Are Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay the only hot Internet stories you know?!

Last weekend in Hyderabad, I was riding the city's new, smooth roads along with my parents. Somewhere close to Banjara Hills (aka Beverly Hills of Hyderabad or so they think), a big roulette board on a sign screamed at us: "Come, join the world's largest gaming company - PokerWorld" I already knew the story and narrated it much to my parents' fascination. Here it goes...

PartyGaming (operator of PokerWorld) is one the wildest Internet super success stories that no one talks about - it has offices only in Gibraltar and Hyderabad (yes!) and sells mostly to poker-addicts in the US. Global? Definitely. Big? Super huge. Online? Completely. It was started by a not so unknown one-time queen of Internet porn, Ruth Parasol. Very quickly.... her story goes that her dad (holocaust survivor Richard Parasol) used to own massage parlors in California. She completed her law degree - joined him and got into the phone sex business, then left him and started out on her own on Internet porn. After 1999, the poker business interested her. She found a desi IIT guy called Anurag to write the software for online poker. Anurag's software allowed 70,000 simultaneous players and she gave him 30% of the company. Launched only in 2001, the company quickly grew to $500M in profits by 2005. Today, Anurag Dikshit is worth $3.1billion - 10th richest Indian per Forbes Billionnaires. He roped in his buddy from IIT, Vikrant Bhargava who also made his millions. Dikshit is never openly seen associated with the business and has recently quit the board, sold some shares and even hides behind desks in the company's photos! It's believed that if they have to step into US shores, they risk being arrested. End of story.