Companies are renaming themselves in line with their site addresses. Such is the influence of the Internet on web-based corporates.

India Internet Pvt Ltd, a Calcutta headquartered company, has rechristened itself as allindia.com Pvt Ltd so as to align its name with that of its portal www.allindia.com.

The company, which owns the globally popular cyber alumni site Batchmates.com as also the community site Companymates.com, chose to switchover to a new name to arrest any dilution to its brand equity.

Allindia.com Pvt Ltd has drawn up major plans for entering into portal development, development of B-to-B (business to business) web solutions and taking Batchmates.com to newer heights.

The company, one of India’s first few internet companies, is targeting new entrants in the portal business by partnering them on the technology front. "We consult with the portal owners, conceptualise the portal, the revenue streams, eyeball generation, stickiness factors and finally do the actual development and maintenance of the portal," said Mr. Arvind Agarwalla, director.

"The follows the globally accepted outsourcing model where the portal owners stick to their core competencies and we stick to ours," he said.

The company has appointed Mr. Sandeep Todi as its new CEO to ramp up the business plan and to cash in on the burgeoning Interent boom. Mr. Todi has more than 10 years experience in software developme and is the chief architect of PERKS Payroll Software and the to-be-announced web-based e-business software developed by Vedika Software Pvt Ltd where Mr. Todi was director – R&D. "We are poised to exploit the skill sets and expertise developed over the years in developing our own community sites and e-commerce sites for our clients," Mr. Todi told ET.

"We shall soon be announcing some major account wins for portal and B-to-B projects," he added. The name change is the beginning of allindia.com’s plans to promote Batchmates.com ina major way globally. Started in 1998, this cyber alumni site has attracted more than 1,95,000 registrations from 125 countries. With over 17,000 schools and colleges registered, the site is growing at a phenomenal 400-500 new members signing up per day.

"This is all happening by word of mouth. We are yet to turn on the promotions," Mr Agarwalla said. Mr. Todi has plans to make the memberships hit the 1 million mark by June 2000 – just four months away.

"We are going to achieve this through a combination of promotional activities to increase the memberships, including holding road shows in schools, colleges, clubs and cybercafes besides campanings in the print and electronic media," said Mr. Todi. "By the end of the year, we will touch a whopping 7 million memberships," he claimed.

The guestbook at the Batchmates.com site reveals the reasons why this site is becoming so popular, Mr. Todi said. Visitors have found long lost school and college friends, some after more than two decades. This home grown dotcom company is projecting earning profits in the current year - ending March 2000.

This bucks the trend of Internet companies such as Amazon.com which pride themselves on losing more money every quarter. "Our business model is a revenue-based one and we are very conscious that value must be provided to the shareholders," Mr. Todi said.

"Next year, we shall see revenues jumping 700 per cent and we will have a very healthy earnings figure to report," he added.