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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.

May - 2008 - issue > Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Gunjan Sinha
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Gunjan Sinha
The month of May 2008 brings together thousands of entrepreneurs, VCs, and industry experts at the TIECON event in Santa Clara, California discussing various aspects of the entrepreneurial journey – from bootstrapping to identifying great opportunities to building great teams to raising capital and to creating shareholder value. A number of tracks will discuss opportunities in social good and challenges facing the world economy, thereby presenting opportunities for the current generation of bold entrepreneurs.
On the eve of TIECON, I would like to share my thoughts on where I see the opportunities in the coming years for entrepreneurs who are ready to venture out on their own. These are unprecedented times for entrepreneurs and investors who are willing to address the challenges and opportunities in the future.

Opportunity 1: Delivering Intelligent Services
The next decade is going to see the rise of intelligent knowledge-driven services, which bring deep domain and market understandings coupled with technology excellence. Companies and entrepreneurs who combine domains and markets with technical strength and leverage global organizational models from India, China, and the U.S. to bring the best talent together will rise to the top. Traditional IT services and BPO services will give way to more advanced KPO (knowledge process outsourcing) services. Entrepreneurs should look at these services in the areas where there is deep domain and market understanding requirement, yet the companies internally are not able to do a good job by themselves. A great example would be, for example, to create a company focused on delivering market research services through facebooks, linkedin, and other popular social networks. Market research is a well-understood concept; we now have new platforms where large number of consumers are aggregating. How do we create the next generation market research services company? This kind of intelligent services presents real business opportunities for next generation entrepreneurs.

Opportunity #2: Building Knowledge Networks
First generation social and professional networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn) have created large platforms for individuals and businesses to aggregate on the Web. As we look ahead, one would see the formation of a new class of professional and social networks, which would be very targeted knowledge networks, bringing together knowledge holders and knowledge seekers to exchange ideas, innovations, and advise in ways that create true value for all participants. SiliconIndia.com is trying to build such a knowledge network; there will be many more of these networks rising up in different verticals and niche domains. I do not envision that the horizontal platform networks like Facebook and LinkedIn will be able to do a good job addressing the niche areas of these knowledge networks.

Opportunity 3: Towards Clean and Green consumers and enterprises

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