StartupDunia

In an interview with the Hindu, Mohit Dubey, founder CEO of Carwale, says that they’ve “helped more than 10,000 new car buyers to enter into a transaction“. More than 50,000 recommendations have been made using their car recommendation engine and 40% of the users who enter a purchase inquiry end up buying the car. He talks about a few pioneering efforts by Carwale - a used car price guide, car recommendation engine, instant online price quotes, which differentiate them from other competitors.

Their revenue model is from generating sales leads to car companies as well as financing companies. With over 20,000 used car listings (Rs 500 per listing), used car classifieds also seems to be a lucrative revenue stream.

He estimates that 5-10 % of total car sales in India will take place over the Internet.

Complete interview at Hindu

Pinkvilla is an new, online community targeting the Indian Woman. As with any other site whose target audience is women, PinkVilla users can share beauty tips, participate in celeb gossip, track latest fashion trends and discuss any and all other feminine related topics. Just as the name suggests, the site has a pink theme, evangelized by PopSugar and Glam in the US. The site relies on User Generated content (UGC) - users sign up and can contribute an article, a story, a beauty tip or almost anything that falls into one of the predefined categories. You can also invite friends to join your network or add any of the existing users to your social network.

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When it comes to VC funding, term sheets and such, its a constant learning process for me. I scout the net to find useful information related to VC funding and all the terms and process related to VC funding. I came across two interesting posts related to VC funding and I’d like to share them with you - chances are that you may have already read these.

The myth of 51%

One of the greatest misperceptions in the early stage entrepreneurial world is that control revolves around maintaining greater than 51% ownership in a firm. In many term sheet negotiations, I have seen entrepreneur after entrepreneur focus intently on maintaining majority ownership. While this is key for buyouts when the company is cash flow positive, it is not the key factor with venture deals. How so???

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As per a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), India is set to become the worlds fastest growing market for entertainment and media.  The Indian E&M space is expected to reach RS 100,000 crores by 2011. Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region, with India and China leading the region at a CAGR of 18.5% and 16.8% respectively over the next five years.

Internet advertising is poised to emerge as the fastest growing segment over the next five years.

US will be the largest but slowest growing market at 5.3% CAGR by 2011.

via BS

FE reports that Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) is planning to launch a news portal under the Big Internet brand sometime soon. No registration or subscription will be needed to access the site. The portal will help ADAG feed news to its IPTV network and to its radio network (when and if the govt. allows this).

via FE

While a storm brews in the US blogosphere on a controversial ad campaign from Microsoft, the second session at IAMAI’s Web 2.0 conference touched upon the topic of using blogs as a marketing tool in the Indian market (If you do not have the time or patience to sit through the 1 1/2 hour video, catch a brief summary at ContentSutra).

A couple of panelists, including Garima from Citibank, were of the opinion that ad banners on blogs were a bad idea. The rationale being that advertising on blogs disrupts the sanctity and integrity of blogs.

I strongly disagree. Majority of the Indian blogs already use Adsense as part of their blogs and as long as bloggers have a disclosure policy, I think ad banners on blogs are perfectly acceptable.

What do other Indian bloggers feel about this ? Also, as part of the blog audience, what do you think about this ? Should blogs have ad banners ?

Be it Guy Kawasaki or be it Paul Graham or be it Steve Jobs - every pundit swears by the mantra that you should do what you love. If you do not enjoy what you are doing, there are very few chances that you will be successful in it.
So, here’s a question for those of you reading this post -

How many of you actually love what you are doing ?

If not, are you doing anything to change that ?

Feel free to leave your responses via anonymous comments. It would be great to get a feel of how many of you are actually pursuing your passion, whatever that might be.

So, if you couldnt make it to the IAMAI Web 2.0 conference, you can catch up with the webcasts here. The webcasts seem to work fine in IE but not in FireFox.

Some of the sessions are great but some others seemed to be more like an act of self promotion.

Breaking News -
YouTube has a feature where it displays all the sites that link to a video. A lot of users have downloaded videos from YouTube servers using FTP. These inward links to YouTube seem to expose the userid and password of the user in plaintext as part of the url.

A Google query will show all the breached accounts which are vulnerable. If you think your userid is compromised, change it immediately.

hat tip Rohan

Earlier this month, Picsquare and iTasveer announced integration of their services with Flickr. So, Picsquare and iTasveer users could provide their Flickr credentials and order prints of the photos they had already uploaded to Flickr. Now, it seems that they in for some stiff competition from Bangalore based startup, Printo. They will begin with integrating Flickr in the next few months and then expand to other photo sharing sites like Snapfish, Shutterfly and Photobucket. The startup will offer only photo books, photo calendars, custom wedding invites and will not delve into single photo prints. To me, they aim to become the document and print retail chain across the country - the equivalent of Kinko’s in the US.

via Hindu