A farmer in Nellikuppam in Tamil Nadu browses the kiosk in his village for a latest update on the prices of agricultural commodities. Not only that, he also catches the latest gossip in the Tamil film industry and is informed about the latest new on "Amma" Jayalalitha's overtures to the Vajpayee government. The additional information is packaged exclusively in Tamil for the farmer, thanks to the Bangalore based dotcom, Indiainfo.com. Long after the naysayers wrote it off as another bubble in the dotcom burst, the horizontal portal, which was one of the first Internet ventures in the country is slowly making money. "We did commit mistakes," says, B.G.Mahesh, co-founder and CEO, Indiainfo. The portal is undergoing a turnaround to achieve a cash break-even next quarter. As Mr. Giri Balasubramaniam, vice president, alliances, says, "We had a clear strategy to bring the portal back as a leader."

Giri and Mahesh spoke to K Raghu in an interview to The Asian Age.

The Asian Age: Has Indiainfo.com learnt its lessons from the dotcom burst and the technology meltdown?
Indiainfo.com: Like many, we were also focusing on the eyeballs for fetching revenues and suffered huge losses. We have learnt from our past mistakes and know that eyeballs and huge valuation cannot fetch revenues. We are now realistic and exactly know our strengths and weaknesses. We started this dotcom not just for valuations, but to run it as a business organisation. We have restructured our organisation and for the financial year 2001-02, we implemented the project SWIFT - strategy, win-win, innovation, focus and teamwork.

AA: How has your business shaped since the implementation of SWIFT?
Iinfo: With Swift, we have evolved a multiple revenue stream model. In areas where we are strong, we lag behind, we have forged alliances and this is bringing results.

We have cut costs and have evolved revenue models even offline. We have centralized our operations in Bangalore. We are heading for a cash break-even by the first quarter of 2002.

Stringent accounting, which shrunk revenue cycles to a monthly basis has seen Indiainfo reporting an increase in revenue by as much as eight times in the last eight months.. We have curtailed our expenditure to around Rs. 36 lakh per month from a high of Rs. 2.5 crore during September 2000. Presently, our revenues have increased to Rs.32 lakh from Rs. 3 lakh in April 2001.

AA: What are Indiainfo's strengths?
Iinfo: We have strong and dedicated user base and we receive around 94.5 million hits every month. Over 50 percent of the hits are from abroad. Our vernacular channels are very popular and here we get 90 percent of the hits from abroad. We have strong verticals such as Careerindia.com, Thatscricket.com, Evesindia.com, and Quizbrain.com among others.

AA: What are the alliances you have forged and how is the revenue shared?
Iinfo: We have e-commerce alliances with Fabmart, NRI Gift Shop, Value India, Globus, Namaste and Bazaar. We have also tied up with portals for specified content like technology, where the traffic is routed to their site. We have different revenue sharing models like fee-based, annual retainer and also on diversion of traffic.

AA: What are your other revenue models, both online and offline?
Iinfo: We do targeted e-mail for our customers and earn revenue through banner ads. We have tied up with Lycos to provide vernacular content on their site and we charge a retainer. Through Quizbrain.com, we conduct quiz competitions for corporates and at Careerindia.com; we offer placement services mainly to Gulf and the far East countries. We have also started language teaching courses for software professionals, with around 45 people learning Japanese. This, we plan to make it mutilocational in the South. We also do language translation, create multimedia CDs among others. There is a significant share of revenue coming from offline sources. We had raised funds to the tune of dollars 16 million. We are comfortable with our reserves and will continue to improve ourselves.

AA: What is your employee strength?
Iinfo: We now have an employee strength of 102, as against 375 in September 2000. We may be the first dotcom where employees who had quit have joined back and are working. We are comfortable with the present strength.

By K Raghu

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