It seems like ages since i first started the India 2.0 series and now we are on the 4th part after india 2.0 part 1, part 2 and part 3. Till now we have covered social networking, social bookmarking, video sharing, picture sharing and even events sharing.

In the 4th part of India 2.0 we are covering 4 very interesting sites and some of them which are more original and less inspired from International Sites.

Techtribe.com  - A networking community for the techies. Please note I haven’t used the term "Social networking" and that is for a reason because Techtribe is different as Unlike social networking ventures that promote building a ‘one-to-many’ network of hundreds of friends, techTribe’s focus is to enable networking that facilitates the formation of ‘tribes’ of like-minded professionals. Also to give the site a more professional and serious outlook techTribe has announced a year long campaign called connect2Develop, where it will award a grant of up to Rs 1 million each month to an innovative idea collaboratively developed by professionals using the techTribe platform. The goal of connect2Develop is to “democratize opportunity” for entrepreneurial ventures and provide grant funding for the most innovative ideas.
As far as looks and usability is concerned techtribe seems to have got it right with Orkutish scrapping features like pings and also a community building exercise with tribes and forums. What will be interesting to see is what they are intending on building going further as their site (once having traffic) can get into providing project management software that IT professionals or even Companies can subscribe online.

Cyn.in (pronounced as Sign.in)  - This site is what they call Enterprise 2.0. Recently we had an article on google’s release Google Apps for your Domain which offered softwares to businesses. Cyn.in can be taken as a more comprehensive and if i may add by the looks of it very well thought out Enterprise 2.0 website. Cyn.in seems inspired by internationally acclaimed enterprise 2.0 site 37signals.com which has products like basecamp, backpack, writeboard and tadalist  which are extremely popular abroad. The company behind Cyn.in is Cynapse which has created community software like Ameio and a notes software syncnotes.com.
Cynapse is led by Apurva Roy Chowdhary and click here to know more about their team.
Honestly I found the concept and the method in which they are promoting the site very impressive. Currently they are giving bloggers 6 month of access to their site absolutely free (smart marketing tactic i must say). As far as the market they are addressing there is a huge potential hidden there. Software a Service (Saas) is a huge growing segment is India which is still at its nascent stage. India’s SaaS revenues increased over 53 percent to $7 million in 2005, and the market is expected to grow to $48 million by 2008, representing the fastest growth in the region. 

Also the pie chart below shows how the need for mid market ERP is going to grow in India especially for SMB’s which in turn will help the software as service which essentiall addresses the needs of SMB’s

 So it looks like Cynapse is in the right market but with salesforce.com (which is an international leader in Saas) coming to India by this year end and with giants like Google launching apps for your domain one can expect fierce competition in this market.

MapmyIndia.com - This is India’s answer to google maps. A digital mapping portal by CE Infosystems, a Delhi based company. This India centric web 2.0 site works almost exactly the way google maps work. It covers the top 80 cities in India, with the main metros being covered in greater detail. The features of this site include Map Search - searching any location through a search box, Driving Directions - driving directions from one place to another, eLocation - This helps you mark your own specific location and Local search - This gives information about local services atms etc. 
This website is also compatible through mobile phone and can be accessed at mobile.mapmyindia.com. More on this site can be read here

GoYaar.com - An Indian social networking Web site founded by Phalgun Raju, a 29-year old former McKinsey and Company Consultant holding Master’s degrees from the likes of MIT and the Harvard Business School. He describes the new Web site as an exciting and easy-to-use tool to connect to and interact with friends, batch mates, and colleagues online.
As far as I am concerned Go Yaar has a plain jane look with regards to design and though the features include blogs, video, music and photo uploads. But all in all its a standard social networking site in direct competition with other Indian social networks like Humsubka.com and the yet to be launched Yaari.com. Infact looking at the competition hotting up in this space Fropper.com which was one of the early movers in social networking (if we can call fropper a social networking site!.. I think its more dating) has revamped its site and launched something known as fropper zones. Earlier fropper was just dating but now they have added something called fropper zones that offers an additional social networking platform and enables people to store & share photos, create blogs, form groups & connect with other people. And most importantly do all this for free..
So here is what i feel Indian or not Indian social networking is based on making new friends and finding old ones and till now the only site that has been able to accomplish the two goals in India has been Google’s Orkut.

This concludes our 4h part of India 2.0 series i hope you enjoyed reading it please do comment on the sites we have mentioned here and let us know your review. And yes we will be coming back with part 5 too

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