What’s common to the new generation of entrepreneurs on the Indian Internet? They are young, passionate about their ideas, have degrees from top-tier Indian and foreign universities and most have given up secure corporate careers to cover uncharted territory on the web.

Take 34-year-old Kavita Iyer and minglebox.com, the new website she’s launched. A social networking site targeted at the Indian youth, it’s the latest passion in the life of this Hindustani music enthusiast who also happens to have degrees from IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabasssd and has worked with the likes of Tanishq, ICICI Bank and Wipro.

Today, along with co-founders Sanjay Aggarwal and Sushma Abburi, both old friends from IIT, she runs minglebox.com from a no-frills office in Bangalore, that may be low on swank but is high on passion. Their reason for swapping risk- free corporate careers with a plunge into entrepreneurship? “Nothing else seemed to have the same level of challenge and opportunity.”

There are dozens of others like her providing the Net savvy Indian consumer a host of services. There are local search engines such as guruji.com, onyomo.com and ilaaka.com that help you locate a particular kind of restaurant in your city in an area specified by you; ones like the popular burrp.com that lets you do that, and read what others have to say about the place. Then, there are photo-uploading and sharing websites such as picsquare.com and merasnap.com that let you order prints and ship them to your family and friends. There are also job-search engines such as bixee.com that let you look for an exact job match across several job websites, video uploading sites such as apnatube.com and meravideo.com that allow you to upload that cute video of your dog having a bath to share with friends.

Kavita Iyer (standing, centre) CEO, Minglebox with her team

There are also Indian versions of the immensely popular global no-frills classifieds site Craigslist, such as indialisted.com, oneindia.com and listings.in where you can do anything from renting a house to selling your old furniture. All this, besides the already popular services such as blogging, social and business networking and dating that are increasingly being presented in Indianised versions by websites such as minglebox.com, fropper.com, yaari.com and desimartini.com.

It’s all part of a phenomenon called India 2.0, and in case you’re wondering, it’s not a Matrix-like program revising the software called ‘India’ and coming up with the new, improved version. It actually refers to the second coming of the Indian Internet and a host of new websites that are trying to grab the imagination of the younger generation. (And maybe become the Indian YouTube — the video-uploading site that got acquired by Google for a whopping $1.65 billion.) Unlike their predecessors, they are not content with giving you your daily fix of news with a smattering of other services like e-mail and chat. They want you to use the Internet to run your life.

From left to right: Kartik, Pankaj and Manish — the Picsquare team

Experts say it is the extension of a global phenomenon called Web 2.0 — a wave of second-generation websites that are heavy on user-generated content and empower amateurs to upload and share content on the Net. “It is a reflection of this on the increasingly mature Indian Internet where both the content and the users are becoming more sophisticated,” says Shubho Ray, president of the industry body Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI).

For Silicon-valley returnees Anand Jain and Deap Ubhi of burrp.com, modelled on international favourite yelp.com, the motivation to launch their own site from a their flat in Lokhandwala, came from their own experience of looking for good hang-out joints in Mumbai. “We encountered a gap between those trying to find local businesses and those who knew more about their localities,” says Ubhi, who along with Jain got a taste of start-up culture in Bay Area, California — something that spurred them on when they started burrp.com. The website has Delhi and Bangalore versions and will see a Calcutta edition soon.

Jain and Ubhi feel there are more people willing to invest in Indian web ventures and this is egging on activity. “I can’t remember the last time there were so many India-focussed funds. There is an imbalance between available capital and quality deals to invest in,” says the duo that received angel funding in the US in March 2006 and is looking forward to closing a 7-figure first-round funding deal by February 2007. Meanwhile, they are having ‘an awesome time’.

Having fun is a big part of what’s it all about for many of these young enthusiasts. After all, the gains outweigh the risks, which are not very big to begin with. Look at IIT Mumbaians Manish Agrawal and Kartik Jain of picsquare.com. They were clear about the fact that they were going to try the idea for a year when they started out. “If it didn’t work out, we knew we would stand to lose a maximum of what we would have made from a day job,” says Agrawal. However, having received funding from The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), the young duo is raring to go.

Vivek Pahwa of bixee.com

According to Amit Ranjan, a dedicated Net-watcher who runs tech website webyantra.com, the booming job market with its huge demand for graduates from A-grade institutes has led to a certain sense of security. “More people are willing to take a risk with their careers,” he says.

Also, it doesn’t cost much to launch a start-up. “Hardware and bandwidth come cheap these days,” say ex-Yahoo employees Ruban Phukan and Rajesh Warrier who are the Bangalore-based co-founders of Web 2.0 properties such as bixee.com and pixrat.com. Having recently been acquired by MIH Web Pvt Ltd, the Indian arm of South-African media company Naspers, the two are visibly excited about the first such move in India 2.0.

And ultimately, it’s the rapid growth of Internet use in the country that’s behind all this. The IAMAI estimates that there are around 28 million Indians online regularly (37 million infrequent ones) and this figure is estimated to reach 100 million by 2007-08. Broadband services are poised to take off, and faster and more widespread connectivity to the Net is just around the corner. The growth of online advertising — estimated to be Rs 162 crore in 2005-06 and expected to cross Rs 218 crore in 2006-07 — has also helped.

Amit Ranjan feels that something that has fanned the flames of web entrepreneurship — not just in India but worldwide — is Google’s Adwords program. “Anybody can create a website and put Google ads and start earning advertising revenues,” explains Ranjan. While those revenues are significant only if the site has a lot of traffic, it is a tremendous psychological booster, he says.

Ruban Phukan and Rajesh Warrier of bixee.com

Exciting as all this is, the fact remains that most of these new websites are modelled on popular international formats or rely on providing an interesting mix of various features provided by different popular websites.

Take fropper.com, one of the biggest in the Indian social networking space, that aims to provide integration across the popular youth interests: photos, music, videos and blogging. Given the popularity of existing international sites, the way to differentiate yourself is to go local with a vengeance, feels Navin Mittal of fropper.com (backed by the shaadi.com team).

Indianising the content and making it simpler for a less sophisticated user-base are some of the tactics used by websites that have adapted global formats. Added features also help. Minglebox, for instance, plans to introduce something called MingleMobile to help users “blog from their mobile, upload photos from their camera phones and send announcements of blogs to their friends from wherever they are.”

“If a site like Orkut exists, why would people want to sign up for an Indian social networking site, you may ask. Turns out they do,” says Vivek Pahwa, the 25-year-old alumnus of ISB, Hyderabad who has kicked off no less than four web properties in the last couple of months — among them the social networking and dating site desimartini.com and listings site indialisted.com.

“They feel more at home on an Indians-only site. Also, the trick is to use a popular concept but go beyond it and add innovative features,” he says. He describes his own Desimartini as a mix of Orkut, mobile networking and MySpace (which lets you customise your homepage, a feature not provided by Orkut).

There are those who are not very happy about this trend. “We’re just not seeing enough innovation in the Indian businesses,” feels web-watcher Nikhil Pahwa, a writer with contentsutra.com that tracks movements in India 2.0. “The business models here have to be adapted to the Indian context but for some businesses, there isn’t enough traction for them to become viable. The market here isn’t evolved enough,” says Pahwa who describes his job as a ‘24x7 obsession’.

Others are more optimistic. To the extent that they are not even daunted by the spectre of 2001 — the year of the worldwide dotcom crash. “I think this time it’s real. The market is real, the user base is real and most companies are careful about bringing real value to the customers. The focus is to give the user something that is missing,” says Gaurav Mishra of guruji.com.

Will these shiny-eyed entrepreneurs be around five years from now and will some be millionaires with showy houses and flashy cars? It’s certainly not going to be a cakewalk for these websites to establish themselves as recognised web brands, let alone reach the popularity levels of, say, a Google, an Orkut or a Youtube. But, given the kind of energy buzzing around the Indian web, we might yet see an Indian Sergei Brin and Larry Page (Google co-founders) reach out to capture the world’s imagination.