The idea is to make a student network in India through a web service. I must say the brain and heart in this is Saurav Jindal (http://www.tower-research.com/tower/team.shtml#saurav-jindal ). I am merely his first hire in this. The motivation of the idea or the guiding principle in the idea is not intended towards profit or growth but the availability of interaction between students in the many eductaional institutions. I feel it is very important to start with "for example"s since it reflects the sort of final picture that the service should have. For example, a student in R.I.T Jamshedpur  will have a profile page of his own which can be quesried by others upon his discretion. Other social networking popular practices will be used similarly to the lines of facebook. Say he is enrolled in "Introduction to Programming in Java". There will be a page for this course with links to the students enrolled in it and with content ( prescribed books, video and audio content, mock examinations, etc ) authored by the teacher in the course. But then this page will have a super page which is Java 101. This page will be almost merely an aggregation of content that has Java 101 as a parent. There will be majorly a  curriculum ( list of things that are covered ), suggested readings ( sorted by popularity of the sources in the suggested readings list of the course offerings it is aprent of, a search who is enrolled section, a message board, and a tutorial content section, which can be further searched on based on a keyword.

Market Research:

Here is a list of publicly perceived best educational softwares in the US:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=1006021107592  

http://store.sunburst.com/ 
http://www.learningcompany.com/jump.jsp?...
http://www.encoreusa.com/products.aspx?c...

Imagine Myspace ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060212/ap_on_hi_te/rising_online_space  ) and Facebook  ( popularity )together. It has potenital to provide a valuable entertainment and online presence to many individuals specially considering india's scattered IT centres. But having said that it will be a challenge to not get diverted by those possibilities. The aim of the service is to build the educational infrastructure in India. Possible source of revenue and assistance are companies who would be hurt by the projected shortfall of IT talent in 5 years. The mere JEE coaching business in India is a million dollar business according to the following approximations. The number of peope who ake the exam every year is almost 200,000. Each student would spend close to 1 to 2 lakhs of rupees on coaching. The medical entrance test coaching business is not quite advanced since not many medical students go back to teach other aspirants, but it is still a huge business. Also we can observe that membership cannot be based on being in school or having graduated from one. It is basically a portal for educational information dissemination in India. Education or instruction should be a choice of the content developer. Also the audience will itself direct content towards demand. But it's aim is not to be just another social network. Also the revenue model need not be based on ads, which no matter how relevant are fact of the matter external to the site. It can be an itunes model. Where the provider takes a small cut of the content distribution revenue. I fell I am not well qualified or havent done enough research to engage in that discussin. But I think I should make a website soon. I need to get it made before april first week since Saurav Jindal will got to India at that time. He has a lot of friends in many places in India who can assist in the initial content contribution.