oCricket.com – A Social Network for the cricket addicts
Brajeshwar presented his new venture, oCricket.com, at the Startup Saturday event.
oCricket.com
What is it about?
oCricket is supposed to be a Social Network, specifically dedicated to cricket fans. With the typical features of social networks, including friends, sharing, commenting, etc. A genuine Web 2.0 product.
What more?
One of the key features that Brajeshwar showcased was a way to link any media content from anywhere on the net, quickly to one’s account on oCricket. The ease of this linking, and then the content showing up on oCricket, along with the necessary copyright disclaimers, is a neat feature. Using this, the property can get a lot of good images, videos very quickly, once the users start using these features.
Other obervations:
The site is strong on technical aspect. Features appear to be quite rugged and well coded. The site also presents a very professional, international look and feel. The site is hosted on Amazon cloud computing, enabling cost efficiency on hosting costs. As Brajeshwar mentioned, many other useful tools are also bought on a small monthly fee basis, keeping the overall running costs low. At this time, there were no revenue options visible, and Brajeshwar mentioned that several plans were there, but these would be coming up in time, once usage traction is found.
Wisdom Nuggets:
1. It appeared that the entire content was user generated. Which is perfectly fine. But which means that the key input from the site owners is the technology input, which allows the social network to flourish. Then, in reality, there is not a lot of investment done by the team, on the vertical per se. Cricket has been chosen for its popularity, but beyond that, it is incidental. Then, it could very well make sense to quickly scale up the project by creating a whole bunch of similar properties, and port the same features there as well. Be it say, for all sports (oFootball, oTennis, oF1Racing, etc. etc.) to carry the sports theme through, or say, pick India’s biggest engagement verticals, other than cricket, viz. oBollywood and oPolitics. In doing so, there is enough traction that could come, without additional costs, and for a user, there may be multiple interests, and a higher level of engagement, after having acquired him.
2. If this is not done, there needs to be a very serious compelling reason for a user to come to this site, specially for cricket alone. Would one not expect such neat groups to be found on one’s own existing social network, be it Facebook or Orkut or whatever? oCricket will be well served then, to quickly come up with Facebook apps for their offering.
3. There are no apparent entry barriers. Having said that, I buy Brajeshwar’s point on the same. No one has done it before, and they can grab the piece, if there is one. Others will have to fight and catch up, once oCricket gets some critical mass.
4. There is a serious doubt about the copyright factor. At least in my mind. Is it right to pick up content from FlickR or other sites, and just put it up here, and acknowledge the source? I am not sure how other content owners will feel about this?
5. There is also the Google search engine factor, with respect to the same point. Will it not be duplicate content, when it is showing up at the multiple locations? Google does not really like that from a search engine positioning point of view. This could work against oCricket.
6. The revenue model is again a challenge. How long can the site continue to work without revenues? There is a hope to be able to raise venture funding. In today’s investment climate, if it does not happen soon, where does that put oCricket? Without some brand building budgets, growing registered users may become a challenge. And lack of revenue options will put pressures on the finances, I suspect.
7. There is also the challenge of easily differentiating in a congested space. There are tons of cricket sites on the Internet. Is oCricket very different? Will it appeal to users significantly more than others? Why? And does that ‘why’ get answered intuitively when you reach the site?
8. Cricket has not been a vertical to draw a lot of advertising. The demography of a cricket lover is quite diverse, and not a highly targeted one, from an advertiser’s point of view. So will there be money to be made on a cricket vertical? That is a challenge.
Zopte.com – The Web 2.0 Factory
It is interesting that I start this new blog, with a review of a website that starts from the last letter of the alphabet. Maybe I will end up going from Z to A!
Harsh Jain, the founder of the website, Zopte.com, presented his product at the Bar Camp5, in Mumbai.
Zopte.com
What is it about?
Zopte.com enables anyone to start a Social Networking site, with many of the standard features that such sites need. Getting started with a base level social networking site of your own is very simple. You can select the applications that you need there, and enable them for your own site.
What more?
Your site can be hosted by Zopte and can have your own domain name. With simple markup language like steps that Zopte suggests, you can make your own applications. And add those to your site as well. That in fact, is the clear advantage that zopte offers. Not having to depend on widgets and such, you could potentially create features on your site, by yourself, with simple steps.
The entire service is free at this time.
My observations:
At this time, clearly there are no revenue channels, and clearly there are costs.
At this time, I am seeing challenges in SEO work done on the site’s own pages. If you see the screen shot above, it does not even have a page title. How will the service grow?
Although the site has been “launched”, many of the links on home page itself, appear to be ‘coming soon’.
Wisdom Nuggets:
1. At first view, the service appeared a lot like WordPress.com. Harsh explained the differences, especially with regards to the markup language that enables any kind of new applications to be made and integrated. Fair enough. But then the difference needs to be something that a LOT of people need, something that is easily communicated across the site (at this time, it does not come out so obvious). And after all that, you still m have to face the brand equity factor, in favor of your larger competitor.
2. There has to be a real estimate of the market size for this. If there is so-called markup language, even if it is simple enough, the application is not exactly the kind that a common non-techie user can quickly adapt to! Then when you see the techie space, would they like to use a ready tool, or they would also want to make a tool themselves? Who indeed, would be the regular users of a service like this one? Or put it in another way, the application is a little complicated for common usage, and a little too simple for a flexible techie user.
3. Then there is always the revenue challenge. How will revenue be made? Also once you figure out a revenue channel, you have to see the potential projected value of money that could be made there. Overall viability of the project is determined by summing up these different revenue options.
In conclusion, there is a clear need to figure out the revenue lines and then do a dispassionate working of the larger business plan that could emerge.
If there is an acknowledged challenge to the business model, I may even recommend checking if it is possible to adapt the service for WordPress. Or in other words, offer this platform from within the WordPress pages, and give these value additions to all WordPress users. There would be quick, large scale adaption, and the viability will no longer be your problem alone, but also that of WordPress!!
Inspiration
UPDATED INSPIRATION: Current date: March 9, 2021!
Below is the original note on the inspiration that I had to start this blog, some 12-13 years back. That was when I was tracking some startups and evaluating them. I had not updated this blog much in recent days. And now, the focus would be very different, in any case. At this time, the purpose of my occasional blog post here, would be to discuss and debate a business strategy or an investment idea, for purpose of interaction with other like-minded people.
Hope you find it to be of interest.
The original inspiration from 12-13 years back is as follows:
Attending a Bar Camp, Startup Saturday and the Entrepreneurship Summit, in the last 3 weeks, took me back to 1997-98 days when we were starting up for the first time, with Homeindia.com, along with few other first-generation dot com entrepreneurs in India.
I can see the same energy now, perhaps only magnified by the changes in the economy over these years, the emergence of India as a country to reckon with, the maturity of the ICT businesses, the far larger familiarity of the technologies for students climbing out of their campuses, and of course, the awareness now, about an ecosystem that can encourage entrepreneurship.
There is another change. Me. With 11 years of hands-on Internet experience, there is a larger “intuitive” feel on the industry, there is beyond the romanticism of the business, a better understanding of business realities, of markets, of revenues and results. As one young participant respectfully pointed out, there is the “gray hair” difference.
This has inspired me to start this new blog. To share my 2 cents worth, on new startups that I see coming up. Based only on information that is in the public domain (or shared by the company in public forums), and not based on any private information that entrepreneurs share with me. With an idea to give some new perspectives. Ultimately the business succeeds because of the entrepreneurs and they need to trust their gut. But “outside” views help sometime. And which is what I strive to provide here. With only one goal in mind: to enable the entrepreneur to SUCCEED!!
The Gray Hair Speaketh 