StartupDunia

CafeStocks is yet another startup trying to marry social features and Indian stock market investing. The goal is to use wisdom of the crowds for buying and selling stocks. Users can collaborate and seek out opinions and ask questions related to any particular stock.  Each user can maintain their virtual portfolio and based on the performance of their portfolio, earn karma points.

While there’s little novelty regarding the concept, the problem lies with CafeStocks’ poor execution. Be it design, content or utility, the site feels somewhat lacking - I guess they should have waited some more time to seed content before opening it to the public. Without proper focus and execution, it may vanish into oblivion, especially since others seem be executing quite well.

The incubators at Trivandrum TechnoPark and the ICICI Knowledge Park have been awarded the “Best Technology Business Incubator” for 2007. The national award has been instituted by the Dept of Science and Technology, Govt. of India.

In the TechnoPark incubator, 71 startups have been incubated, of which 35 have graduated and moved to bigger premises, while 31 are still continuing operations in the incubator.

In the Knowledge Park incubator,  29 companies have been incubated, of which 10 have graduated and moved out, while 19 still continue to operated out of the incubator.

As as aside, one of the big benefits of operating out of an incubator is that you need not pay service tax on the services provided. See this (PS: word file) for additional details.

A distant friend asked me this question during a conversation yesterday:

What Indian city is best conducive to entrepreneurship ?

Based out of a tier - III city, his town lacks reliable broadband access, human capital is not appropriately skilled and there’s a lack of exchange of intellectual ideas amongst his peers. He’s contemplating moving to a bigger city, where he can get easy access to ideas, capital and skilled people.

The question really got me thinking. Which Indian city would be most suitable for me to setup shop, if I were an Internet entrepreneur in India ?

Mumbai would be prohibitively expensive for majority of the startups, unless you have a home there and you dont really need to rent office space etc. That leaves Pune, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad in the picture (surprising, but you dont really hear a lot about Hyderabad in the context of startups etc.- other than ISB). The list can be further trimmed if there’s a possibility that you’ll need VC funding, since majority of the VC’s require that you relocate to the same city that they are based in.

Personally, I’d opt for either Bangalore or Pune (Chennai weather is not for me). I’d love to hear where you’d base your startup, if you were/are an entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur, have you faced a scenario where you would have had better access to resources if you were located elsewhere ? Do you think life would have been easy in terms of hiring, networking etc. if you were located in a startup hub ?

Say you bootstrap your Internet startup and are on the verge of either making a public announcement or pitch media-bloggers about the impending launch of your startup.

My question is - how do you anticipate the traffic load and how do you plan accordingly for any contingency? Assuming that the pitch was successful and you get a moderate to sizeable amount of traffic, if you are on a shared hosting plan, chances are that the site may cripple under the load.That would be a nightmare for any Internet entrepreneur - getting all the coveted user traffic, but hardware resources fail to keep up.

On the flip side,  you might be faced with the scenario that you opted for a dedicated hosting plan and the traffic just never came. And now the 100-300$ + monthly costs for the dedicated server are a strain on your pocket - at least till the traffic to the site builds up.

Probably, this isnt as big an issue –and more so, I’m just curious to find out what others think about the same. If you’ve already been through such a scenario, what decision did you finally opt for ? Did it work out to be the better decision ?

Bennet, Coleman & Co., owners of IndiaTimes portal and Times Of India, are planning an IPO listing. The listing is likely to happen within the next year as per insider sources.

The IPO plan is being linked to retention plans for some of the leading editors in the group who are being wooed by rival newspapers with offers of stock options.

A lot will depend on how the global and Indian economy shape up.

via BS

Yes - MingleBox powers two Orkut apps - iPoke and Teen Patti.

As screwed up as that sounds - MingleBox, which, is supposed to be a social networking site for Indian colleges and universities (they changed focus from being a generic SocNet site) makes apps for Orkut, another social networking site.

Strategically, it makes a lot of sense for Minglebox from a marketing perspective. Hope that the apps spread virally within the huge Indian demographic on Orkut and lure them over to MingleBox. But this sounds as whacked as MySpace building apps for Facebook.

If anyone can figure how Orkut benefits from this (other than getting two additional apps into their fledgling app repository), can you kindly enlighten me ?

Dhingana has just launched a games section with games like Cricket, Holi Tamasha etc and have refreshed their landing page to a great new design.

As popularity of Dhingana soars, I thought this would be a good opportunity to interview the Dhingana founders on their entrepreneurial experience thus far. As per Compete, US traffic to the site is down ~5% from January 2008, but is up by about 700% over the last year.

Interview follows:

1) How old is Dhingana today ?
More then 1.5 years old.

2) Can you share any interesting insights into your audience - like which are the top 5 countries you are seeing the traffic from ?
Sure. Our user base is spread over the world in more then 185 countries. Top countries are India, US, UK, Canada, UAE, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore, Germany & Japan

3) Any interesting info related to how many monthly hits / pageviews ?
4) How many  MB/GB’s are you currently streaming a month ?
This is a very exciting time for us. We are experiencing phenomenal growth rate and we have grown by more then 880% in terms page views over the last year.

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Yahoo India has launched a new concept called ‘Glue Pages‘ for users of Yahoo India search. ‘Glue pages’ aggregates text, images, video from across the web in various verticals like health, sports, entertainment, travel etc. and presents a ‘visual’ search results page. The goal is to provide a broad coverage of search results across a variety of information sources.

For example, a search for ‘diabetes’ gives you results from WebMD, HowStuffWorks, Yahoo Groups, Google Blog search, Yahoo Answers etc. Regular search results, of course, are also included.

As the beta evolves, the goal is to create topical pages built and maintained by subject matter experts. This concept is currently live only on the Yahoo India page and probably will be rolled out elsewhere, depending on the results observed for Yahoo India.

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MetaASO has launched their P2P based suite of applications, labelled Mermaid, into public beta. Currently available products include solutions for realtime multimedia broadcast, radio, news broadcast, web conferencing, games and online collaboration.

Unlike traditional P2P, Mermaid products are completely serverless and require no centralized repositories like the ones needed for BitTorrent. One of the only product constraints is that they are IPv6 compatible only. Since the applications are built on a P2P based architecture, you do not need to invest heavily into server infrastructure and hardware. Using the ‘MultiSource’ product, for example, you can create your own secure,private network and broadcast any audio / video source connected to your computer to everyone connected on your P2P network.

Currently, Mermaid is used for corporate trainings, meetings, broadcasting surgical procedures, reporters from remote locations. Amongst early enterprise adopters are telecom and media companies, who want to extend their network reach online and use the IPTV/News/Radio Broadcast features from Mermaid.

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There are many startups hoping to tame the local search market in India. At first glance, Loconomy seems no different.However, on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Loconomy offers some subtle, interesting features, which may very well set it apart from some of the other players.

Some of the generic local search related features offered by Loconomy:

• Search and find information related to local businesses
• Rate and review businesses
• View local business locations on a map
• Access and share information online or via mobile

Beyond these vanilla features is where Loconomy actually gets interesting. Instead of providing just a one way interaction from consumer to business, the site also offers businesses the opportunity to reach out to customers. Businesses can claim their entry and add product catalogs, menus, deals-coupons, audio-video brochures etc. to their profile. Besides ads, the company makes money by offering premium packages to businesses, which include premium features like featured placement, microsite development, very own dashboard, analytics, review alerts etc.

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