the phone. Bhatia was convinced India was ready for an Internet explosion, but how to get everybody online? His answer: a link-up with cable TV. One in four households has a tube - and almost all of them can get cable. Bhatia planned to plant an information pipeline from London to Bombay, rope in some of the country's 600,000 cable operators, and sell a cheap set-top device to turn the TV into an Internet gateway. Total cost: $200 million. Then he got wrapped up in New Delhi's red tape. "The task is not technologically difficult, physically it could be done in a couple of years," he says. "But the laws are so against you, the business practices so archaic, that when I went in, I saw it would take 10 years. That disappointed me." But it did not deter him. Bhatia has adopted a more subtle approach. He sits on the board of an Indian firm called Homeland Networks that is collecting India-specific content for the nation's growing number of Web surfers. "We're capturing eyeballs," Bhatia explains. It is the first stab of a two-pronged offensive. First, build up a user base. Second, lobby government to put the laws in place that will foster an information revolution. Once the public is ready and the lawmakers have clicked, says Bhatia, "I'll branch into infrastructure." Bhatia recently sponsored and spoke at a conference at Stanford, inviting "all the people who can influence [Indian] policy." The message: On the World Wide Web, geography means nothing. The next Hotmail could emerge from Bangalore, not California. cnn.com