Cashing in on cellphone content

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: Value-added service (VAS) provider Vijay Shekhar Sharma, managing director, One97 Communications (P) Ltd, is one those gifted individuals who has always been a bit ahead of time—be it at school, college or in the tough world of start-ups.

Sharma was 14 years of age when he passed class 12 and had to get special permission from the vice-chancellor of Delhi University to appear for the Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) exams when he was 15 years of age as he was under-age. He was not allowed to take the exam at 14, so had to wait out a year. He entered DCE in 1994 and successfully passed out in 1998. What was indeed remarkable was that he studied in Hindi medium in school and switched to English in college.

“I spent the gap year between class 12 and the first-year college reading English newspapers. In fact, I used to bunk most of my classes in DCE and I could not comprehend what was going on. I knew most of the computer terms in Hindi.” Meanwhile, while in DCE, he spent the time away from classes in the college computer centre and he and his batchmate Harinder Pal Singh together started a company while in third-year college called Xs! Corporations, that functioned both as a web portal, and as a search engine. It also offered web guides services including web directories. “A New Mexico-based venture capital fund called Individual Angel Investor invested in us. It gave us seed-money worth Rs 20,000.” The college allowed their start-up to function in campus—the computer centre, to be precise—as they managed the college website and email services for free.

The company’s web portal was then sold in 1999 to Living Media India Ltd (India Today group). In lieu of cash, the group gave them a barter arrangement. Sharma, therefore, got more business from that group, which included web maintenance and managing live coverage of elections for TV Today that was beamed during those days on Doordarshan. “Between February 1999 and May 1999, our turnover was Rs 50 lakh. We had brought on board two more persons who were my batch mates in DCE as partners,” says Sharma.