Being a domainer I would suggest you to use a different domain name for Events Portal, otherwise you would be sending free traffic to IndiaEvents . com .
IndiaVents.com domain name will be more suitable for discussion portal or consumer portal .

News aggregation is a good concept.
I do agree that people can selectively read news by browsing the headline. (Reviews/Popularity count indicating how many times the news was read would help)
But, I fail to understand how it provides richer “news reading experience on the web” as eventually one has to go to the actual website to read the content.

I’d like to add a few points here:

(1) Useful versus Cool: YouTube/MySpace are cool. Shopping.com/iNods.com are useful. You will see the alexa charts for these services to be very very different in a number of ways. Cool sees sharp rises and falls in traffic. Useful (if it really is useful) sees consistent and sustainable growth in traffic.

Our current services are more on the “useful” side of things, and we do have some “cool” ones in development as well.

(2) With regards to VC money, what I meant was that once you raise money sometimes you are constrained to pursue a specific direction only and its tough to experiment. Hence we are not raising money at this time.

Also, look out for the 1.0 revamps for indiamarks and indiahappening and a full revamp of indiavents, based on what we have learnt/seen in the last few month. I will keep you posted.

Best,
-Vaibhav

India Strategy Series: Experiment with different services and steadily build a loyal user base posted at IndianPad.com…