Ventures

*This post originally appeared in my other blog on March 30, 2008

The Godfather of Google’s cash cow AdSense, Gokul Rajaraman is starting up a new venture named ChaiLabs. He is yet to unveil the secret of what this new venture is about. But there is a lot of anticipation already. I am breaking my head – well, virtually – to guess what this ChaiLabs is about. I don’t have a clue.

And when I and my friends were talking about this, the topic suddenly turned towards Shabir Bhatiya. And when I checked his latest ventures, there are a lot. Like BlogEveryWhere, SabSe Bolo and LiveDocuments. I don’t know what is so unique about Sabse Bolo. After all, the buzz is about conference calls and the calling charges apply. May be I am too naïve to understand this, may be one of you will explain me. But this Live Documents has got a gloss, I guess. For a long time this protection of word documents is challenging and too weak. With this Live Documents, that can be a breeze. The documents can be protected with the accounts from Live Documents. You will be able to open the document only if you have account with Live Documents and then, obviously the author of the document must include your account in AUL list. In that way, the document could be protected in a way, for sure. This entire Live Documents is built upon Office, as they say. But it would be a hard fight for Live Documents, with the web2.0 providers like Google and Zoho.

Zoho has already introduced building applications online and it’s a breeze to create an application, mainly data gathering something link polls and all. I tried it and created a data form to gather data against Indian Airlines.
Apple has launched video rental, and I see a similar effort – well in early stage – from Rhydun. Rhydun is a product of MusicIndiaOnLine. You can listen to songs online. Of course, you can choose your songs. The quality is good, as they claim. And importantly there are surveys asking: how much will you pay and money related questions. I can guess where it will lead to.

There are lots of ventures. Like chailabs I may go for ParottaLabs. There is a considerable market for parotta (Rotti-Cenai) in Malaysia and Singapore. Like pizzahut I may go for RottiHut. Online parotta ordering and delivering. Sounds good, huh? I came across HeyMonkeyBrain.com – a venture from Squidoo. They (Seth, in particular) say it is the fastest growing internet company. But I am not sure, what he mentions! HeyMonkeyBrain is about picking up a topic and arguing. Arguments are always endless. But what you get in the end? What is there for Squidoo? Revenue from advertisement?

Creating just a site is easy but making an impact is the toughest thing.