A missing category in the Consumer Internet space?

I was reading Mark Sherman’s blog which has a very useful listing of US consumer Internet companies in the various categories. He has also started plotting the Indian consumer Internet companies against each category. Anurag Gupta’s latest blog also provides a more comprehensive listing of Indian companies in the various categories of the consumer Internet space. You can go to both from the Links section of this page.

What was stark to me was the lack of “Learning” as a category in the 2.0 reincarnation of the Web. So much for the “killer app” of five years back. However, I strongly believe that interesting business opportunities will emerge in this category. Consider this: if Web 2.0 is really all about collaboration, how do we really learn? By doing and collaborating. A lot of Internet businesses in learning have focused on content delivery and tracking. But if you look at the way we learn: we pick up information from courses just in time and then we ask around and collaborate with others on real projects, learning most often on the fly.

There are early signs of ventures emerging in this space. Dimdim is building a free web meeting application based on open source. Agreed, their target is not the consumer internet space and nor does the application supports learning requirements, completely. But consider an idea where this could lead to: a free Internet service that allows users to log in and work on projects together. It should have features that allow users to share and edit documents and code (standard content management software features) with a few web-conferencing tools thrown in (share & store presentations, questions and answers …). Finally, the key feature: for each participant to request for and rate the skills of others and the ability to search for people based on skill sets.

Can this be monetized? I think it can. Companies and universities can run specific targeted campaigns for recruiting is one obvious way I can think of.

The recent Economist survey on Talent laid emphasis on career management and continuous learning in an era of global shortage of skilled workforce. Given this, it is hard to believe that Learning has disappeared for ever from the list of interesting Internet opportunities.