She was, however, unwilling to disclose the extent of investment. News Corp had recently picked a 15 per cent stake in the company.

The Microland group holds the remaining equity in the company according to Vetteth who also said that ICICI had come into the company before the other investor, News Corp.

"We plan to deploy the investment in the area of brand building as well as building the product and also ramp up our technology and hosting environments" says Vetteth.

ITspace is a vertical technology portal which is focussed on building IT communities. "We are structured largely around three community focussed axes and each of these is further divided into sub-segments relevant to those sections" explains Vetteth.

The technology portal primarily aims to create a virtual community of technology creators, developers, vendors, and users who will interact, share content and eventually shop online as well. At the moment the portals has spaces specific to CIOs, entrepreneurs, developers and students. "Our content providers are largely from the industry itself" says Vetteth "for instance if you take the community of CIOs which we have built online much of the content there is provided by prominent CIOs themselves, so it becomes a talking point and a platform for interaction for all CIOs" explains Vetteth.

For the student community, the site has an interesting programme whereby students specialising in IT can bag projects with reputed companies and fulfill these on a freelance basis. "This is a great push for students just out of college since they can then get references from reputed firms which may not be ready to actually hire freshers out of college" says Vetteth.

The portal has also launched a series of branded properties called Future Talk and Tech Talk where achievers in the field of IT chat with ITspace's visitors.

The site plans to launch online shopping for IT related products shortly. The other revenue channels include banner advertising, job channels and content licensing.