Is Web 2.0 bubble being burst elsewhere and what can India learn.

First there was kiko which was bought by Tucows a few days ago for 250,000$ and now another a so called web 2.0 company (HuckABuck) is listed on eBay with its current highest bid is about 9300$. Now Is this a burst of a bubble or the end of the web 2.0 era. Moreover Is there some lessons that India can take from this which is now entering the web 2.0 fray.

My opinion on these companies is fairly straightforward, these companies can’t be called 2.0 in truest sense. No I am not arguing semantics here, my point is that these are merely features and none of them have fundamentally created new value which is required to be called a 2.0. Features don’t create big business but rather they naturally chart their course to get attached the product that they are a feature of (or should’nt it be the other way round). Now kiko is a feature which fitted naturally into tucows and they have had a more than fair return. Bubbles are condition when there is a market failure due to multitude of reasons. So this is certainly not a bubble but market at its work and hence HuckABuck would find the right buyer for the right price too.

Coming to India and web 2.0 my general observation has been that India is typically about 36 months behind the valley in any of the trends (Europe is generally 18 months behind valley). This happened during the dotcom days and now the same with web 2.0. With the recent business world article on web 2.0 entrepreneurs we could say that web 2.0 has entered Indian mainstream. The web 2.0 trend had started in US around 2003 and it got fancy name coined by Tim O Reilly in 2004.

Now what is that we can learn from web 2.0 that has happened in Valley and Europe so far. One thing that is certainly undeniable is that there are some fundamental changes that are happening. (See my opinion on web 2.0 & mobile 2.0 on top right side bar) During this tumultuous times we could either choose to build features (call it web 2.0 or not) for becoming a part bigger platforms or build some innovative platforms and unlock great value. To be very frank I am not way too impressed by the list in the BW article, though I have not tried any of the service listed there but one look at most of them will tell you that they are like what Bazee was a few years ago. No doubt that they may walk their way to riches but then they have quickly look out for their Ebay (or GYM). Kanwal Rekhi when I met him once had an interesting name for such Bazee kind of companies, he called them YAFO(yet another fad opportunity) companies. But then India does not have ( & may not have for a while) any incentive to fundamentally innovate. As one of my VC friend sums up very nicely why would anyone risk his neck when he can make huge money by just sitting on a couch and tapping a few buttons.

The reporter from BW did not seem to do thorough research on web 2.0 and hence did not cover couple of other significant players in India, two of my top picks would be the Ashish & Gaurav from tekritisoftware (ourmedia.org that they built a while ago is more 2.0 than you could know) & cleartip.com ( I just can’t stop gushing about these guys, infact they should add a caption to themselves – ‘Clear the pain from booking a Trip’)