Hindi portal goes live, gets Rs 12 cr investment

Hindi portal goes live, gets Rs 12 cr investment
ENS ECONOMIC BUREAU

mumbai, feb 23: After a dozen new portal and vortal launches, dotcom has now started going local. The world's first Hindi portal with original content, Webdunia.com, recieved $ 2.8 million (Rs 12.2 crore) venture capital investment from Walden International and angel investor Prakash Bhalerao. The stake they picked up was not disclosed.

"This is the first round of funding. We expect it to have multiple rounds of investments," Walden India director Sudhir Sethi said at a press conference on Wednesday. The site has a clear first mover advantage on the lines what portals like Rediff enjoyed, because it is one of the earliest to target regional market.

It has a Hindi search engine which lets the user search for Hindi content in various categories, classifieds and a section featuring Mumbai-specific events and information, apart from news, e-mail and other features. A unique feature of the site is that it does not require any fonts to be downloaded by the user.

The site recorded around 1.2 lakh vistors and 8.5 lakh page views in January. In February, the number is expected to go up to 1.5 lakh vistors and 10 lakh page views. Nearly 40 per cent of vistors are based out of USA and Canada, and only 29 per cent are based out of India. This mix is expected to change as the internet subscriber goes up in the country to nearly 60 per cent India-based users.

The promoters also plan to set up cybercentres at different places and have information from government offices like mandi rates on the site. The Maharashtra government has already said it will support the venture by providing content from state government offices. The site will facilitate business to business and business to consumer transactions in Indian languages.

According to founder and CEO Vinay Chhajlani the site will also be a content aggregator for localised Hindi content, enablers of other Indian language websites. "Only 6 per cent of Indians understand English. The potential for Indian language content on the internet is much bigger than that in the English language," he added.

Meanwhile, a vortal for the electrical industry, electricmela.com, was also launched on Wednesday. The B-to-B site is targeted at manufacturers and dealers of electrical goods and aims to reduce procurement cost and time. It has information on 30,000 categories, 3500 companies and 1000 dealers.

The site provides a virtual shop for manufacturers and dealers where customers can place inquiries and orders, plus an auction for second-hand goods and scrap. Revenue will be from three streams: hosting charges for virtual shops, commission on transactions and advertisements. "In three years we expect a revenue of Rs 200 crore at the conservative level and Rs 1000 crore on the higher side," director Shailesh Jain said.