The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
April - 2012 - issue > VC talk
New Venture Opportunities in Social Media
Ankur Jain
Vice President-Blumberg Capital
The social media juggernaut has increasingly gained momentum over the past few years and the pace of adoption has been astonishing. 70 percent of all internet users are now on Facebook and consumers spend more time on Facebook than any other web property. And this is a global phenomenon. Some countries such as Israel, Argentina and Turkey are heavy “social networkers” with over 10 hours spent per user per month on social networking sites. The U.S. average is about seven hours. As this fire continues to spread, it is natural for an entrepreneur to want to leverage this mega-trend to build a business. So there have been a flood of “social” companies that have arrived on the scene. It doesn’t take a lot of heavy lifting to attach the word “social” to your business, but it does take creativity and domain expertise to create a truly disruptive business.
It is useful to classify the social media landscape into two segments –
* Applications that leverage the social graph. I use the term “application” to cover a rather, broad spectrum. Many applications refer to themselves a “platform” which to me just means that these applications allow other add-on applications to be built on top. For instance, Spotify is an application for consumers to enjoy music while interacting with others.
* Infrastructure to support the ecosystem of these social applications. For instance, Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that allows users to monitor and manage communications to multiple social media sites. Another example is Nanigans which is a Facebook advertising solution.
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