Yes Vijay, I agree. Startups do Fail
Vijay Anand, key Proto organizer, wonders why Indian tech blogs are creating a fuss about failed startups. In a post over at VentureWoods, he writes:
“I am seeing a flurry of activity among the tech blogs who’ve caught on a interesting topic to latch onto. Failed startups. If you ask me, I am not sure what the big fuss in this is about.
Birds fly. Fishes Swim. Deals Fall through and Startups Fail. This is the natural order of things. The only thing we can do is alleviate the chances of success for a startup by a small degree. We do not, neither can anyone assure anyone of success and failures totally. Heck, the Silicon valley, which is considered to be this rich ecosystem, has its fair share of failures. What are we going to do about that? ”
In my response below, I speak for myself and not other tech bloggers - so please interpret it as such.
Vijay, no one is making a ‘fuss’ about failed startups. As a tech blogger, who reports on new startup launches, I only see it as fair to cover about startup failures as well. After all - failures are part of the ecosystem. Else, we’d end up covering only one end of the spectrum, which would be unfair. Silicon Valley failures dont go unnoticed either (TC deadpool).
Talking about startup failures is also good in a way for young, recent college grads,entrepreneur wannabes. They shouldnt get the impression that entrepreneurship is all hunky dory and sexy. Its a risky, challenging affair, with high probability for failure. Educating them about such failures would help them to make the assessment if entrepreneurship is their cup of tea.
Glorifying failure would be wrong - and I have tried to stay away from it.
Finally, I’d also like to add this - when a company like ByIndia, which made audacious claims like being the fastest growing search engine and SocNet site for Indians & which started the (in)famous $5 million sweepstakes fails, you cant help feeling a devilish pleasure reporting about it. I maybe guilty of that and I’m totally fine with it.
HealthCareMagic - health portal for Bangalore
HealthCareMagic is a new health portal for India, trying to bridge the gap between users and healthcare in an interactive way. They are currently in beta for Bangalore only and plan to expand services to other Indian cities as well.
Some of their key features are:
- Chat live with a doctor for free using the portal (between 9 AM - 9 PM IST)
- Rate, review doctors, hospitals. Share your experiences
- Search and compare doctors and health care service providers in Bangalore
- They also have health / hospitalization calculators to aid you in making healthcare related decisions
I’m guessing that monetization will be through an online pharmacy and selling insurance.
While there’s definitely a viable market for the service, I have a few suggestions for them -
First would be to improve the design and usability of the site itself. Second, I’d like to see a section listing some of the most common Indian ailments (cholestrol, BP, diabetes, malaria etc.). An Indianized version of WebMD’s self-assist symptom checker would be a killer addon, but considering that they’re still in beta, I can understand if they launch it later down the line. I’d also like to see some viral features on the main page itself - like top rated hospitals, top rated doctors, most reviewed doctors etc.
Healthcare is a market where word of mouth and personal recommendations from friends and family play a crucial role in decision making.
HealthCareMagic will have a tough time overcoming this barrier - but Bangalore is a good place to begin with - there’s a large migrant, tech savvy community.
HealthCareMagic has a huge potential to succeed and it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve and are embraced by the community.
BlogsJam, a web based blog aggregator for Indians
Citipals has launched BlogsJam, a web based blog aggregator, which aggregates some of the most popular Indian blogs across various categories and displays them in a nice, no-nonsense manner. They cover categories like technology, business, finance, cooking, bollywood, travel, fashion, metros etc.
Its a good starting point if you are unaware of what blogs are popular in a particular category. For instance, I may use Google Reader for my daily dose of technology news. But, since I have no idea on what Indian cooking related blogs are popular, I may use BlogsJam as a point of reference. Overall, I am impressed with the service - its as KISS as possible. They also provide a category wise widget, which can be embedded on any website.
However, the one thing that I wasnt very convinced about - how does BlogsJam strategically fit into Citipals, whose core value proposition is local, movie reviews, recommendations etc. So I pinged them about it. As per Ashish, the co-founder,
” in citipals, your social network consists of your friends, as well as the bloggers and web-sites you trust, these all become part of your social network.
We also bubble up blog posts on citipals, that are contextually relevant. eg. the ‘BollyWood Channel’ is contextually relevant on movie pages, and you will find posts from the ‘BollyWood Channel’ in the blogsJam widget on the r.h.s. bottom of this jodhaa akbar page, http://www.citipals.com/f_24890_jodhaa-akbar“
For some reason, I’m not quite convinced. In my opinion, they should launch BlogsJam as an independent service. Keeping the two mingled kind of confuses me as a user.
Commuter Feed - broadcast traffic reports using Twitter
CommuterFeed is a new startup that uses Twitter to receive and broadcast traffic updates.
Now, why does this sound so familiar ?
Some super cool open source projects from India
Twenty of the best open source projects were declared winners of the FOSS India Awards 2008, at the recently concluded Open Source India Week 2008.
The top honors were taken by “Hindawi”, a project that enables system level programming in Indic languages. It supports C, C++,lex, yacc, Assembly in Hindi, Gujarati, Assamese and Nepali.
Zmanda Recovery Manager, a recovery manager for MySQL server came in second while “Dhvani”, a framework to develop Indian language text to speech conversion (supports Hindi, Kannada, Malyalam) took third place.
There are some equally amazing finalists in the top 20. Check out the entire list here.
Its awesome to see such super cool open source projects emerging from India.
When advertising loses its context
While reading ContentSutra the other day, I noticed the TravelGuru banner on the right sidebar. And couldnt help wondering how out of context the banner was - in terms of time.
Time based contextual ad campaigns are effective - but only at the relevant time. Outside of the time window, they hardly make sense. Just like this one. I guess, TravelGuru took the easy way out.
VCs pump $928 million in 2007 in India, a 166% YoY jump
VC’s invested $928 million in 80 deals in the Indian market last year. This is a whopping 166% increase over last year - in 2006, a $349 million was invested in 36 deals. 48% ($384 million, 38 deals) of the $928 mill went to IT companies, business-consumer-retail got $346 million (30 deals), healtcare got $100 million (7 deals).
Median size of the round was about $9 million in 2007 as compared to $8.7 million in 2006.
via release.
VentureBeat also has a spreadsheet with the segment wise breakup.
Convert any blog feed into audio using BlogBard
BlogBard is a cool new startup, using which, you can convert any blog feed into audio.
Yes, thats right. Provide the url to the RSS / ATOM feed and Blogbard will convert the blog posts into audio. I tried out the service and the text-to-speech conversion if pretty darn accurate. Even the pronunciation of several proper nouns is right on the mark. For instance in this post, the service was correctly able to pronounce Rajnish, BollywoodHungama, Niraj etc.
As per Manoj, the founder,
“The problem we are trying to address is creating a new channel for consuming content that is traditionally consumed by reading, which is difficult when we are multitasking or simply not in front of our PCs. Our typical PC users include people who like to listen to online radio in the background”
Microsoft launches digital advertising platform in India
Microsoft has launched its digital advertising platform in India. India is the only country outside of US, where the company has launched the service.
As per Rajnish, India head, MS Digital Advertising Solutions, “The total advertising market in India is of $5 billion. But the online advertising market is still minuscule. We find there is enough scope (for growth).We expect the online advertising market to capture two to three per cent of the total advertising market in as many years.”
BollywoodHungama, Equity Master, HDFC Securities and Facebook have been roped in for the launch. NDTV Media is the exclusive sales partner for Microsoft. I’m not sure if outsourcing the ad sales to an outside entity is such a good idea. A similar attempt by Sify last year, already flopped. (Update: I missed out that the MSN-NDTV relationship has been in place for some time now).
As per NDTV Media COO, Niraj Dutt, they plan to have 750 advertisers on the platform by end of the calendar year.
Hmm..Rediff could rope in only 230 advertisers in the last quarter - do you think 750 is an achievable target till the rest of the year ?
via ET
ByIndia.com puts itself up for auction on eBay
Around an year back, ByIndia announced free participation to its $5 million sweepstakes for anyone who registers on their site. They also claimed to be “India’s fastest growing search engine and social networking site”.
Boy, have things changed over the last year or what.
Today, they announced that the site has been put up for auction at eBay.
The starting bid has been set at $0.5 million and you can follow the auction (and place your own bid) here.
I guess, we’ll soon have to start our own equivalent of the deadpool.
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