This is because they don't have an exit route in terms of being able to go in for an IPO and list on the stock exchange, the speakers reasoned. They argued that the internet is not a sector which yields fast returns and hence, norms which are applicable to other brick and mortar firms cannot be made applicable to the virtual world.

It may be years before an e-commerce firm yields profits. An internet start-up from the US cited the case of a company, which had sales of just $25,000. Its market capitalisation after venture capitalists buoyed it up and listed it on the stock exchanges: A hefty $760 million.

Merchant bankers and regulators in India have strict conditions for a listing which simply cannot be applied to Web firms. While the mood was generally negative about venture capital, one could spot management consultants and a few managers from venture capital firms rushing around frantically looking for winning internet ideas.

A conference is planned in the near future on venture capital and the interent by TFCI, which should have a smattering of the cheque-book flashing types going around.

What's the fuss about?

VSNL has been tomtomming its achievement of ramping up its bandwidth availability to 165 Mbps over the past few months. All that an attendee at ebiz India '99 had to say was: "Intel alone has 350 Mbps of bandwidth available to itself for corporate use. And VSNL for a population of a billion people has a meagre 165 million. Clearly, if it wants to get the country on the internet path it has to look at doubling the available bandwidth."

True. While VSNL acting chief Amitabh Kumar says that half the current bandwidth is unutilised, subscribers are still struggling with slow downloads and difficulty in getting connected. Also, other ISPs are hooking on to the VSNL international internet gateway. So wouldn't it make greater sense if VSNL bought in larger quantities? Probably double of what it has currently?

This will help it in many ways: Buying higher volumes will help it negotiate a better price, though all the bandwidth may not be taken up and may not generate revenue. It will also lead to less choking of the pipes during peak hours. Lower acquisition costs will mean lower selling prices, means lower internet access rates charged by ISPs, which in turn will result in more people getting incentivised to get onto the Net.

Mahadev.com

He's barely 26 but already heads a company which has business commitments totalling $30-40 million, and is valued at a cool $90 million. Srinivas Polisetty heads start-up Mahadev.com from San Jose, which hawks e-biz solutions for internet companies from its offices in San Jose, Europe, Singapore and India.

Polisetty is in India to build relationships with value-added resellers, system integrators, distributors and create awareness for Mahadev.com's solution. "We are targeting the large Indian enterprise market and offering a world-class product that meets long-term and short-term goals of portals. It's an end-to-end business solution. It generates quotes, processes orders, routes them, and even handles the shipping and tax and electronic payments," he says.

The cost: $75,000 per CPU (approximately: $300,000 for a box which has four CPUs). Polisetty believes he may have to tailor this price for the Indian market after the discussions he had at the ebiz '99 conference in Mumbai.

Internet origin

When did the internet really originate? Some say it was in 1969. And did you know that the first network message was not even completed at first attempt.

Internet users in several parts of the world celebrated its 30th birthday on August 30. It began, apparently, in 1969 at the University of California when Professor Leonard Kleinrock and his research assistant Charley Kline connected to a colleague at the Stanford University close by with the help of a terminal connected to an interface message processor, the first computer network.

Kline typed the letter `l' and got a confirmation that it had been received. The alphabet `o' was typed next. Again this was confirmed as received. And then just as `g' was going to be typed, the network crashed. But undeterred the two set up the system again and this time the experiment worked.

Kleinrock's experiment made his computer the first node of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Arpanet, the world's first major packet-data transmission network linking some of research computers in the US. The Arpanet was the precursor the internet as we know it today. Later other independent networks were added and finally they were interconnected when the technology to do so became available in the early eighties.

(The writer runs a web portal indiantelevision.com and can be reached at television@vsnl.com or at webmaster@indiantelevision.com. Feel free to e-mail with your comments)