“Video revolution is what I think holds the maximum potential” - Rohit Varma, Interskale

Rohit Varma is a Consumer Internet Entrepreneur and Marketing Professional with a decade long experience each in FMCG and in the Consumer Internet industries, in India and in the U.S. Rohit is an IT-BHU and IIM-A alumnus, he has also helped build India's most famous Internet brand Rediff.com

In a conversation with YourStory.in, Rohit shares bits and bytes about emerging Internet Consumer market in general, Internet in India, and his company Interskale.

So Rohit, what is Interskale all about?

We are a best-in-class digital marketing and consulting firm. There are three parts to our business. First, we advice people on how to use the internet, second is that we are a digital marketing firm, we use the internet to help people/companies market. Very specifically, we help organizations grow. The whole focus is on helping organizations scale up, and I am not talking only about startups but also medium size companies. The third is the best-in-class piece which says we are aiming to be a quality firm. There are a lot of players which are trying to do work like ours. Our differentiator is being a quality player, we provide quality services.

Why did you start Interskale?

It happened over a period of time. As I was a chemical engineer, first seven years I tried to do stuff related to chemical industry. Then by accident, I drifted to consumer product industry and then I liked it. Everything I have done in the last two decades has been related to marketing. Earlier it was marketing of consumer products; later it was the marketing in the internet. Luckily for me, at IIM Ahmedabad, we had the best of marketing professors in those days. I felt I had good training in this field and so I stuck to that. In late nineties, the internet scene was coming up and I got really interested. That days Rediff.com was a small start-up and I contact them out of the blue. They offered me a job and I became the first marketing head of Rediff. I also started a social networking site after my stint there. In 2007, I tried doing consulting work with Aptech. Basically, what I did was use all my knowledge of marketing and internet, and put it together. Already we had quite proved ourselves in the field of marketing. So I thought, why not move out and start up a premium company in the field of internet marketing and consulting and that’s how Interskale came about.

On providing a good working environment.

I have worked a lot in public sector , in multinationals, both in India and abroad. One needs to create a great working environment. There are very few companies that people aspire to work for. Companies may be doing well in business terms but it’s not that people are eager to work for them. Out of my personal experience, it’s not really hard to create organizations which have good working environment. In our case, it's an intellectual type of enterprise, so people are the assets. They have to be at the forefront of a very fast moving field called internet. So they have to be motivated and charged and always learning about new stuff in this field, productivity depends on how motivated and happy they are. Also in our case, the type of work that we do is also in our favor. There is nothing monotonous to be bored about and we always have interesting work.What is the next exciting trend you see in internet?

Personally, I think the most interesting thing is going to be video. I have seen email, instant messenger revolution, chat, search and now social networking. The video revolution is what I think holds the maximum potential. In India may be due to bandwidth reasons and also due to unique reasons that the most used business language is not the native language, there is a gap. In all other countries, the local language is the business language usually. However in India, we don’t have the culture of writing. People are not trained to write, not even the basics. For Indians, when compared to reading or blogging, a better reachable way would be video.

What is the potential you see for growth in online advertising space in India?

Going by statistics, India is one of the laggers in terms of online advertising. Online advertising will grow, definitely will grow huge. Companies like Google are spending a lot of time in educating organizations on how internet can be used. If there is an organization, to grow and innovate, certainly it has to use the internet in some way or the other.

Where do you see Interskale five years from now?

We want to be the best in this field. It will take 4-5 years for us to establish ourselves. There is a lot of scope; one cannot hope to capture the entire market. We hope to enjoy ourselves and it would be a learning experience with new technologies coming in. There will be a lot of challenges, new applications, but the real merit for us is to do quality work and make sure that we can make a difference to the clients' business.

Do check out http://www.interskale.in for more details!