Innovation Personified

In 1996 one man made the whole world turn around and ask in a highly surprised tone “What!! Four Hundred Million…Really???”. The man was none other than our own Sabeer Bhatia, the man who made Microsoft yield $400 million from its cash coffers for his email service Hotmail.

Since then tons of Indian web portals have been making money on the net. A notable few are naukri, jobs ahead (Job portals) rediff, sify (news portals), shaadi, India matrimony (self explanatory), bazee (auction). But still none of them has actually fully utilized the major advantage that the web provides, the whole world is your market place and every person on this earth (who knows may even include aliens in other planets) is a potential customer. All these portals are targeted towards Indian users only.

A couple of days back, Sabeer Bhatia launched www.blogeverywhere.com , the latest brainchild of his innovative ideas. This is one idea that had not struck any of the engineers (atleast not till today) at the web giants google, yahoo or msn. It is a toolbar added to your browser that allows you to write comments about any web page you visit and also allows you to read what others have said about that page. It is a free software and Sabeer plans to make money out of advertisements.

The search giant Google made billions from web advertising by knowing what people were looking for on the web (using its revolutionary text based ads and adsense technology). Today blogeverywhere databases will contain tons and tons of information about what people like and don’t like. Whenever any product is released, here’s a small list of the information that Sabeer Bhatia will know within a matter of hours

-what do they like about the product

- what extra features would they like to have

- what is the section of people (based on geographic location, age, sex, interests) who actually like the product

- how does the product fare against the competitors

- what it is that they hate about the product

Well as the saying goes, Information is Wealth, the databases at blogeverywhere will be a treasure. Now all that Sabeer needs to do is pull in as many users as possible, develop tools to extract information from the tons of data and cleverly sell the information to make billions of dollars. Hoping to see an Indian take on the web giants on their own turf.

A word of caution from Agent Pal to Sabeer is to make sure that the servers are able to handle the terabytes of data that will be flowing in each day.

Sabeer has made every Indian IT professional proud.

Cheers,

Agent Pal