The company had received funding to the tune of $1 million from ICICI Ventures earlier this year. The investments in the new offices will be from this corpus, according to Mr Desai, though he did not declare the extent of investment.

Explaining the rationale to set up base in these countries, Mr Desai says, "Our model is one which can be replicated anywhere in the world and we chose Australia since its Internet penetration levels are second only to the US and initial market research in these countries has shown that the users are pretty excited about a site like ours, says Mr Desai.

Chequemail has evolved from being a site which shares ad revenues with users of its e-mail service to one which offers a plethora of community building services like egroups, greetings, reminders, chequemail privileges, helplines etc and continues to share revenues from its new streams of business with its users.

The company's current revenue models constitute advertising and a per user fee that it charges sites to which is diverts traffic. Chequemail currently has a tie-up with BillJunction.com, the online bill payment site, to whom Chequemail diverts traffic. Each user, who goes to BillJunction via chequemail is paid a fee for doing so, in keeping with the site's USP of sharing its revenues with users.

Chequemail has a registered user base of 1,68,000 according to Mr Desai.He adds that Chequemail will be getting into research services for corporates, whereby corporates would pay the site a fee for getting questionnaires answered by its users, in a month's time. Besides this, the site also plans to launch group buying services.