This entry is being reposted from my personal blog.

Last week, I had this blog post profiling Bixee and its launch of Pixrat. Yesterday, Pixrat was featured on TechCrunch. Hey! I BEAT Techcrunch on this one .

Pixrat is a cool photo bookmarking tool from Bixee, the Bangalore based startup. Its a mashup of del.icio.us & flikr. Pixrat must surely be the FIRST WEB2.0 INDIAN company to be TechCrunched !!

Congrats to Himanshu Nautiyal and other co-founders of Bixee on this.

This entry is being reposted from my personal blog.

The Web2.0 era has spawned a bunch of Indian startups in the consumer internet space, most of them in the mass-market, B2C space. One company that is making the right moves and going places (notwithstanding the naukri.com episode) is Bixee, the Bangalore based website.

Bixee has had two websites for a while: glogblog.com – a community based classifieds site (with a tongue twisting name) and bixee.com – the job aggregator site; while the classifieds site is loosely modeled on Craigslist, the job site is (to my mind) the first Indian aggregator site worth any mention. A few days back, Bixee launched Pixrat, a cool social photo bookmaking tool (somewhat like flikr-delicious hybrid); also around the corner is a real estate site allbhk.com (not yet launched) – I guess its likely to be another aggregator site for properties & real estate.

What I like about their approach is three things-

1) Firstly, in the consumer web space, where barriers to entry are low and failure rates high, Bixee isn’t putting ‘all its eggs in one basket’; rather they are spreading their risks across a barrage of potential business ideas
2) Secondly, the areas they are trying to focus on (except the job space) are characterized by the presence of a profusion of mediocre websites (web 0.0?), none of which have critical mass, leaving the doors wide open, for a well designed aggregator website to hijack a sizable chunk of the traffic.
3) Thirdly, the UI design of all their websites is very much in the Web2.0 mould: simple, neat & clean, using white/pastel shades etc.

Their websites/blogs don’t tell you anything about the company or its promoters. I think it must be a bunch of diehard Web2.0 enthusiasts behind these endeavors.

Obviously, getting the product out, is only half the job; the other (and trickier) half is to gets the targeted audience to actually use it and generate substantial, sustainable & scalable advertising revenues out of it ( I’m not totally sure but I think the revenue model behind all their websites is based entirely on Google adwords, contextual ads etc) .

I think Bixee has made a good start out of the blocks….let’s see how they fare up to the home stretch.