PUNE, INDIA: Business-networking site ZaaBiz Pty Ltd is eyeing the Indian Diaspora to increase its number of members to one million.

According to this Australia-based start-up with focus of SMEs in the APAC region, Indians could constitute 70 per cent of its expected one million members. The rest would come from Down Under.

ZaaBiz also sees strong growth in geographies such as Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore and Dubai.

"Interestingly enough, we already see over half of our 100,000 members coming from India with the right, safe and promising environment Zaabiz is giving for pure business networking, specially for SMEs,” Michael Brecht, founder of ZaaBiz said.

“Then there are about 20 million Indians living outside the country and keen for such networking that can connect them back to the country," he added.

The venture, which has a mix of premium membership and advertising as its revenue model, is viable enough to generate revenues to make it profitable by next year.

It is also on its way to leverage a new avenue for revenue. This is a sponsorship model wherein micro-communities on the site can have respective sponsors.

There are 20 sponsors so far and Brecht plans to add more as he visits India in the next few days. The target is to have about 200 sponsors by this calendar year.

"ZaaBiz will look to create a unique business model around its networking platform allowing people to create groups and also allow the groups to be sponsored by corporate thus creating an alternate revenue stream for itself. Most ZaaBiz networkers network for information, jobs and to connect to people; the universe of brands that would want to reach out to such a profile of people is immense and hence ZaaBiz as an advertising platform holds huge potential for advertisers," Brecht said.

Will ZaaBiz thrive in an arena where established players such as LinkedIn rule the roost?

"LinkedIn is a great American platform and a big global player. But I believe that the business now is happening at the local scale, more so for business segments. We are putting our thrust through relevant content, local focus and environment for Indian members. When we started it 15 months back, nobody was looking seriously at the business segment and local needs in APAC. Asia, and therein India, has shown considerable market growth for us," he added.

On the OpenID alliance, which is about allowing a user able to use one online identity across multiple sites, Brecht said, "We have been contacted by few players but as of now I don't see any advantage and thus a bit cautious. If there comes a time, when it makes sense for members we are open to talk."

German born Brecht, now based in Australia, started ZaaBiz in October 2007 with an aim of building a networking platform to facilitate better business decisions among serious minded business people by bringing them together on the platform.

Its services currently range from groups, forums, articles, newsletters, advanced search and powerSearch, finding new business connections and more Web 2.0 applications under development.

While the US market is ruled by heavyweights such as MySpace and Facebook, India has seen considerable heat in this space in the recent past with first-movers like Orkut followed by a slew of players like Fropper and BigAdda.

According to a 2007 score-track by market research firm comScore, Orkut grew by 35 per cent in India in the past one year; followed by MySpace, which grew by 33 per cent, while Facebook came in at third place vis-à-vis the Indian market. MySpace officially launched in India this April.

According to a WatConsult approximate estimate for the Indian market, five years ahead at 2011 at 15 to 2 per cent of the outside of US numbers, the Indian online spend on social networking could be pegged at 150-200 million dollars. That could mean a market leader with 30 per cent share would have revenues close to $50 million.