Cashing in on cellphone content

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: of four persons that worked for them in the premises that India Today allowed them to work in as part of the barter arrangement were sold to Lotus Interworks headquartered in New Jersey, USA in end-1999 for half-a-million dollars. The monies earned were split between the four partners.

Lotus Interworks, in the meantime, acquired two other companies in India—Origin Technologies and MindsEye Information Systems and set up Intersolutions India Pvt Ltd in 1999, a subsidiary of Lotus Interworks. The company was headquartered in Noida, UP. Sharma was asked to come on board as a programmer and he was paid a huge packet—Rs 1,00,000 per month. However, he soon tired of the job as it did not give him the freedom of functioning that he craved for.

Sharma quit at the end of 2000 and in 2001, co-founded One97 Communications (P) Ltd with Rajiv Shukla, a former colleague to provide web-based and value-added services in the telecom domain, with Rs 2 lakh of his savings as seed money. However, the company went into loss with the dotcom bust in 2000-2001. Shukla soon left him and Sharma was on his own again. He found that he had to earn a living through alternate means. He became a consultant, and earned Rs 70,000 a month at Startec Global Communications that had its headquarters in the US. However, the entrepreneurial drive never really left him. He, then, borrowed Rs 8 lakh to start all over again—from his parents and sister. He says, “The way forward was the telecom sector which was opening up. Although I was working for Startec’s Internet technology division, I knew that they had a separate dial-in service division in the US where a consumer could dial in to hear news, music and other content.” The crucial lesson that he learnt in the company was “monetisation of content”. He says, “In the telecom sector you earn from day one unlike the Internet where you have to invest heavily in servers and other equipment before you can begin earning.”