Platform Plays: Platforms are the best enablers of our times. From Blogger to Wordpress to Twitter -- the landscape is littered with products that are more platforms than being just products by themselves. Monetization is a bit of an issue here, especially in the case of a product like Twitter, but platform plays are gradually getting to be the number one way to make rapid inroads into new and existing markets. The Indian innovation landscape badly lacks any sort of platform worth mentioning. There is considerable scope on this front, be it something online or mobile, in India.

Openness: Both products and platforms in India are tremendously closed to any kinder of wider-participation. This is quite a chicken and egg problem, with products not enabling participation from outside the walled gardens due to a lack of participation and participation being restricted as as a result of a lack of products that enable it being there. There is a huge opportunity for open platforms (not to be mistaken with Open Source), that enable content, participation and ranking from outside the expected quarters.

Original Content: Imagine this: a vast majority of content on the Indian internet properties that would generate most of the traffic is pretty much the same thing regurgitated in 1500 different ways. Which has an interesting angle to it that, even when it is common, the content is pretty expensive to acquire and create. So, at least in theory, you should be able to sell (ads on) original content at a premium. How much of a premium can you derive out of it is worth a discussion that can spawn another post, but I do think there can be a premium which can be gained.

The trouble really is in finding the right content creators and paying them well enough and also having the patience to persist with it because content plays often take much longer to gain traction and it would also have slower organic growth and it is an uphill task getting the content discovered at the right avenues. Then again, if you think about it, the only actual costs in such a set up should be traffic serving costs and paying the writers -- both being numbers which are considerably slower than the multiple crore losses that most horizontals are taking on board these days.

Regional Languages: English is a thin thread that binds India together. English has very limited market opportunities in a region like India where the ratio of English to non-English speaking users must be an insane number. Of course, the non-English speaking number is still a hypothetical pot of gold making eyes at the entrepreneurs at the end of the tunnel that is right now blocked by the darkness of penetration. But penetration is an issue which will go away only with time and without enough content being there, there is no use case for the non-English speaking junta to be on the net. And creating interfaces in local languages and publishing news in local languages are not exactly the huge leaps that are required to bridge this gap.

The right solution for this problem is to think of each major language segment as individual markets with individual needs, much in the vein of how the Japanese market has evolved in the recent years. You cannot create a template and re-implement it. You have to see what works in each market and tailor the product accordingly. Generalize at your own risk.

Location-based: A whole host of people have tried location-based content/services through the years in India -- but nobody has, at least not yet, managed to get it right. Most of the 'why' in the reasons they have gotten it wrong is because location-tagging data/content right now is done and tackled in the wrong manner. There is a huge window of opportunity here to do it in a different way and that different way to do it is so obvious that it is a surprise that most people have missed it till date.

Do-it-right: Media, user generated content, e-commerce, classifieds, search -- take any segment you want to and you'll see tremendous holes in the Indian innovation landscape where you can launch considerably better products and user experiences. The stumbling blocks here often are very high capital requirements which is accrued from marketing and other traffic acquisition expenses. Simply put, you can do a brilliant earth-shattering product at this moment, but to get over the existing clutter you will need access to vast amounts of capital to be even just seen by a good enough number of people. Just being good enough can often be just not good enough. Which sucks, but that is how it can be at times.

User Engagement: When was the last time when you -- as a user -- were engaged by an online experience in India that captured your imagination consistently over a long period of time? The hit-and-run user is the bane of Indian internet and for the industry to make rapid strides towards becoming a sustainable innovation ecosystem that goes beyond display advertising and transactions as the only means of revenue, that kind of usage needs to end. The key to ending that kind of usage is to bring about a persuasive and more engaging interaction with the user.

SOHO & Indian Enterprise: We have, through the years, we have built a mutli-billion dollar industry designing solutions for enterprises mainly in the West. Due to constraints of margins, we don't use the same talent to build products for the Indian enterprise, but that does not mean there is no business opportunity there. In fact, there is a huge business opportunity because the Indian enterprise's (I mean the ones that are located outside the of the urban ones that are basically clones of their western counterparts) ground realities are vastly different from enterprise software that has been designed for the West. It is a tremendously difficult nut to crack, even without taking into account the vagaries involved in getting traditional Indian enterprises to switch habits and leverage technology to their benefit, but it is a huge opportunity.

Linux-based Solutions: If you have a sub Rs 15,000 PC with peripherals that work as advertised without tweaking or the downloading/configuration/compilation of numerous shell scripts that runs Linux (with a browser, office suite, chat clients etc), which is fully supported, I don't see why it won't do well in India. This is essentially the poor man's clone of Apple's business model, where you know that the things you buy will just work out of the box. For this to succeed, it has to be a volume play, since the margins on PCs are so dismally low that it would not otherwise make any sense to do it.

There are numerous other such products (like home media centers, storage servers etc), that are possible on the foundation of Linux and I do think it is very much possible to pull it off.