Online Catalog
(Business World, New Delhi, 13th December, 1999)

Ever wandered over to the Yahoo arcade and done some pointless window shopping - like look for a Pentium III laptop with 48x CD-ROM and multimedia, all for less than $600? Now, you can do it here in India, at least small businesses can. Intel, betting heavily that they will buy online, is lending its weight to http://www.pczoneindia.com/, which seeks to be a Net-based shopping mall for all things computer - related. The best part is that it offers the same facility that Yahoo does - you can set your criteria (price, processor…) and search the store. A logical extension of the 18-month-old PC Zone catalogue aimed at small and medium enterprises, the site allows all shopping transactions right upto the point where the order is placed. Then somebody has to trudge to the bank, stand in line and get a demand draft. The site, while well laid-out does contain stray instances of shoddy coding. The company's MD is Manpreet Singh who launched Beanstalk for HCL and became CEO of HCL Frontline at the age of 31. He's being angel funded by Gokul Tandon, Shiv Nadar's brother -in-law and a former vice-president of HCL. Intel's software development centre in Bangalore is said to have chipped in with substantial support during the site's conception. But the site itself was built by Delhi's Trisoft Design, which is run by ex-Microsoft man Hemant Sharma.