Simarprit’s Weblog

Website Incubation and Compare Infobase May 5, 2009

Since quite sometime i have been thinking of penning down my thoughts on what i do for a living.  whenever I sat down to do this, I landed up asking myself hundreds of questions and the net result, nothing penned down.  Today I am sitting with the intent of making an all out effort of writing down synopsis of last 11 years of work.

In 1998, Compare Infobase Limited was incorporated as a Private Limited company with the mandate of developing and selling websites.  For a company to have developing and selling websites as its objective was as new in 1999 as it is today.  Almost all Internet companies worldwide focus on developing one or two or may be a handful of websites and then ramped them up to very large sites.  Somehow I wanted to develop an organization which worked on many websites at lower and middle range of price brackets.  The genesis of this thought probably was the conservative upbringing and lack of readiness to put all eggs in 1 basket.

Compare Infobase started with its 1st website Indiaprofile.com, which was made with an objective of projecting India to the world.  http://indiaprofile.com was sold to a tour operator after 5 years of its incorporation and is now a descent revenue generator for its new owner.

Mapsofindia.com was more a need of the time then a journey into cartography.  Plain and simple there were no Indian point of view maps of Internet way back in 1998.  The UN adopted Map of India which truncates Kashmir and certain other parts of India was the most prevalent and the known face of India on the Internet.  http://mapsofindia.com since then has grown to be a site which attracts over 100,000 people everyday and a site which has made the Map of India with India’s point of view, the recognizable face of India.

Something very funny happened in 2006, General Musharraf made a presentation to global audience on Pakistan and its investment potential and as the luck would have it the presentation had the map of Pakistan without the part of Kashmir which Pakistan claims as their own.  It was very embarrassing for Pakistan for General Musharraf and a cause of big celebration at Compare.  We could hear ourselves saying that Mapsofindia has done what it has set out to do – job done, mission accomplished.

With over 100,000 pages of mapping and generic information on India, Mapsofindia.com is one of the largest primary repositories of information on India.

Compare Infobase took a conscious call not to sell Mapsofindia but to grow it for itself and to nurture other sites on various verticals on India.

Running Mapsofindia gave ideas for a whole bunch of websites.  Compare decided to foray Education, Economy, Travel, Jobs, Handicrafts and Celebrations.  1999 saw a host of websites launched by Compare Infobase.  Indiaedu.com took the mantle of covering the education vertical for Compare. Indiaedu.com created India’s 1^st database of education Institutes and the site which started with just 20 pages is today a repository of over 20,000 educational Institutions in India and was recently sold by us and is now a flourishing independent business.  There is a smile on my face everytime I look at Indiaedu and this smile is of satisfaction.  http://indiaedu.com is a unique example of Silicon Valley reaching out to India.  Indiaedu.com is owned by two Silicon Valley professionals, both of them have never been to India and nor have had any Indian relative.  Its a pure business for them, which they are pursuing and growing.  Compare Infobase continues to maintain and manage its incubation on their behalf, the quality standards and the best practices which have been put in place ensure that the site keeps growing day after day.

If Indiaedu.com got sold to Silicon Valley professionals based in Silicon Valley then an advertising and marketing geek decided to buy http://economywatch.com for his Singapore run business.  Economywatch.com covers India and the US Economy in great detail and now under its new ownership covers economies of other countries as well.  Once again Compare remains associated with this unique project and continues to contribute to its growth.  If the clock is to put back to 1998–99, one can’t help reflecting upon the easy availability of the right domain name of the right Incubation project.  Compare was incubating projects then, Compare is incubation projects now, but the projects being incubated now struggle for good domain names – I wish we would find some way out to have relevant domain names easily available to us.  Economy Watch, a great domain name, a great site, a good owner, an idea incubated, a business created, a business sold, another smile of satisfaction.

More to come…