Ram Shriram, the founder of Jungalee.com, has partnered with other Indian-origin promoters to launch elance.com, a global services exchange portal which can effectively become one's best route to moonlighting using the web.

Shriram, who quit Amazon.com earlier this month, is on the board of elance.com and google.com, a next generation search engine, besides Yourdley.

Google.com is a next generation search engine. With older search engines fast becoming irrelevant due to ad clutter and poor search matches, google.com promises to give a satisfactory and relevant answer within the top 10 searches.

"I can now pick and choose the companies I want to work with. I am spending most of the time in technologies and services that I think are going to bring forward the next generation of internet in India,"Shriram told The Financial Express in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

"Elance.com has a lot of relevance for India as it will appeal to the software developers a lot here. Suppose there is a company in New York which wants a website developed, even a student in Delhi, if he can write HTML and in some languages, he can bid and if he quotes the best rate, he can deliver the whole thing over this site. Similarly, it could be a graphic artist, ad designers or anybody, the possibilities are immense," he said.

Good news is Shriram is eager to do hand-holding for Indian entrepreneurs wanting to start internet ventures. "I am talking to private individuals and first trying to understand the market. I certainly hope to work with some bright people," said Shriram.

"This is the first time Indians have succeeded so well, primarily in the internet and networking. Look at the number of companies acquired by Cisco. Many of them were started by Indians. There are informal networks of like-minded Indians thathave developed, but no formal structure has emerged yet other than The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE). But people find out about us and keep e-mailing us looking for advise and help", he said.

However, a legend of international level is yet to emerge from India, one which will be in India and run by an Indian entrepreneur. As against this, Israeli IT industry has given birth to many a successes like Mirabilis.com which owned ICQ, later got sold for $400 million to AOL. There are not many such companies which we can point to in the Indian context, Shriram said.

"On a comparative scale, we are not yet there. A large number of Indians are doing well, but an Indian-bred company which is insanely successful and gets bought like that is yet to emerge. You need one or two like that in India", Sriram said.

On India, Shriram said the country needs to sort out a few basic things like the infrastructure bottlenecks.

Sriram said many internet companies are valued insanely right now in the capital markets. "It has ledto a gold rush like mentality. Once the markets turn harsh, a lot of these companies who do not have a long-term viability perspective, but got funded merely on the basis of the idea will find themselves out of business. Indications are already there, but I feel the markets will correct the trend automatically".

The internet, according to Shriram, can make critical difference as even a student in a small city will soon be able to liberate himself from shackles. So where new enterprises will still have a little difficulty due to infrastructure, it will be individuals and professionals who will make the difference on the internet.

Sriram said "it depends on the market you are going after. Amazon is going for business to consumer (B2C) or consumer to consumer (C2C) in the case of auctions. You build for scales and keep adding lots of customers and in my two years we grew from two million to 11 million. So at some point I believe that volumes will result in profitability."