Expedia acquires TravelGuru stake - No Deal
Nikhil has an update from TravelGuru CEO Ashwin Damera that ongoing rumors of Expedia acquiring majority stake in TravelGuru for $17 million are mere speculation and that no deal has been signed.
Just like everyone else reported, a $17 million for a majority stake would be just like a desperate deal. Something seemed very odd about the numbers.
Will Twitter go the Friendster way ?
Twitter, who recently secured their second round of funding, has fueled the microblogging phenomenon. As more people caught on to the “What are you doing” culture, folks at Twitter have hardly kept up with the increased load. The site has faced several prolonged downtimes, which have gotten only worse over time. Not a week goes by without someone whining about Twitter’s downtime.
It makes you wonder about why frustrated users havent already switched over to other competitors ?
Well, truth be told, there werent any worthy alternatives out there to which people could switch to. Jaiku seemed a formidable foe, but new signups were closed after the service was acquired by Google. Pownce emerged as a likely alternative, but wonder why it was never able to take advantage of Twitter’s problems and cannibalize on that. Inspite of the problems, Twitter grew like crazy, while traffic to Pownce seems to have stagnated.
Lately though, it looks like Friendfeed has emerged as the most likely Twitter alternative. Several high profile users have already given up or are on the verge of giving up on Twitter and moving over to 
Friendfeed. Friendfeed may not be excatly the same as Twitter, but offers the same value as Twitter - the value of conversations. As soon as more conversations shift from Twitter over to Friendfeed, more people will make the jump.
A mini primer on Location Based Services and its state in India
Location Location Location ! If you keep track of latest tech news, you’d know that these days Location Based Services (LBS) are as hot as Pamela Anderson was during her prime. If you still need convincing, consider the recent acquisition of Plazes by Nokia. Or Verizon’s investment in Loopt. Or that Steve Jobs demo’d the Loopt app for the iPhone during his keynote earlier this year. Or just the amount of sheer coverage that LBS is getting is press and blogosphere.
To make up for my lack of knowledge about LBS, I set out on a mini-quest. To find out what LBS is all about. For those of who are interested, here’s a brief primer on location based services based on the research that I did.
Note: If you find any errors below, please feel free to correct me. I am not a domain expert in LBS
It goes without saying that LBS are based around a single context - location. Where are you located ? The premise being that if the location is known, app providers can easily pass on useful data to you. Useful because the data would be location relevant. What’s the closest Hookah bar or where’s the closest Mexican restaurant ? The potential and possibilities of such location aware services are endless.
But before we go into any of it, lets first look at the various ways using which, you can broadcast your location details. A location in LBS technology implies a latitude & longitude, so that you can accurately ‘located’ on a map.
1) Self Reported:
The most basic approach for determining the location of an end user is to have them report the location themselves. If users know their latitude and longitude, they can report it. Else, users can report a street address or an intersection and the onus falls on the service provider to decode that street address / intersection in to a valid location. One of the big drawbacks of this approach is that it depends on the level of user participation and the end user does a lot of the grunt work. Plazes is a location based service that depends on users self reporting their location
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Inventus Capital launches $125 million fund for early growth Indian companies
Inventus Capital Partners are planning to invest $1 - 10 million in 15-20 early stage, technology focused companies in India. Investors include Kanwal Rekhi, John Dougery based in Bay Area while Samir Kumar and Parag Dhol will be based out of Bangalore.
via release
LifeinLines and LifeBlob - timeline for your lifestreaming
LifeinLines is a new app to record and share your life with others, aka your lifestream. Capture your thoughts, memories, observations, reactions - almost anything that you want, anytime, using any media.
As founder Ankur puts it -
It’s like an ongoing autobiography- a medley of text, images, videos and voice that you can maintain rather easily.
You can post updates via web, email, SMS, GTalk or even your phone. You can also set per item level privacy and share updates with your friends or make them public. The UI is pretty cool but I could not find user level RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.
Wowzio - A widget platform from Citipals
Citipals had launched BlogsJam, a feed reader with widget support in early 2008. Now, they are extending the widget suite and launching Wowzio, a widget platform, which 
includes a content widget, a photo slideshow widget and a tagcloud widget. The widgets are javascript and CSS based and can be customized to your own environment.
While the content and the tag cloud widgets might make sense, the photo slideshow widget might not be of much help to content-heavy blogs like StartupDunia.
None the less, Wowzio is a pretty neat product and has the ability to spread virally. Pending additional details, I’m not sure how Wowzio fits into the overall strategy of Citipals. Widget monetization, as a whole, also remains an unsolved problem.
Chinese firm TenCent signs deal to acquire 50% of MIH India Global
TenCent Holdings, a leading Chinese portal, has secured an option to acquire upto 50% of MIH India Global Ltd. MIH operates the portals iBibo, Dwaar and OneFamily.
TenCent plans to invest $7.5 million in MIH India Global over the next three years.
MIH India Global is backed by media conglomerate Naspers, which, also owns a 35.5% stake in TenCent. Nice !!
via release
Move over Digg clones, time has come for the Indian Reddit clones
When Pligg, a popular open source Digg clone, was launched, countless sites popped up on the map, wanting to be India’s Digg. With time, the most lame ones have gotten weeded out. But that still doesnt deter others from launching a Digg clone even today.
Now that Reddit is open sourcing their code, I’m hedging my bets to the possibility that within the next 1-3 months, we’ll see a lot of Reddit clones pop up for India related content as well. The only hindrance towards Reddit adoption and deployment is that it is Python based as opposed to the popular PHP.
None the less, keep a lookout and expect to hear about HumReddit, BharatNews, IndoNews, Indyanews or something similar in the next few months.
VidyaCenter - marketplace for coaching and education
VidyaCenter is a new Bangalore based startup, hoping to become the marketplace for coaching and education. Students can compare different institutions-teachers, read feedback, enroll for courses they are interested in. They can also take mock tests, compare results with peers and network with other students. If you are looking for coaching related to a specific topic, you can place an ad, alongwith the amount you are ready to pay for the coaching.
You can also sign up as a teacher/coach for a topic you are proficient with. Upload course content (can be text, video, presentation etc.) and quote the price you want to charge for the course. You can look up specific learning needs of students and if the needs match, contact the student about your course.
While the concept sounds cool, I have a few doubts about the service:
1) Can anyone sign up as a teacher ? Does the site weed out imposters ? Who determines if a person is qualified to sign up as a coach ?
2) How does the payment process work ? Does VidyaCenter act as an escrow, while the coaching is delivered ? How are
3) The site does have a feedback mechanism, but till there’s enough data to close the loop and collect substantial feedback data, what / how can students gauge effectiveness of a course/teacher ?
Coaching, especially CAT related coaching, has always been a mania in India. VidyaCenter does offer an interesting proposition, but till it gets a good chunk of users and good feedback data, the site will have its share of skeptics.
The site does have a bunch of pretty motivated folks behind it, so lets give them some time to build and grow the site.
Joining the OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup
I am glad to announce that StartupDunia has been included as part of the OpenWeb.Asia workgroup. OpenWeb.Asia is a network of premium blogs focusing on the Asian Internet industry. Bloggers from China, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia are part of the workgroup.
The goal is to increase collaboration and inter-communication between these local Internet markets and make a unified representation of the rapidly developing and emerging Asian Internet industry. The initiative is spearheaded by Gang Lu who blogs here.
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