StartupDunia

Venture Capital (VC) and Private Equity (PE) investors have invested close to $17 billion in 706 companies in India between January 2004 - June 2007. Of these, they have exited from 160 companies either through IPOs or M&A.

And majority of the exits have been successful, as per Arun Natrajan, founder of Venture Intelligence. As per his estimates, there are about 100 active players in the market with 30-35 VCs and about 60 private equity investors.

via Asian Age 

TiE Mumbai is organizing a 2 day conference, titled TiE World. The objective of the event is for attendees to learn,collaborate and network with other entrepreneurs, VC’s and other members of the fraternity. The conference will be held on Sept 6th & Sept 7th and going by the agenda, this definitely looks like a must-go event for anyone interested in entrepreneurship.

Agenda for Sept 6th:

• TiE world-leverage the network
• When to start-up
• Growth path: Build or Buy
• Pre - Funding / Boot- strapping
• Expansion
  • Just funded!
  • Mid-Sizes
  • Overseas
• IPO/ Exit

Agenda for Sept 7th:

• Finance/Funding Raising
• Sales & Marketing
• HR & People
• Women Entrepreneurs
• What VCs and Angels look for
• Future opportunities and trends

If you can, definitely try to take advantage of this event.

While WPP registered only a low single digit growth in the developed markets (5.1% in North America, 3.1% in Europe and just 2.3% in the UK), it grew by a whopping 29% in China and 22% in India as per the first half results announced by the agency.

On a separate note, G2, owned by WPP,  is close to acquiring three small to medium agencies in the digital marketing space in India.

A testament to how strong the advertising industry (including online-digital advertising) are growing in India.

As per a story in Business Standard, Hitesh Oberoi, COO - Info Edge, says that they are evaluating entry into other verticals - auto portals, educational portals and yellow pages to name a few.

Speaking about how they intend to differentiate Brijj.com from LinkedIn, Hitesh emphasizes the integration into Naukri.com and also that the service will be localized for the Indian market. With other upcoming features like importing GMail and Outlook Express contacts directly to Brijj, the service will go out of beta in the next couple of months.

So, which vertical do you think Info Edge will enter next ? Why ?

I just compiled a list of known incubators and entrepreneur resources. Have made it as a static page for easy access.

You can see it here.

Please feel free to make suggestions if anything needs to be added/corrected from the list.

I believe that technology incubators in colleges and universities are very crucial to innovation and entrepreneurship. More than the incubation, I think they give young graduates a taste of entrepreneurship and encourage them to consider entrepreneurship as a viable career option.

More and more academic institutions in India are recognizing this and launching incubators to foster such innovation on campus. Latest to join this bandwagon is Vellore Institute of Technology. They have launched a Technology Business Incubator with the sponsorship of the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India. Their mission is to promote entrepreneurship, incubate startups and offer technology development services to companies with close proximity to the campus.

Several companies have been successfully incubated already and several others are in the process.

Here’s wishing all my readers a very happy Independence Day.

After years of a closed, socialist economy, India is finally on track for a solid growth curve - and I hope it continues well into the future.
PS: the one thing that I dislike - all the new media channels (be it print or TV) seem to be in the mood to profit from the Independence Day sentiment, treating it more like a commodity.

Well, thats exactly what a study released by the Online Publishers Association reveals.  Online content is king. Internet users spend almost half their time viewing news, entertainment content etc. overshadowing other online activities like email, online search, and online shopping.

The 4 year study conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings recorded a 37 % increase in time spent on content sites, which includes online videos too.

Online content accounts for 47% of the time spent online in 2007 (was 34% in 2003). Web search accounted for 5% of the time spent online in 2007 (3 % in 2003). Commerce and shopping sites accounted for 15%  in 2007 (20% in 2003) while email (& other communications) accounted for 33% of time spent online in 2007 (46% in 2003).

via Reuters 

Trine Game Studios is a small (about 80 team members) Mumbai based game design studio. Besides providing services related to game development, they are working on some really, really cool games for the Indian market. Their flagship game is titled ‘Legends of Great India’ and is a real time strategy game. The twist - they characters in the game are based on Indian mythical characters and Gods like Hanuman, Ganesha, Ram, Arjun etc. The goal of the game is to save the future of India from all evil, including Ravan. This, in my opinion, is localization at its best. By incorporating characters and stories that we’ve all grown to love and cherish.

But dont take my word for it. Take a look below at some of the screenshots of the game.

The game is currently in production and as per Trine co-founder Sangam Gupta, they will take their time to release a high quality game.

Trine also has some other upcoming games for the Indian market - ‘Streets of Mumbai’ (car racing based on Mumbai city streets), ‘Wings over Kargil’ (a third person airplane combat shooter game based on the 1971 Indo-Pak war).

I think games with such Indian flavor will definitely appeal to the Indian gaming audience. Hopefully, we get to play these awesome looking games sometime soon.

The studio is founded by Somil Gupta and Sangam Gupta and they have had stints at EA etc. The company is currently bootstrapped.

I’d written earlier about the TiE-ISB Connect 2007 business plan competition. The schedule for the event was just finalized and is scheduled to be held on November 14 - 16 at ISB, Hyderabad. NEA Indo US Ventures is the main sponsor of the event.

Entrepreneurs interested in participating should initially submit an executive summary by August 31st in the prescribed format.

About 8 prior participants have received business leads and support in refining biz strategy. Four have attracted angel investments.

This is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to showcase their talent and connect with the right people. If you are an aspiring - existing entrepreneur, definitely consider participating.