India on my mind

I'm sitting in Melbourne this morning having survived the titanic snoring and dubious personal hygiene of the large man in shorts next to me on the plane. Don't you love flying? I'm speaking tomorrow at the annual Leaders' Forum of the Exhibition & Events Association of Australasia. More on that later in the week.

For now, I have India on my mind. As I look at what I've been bookmarking over the last week or so, there's a lot on India. Two seemingly unrelated items highlight how important it is for those wishing to succeed in B2B there to devise strategies which draw in the tens of thousands of SMEs,

Tradeindia.com is probably the most important B2B 'portal' in the country. It's the top-ranked according to our calculations (based on the ever-unloved Alexa, the least dodgy of the ranking sites). Bhupesh Trivedi reports that they have launched a sub-site, SME Times. Bhupesh quotes Tradeindia CEO Bikky Khosla, saying that "SME Times would be a one-stop information library for the EXIM sector...[and]...that with Tradeindia’s wide reach, the news they provide would expose SMEs to new information, ideas, and values, and would help them take the right decisions for their businesses".

Meanwhile, the ever-active Cybermedia is also targeting the SME sector with a new initiative announced with ICICI Bank. As with TradeIndia, this new service is also focused on providing knowledge but will take the form of a forum rolled out across 26 cities. When he spoke at our UFI Asia Seminar in Macau back in February, Cybermedia CEO Pradeep Gupta talked of the need to develop multi-layered strategies in India, targeting big companies in big cities as always but also smaller companies in the next level of second tier cities. Here he is, then, putting those words into action.