Rajesh Jain’s Ecosystem

Business Today (sub. req): This is an article on India’s one of the first internet entrepreneurs Rajesh Jain in Business Today on what he is doing now. Read on:

One way to find out which way technology is headed is to keep an eye on Rajesh Jain. The man has been there (ahead of time, actually), done that. He built a cluster of sites, such as samachar.com, khel.com and khoj.com in the very early days of the internet (1994) and sold them to Sify for $115 million (Rs 499 crore at the then exchange rate) in 1999. Jain hasn’t been sitting back and taking it easy since (although he has managed to keep a low profile). He has been ideating, investing and launching new ventures.
Today, there are seven such, each of which is a bet on tech’s next big thing. Jain likes to call this the Emergic ecosystem. Emergic is the man’s term for disruptive innovations in computing that can bridge the digital divide. “The driving vision behind this platform-codenamed Emergic-is to make computers and broadband access available at a cost of Re 1 per hour,” Jain writes in his blog (Emergic.org; a media-shy Jain declined to talk to BT for this story).

What are Jain’s big bets? The first is low-cost messaging and security solutions offered by his company, Netcore Solutions (he spends almost 70 per cent of his time on this). From e-mail to bandwidth management to spam filters, Netcore handles everything and with Linux-based solutions (some 300 companies have bought into this vision). Then, there is Novatium, a partnership between Jain, Analog Devices’ Ray Stata and IIT Madras Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala to design and make low-cost hardware that will change the way people in Asia and Africa use their PCs. The company’s soon-to-be-launched Nova Netpcs will essentially be thin clients (that means much of the intelligence, or software, will reside with servers maintained by a third-party service provider, maybe telcos, and accessed by users over broadband) that provide a simple-to-use computer interface for just around $100 (Rs 4,500). Jain is also an investor in two more companies incubated by Jhunjhunwala, Midas Technologies, which makes equipment based on the low-cost cordect wireless standard developed by the good professor, and also provides broadband solutions, and n-Logue, an ISP (internet service provider) and wannabe telco that uses this technology to provide voice and data services in rural areas.
Jain is also part of an interesting project called Seraja, the brainchild of Ramesh Jain (no relation), a professor of computer science in University of California, Irvine, and the founder of three companies (praja, Virage and ImageWare). Although not much is known about this project-conceived in February this year-it is said to be developing an experiential search engine for events (for instance, an event like a cricket match can be searched and experienced using multimedia tools). Finally, Jain is also an investor in Rajat Barjatya’s Rajshri Media, which creates and aggregates Bollywood content for delivery through broadband and mobile networks, and PubSub.com, a New York-based next generation web tool that matches a pre-stored search query against any new information appearing on the web. “I think about what I am doing as blending entrepreneurship and thesis-based investing. Will it pay off? I hope so,” he writes in his blog.

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