StartupDunia

SF Chronicle has an interview with TCS chief Ramadorai. An excerpt from the interview:

Q: India has a reputation for cost savings, more than it does for innovation. What can be done to change that?

A: Entrepreneurial capabilities and research capabilities must be fully encouraged. And the VC, the seed capital, must grow into this segment. The university system … the IITs, the IIMs, must encourage students and bring in programs that encourage entrepreneurism similarly to how Silicon Valley works. And larger companies must create innovative business models for the future. This is the challenge, and this is the opportunity.

IBNLive is on a mission - exposing the overbooking of flights and violation of safety norms by Air Deccan.

Great investigative and sensationalistic journalism.

The WTF moment - Air Deccan chief Capt. Gopinath defends the overbooking situation with the following response:

“There were some over bookings. Our website was hacked by some unknown elements. There were flights showing on the computer, that did not exist!”

Come on captain, if the ‘unknown elements‘ hacked into the website - why would they try to create additional flights — wouldnt they find it more lucrative to steal credit card info & stuff ?

Late last year, a supposed YouTube clone - MeraVideo, created ripples across the blogosphere and other media when they claimed to be close to receiving $1.5 million VC funding. To this date, there have been no confirmed reports that any such deal has taken place.  MeraVideo founder, Kanwaldeep Kalsi, evaded the question posed to him by Kiruba as part of a PodTech interview.

Well, the site today is in shambles - sleaze and semi-porn content thrive on the site.  I wonder why they’re even paying for the bandwidth and hosting expenses. I’m writing off them as officially dead ( probably we need to have a deadpool similar to TC ).
Nonetheless, Kanwaldeep took the entire media and blogosphere for a big ride - got tonnes of publicity and got people talking. Well, in the long term, I think he’s hurt himself and his credibility.
A huge, huge HOAX.

I wonder how and why we (including Podtech and Rediff) fell for it.  What should be done to avoid recurrences of such events ?

The Doing Business arm of the World Bank has published a report on the state of doing business in South Asia. The goal of the report is to provide benchmarks, based on several objective factors, on how business friendly a country is. They also provide suggestions to reform the bottlenecks that a country may be facing.

As per this latest report, India is the top reformer in the South Asia region. Starting a business in India has become considerably easier - It now takes 35 days to register a company in Mumbai as opposed to 71 days a year ago and 89 days in 2004. It is further projected that as part of the e-governance initiative undertaken by Ministry of Company Affairs (MCA-21 project), the time taken to start a business will reduce further.

India is definitely making much needed reforms - but it still has a long way to go. Consider the following:

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Mashable has a post on a new Indian social networking site called IndyaRocks. Looks pretty cool from the screenshot and also promises a lot of great features - SMS integration, photos, bookmarking, web clipping and blog integration.

They are still in private beta and their blog is here.  PhoneLinx (not yet launched) is the parent company and the founders seem to be based out of San Jose, USA.

The annual media and entertainment convention is being organized in Mumbai 26th - 28th March. The industry is projected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 18% to about Rs 100,000 crores.

I dont make predictions and stuff but something tells me that you’ll definitely hear from Rajat Barjatya of Rajshri.com at the event :-).

As India’s IT industry keeps booming, companies are finding it difficult to recruit talented, credible candidates. The attrition rate is high and consequently, there is always a huge demand for hiring good quality candidates. Unlike the US, it is not uncommon in India for candidates to exaggerate and sometimes even lie on the resumes. Such bogus resumes are expensive to the hiring company - not only in terms of cost but also in terms of time and energy.

MohanChoti, founded by an ex-IITian, aims to address these problems by providing hiring companies a database of reliable job candidates. Candidates can submit their resume, search for jobs and indicate references who can testify to the resume contents of that candidate. Hiring companies can search for resumes, and view the references provided. Based on the interview, the hiring company can then interview the candidate and in turn, rate the verity of the referee.

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Gil Forer, global director of venture capital and IPO initiatives for strategic growth markets at Ernst & Young Global, spoke to DNA Money on India’s place in the venture capital world. A few excerpts from the interview:

India is still at the beginning. Almost $750-800 million were invested in VC-backed companies in 2006. The ecosystem here (India) is still developing. So we have seen foreign VCs coming in. We have seen more companies being funded. Some companies have seen some exits already. What we saw few years ago in China , We see it here now.

What can be done to create a vibrant ecosystem?

We have various criteria namely, 1) capital — which includes venture capital, private equity; 2) intellectual capital including entrepreneur of R& D centres of companies such as Microsoft; 3) Spirit of entrepreneurship in terms of willingness of individual entrepreneurs, acceptance of failure, acceptance of individual worth. All these must be factored.

We also look at infrastructure in terms of sufficient number of law firms and physical infrastructure, companies exports without lot of bureaucratic hurdles, the legal environment whether intellectual protection is there, tax issues and so on.

Overall the place should be a nice place to do business. California is what it is today because of its environment. It’s difficult to create entrepreneurship skill in a place that is difficult to live in and the last thing is the market. Also, large domestic markets play a crucial role in creating a vibrant system. One should judge them on scale of five on each parameter. I’ll leave that to you. You will agree as an emerging market, you (India) have still not yet reached optimum levels on all these parameters.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Art work by Indian artists seems to be in high demand. Consider this - a recent auction of Indian art at Christie’s auction house in New York fetched a whopping $4.6 million dollars. Yes, you read that correctly. V S Gaitonde’s untitled piece alone fetched $768,000.

SaffronArt, IndiaTimes, Osian and Apparao Gallery are some of the notable art auction houses in India.

A few statistics about these Indian art auction houses below and you’ll get an idea of how exceedingly well these auction houses are doing:

• SaffronArt’s most recent art auction made Rs 19 crore with the highest sale pegged at Rs 1.5 crore (IBNLive)
• SaffronArt’s previous auction fetched about Rs 70 crore with the highest sale pegged at Rs 6 croer (MoneyControl)
• The online art auction market in India is estimated to be around $150 million. Osian’s art based investment fund attracted 656 investors and raised a record Rs 102 crores (yes an art investment fund). The Net Asset Value (NAV) of the fund currently is 124. (IHT)
• The IndiaTimes Art portal attracted 5 lac visitors within first 15 days of launch (AlooTechie)
• Osian’s recently concluded auction fetched Rs 39.8 crores with the highest piece sold at Rs 5.76 crore (Osian PR)

Now, I’m not an art connoisseur to know if Indian art is really worth so much moolah - but hey those figures indeed pique my interest.

And I’m not alone - it seems the Indian Tax man is also intrigued by these numbers. Hence it comes as little surprise that as per the recent budget, capital gains tax will be levied on sale of paintings and artwork  starting April 2008.

Barcamp Bangalore 3 is right around the corner - March 31 - April 1.  Besides Internet, mobiles, the theme also includes impact of technology on society.

Should be a great event. Sign up if you havent.