I think minglebox is doing a great job :)

I bought the tickets to calcutta from this website,they are paying very much discounts on the tickets booking in advance.

Any idea how much share did Sequoia get from 7 MM deal?

At a loss why they invested 7M$ in this?

has anyone tried:

http://www.meetingflex.com

It has got some amazing profiles

mingle box is a crappy site…....and sandeep is disgusting to do what he did - no ethics

Everything aside, the guy who could gain most out of this is Sandeep Singhal. He gets Sequoia to put in money in his 'family' business which BTW is a ridiculous SN company - amazingly bad business model. His wife is going to take home a hefty salary from that investment, so that helps. And if the business returns (which is very tough to believe), it would give both the husband and wife returns from it :). Let me see if I could get into a VC firm and invest in my family business :) - would love to siphon money in my home :)

I think Sequoia is really running out of places to invest. I would have assumed that with people like Mike Moritz in the company, such severe corporate governance issues would have been taken care of - maybe I was wrong !!

Waste of money and time… This site is of no use..
I will go back to orkut.com

i remember minglebox spamming orkut sometime back not once ,not twice but continuesly.
i wonder how they rasied 7$ milion funding and FYI i did try them :)

Hey, heard Yahoo after missing facebook in US it is acquiring a student networking site in India. Is it Minglebox.com or Bharatstudent.com???? Both Minglebox and bharatstudent started of spamming all the communities on Yahoo and Orkut which is more popular now?

I cant understand how a crappy site like minglebox can get $7 million dollar in funding. I am absolutely amazed. Have the investors gone insane?!

Hi Prakash,
could you mail me (at nikhil AT contentsutra DOT com) a screencap of how the page looks, and which browser (and version) you're using? Also, is there any specific page where you've had this problem, or is it across the board?
thanks,
Nikhil

Comment not related to this post.

CS Team : It would be nice if you pay a little more attention to the design aspect.  The text is fully crampled and im unable to decipher the content.[ I guess the side bar gets overlapped with the body] . 

Thanks.

Dear friends,

Most of you have responded to this article very well. I wanted to share some insight into what i know and also my assumptions. Mingle box is a bad copy of Myspace.com and their user experience sucks. I must tell you Mingle box has no solid ground. But never know with the money they have now they can create 3 myspace for india.

Why are we even comparing with Myspace and the likes. Lets look at India's Internet reach and the real issue.

There are only 4 million subscribers in india. But there are total of SO CALLED 20 million internet users. This is official data by the mark research firms (Ask any internet entrepreneurs like me they would tell you it is not more than 15M). But out of this 20M, more than 60% use internet only for 1 hour or less everyday. Users in India don't feel internet as personal to them as compared to mobile. Cuz of various factors like reach, easy access, etc..

I was told few months ago by one the mingle box team that they have 2000 people signing everyday. Which means by now they have run out of users. *smiles*

Any idea is great. So as Mingle box for the founders. They can get even $100 milllion.

Wish my wife is a Managing Director of Black stone or some other Top VC firms….hahahah

Pour your thoughts you guys are great.

Why do we need another social networking site? Although I believe in SN I don't think there is a play here just for the Indian market. By the way there is a decent post on how to utilize the power of SN for growing your business on:

http://blog.rekabu.com

"All social networking sites do product innovation only through spams"

Umm…that's not product innovation - it's marketing.

All social networking sites do product innovation only through spams.,
One example of such spam site: http://www.bharatstudent.com/ which spams all yahoo groups including many of my own :(

does anyone know how many users they have? I remember they were spamming a bunch of orkut users a few months back…..their traffic stats from Alexa are pretty awful…...but that could change quickly…..especially when you have 7 million to build traffic and do product innovation (when 50,000th social network in the world uses that word it really cracks me up)......

Self praising is a very bad marketing technique

go for it minglebox!! we need some real Indian sites

i study in a bangalore college and got invited by my friends to our page on minglebox.. its different for sure and we're still discovering all the features…

WATblog.com has a nice article on the whole thing and funding stuff. nice comparison between kleiner perkins and sequoia…i think they do more justice to social networks than contentsutra

"Most of the profiles here are created and forgotten; groups/communities with ust members and no activities."

hmm… the second is true of orkut more than anything else, but that's where the differentiation comes in.. orkut has not changed much for the last 5 years - and why should they - they're doing well in india and brazil..

more importantly - what do you do on orkut? scrap each other and… and?

now fast forward 3 years.. india has broadband penetration.. where's orkut? if they innovate - still on top - if they don't? you're still only scrapping?

look at the younger generation (kids in school) - compare their internet usage with ours - bring in broadband, wireless, in schools, colleges the works and add it all up and you have the need for places for people to exchange their lives online.

does orkut provide a solution to that need? partially..

hence, the growth in indian social networking..

dating and social networking are different worlds
minglebox seems unique in its offering, can't compare it to fropper's old avatar atleast. From the names of the companies listed above, it looks like there is enough within the team to pull off a big one here
does anyone know how big is the user base on mingle? general browsing experience is pretty good and i get a sense that there are a lot of people already. and whats with the alpha label

There is a right time for everything and so is true for web 2.0 companies
I know that there are good reasons to be skeptical about yet another SN site but then again there is no strong domestic player in this space (acknowledge that there is a lot of noise) and there is surely space for more than one :)

I think minglebox is doing a great job. they seem to be working closely with their users - I find something new there every week and the look of the site has also improved nicely in the last few months. Their focus on building authentic college communities has a lot of potential. We will have to wait and see where does it all go ...
... good luck minglebox !!

Dont understand all this stuff about who should get money or not. I am an active user on minglebox and quite like it !

There WAS an Indian and global company in the dot com days, which WAS about social networking (only the term had not been invented then), which went to college campuses to get users and "create communities", and which got more than $7m in funding. Anyone remember what happened?

Minglebox (and its investors), learn from history, FAST, and don't repeat the mistakes!

Fropper started as a dating site., And now they completely changed their vision to social networking site. - A big change in vision

Now there are a dozen, "me too, Join us" kind of social networking sites.,
What kind of analysis these VC's do before dumping money into anything and everything?,
Atleast , if the focus is targetting college guys, They should host sites for every college and create events, enable communication between the students through a hosted email solutions to become popular,

Kavita is married to a Sequoia guy and they have an investment in Fropper. How does one ensure information about Fropper's plans does not leak to Kavita? Talk about insider information and conflicts of interest! And I wonder what level of diligence was really done. This whole family business is always dodgy - so much for professional, operational and informed investors!!!!

"Can see biased attitude in this article…"

Well, that's ridiculous - I'm skeptical about every initiative, and that's the nature of our publication. Yeah, Vivek's my cousin, but that has no impact on how we cover other businesses. Also, DesiMartini doesn't yet meet our editorial criteria, and we won't cover it until it does. When we do, we'll be critical of it too.

The author of this article "Nikhil Pahwa" seems to have a connection with "Vivek Pahwa" - founder of Desimartini, besides the name :P ...

Can see biased attitude in this article…

Good Luck to minglebox!

Hey heard these guruji(sequoia backed) guys raising some good investments..the search engine rocks and they already eating into the google market slowly, they certainly deserve an award for the best indian product. any news on whats there next gameplan..m sure sequoia is betting big time on them as they did with google long before remember.any views

Besides Orkut (for social networking) & Linked In / Ryze / Open BC (for business networking) are anyone of the following websites getting traffic:
- Fropper (holds some ground now - none major)
- Desimartini (the advt doesnt tempt users to log on.. does it?)
- Bigadda (coming up)
- Minglebox (who even heard of it)

Most of the profiles here are created and forgotten; groups/communities with ust members and no activities.

There is no reason why users will move from Orkut to these sites. If they have too, they need a strong differentiator - which cant be seen in either of it.

Guruji, IMO , is a wise investment, But why minglebox?

fropper ,now mingle box are funded.any other socialnets in India who have recieved funding.whats the funding status for indyarocks-any idea

Did Minglebox approach other VCs apart from Sequoia? Any idea?

The college stuff on minglebox is interesting…lets watch

I like the UI - lots of little variations, but neat experience and getting better by the day.  good luck minglebox.

to "lets open our eyes": actually Kavita is Sandeep Singhal's (Sequoia India MD) wife, but having said that its not an underhand deal. there is no harm in investing in well run family businesses :-)

I am more concerned about how Sequoia manages the conflict with fropper.com as People Interactive, the parent company of Fropper.com has also raised $8M from Sequoia.

Basically Sequoia is keeping money in two of the most trafficked community sites in India after Orkut, so if either one wins they win.

Smart but also shows they have no idea whats going to work in India. So much for operational expertise from VCs

Yea.. This is weird. We have one guy who says Social Networking is dead and the other is pumping 7M into it. Sometimes, I feel Angel investors do more research than VC firms !

Having said that, I think Sequoia Capital is betting on the whole Web1.0/2.0 scene in India. They pumped 7M into Guruji and now this. I think they are going to evenly distribute their portfolio, hoping that one of them will click. Or they will combine all these companies and become one big media portal?

Their idea of creating a community around College is not unique . FACEBOOK did it first most of the colleges like IIT and IIM have there pages on FACEBOOK

i think sponsoring the college fest is a good idea . I remember Bazze did it at IITK and a lot of folks at IIT became a BIGTIme Bazzy user later .

they have right Tech competency though i like their UI . they are learning form every other   website . each feature reminds me of one website or other . but over all they have done a good job with Core engine .
Now the next challenge is to get user base . $7 Million is enough to ensure that i guess .

Next few month will be interesting . Good Luck to Kavita and Her Team

HELOOOO- is this a real deal or under the table deal.Is krishnan.iyer of sequoia a relative of kavita iyer-just wondering WHY minglebox-

its literally a zero value site.
now beginning to wonder the integrity of INSIDERS

Already feels a bubble burst,

What happened to Sanjay Mittal ? I think he was in the management team at Minglebox but no longer there at Minglebox. Has he left ?