Desi Martini (aka Facebook ripoff) sells for 10mln?
Ok, the news is about 3 days old but I’ve been traveling and I just got back home to LA and I’m still jetlagged. Anyway, on my last day in New Delhi, one of my friends called me to let me know about Desi Martini’s sale to HT Media (The Hindustan Times group).
I had written about it when it first came out back in May here. I was a little peeved how the CEO was waving the Indian originality flag in all his press interviews, whereas the site didn’t even have its own distinct “desi” stylesheet. Fast-forward a mere 6 months, the site claims a user base of 250,000 and a sale price of $10mln.
I guess there’s something to be said about imitation. Why innovate? We should just ripoff (and I mean literally) existing success stories and go on a PR rampage listing these ventures as a “site run by Indians for Indians”. And who knows, a couple of months later we might be taking it to the bank.
On that note, I’ve been putting together a list of my top 3 innovations imitations. Here goes:
1. Googli.com - Google ripoff. Shouldn’t be hard….just need to slap on a search box on the main page and I’m done.
2. khodo.com - Digg ripoff. Yes, there are a million Digg clones out there but how many of those are really “for Indians and by Indians.”
3. Hot-male.com - Hotmail ripoff….Whoops!!! Domain is already taken and it is not a free email service.
After a little digging, there seems to be some mystery around the $10mln price tag and no one is disclosing the actual price yet. Quoting HT itself, “Terms were not being disclosed, though HT Media said it was for less than $10 million (Rs 39.3 crore).”
“Less than $10mln”….what does that even mean? $2 million? $7 million? $1 dollar? Hmmm…I’m going to use that as my default answer to most questions from now on.
“New Suit”. “Why Yes”. “How much?”….”Oh, less than 10 million.”
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haha…I enjoyed reading this one.
↓ Quote | Posted November 30, 2007, 8:12 pm