Indian tech startups get around $1 billion PE investments
Indian startups got about 20% of all PE investments. Travelguru led the pack of tech startups with $25 million in funding followed by TutorVista ($12.5 million) and BillDesk ($7.5 million). This momentum is projected to grow in 2007.
(via Business Standard)
Moblogging and the Indian market
I’ve been participating in an interesting discussion about the market size for uploading photos from mobile for Indian mobile users. During my visit to India last year I noticed that besides SMS’es, taking pictures from mobiles seemed to be a very popular activity with the teens/ college going kids. I wonder on how popular would a service be that enables users to upload from mobile to the web directly and then share it with friends and family. Considering that there are 100 million mobile users in India, there’s a possibility that the size of this market may be huge !!
Blogarithms » Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand
Dan MacAskill (CEO of Smugmug) is their biggest protagonist. Businessweek had a cover story about it. Uzanto (Amit Ranjan’s company) uses it for SlideShare. Yes, I’m talking about Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3 for short). I think Amazon S3 is a brilliant idea and a boon for startups. It is not only cheap but, it also saves you all the effort of administration, backups, quality of service and the headaches of maintaining the infrastructure. The founders can focus on the business aspect of the idea and worry less about infrastructure. Here’s another great example about Amazon Web Services — this is the first example I’ve come across that uses several other services than just S3 — Blogarithms » Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand
Orkut integrates Google Video and YouTube
Just noticed that you can link videos from Google Video and YouTube on your Orkut profile now
If only Yahoo could figure out a way of integrating all the recent companies that it has acquired. I guess Yahoo’s acquisition policy in recent times has been guided more by thought of ‘what if Google gets it first’ rather than ‘how would this company plug into the existing Yahoo services’. When that happens, you not only end up with crazy integration issues, but you also end up upsetting (& possibly losing) the user community of the acquired site.
Rediff - The amazing story of the making of Naukri.com
Rediff has a great candid interview with Sanjeev Bikhchandani - CEO and founder of Naukri.com. The amazing story of the making of Naukri.com
For me personally, the section below was very insightful.
It is a myth that entrepreneurs are not risk averse. I must be the most risk averse person I have met in my life. I am really scared of risks. The point is to keep de-risking at every opportunity. So first, I did not quit my job until after I got married knowing there is income in the house. I began to teach on weekends.If I had been single, or my wife was not working — in fact she was the fist angel investor — it would have been a lot more difficult. I may not have done it. These were all de-risking strategies. When you start out you dont know where you are going to end up.
Confessions of a cybercrook working for the FBI
Wired has an interesting story about a cybercrook turned informer for the FBI. Interesting details into how the credit card and identify thieves operate. Definitely makes interesting reading - Wired News: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
AllIndiaDeals - Indian version of BensBargains / FatWallet
Shopping discount / coupon aggregators have thrived in the US market for quite some time now. Fatwallet, Bensbargains, deals2buy are some of the major movers and shakers in this area in the US market. The business model is simple - Aggregate deals on consumer products - ranging from electronics to apparel and make revenues from advertising or CPC referrals. There is a huge fan following for all these sites in the US. Traffic to these sites during the holiday sales (especially Thanksgiving and Christmas) is pretty significant.
With the rise of shopping portals in India, it doesnt come as a surprise that similar sites are emerging for the Indian audience. AllIndiaDeals, DiscountsIndia are a couple of entrants to this arena. They are basically Fatwallet redux - albeit for the Indian audience. They aggregate shopping deals for products ranging from apparels, books to electronics and home furnishings.
Development finished - design process begins
With all the vanishing act that I’ve done in the last couple of months, I finally have something to show for it. Well, technically speaking, I cant show it just yet. The development is near complete and now what remains is mainly the design for the site. The only hint I can provide is that it has something to do with mobiles / cell-phones. More updates to follow very soon.
In the meanwhile, can anyone recommend a good design studio / freelance designer ?
Need the AJAX kool-aid ? Look no further, try Jquery
If you’re looking to delve into AJAX, try Jquery & you’ll look no further. I’ve used several AJAX toolkits earlier - Prototype, Scriptaculous, Rico etc. However, after trying Jquery, I dont think I’m going to be switching to any other toolkit for a long time. Jquery is an amazingly light, lean (only 19K in size) and powerful Javascript library. It has this amazing method of ‘chaining methods’ , which gives you amazing flexibility and power in accomplishing what you want to do. Here’s an exampe:
$("p.surprise").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");
Not to mention that there are some amazing plugins that extend the basic Jquery functionality. The Jquery team is amazingly active and in case of doubts, the Jquery mailing list is a great help.
Go ahead, try it out — you’ll love it.
MyDreamShaadi.in - ‘Webify’ your marriage
MyDreamShaadi.in facilitates about to be married, young couples to create a personalized website about their wedding. You can put up information about your impending marriage, create photo galleries, create a guest book, host marriage related videos, directions to the venue, online RSVP etc.
They have varied pricing plans and the package features vary depending on the pricing plan. Here’s an excerpt from Hindu:
Behind every perfect wedding celebration, there’s lot of running around.
Most important of all is the task of inviting people. This starts with printing the cards, getting all the addresses in place and visiting innumerable homes. Everyone wants to know where it all started and how. Just imagine the plight of the bride and the groom who have to repeat the same story 100 times. Is there a way to escape this? Yes, thanks to technology.
The site mainly seems to be targeted to NRI clients and may take some time to catch up in India. Overall, I think, its a great concept, has a viable business model and if executed well, may become a winner. But watch out - it wont take long for BharatMarimony.com and Shaadi.com to catch up and come up with their own act.
