CommerceNet is planning to put together an investment programme to fundstart-ups in India. The fund will be jointly raised by the Indian membercompanies and some other global members.

According to CommerceNet president and CEO Mark Resch, a similar investmentprogram has been constituted in the US to facilitate seed stage funding (of$100,000 each). Under the scheme -- starting year 2000 -- one investment permonth will be made -- which will later, in 2001, be increased to one per week.The Indian investment pattern was likely to follow the US model, he said.

Calling it a market of opportunities and ``volatile optimism'', Resch saidIndian technology-and-media majors including LG Soft, Wipro, Econnect of theZee group, apart from the Karnataka state government and several US-basedcompanies were likely to be active members of the Indian operations.

Resch told The Financial Express that talks were currently on withthe prospective members. Operations are expected to commence by October, andare likely to be headed out of Bangalore.

The six-year-old non-profit consortium which has operations in 12 countriesand over 500 members worldwide (700 together with subsidiaries) includingIBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc, is focused on understanding and working withforces shaping the B2B e-commerce scenario globally.

CommerceNet, as part of its strategy to enter emerging e-commerce markets,was keen on entering India, Israel, Switzerland and Argentina, Resch said.``These are the early days of the Net and India, given the opportunities, isan immense market for e-commerce,'' he said. ``There is interest andwillingness to experiment with new business models along with an explodingcapital market. The focus for India will be to help build business modelsand best practices related to e-commerce that will make business practicesglobally interoperable.''

On the areas for improvement, he said that the fundamentals of businesspractices, financial infrastructure and taxation policies needed to belooked into.

``In India, more business happens offline than online. As the industrymatures the e-commerce aspects need to be closely integrated with the waybusinesses work. And also a nascent industry should not be strangled withadded taxation before it can start yielding results,'' he said.

As for India-specific plans, he said the consortium and its members wouldfocus on taking good businesses to the global e-commerce market besidesgrowing the industry domestically.

The IT, comsumer electronics, automobile and pharmaceutical sectors werepotential segments to build e-comm-driven business networks, Resch said.``CommerceNet will work with companies to evolve a standard for e-commprocess certification. We have worked on projects in the areas ofprocurement, electronic data integration, security and systeminteroperability. The working model in India is likely to be similar,'' hesaid.