I met a young group of student entrepreneurs today who came to me for some basic advice on how they can start up a new online video portal. Their idea was to open a niche video portal and cultivate a community around it - in the process helping content owners / producers with the technology and sharing revenue with them. The idea wasn't unique but one of the co-founders had a good insider connect within the artist community which he hoped to use in content aggregation and building audience. They had identified a team of programmers in Hyderabad who would be able to do all the "coding" for their video portal, and they would do the groundwork. My immediate advice to them was - don't create a website ! Counterintuitive as it may sound, the time for starting websites and portals from ground up is long over. The time now is to start 'services' and not 'websites'. The web has come a full circle, from the days it was a haunt of Geeks, to today when eve...