Rajesh Kalidumbil is smart and very intelligent but he is not Mr.  Deap Ubhi.

He is co-founder of a new web sensation called
www.lordsofodds.com

Rajesh Kalidumbil seems so knowledgeable, but he only talks about Burrp. Google it. Perhaps because he is the Burrp smart guy everyone is talking about. Its Deap my friends.

Hi Deap.  You have done it again.

We wish all the best for Ashish kashyap

@Grapes are Sour

What value have Yahoo! or MSN or Rediff added to the net.

Interesting question. Have you heard of Rediff Bol? Or of Yahoo messenger? Or of people coming in with free email? Or the passport project (which flopped) but was the progenitor of the idea called OpenID? Heard of attentionmarkets? Social graphs? Pagerank? Natural language search? Please refrain from such comments in the future. :D

Let me just take Rediff as an example. The Ram sethu story breaks covered in indiatimes and rediff. The Rediff story has over a 1000 comments, while the indiatimes one gets 6. Go figure. And woe on Rediff for letting this tremendous start they have sap away day by day. Ajit B - wake up…

Grapes need time to become large and sweet.  For Indian market: it has a big market potential.
People need to come out of short-term thinking on that matter. Nasper's group or Yahoo or Rediff or Indiatimes mail is not a fool investing in this domain as of now.

Ashish Kashyup and his kin are making a niche for themselves for time to come. What all need is patience and perseverence. The toughest would win.

Ashish, on his part, needs to define that toughness criterion for his team and carry on with the team chosen thereafter.

What value if Rediff adding to the internet domain? for that matter what value is MSN adding? OKAY - Not even Yahoo!

Buy content, offer freebies to consumers, get impressions, sell to advertisers.

How different is the business model that is being tried out by Ashish Kashyap and his kin?

The market is small. You guys should be blessed that money is being pumped into this small internet economy. Everybody is in the learning phase (even ibibo… dwaar.. burrp… and sneeze, shout etc)

You guys, your grapes are sour… and perhaps small too!

Its a reality that MIH is investing a lot in India and all benefiting from that should be really happy, in short term at least. For Ashish Kashyap, he knows quite well that " there are full of wrong people in the wrong position from the wrong background with the wrong potential, specially in the management " and also in technology.
The wrong he is doing with the company and also with the section of people benefiting from this MIH downpour of money in India is, that he is not taking any step to get things rectified. If the inefficiency goes on for long, MIH might move out of India and that would be a great loss to India, courtsey Ashish Kashyap.
  Let Ashish Kashyup decide when to take the step.
As far as acquiring startups like burrp is concerned, its not a big deal for Naspers group.

With due respect to all the genius people writing comments here , i would just like to ask something..When you people can think of all such LOSSES and DISADVANTAGES etc etc dont you think MIH / NASPERS / IBIBO management has atleast one person who would have thought all this ???

Keep an eye guys…this company gonna rock soon..!! You will soon be among a list of products by this company which has a lot pf potential to grow ..being financially so strong it is not among a rat race..give yourself some more time to give your expert comments..and you will see the results..

Else we bloggers are always welcome to kill time uttering these conclusions and advising managers all around when we ourself are not much of a bigshot…

Hello! Any unbiased comment here? The entire discussion (if I can call it that) reeks of some past prejudices and grudges!

Please introspect.

A hugely successful South African company decides to invest its money in India…
Who gains? India
Employs locals as part of its management team. Invests in local entrepreneurial ventures.
Who gains? Indian professionals
Then they throw some money at their users.
Who gains? Indian consumers

Naspers must see some gains for itself in doing so in the first place.

So who does NOT gain from this???

Well… the people commenting above—who seemed to have missed the bus this time around!

CS / Nikhil: Bad show :(

A lot has been said, so let me add my few rupees worth. How many of you have been in a position to invest and make returns for investors? Do you even have any idea of the risks one has to take? I admire Ashish for his gumption to invest in properties—yes, some will fail but some will also take off and that is where this guy is good- he will take his risks and he will get there—why am I confident? I have been in a similar situation and I had to make calls and I succeeded in making investors happy.
If only ashish took on some good solid guys into his team-people who know what they are doing and made a run for it—then he'd be dancing.

I have read all the comments and I feel that 1-2 users who for some reasons do not like MIH are using this article to take out their frustration against them especially Ashish Kashyap.
I feel that MIH is doing some amazing stuff - I simply love iBibo and all thier other products. They are the only serious players in this domain in India. Also there is no harm if MIH acquires sites like Burrp because they are the only one who can take it to next level.
Keep going MIH - you are doing great work!!

I wonder what this fuss is all about, especially on a speculatory story. And has anyone checked ibibo lately on Alexa? I am not an avid blogger, and haven't cared to get an account on ibibo either, but the long thread here prompted me to take a look again. The home page looks confusing, but it's an active site with lots of users networking with each other. I dont subscribe to the philosophy of paying bloggers some crazy money for copy pasting junk from elsewhere but the marketing ploy seems to have worked in their favor. They have some really good quality content and people. And I also stumbled upon dwaar.com which looks very interesting, far better than a Guruji which is fighting a lost battle trying to be google of India. But guess dwaar will have tough time too. Google rocks!!

कैसे कासन को दिया है कश्यप जैसन को दिया है,
बारोप ने उनसे लिया है मेरा भी START UP बिकवआ दे
थोड़ी से तो लिफ्ट करादे

Actually a little worried, Rajesh. :) Divergent views are useful for everyone, but there are slanderous undertones here. For me, it's never about the number of comments or the alexa ranking for me, but the knowledge shared in the comments.

Exactly. If it can be gamed, it can be gamed from both sides. Apples to apples.

Good point about the feeds, though :)

Sorry RealityBites

Alexa can be gamed, and pretty easily - I have done this with 3 people and taken a site in limited alpha from 4 mio odd to 60k in 2 weeks. (with all of 250 users in actual). So Alexa is pretty much crap. Fun tool though.

And you forget that CS has a lot of people subcribing through syndicated feeds.

And anyways, UGC has a looong way to go in India, maybe some model in between can evolve.

And Nikhil would be happy with all this commenting. Arnt you?

ContentSutra Alexa Ranking: 40,181
Burrp Alexa Ranking: 65,734

Facts: Alexa sucks, but we are apples to apples here. ContentSutra is "India's Digital News Monitor", relevant to Indians across the globe, spanning across multiple industries, verticals, etc. Burrp has reviews on just restaurants for a few cities, relevant to only people in those few cities.

I would say traffic is damn good for these guys as the difference is only about 25,000 between the ranks.

"couple of burrp key smart folks can focus on MIH India products"

key smart folks??? really? ROTFL, LMAO :-)
probably i guess the burrp guy is smart who brain washed ashish for his product :)

major problem with mih india is,
there are full of wrong people in the wrong position from the wrong background with the wrong potential, specially in the management :-)
and i guess ashish k knows about this too, but he is not able to do anything.

I agree with the previous guy. Sounds like a bunch of sore losers here. Relative to all the other internet startups in India, Burp is definitely on top. So buying a quality team, buying a model that is working (albeit at its own pace), and buying a company that knows how to create community is a good proposition.

Guys,

Why are you so hard on the Burrp founders. Let them make their money and go on to do something else. MIH gets another online property.

I'm actually thinking of making this into a business. Hire 3 smart guys from campus - spend 10/25 lakhs making a site + getting some traffic. Sell to MIH for 1 crore. Repeat.

Oh! This is what YComb is doing!! (PS - I have great respect for Paul Graham and the YComb model) - wish someone had the balls to do something like that in India.

Rajesh

Check Burrp.com now….
Yesterday.. 2 reviews were posted.
In last 24 hours again only 2 reviews were posted? On which one was by its founder.

Does anyone still want to acquire Burrp?

Burrp has just managed to make some noise.. but has not really done anything significant. MIH has failed to take off… so has Burrp.

Burrrp… I just let it out! ;-)

Someone needs to bring sense into MIH and Ashish K :)

I guess they have way too much money to waste. I agree w/ Durani that there has to be a clear reason of acquisition. Burrp has neither traffic nor content. I have friends who have been requested/ paid by burrp to write reviews, though I know everyone does so. If reviews was a reason, then acquire mouthshut.

I heard that burrp has been going around for last few months trying to raise money from VCs but no one has been willing to put in any money as none see a possible route of making money - maybe MIH does :).

Can someone pls tell me if there is even a single MIH product that is worth talking about? Now what is Burrp? A bunch of reviews about places that may or may not be around/survive a year from now. So, what are we to do with all those reviews—store them in our history archives?
I humbly suggest that we all get back to discussing more important things like what Britney will do next to get on the front page;-)

Hi More Insightful,

I agree with part of what you said, especially the part of using the money legally :)

1. As far as I know, they have 2-3 key employees only. They have partnered with a firm to get the product. And purely to get those 2-3 key employees, one would not pay more that $100K-150K per employee (on the higher side) - so that makes it a $0.5 mn valuation - way too crappy a deal then.
2. True, but neither have traffic.
3. This I totally agree with :)

well, using burrp is a bit scary - there is no security of my password when i login into the site - so guess any hacker can easily find out what password i am keying in to login into burrp - and then use the same password to access other important sites that i access :-(

Perhaps aquitition of burrp sense because
1) you get relevant employees which is extremely hard to find and perhaps couple of burrp key smart folks can focus on MIH India products
2) burrp model aligns well with MIH i.e. UGC
3) MIH India gets to remain in the news and show its doing something
MIH can emerge a single largest player in the Indian UGC market.

All said and done this will be a good way to utilize money in the bank otherwise how the heck one will spend so much money legaly.

Seems that MIH has too much money and does not know what to do with it. Buying Burrp does not make any business sense. Burrp, stand alone, is struggling to make any money (has no viable business model for India) & I don't think that changes with joining MIH.

Anyways, what is MIH trying to gain by grabbing Burrp?
- Traffic? Burrp has extremely low traffic
- Content? It's mostly copied from several public / private sources which are available to anyone.
- Technology/ Product? It's a very standard technology wrapped around with good add-ons. One should be able to build this in few months. Burrp is a well packaged site but acquiring it just for good packaging makes no sense.

And if Burrp does get acquired for reason # 3, then it will not be a good valuation for Burrp & its team. Lets see how it turns out !

More money will come to India from South Africa and allow Burrp and MIH India employees to buy new cars and flats….when they exhaust 60 million then they can always find new jobs…not a bad deal afterall :-)

Why would Burrp (if this info is true) want to ally itself with someone like MIH? I am sure they must care about their little reputation…. But then Burrp is afterall a review site, not a technological marvel, so likes bed with likes I presume:)

I hope MIH doesn't ruin Burrp, cause it's a great service.  They've really been swallowing everything up lately…

LOL ,ROTFL .

Q: What is difference between God and Ashish KAshyap ?
Ans:  GOD Doesn't think he is Ashish Kashyap .

Good bless Share holders of Nasper ,