This writer has reached this conclusion going by the manner in which Rediff.com is evolving. It could either be pre-empting Yahoo! in India or it could be preparing a Yahoo! India mirror site for the US Web giant. David Mickler, Yahoo!'s Asia sales director, was in Delhi recently. He said he was working on Yahoo!'s India strategy and would set up an India portal within a year.

That period will be considerably shortened if rediff.com and Yahoo! tie up. The joint home base could then be branded as Rediff-Yahoo! An indicator that there is something going on between the two is the search engine submission/registration process that Rediff.com has created for listing a site. It is a replica of Yahoo!'s format, step by step. The look of Rediff is also evolving into an Indianised Yahoo! me-too, in almost every way. This could be sheer coincidence but it's more likely that these changes are by design.

Several portals are zooming into India to set up their India gateways. Lycos, Amazon are some of the names that keep cropping up. These companies will be spending big money to make a dent in India.

By tying up with Yahoo!, Rediff.com will not be sandwiched between the two layers of the foreign brands and the venture-funded Indian players. Rediff will get loads of money for its partnership from Yahoo! which could then be further converted into truckloads when the two take Rediff-Yahoo on to the American bourses for a listing. The Yahoo! tag will mean a lot easier, and increased quantities of moolah, for Rediff.com.

For Yahoo, a Rediff partnership will mean an almost instantaneous entry and in partnership with one of the richest content sites in India. We'll have to wait and watch whether the drama pans out as this writer thinks it will.

Saudis protest

The internet tribe is spreading its protest. After Israeli internet buffs, it's the turn of Saudi Arabian WWWers to voice their ire against high internet access and surfing fees.

Today, Saudis are expected to boycott using the internet setting back local ISPs some Rs 80 lakh in lost revenues. Why are Saudis angry? They are being ripped off by ISPs who are charging them about Rs 2,500 per annum as registration fee, and about Rs 1,800 as monthly rentals. To add insult to injury, they are also burdened with a Rs 50-hourly charge. Mind-boggling charges to access the Net. Compared to that our VSNLs, MTNLs, MantraOnlines, Satyam, are cheap.

Earlier, Saudi internetters used to dial up to the US, Bahrain or Cyprus to access the Net. It's not as if that mode of internet access was any cheaper. The Saudis are hoping that their strike will force the IAPs to at least consider rolling back prices. As many as 50,000 of them have hopped on to the local Net train ever since they started operations early this year. Will the 50,000 disgruntled succeed in getting their due? Hopefully, they will.

Develop website glues

The statistics are frightening. Four out of five visitors will not revisit a site once they find it not good enough to keep them glued. These are the findings of Nvision and Engage Technologies, two UK-based companies.

The two firms say that surfers spend 35 per cent of their time on the top 50 sites. Other statistics from IDC say that the Net will have 500 million surfers worldwide by 2003. And the number of sites will be probably twice that. As much as $2 million will be traded online every minute; 80 per cent of all business deals will be done online, the research firm states.

Hence, corporate chieftains had better take care while going about building their websites. They need to draw in elements, which compel surfers to come back at regular intervals and hence, increase stickiness of the site. Otherwise, they could well end up missing the e-commerce bus.

(The writer is developing an internet portal http://www.indiantelevision.com. Feel free to e-mail with your comments to television@vsnl.com or television@hotmail.com)