SysInclude is a professional networking site for Indian IT folks that has just had its wrappers taken off. It has been founded by two seasoned technology professionals, Gautham & Harish both of whom held senior management positions at TIBCO, before they decided to call it quits to pursue their Web 2.0 dream. They have positioned SysInclude as a focused community for advancement of Indian tech professionals and feel that one of the key ingedients for this is to have an inherently trustworthy system. So you can register on the site only if you belong to one of the 125 Indian IT companies their system recognizes (you’d need the corporate email ID for registration) much like what Facebook had for educational institutions initially. They know this can significantly restrict their potential audience but think it is worth the trade-off.

While being a community website, SysInclude certainly has a different kind of feel to it. This is what the member profiles looks like and this is a list of the companies currently represented. The companies can been reviewed by the members and you can drill down into the company list by compensation, job satisfaction, growth, hiring process etc. (the links don’t seem to be working though currently) Incidentally, the highest rated company seems to be Infosys followed by Wipro, Satyam, HCl & Sun (see screenshot). Also check out this personality test that you can take (its based on Carl Jung’s framework) and your personality type shows up in your profile. Interesting! I could not explore more functionalities on the site simply because I’d need an email ID with one of those 125 companies in order to get an account.

The site will remain free for individual members; monetization will flow from corporate deals and recruitments. Recruiter/Corporate accounts will have more features that will help manage the recruiting process and have better search capabilities.

Sysinclude joins Techtribe in the professional networking space for India. While there is a fair bit of overlap between the two, their are perceptual differences as well. Techtribe does not restrict membership to corporate email IDs, hence it looks more like a typical social network, while SysInclude has a more disciplined look to it. Both approaches must surely have their own advantages, though for now, Techtribe certainly has the first mover advantage.

Vakow is a online community centered on SMS. It is trying to leverage on India’s mobile boom and that one thing in mobiles (sans MMS, GPRS, 3G, Edge and all such fancy acronyms) that is a proven mass market winner- SMS. Vakow allows you to build up an online SMS collection (or repository), which can then be adorned with the typical Web 2.0 goodies- sharing, rating, tagging, commenting, forwarding, subscribing et al. Posting of the SMSes can be done through the web interface or from your mobile. Vakow is the effort of Rahul & Amit, who were amongst the earliest employees (No 4 & 5) at Webaroo. They have since moved on and are pursuing this venture full-time.

So what is the need that the webapp serves? The founders think that Vakow’s basic appeal is based on not just its fun element, but also the fact that when millions of SMS are being sent everyday, people would want to search for interesting ones- they can do so on their site now. The future monetization strategy will revolve around advertising (online, mobile, permission marketing) and content syndication via close partnership with relevant companies.

Check out some of the SMSs featured on Vakow’s homepage and you can’t help laughing. This proves the fun part of Vakow’s appeal; what the team will need to prove, is its utilitarian value.