REDIFF: Big US launch planned
Financial Times, May 12, 1999

India's leading internet portal company, Rediff, yesterday unveiled plans for a big push into the US, with the launch of a sophisticated new portal site for expatriate Indians.

Rediff hopes to capture the ethnic Indian market of 1.2m mostly wealthy and technology-friendly people, including many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It is also setting its sights on the 20m Indians living abroad in Europe, Africa and Asia.

The launch marks a new challenge to the leading US portal sites, which have themselves recently begun to expand aggressively overseas.

"US portals have succeeded in cutting across users the world over by introducing localised versions of their services," said Ajit Balakrishnan, founder and chairman of Rediff. "Rediff.com aims to do the same out of India."

The US venture also signals the emergence of a second generation of Indian technology companies. While most existing companies are software service providers, the new generation are mainly web-based businesses.

About 60 per cent of Indian Americans are on-line, making the community an important market. Indian nationals also account for the largest number of programmers working in the technology industry on short-term visas.

Rediff, backed by international venture capital from Draper, Warburg Pincus and Intel, has constructed a full-service US version of its existing portal, which, with 80m hits a month, is India's most popular by far.

The portal contains news about the Indian community in the US, gathered by a network of 16 correspondents, and a portfolio tracker for non-resident Indians who have bought shares on the Bombay stock exchange.

Visitors can select a regular desk-top feed of news from India, delivered every five minutes, and buy tickets for Indian cultural events in the US online.

Rediff also offers free e-mail, online dating introductions, flight availability on airlines, music samples, Indian train and hotel services, e-commerce sales of books, music and flowers, jobs, a shareware facility for software programmers and what it calls "Astrology (serious)".

Yesterday the company launched its new search engine - a challenge to India-dedicated service Khoj. Mr Balakrishnan said the engine would define its directory in cultural rather than geographical terms.

"If you are Indian you are not just interested in Indian sites, you are interested in international sites, but the perspective is different."

He said Rediff - like most of its internet-based peers - was ultimately planning to go public, but not for a year or two, until its revenues stabilised.

In the meantime Rediff is likely to face competition at home from US portal sites, which analysts say are less than a year away from launching their own services targeted at India and Indians.