“We’re doing it in a conference 2.0 format – we’re sitting on bean bags.” And with this, began the IAMAI conference on Web 2.0.

As such there was very little said that was new: MIH India CEO Ashish Kashyap, former Country Head for Google in India disclosed that there are around 6.5 million Orkut users from India. He defended ibibo by saying that it is disruptive, and that they’re tapping the emotional need by helping people earn by referring jobs, blogging and connecting buyers and sellers. This was countered by Vivek Pahwa, Founder of Desimartini.com, who said that it’s interesting to see people contributing on social networking sites, and blogging, without any incentive. He laid emphasis on experimentation as a means to acquiring and retaining users, and the difficulty of reaching critical mass. Navin Mittal, business head of Fropper said that they tried to de-emphasize English with Easyblogs…strangely, without multilingual content. He evaded my question on what made them change Froppers mandate from a dating site to a social networking site, saying that it was created as a community site, and remains that. Rehan Yar Khan of Yo4Ya.com put things into perspective – it’s the marketing, silly – you can have the nicest GUI, but it’s so damn expensive to make consumers aware of the product. User-get-user customer is one mode of customer acquisition, and they’re creating an instant messenger to facilitate that. What’s different about user generated content today is the quantity. Challenges that entrepreneurs face: getting the right people, scalability, acquiring users, creating solutions for retaining users and reaching critical mass, innovation, building a killer application.

The lowpoint of the session, and indeed the conference, was an unwarranted marketing pitch by Ravi Datanwala, Online Business Strategy Manager for conference sponsor Microsoft, talking about how great MS products are for building Web 2.0 properties…though Navin Mittal did lighten things up by recommending LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), much to everyone’s amusement.

Avnish Bajaj of Matrix Partners, moderating the discussion summed it up – everyone knows the ingredients of building a web 2.0 property – but I doubt if anyone knows the recipe. It’s potentially just the evolution of internet, from the early days to mass adoption. Web 2.0 is the other way round – now users push the business model. The cost of building an internet business is now down by a factor of 3 to 4, with open source technology, advent of search marketing and viral nature of Web 2.0.

Disclaimer: I’m related to Vivek Pahwa, Founder of Desimartini.com