TIE Entrepreneurship Summit - Day 1 - Panel on Internet - The Next Revolution

TiE Entrepreneurial Summit 2008 which is happening over 16-17 and 18 december at Lalit Ashok Hotel had its inaugural address by Azim H Premji, Chairman, Wipro who spoke about his journey as an entrepreneur with Wipro. He spoke indepth about the challenges and the successes of doing business from the wipro perspective. He took the audience down memory lane on how Wipro was transformed from a family business in commodities to an IT giant it is today.

He said “Integrity and unflinching commitment to values is what builds the backbone for a strong business,”

Top business leaders like Azim Premji, C K Prahalad, Nandan Nilekani, Vijay Mallya, R Gopalakrishnan, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Capt Gopinath amongst several others were ones that were present at the TIE Entrepreneurship Summit.

The first day also saw the release of the TiE-KPMG report on the entrepreneurial ecosystem by Pradip Kanakia, National Head of Markets, KPMG with the aspiring entrepreneurs as participants drawing references to the key study insights.

There was a panel discussion on Internet the next revolution in India in which the panelists were Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO Naukri.com, Makemytrip.com CEO Mr.Deep Kalra, Rediff.com Chairman - Mr.Ajit Balakrishnan and Alok Kejriwal CEO of Games2win.com

The panel discussed the slowdown and the impact of the slowdown on the internet space. All the panelists felt that the slowdown would cause a shakeup and raising funding would be a tough task. Deep Kalra of makemytrip felt that the space wuld see a consolidation and some weaker players would die.

On the question about which revenue model’s work in India and Ajit balakrishnan quoted Rupert Murdoch who had stated that subscription based revenue would be bigger than ad revenue for Internet. This initiated a discussion among the panelists on the prospects of advertisiing revenue vs subscription.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani admitted that the jobs space had seen a slowdown in these times and expected this slowdown to be worse than most others before.

All in all I wish the panel had gone a little more deeper into many issues which left unanswered given the slowdown and its impact on newer business evalving around the internet. We caught up with Sanjeev and Deep after the panel and have shot WATShow Interviews with both of them which should be up soon on WATBlog. So stay tuned.