"The Web lacks a method of being able to know who I am and to use that information in a private fashion to bring me what I might want," said Rakesh Mathur, chief executive officer of PurpleYogi.com.

Mathur made headlines when he and his partners at Junglee Corp sold their shopping technology to Amazon.com in 1998, leaving him with around 225,000 Amazon shares. He also founded Armedia Inc, a developer of advanced semiconductor products in Bangalore, and sold it to Broadcom Corp last year for $70 million. Last July, Mathur left Amazon to join Ramana Venkata and Ramesh Subramonian, formerly of Intel, on the new project after the two bombarded him with their business plan for three days straight.

"Theirs was the biggest, most ambitious idea that I would encountered," Mathur told the California newspaper India-West. He expects to launch PurpleYogi.com at the end of June, after extensive focus group testing and market research. To those familiar with Internet "cookies" -- tiny packets of information on your hard drive left there by Web sites you have visited -- and the recent hubbub over privacy breaches by DoubleClick.com, RealNetworks and other companies that were discovered surrepetitiously gathering information about Web users, PurpleYogi is good news indeed. And if you're not alarmed about Internet privacy, you should be. "Privacy is going to be a huge concern in the future," said Venkata, the company's chief technical officer. "You will start seeing more impact on your personal life.

As time goes on, it will become vitally important to your interest that you control it. Otherwise it will be abused, and people will track you everywhere," he said. Founder Subramoniam, developed an early version of PurpleYogi's software and had secured $1.5 million in financing from Intel.

At first, they played with the idea of staying inside Intel, working as an autonomous unit and holding equity in the new company, while retaining Intel stock options. "But we wanted to go out and do it on our own," said Venkata.From a tiny, temporary office and a handful of staff, PurpleYogi has grown to employ more than 40 people, including some of India's and the Silicon Valley's brightest--Stanford doctorates, Rhodes scholars and three Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) top-of-the-class graduates. Funding has now reached $4 million (Mathur and other executives have invested, along with Intel). Without going into specifics, the founders see revenue potentially coming from a variety of sources, including banner ads, a community buying model or a trilateral e-commerce relationship between consumers, vendors and PurpleYogi.

And what about the name? The founders considered naming their company Calpurnia. But it was hard to spell and hard to remember, said Mathur. The phrase "PurpleTomato" came up - but it belonged to some guy in San Francisco. Then, inspiration hit. "From a yoga standpoint, purple s a very important colour," explained Mathur. "The chakra at the top of the head is the crown chakra, which is used to communicate with the divine. The colour of that crown chakra is purple."

-- India Abroad News Service/India-West