Introduction

Question: Where are the successful product startups from India? How to become one? And how long will we be taking example of only one company (Zoho)?

To answer this question, we’ll be attending NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 on Oct 27-28 at the Lalit Ashok hotel, Bangalore.
It’s a traditional conference organized by NASSCOM (short for “National Association of Software and Services Companies”), the consortium that represents software companies in India.
The agenda this year is “Positioning to Win.”

Why is it interesting?

As the official website says:

Come, demonstrate your product, network, share with peers, and learn how to identify market opportunities, build a product organization with domain expertise, roll out a product, build brands, reach out to prospects and customers, create a network effect of channels, user and development communities – in short how to build a viable and scalable business model.

Of course, the caveat is always that no amount of teaching or sessions will help anyone until, you, the audience takes it seriously, imagine putting it into action immediately and ask questions on what will come up in your course of action. In short, look for the advice that you need.

Now that we have that diatribe out of the way, let us focus on the conference. There will be 4 keynotes, 11 panel sessions, 4 workshops, networking sessions and unconference sessions. The full program agenda is available as a PDF. The truly interesting part of this event is the quality of people expected to be on stage.

Here are the parts of the agenda that we found interesting:

1. Key Sessions and Panel discussions:

• Technology Opportunities serving the millions of India: The next major growth area for Indian technology firms
• Building a product ecosystem that addresses the millions of India
• Building global consumer businesses out of India
• Leverage the ecosystem for Product Development
• Indians Pulling off the impossible
• Product strategies in the telecom sector: potential for global leadership
• Why and how you can tie-up with SIs if you have a software product for enterprises
• Listen to key speakers from the usual suspects such as Guy Kawasaki, Kiran Karnik, Ashish Gupta, Rajesh Jain, VCs to people you would not usually get to hear from such as Ajay Dhir (CIO, Jindal Steel), Rajesh Hukku (SVP, Oracle), and founders of successful startups such as from iYogi, Stylkist, BabaJobs, and so on.

2. Workshops such as the Workshop on Go-To-Market strategies for Product companies which is being led by Subinder Khurana, Delivery Head, Enterprise Analytics, Cognizant.

3. Unconference sessions

• Krishnas and Arjunas — regarding advisors and mentors
• Hiring in startups, plus startups and potential employees get to talk to each other
• One on one business mentoring sessions
• Impact of social media inside organizations

4. Product Expo showcasing 12 companies with products for the enterprise market.

5. Specific structured networking sessions for startups with CIOs, country delegations, potential partners, potential advisors, potential employees, potential investors.

The downside is that because there are three separate parallel tracks, we won’t be able to cover all of them. We hope that we can cover the whole spectrum along with other indian startup blogs.

We wonder if we can hope for talks such as the one by Prof. Deepak Malhotra (Harvard Business School) about how to negotiate at NASSCOM Leadersip Forum 2007.

How to follow this event?

If you’re unable to attend the event in-person, then don’t fret because there are multiple ways to follow this event:

• We will be covering the event and hope to bring you new insights and interesting learnings as much as possible.
• Participate in the NASSCOM communities discussions
• Follow the NASSCOM blog
• Follow the #nasscompc tag on Twitter and @nasscom_pc
• Watch out for NASSCOM videos

This guest post is written by Swaroop C H, co-founder of a startup called IonLab. He writes regularly on his blog at www.swaroopch.com, considered to be one of the top ten blogs in India along with StartupDunia.

Comments

• October 15, 2011, Jessie Gill commented: Gippy Grewal

WSJ has an interesting story on the play by play strategy of TweetPhoto, that hopes to usurp TwitPic as the leading photo sharing service via Twitter. Right from initial idea to leveraging developers, it highlights how TweetPhoto stumbled along the way and then went on to have Britney Spears as a user.

Read it here.

Comments

• October 7, 2009, Manuel commented: nice info

Iglooo, a Pune based startup, has launched a price comparison website for books.  You can search for a book based on title / author and they provide price comparison results from vendors like A1 books, First & Second, Landmark and Crossword. To purchase, you are redirected to the vendors website. Currently, they claim not to be making any money from referrals but that should change down the line.

In their pitch, they seemed to stress on their  ‘clutter free design’. However, there’s a difference between no design and clutter free design and the latter doesnt necessarily mean the former. The design definitely needs some work from a usability perspective. For instance, if a book has no photo associated, display a default ‘no image’ thumbnail. Allow to sort results by title as well. If possible and available, include a brief summary of the book in the site results — you could use Amazon API or any knowledge available from public sources like Wikipedia for this. Use a horizontal line or border to easily demarcate the various listings in the results page.

In its current form, the site provides little value to an end user.  Let me elaborate why:

For starters, you cant discover new books using the site. Just like music and movies, you dont necessarily know the title of every book you will like and want to read. Book discovery is an equally important aspect of such sites. Secondly, without the book summaries, I have to visit the vendors website, get an overview of what the book is about — if it doesnt interest me, come back to Iglooo’s result set and then rinse and repeat. As an example, say I’m searching for books related to startups. If I search for startup in the title field, the back & forth process on the results set just becomes too painful.

Few additional suggestions to the founders – get a logo developed ASAP if you are serious about building a brand (learnt it the hard way on StartupDunia). You also might want to consider an alternate name for the site — its too easy to spell it wrong in the url (there are 3 ‘o’s).

Although it needs a few tweaks, the service does have some potential.

• IAndMyStory lets you personalize book characters
• CreADivity provides a marketplace for Indian designers
• SheepStop, Scopial launch crowdsourced T shirt designs

Comments

• September 25, 2009, Champak Bhumia commented: Although I agree with most of the points raised by Pranav, I think the design is absolutely kick ass. Coming to discovering books, I do not understand what made you think this is a book recommendation engine. It clearly states, find books by author or title. And I think it does the job quite well on that. Discovering books based on tags would be a neat idea nonetheless and I hope they start this too. I am looking for a book's cheapest price and I think this does it rather well. If I need to discover books or read summaries, I have amazon and a zillion other such sites. So, I agree with some points raised here but overall, I think iglooo fits my needs quite well.
• September 25, 2009, Prasanna a.k.a Flipkart Fanatic commented: What is the use, if it does not add Flipkart?
• October 1, 2009, Anil commented: @ Champak... Maybe it addresses your unique needs. It is possible, there might be different behavior patterns. If I am required to visit amazon for book discovery and then iglooo for actual purchase, convenience value doesnt exist at all ! Of course, meta-searches are yet to make money, it is easier with the low cost base they work upon.
• October 6, 2009, Iglooo commented: @Prasanna a.k.a Flipkart Fanatic - You'll be pleased to know that as of last week we've added Flipkart :-)
• October 7, 2009, Nikhilesh commented: @Iglooo You guys have to start caching popular searches and books. You can't expect users to wait that long while you scour the middle earth.
• August 25, 2011, emotion-sailor commented: Hi, We are upcoming start up and trying hard to get knowledge about book vendors so that can be work in book retail business like flipkart and amazone.Can you help us as you must be having tie ups with diffrent book vendors for price details.

It is an undeniable fact that mobile is *the* platform in India. SMS usage aka texting is probably one of the most pervasive mobile applications prevalent in India. However, if you want to provide an SMS interface to your web-app, there is no easy solution out there. You need to either buy a SMS short code for yourself  (which is pretty darn expensive) or you can take a do it yourself (DIY) approach by connecting a GSM modem to your server and use software like Kannel to access incoming SMS messages.

So, here’s an idea.

Instead, why not buy a short code and then have multiple customers ‘rent’ the short code ? The way it works is – say you get a shortcode ’12345′. You then let each customer reserve a keyword that they can use with this shortcode. So, for instance, if I need to leverage SMS in my app, I reserve the shortcode SDUNIA. Say some one else takes up the keyword FBOOK. Users of my web-app can send an SMS to my app by sending a text to 12345 SDUNIA <msg>. The backend service parses this keyword and decides which customer the SMS belongs to. So, you need to provide an API as well so that your customers can retrieve their SMS messages and use it in their web-app.  You charge the customers a fee as long as they use the service.

This approach has a lot of potential since it saves other startups and other businesses looking for an SMS interface the cost and effort involved in getting their own, exclusive SMS shortcode.They can literally hit the ground running in terms of providing a mobile interface to their app /service.

TextMarks is one such US based startup that does this same thing pretty successfully.

I’m not sure if such a service already exists in the Indian market. Also, one would need to check for any legal issues involved specific to the Indian market.

let me know what you think.

• Startup Idea – Group buying discount
• Startup Idea for Entrepreneurs
• India not the ideal place for online, mobile entrepreneurs

Comments

• September 22, 2009, Vinuth M. Madinur commented: I think a lot of Short Code providers in India provide this option. http://www.znisms.com/sms-short-code.html SMS GupShup provides a more elegant API and is perhaps easier to get started than negotiating with Short Code providers. http://api.smsgupshup.com/
• September 22, 2009, Vinuth M. Madinur commented: BTW, I heard Facebook uses SMS GupShup API for Indian users.
• September 22, 2009, pranav commented: right -- somehow it totally slipped my mind that sms gupshup does this. thanks for bring that to my attn. i havent heard about the other service you pointed out - they any good ?
• September 22, 2009, Vineet commented: This is already being done almost all short code providers in India. Renting these keywords on shared short codes as opposed to an exclusive code is much cheaper.
• September 22, 2009, Nikhil commented: Hey Pranav, old one. lots of companies, including Yah
• September 22, 2009, Nikhil commented: sorry..accidentally clicked submit. What I was saying is that even Yahoo India has been providing this short code service. Have put up a complete list of short code service providers at MediaNama...over 50 of them. what no one has done yet, apart from ValueFirst with Alertrix I think, is make it easy to use - where you can log in online and buy a keyword at a price. one problem with these short codes now is a TRAI notification, according to which short codes need to have an alphanumeric prefix for identification of their originating operator. This makes it difficult for users to reply to messages. For example, if I query 556655 for Help, I'll get a response from, say, TM-556655 . I can't click reply and respond to it because it's alphanumeric.
• September 22, 2009, pranav commented: thanks all for the input and correcting me - i list such ideas as and when they occur leaving the onus of doing the research on those who find it interesting. if there are lotsa other companies already doing it, it might not be an easy fare then.
• September 22, 2009, Nilesh Trivedi commented: (Disclaimer :- I work with SMSGupShup ) Enterprise SMS GupShup allows you to set up keywords and masks from the online interface. (a Keyword is for directing incoming messages to your webapp whereas a Mask is what shows up as sender Id in the messages that YOU send). In fact, Enterprise SMS GupShup is the only provider out there with a complete self-serviced solution. The API is extensive as well as easy to use.
• September 22, 2009, Rohan commented: Yes, there are many startups/resellers that rent short code. Just google for "bulk SMS software". Actually, their primary service is bulk SMS from PC, but most of them offer short code renting @ about 4.5 INR p/m If somebody already has a server located in-house at office or workplace, they can instead just buy a special number like ones ending with triple digits, or ones that are easy to remember by paying a small premium.
• September 22, 2009, ashutosh commented: Hi, I think that just getting a sim card and putting it "up" with kannel for inbound routing, isn't the key. The legality involved here is that almost all telcos TOS mentions in the application form, something on the following lines: "That, the customer shall use the sim and associated services for the purpose of making and receiving calls, messages, and other services available in the SIM for his *personal use*, not any commercial use." Even if you "bypass" the above, the telcos shall disconnect you and it gets messy, as happened with NetCore of Rajesh Jain ( http://emergic.org/2009/02/17/we-versus-vodafone/ ) . The plea given by VodaFone and Bharti was that NetCore was flouting NDNC norms for alert services, while the truth was that they just could not see someone bypassing the VAS ecosystem, thus denying them their "lion's share". PS: I am not affiliated with NetCore at present, or in past.
• October 4, 2009, Suresh commented: Hi i need to buy a special short code for my company, not the keyword but want to buy a shortcode specific to my company, can you help me where to buy it.
• October 13, 2009, SMS Reseller commented: Another company offering a commercial grade credit based SMS shared short code application with api is Anchor Mobile
• October 17, 2009, Mel commented: I am currently looking for someone who can rent me a short code. But i am only interested in Premium short codes. I want to charge my customers a fee for the applications I will provide. Any suggessions.
• October 17, 2009, Mel commented: By the way, I can be contacted at centralprocessingusa@gmail.com. I will be marketing within the continental US
• February 28, 2010, Rahul commented: Ashutosh, ur comment was a great insite.. sounds like the general population trying to bring down the oppressive rulers :)
• March 8, 2010, Vicky commented: Hey Guys, visit this site www.valueleaf.com. Probably the only company in the SMS, ShortCode and Email marketing industry with ISO certification. I know few people who are their clients. Have heard great reviews about the service offered. Check this company out.
• March 25, 2010, Brijesh commented: Hi Nikhil -- just a slight correction there [good that your wrote 'I think' :) ] -- it is not Alertrix, it is smsmeon.com (and yeah, both sites are from the stable of ValueFirst) that provides keyword on short-code 56070, for free. Whereas Alertrix.com is a free subscription service on SMS. -- Brijesh
• June 10, 2010, Lalit M Joshi commented: Hi Guys I want to know how to get this 5 digit number from mobile network providers such as Airtel, BSNL, Vodaphone or any other. All the information available on net is mainly about the service providers who talk about buying keywords. I want to have my own number and not a shared or rented one. Please help in case you have any information about this topic.
• July 6, 2010, justin bryan commented: sms short code is the new tread of marketing products because of uses of mobile phone. According to recent survey about 90% US people read sms and this shows how people interested in mobile. Sending sms through shared short code or own brand short code to customer helps to reach your products to customer. Short code is now used by all popular reality shows, programs, games and election campaigns to send or to populate their message to targeted audiences.
• July 12, 2010, carolyn joseph commented: Mobile marketing through shared short code or dedicated short code is the most growing marketing strategy these days to promote brands, business, services and organization. Mobile marketing come in focus in recent few years, especially due to fast growing mobile phone uses across the world. Analyst Estimate that in 2008 about 3.4 billions text messages send worldwide and the response rate of these text messages were about 70%, this statistic attract shoppers, business organization to invest in mobile marketing. Today all top brands and organization using mobile marketing campaigns to promote their products.
• September 8, 2010, Harsha commented: I'm exploring the possibilities to starting a short code renting service. Do you know where I can procure the 5-digit short SMS code?
• October 1, 2010, Saikat commented: Hi Harsha, I know some SMS shortcodes that are already configured pan India, have paying corporate clients and are available for a reasonable price. Do get in touch if you are still looking. cheers, Saikat +91 98103 03105
• October 19, 2010, video converter for mac commented: Yahh! SMS short code is one the best to rent and advertise products using sms to millions of mobile subscribers. Short code is very easy and simple way to promote products to billions of mobile users.
• December 6, 2010, Sandip Naskar commented: Hi, Local city based company - Business Time having footprints in most of the states in India, pioneer in Short Code specially rule based 2 way communication. Working in most of the vital sectors, especially in Hospitality, Education, Media and Retail domain. Information is now-a-days instant. Few E.g., Patient admitted to ITCU. Relatives, friends worried about the conditions of the patient. Doing numerous phone calls to Hospital and waiting in a long queue. Things are now-a-days simple and instant. Type DEMOHOSPITALCONDITION and send to premium short code, long code or dedicated virtual number Auto response in just a few seconds - explaining patient's condition. Same can be applied for Instant Billing Information. http://www.businesstime.co.in Cheers, Sandip
• December 6, 2010, Sandip Naskar commented: More detailed explanation of the previous posting Type DEMOHOSPITAL [SPACE] CONDITION [SPACE] [PATIENT ID] and send to premium short code, long code or dedicated virtual number Auto response in just a few seconds - explaining patient's condition. Same can be applied for Instant Billing Information. Patient ID will be retrieved from the system responsible for capturing Patient details and billings. http://www.businesstime.co.in Cheers, Sandip
• January 10, 2011, texty commented: hey, I am looking to start a premium sms business to provide shortcodes to organizations. and also sell bulk sms. What sort of equipment and software do I need to acquire. kindly advice if there are any free downloads available. thanks
• May 1, 2011, Manoj commented: Hi Saikat, I am looking for setting up a 6 digit short code(not buying from resellers). Do you know the process or any contacts? thanks
• May 1, 2011, Manoj commented: Did you get any additional information? Can you pls share?
• September 24, 2011, Ataur Rahman commented: Respected Sir, We want to get Short Code SMS service from your NETWORK. We have a NGO and we want to earn from the Short Code SMS Service like the radio stations who earn from Short Code SMS send to them by the listener. Our aim is to provide free education to the student of BPL families. We have other sources of earnings to provide free education to the students of BPL families. Besides those earnings, earnings from Short Code SMS service will immensely contribute to the Fund of our NGO. So that we can cover the large number of student under our free education services. Sir, Please inform us the about the cost of per Short Code SMS if we want to receive Rs. 3.00 in our account from each SMS? Or please inform us about the percentage shared between the Short Code Service Provider and the Service holder. Regards. Ataur Rahman President LUMS NGO
• October 26, 2011, Stasy commented: Resently i found a new site for cheap online sms - websendsms.com i should say it is pretty simple and easy to work with.

Scopial (MVP backed startup) and SheepStop are two startups that launched their community sourced T shirt design contests.  The concept is simple – new design contests are regularly announced on the sites. Designers can participate and submit their designs – the community votes and the winning design gets prominent focus and the winning designer gets cash rewards. This model has been successfully executed by Threadless in the US.

They enter a somewhat crowded marketplace – other players like Myntra, Pringoo and InkFruit offer some of the same services (although one could argue that myntra and pringoo are much more generic).

So, unless Scopial and SheepStop have some major marketing / viral idea under their sleeve, its gonna be a challenge competing against some of these established (& well funded) players.

To build their brand and market their app, I would say the best place to start would be college campuses. Provide some free branded T shirts to college kids with some eye catching designs and use them as your college ambassadors. College Fests offer tremendous potential to market such apparel – provide some free t-shirts for a handful of kids to wear during the college fests. Additionally, they could also work with the college fest organizing committees to see if the design aspect of the college fest tee’s could be staged on their site. Leverage Orkut and Facebook effectively since those are some of the sites where majority of the urban youth spends their online time.

At the same time, approach design schools and students of NIFT etc. to sign up and submit and compete for their designs – great way to get new, fresh content with low overhead.

So to reiterate, unless they can nail this marketing aspect and or introduce some great virality, its gonna be an uphill battle for them.  Success lies not only in cool designs but ‘being noticed’ in those cool desgins as well – and for that they need to tap into the youth demographic.

• CreADivity provides a marketplace for Indian designers
• Yoplr makes trip planning easy (invites below)
• YouSuggest helps companies crowdsource ideas from users

Comments

• September 21, 2009, Ricardo commented: Yep, viral marketing could help indeed, it would help them diferentiate from the crowd. Also having a great social media strategy is important.
• December 29, 2009, bird t shirt commented: Thank for sharing !!
• December 29, 2009, funny t shirt design commented: i love your blog !
• October 6, 2010, Liam Price commented: viral marketing is of course the best way to market products on the internet:*~
• October 22, 2010, Custom T Shirts commented: Marketing is everything to success, its never late to enter any business, its the way you tackle your competitors, watch them closely and double your move than theirs
• July 2, 2011, bims commented: .) After study a few of the blog posts on your website now, and I truly like your way of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark website list and will be checking back soon. Pls check out my web site as well and let me know what you think.
• August 1, 2011, ugg boots uk commented: ugg boots uk purchase provides an array of real ugg boots as well as leatherbased boots also provide uggs for sale right now goes by take a look at the bargains upon Ugg boots these days. Ugg boots traditional high ugg ugg traditional brief boots ugg genuine, produced from 100 organic leatherbased Sydney merino sheepskin ugg boots the style globe is actually raving regarding all of them ugg boots: discover all of your requirements ugg trunk right here.

Santosh and Anjali, the team behind Bookeazy and Lipikaar, will be launching their latest startup Dubzer at the DEMO event in San Diego. In fact, the BookEazy url now redirects to the Dubzer website.

Not much is known about what exactly Dubzer is about, but based on their Twitter updates as well as some of the job description, it seems that they might be doing something related to language translation.

The company is incubated by Pune based Persistent systems. What ever it is, good luck to Santosh and Anjali with their launch.

• CleverTexting provides disruptive predictive text input technology
• Iglooo – Compare book prices
• Morpheus Venture Partners announces its latest batch of startups

In case you didnt get a chance to take a peek at the TC50 startups, here’s one finalist that presented yesterday – iMo. iMo is a 2 person startup from India and develops an iPhone/iTouch app that transforms your iPhone into a joystick. You can then use it to control gameplay.

One of the best things was their presentation. If you havent gotten a chance to view it, I’ve embedded it below – Himanshu, one of the founders changed outfits from F1 racer to a pilot and finally coming close to whacking a judge with a baseball bat. Absolute must watch.

• Centilian launches Bollywood streaming app for the iPhone
• VidTeq gives you video maps for Bangalore
• Dhingana launches app for iPhone / iTouch

Comments

• September 16, 2009, Vijay commented: How would this product get positioned? A Joystick alternative - so priced half or lower than a joystick? Or as an Iphone app for $9.99? Hats off to the team to put this as a great tech product, but startup? Not sure. But good to see indian companies there :)
• September 18, 2009, Harshal Vaidya commented: This is absolutely amazing. Himanshu, although, looking a bit nervous, pulled it off fantastically.
• September 22, 2009, Suren commented: This is fantastic. Kudos to the presentation. Ideas are one thing but to present it visually in such a short frame is cool. Gutsy and freakin cool way to let your work do the talking. Way 2 go Himanshu.
• September 25, 2009, Prashant Agrawal commented: He is so nervous and danced like a kid. Anyways great to see an indian startup at TC50 :)
• July 2, 2011, bims commented: .) Spot on with this write-up, I truly think this website needs much more consideration. I’ll probably be again to read much more, thanks for that info.
• July 4, 2011, fuar hostesi commented: .) There are some interesting points in time in this article but I don’t know if I see all of them center to heart. There is some validity but I will take hold opinion until I look into it further. Good article , thanks and we want more! Added to FeedBurner as well
• July 4, 2011, granit commented: .) Hello! I just would like to give a huge thumbs up for the great info you have here on this post. I will be coming back to your blog for more soon.
• July 4, 2011, granit küptaş commented: .) There are certainly a lot of details like that to take into consideration. That is a great point to bring up. I offer the thoughts above as general inspiration but clearly there are questions like the one you bring up where the most important thing will be working in honest good faith. I don?t know if best practices have emerged around things like that, but I am sure that your job is clearly identified as a fair game. Both boys and girls feel the impact of just a moment’s pleasure, for the rest of their lives.
• July 4, 2011, kayrak taşı commented: .) Hello! I just would like to give a huge thumbs up for the great info you have here on this post. I will be coming back to your blog for more soon.

On the heels of the Mint acquisition, a Bangalore based startup – Perfios – is hoping to replicate some of that success in the Indian market. Perfios is a web based app that helps you consolidate your financial information and provide a single point of view and insight into your finances. You can import data from different sources – for example, import info from your bank accounts, credit cards, mutual funds, equity etc. into Perfios and it helps you monitor and analyse your finances from a single dashboard.

Needless to say, the service has great value (as validated by the Mint acquisition). There might be an initial hurdle of getting users (mainly due to apprehension on part of the users to trust the service), but as users get more comfortable, I do think that Perfios has some solid potential.

The one horribly icky thing about their current site is the ‘Tour’ section, which is an animated powerpoint slideshow and takes foreover to convey its message. They should make this more simpler and get the message across to the users and provide some detailed screenshots of the dashboard as well. If I were a potential customer, I know I’d want to take a peek at that before signing up.

The service is currently invite only, but they should be launching publich pretty soon.

• Yoplr makes trip planning easy (invites below)
• Ocricket is a social network for Cricket fans
• MumbaiTrader – another social investing startup

Comments

• September 14, 2009, ashish commented: Its an excellent service - have been using for many months and love it. the guys who started it are very high quality folks (the founder of Aztec) and know how to build solid products
• September 15, 2009, Sundar commented: Perfios is an excellent product. Availability of complete personal financial information in one screen has never been such a breeze. I am sure more features are coming in.
• September 15, 2009, Rakesh commented: Can this service pull my account information from my bank directly (assuming I authorize etc of course) ? I was under the impression that Indian banks don't support (at least as of quite recently) some set of standards (dont recall the name) that are mandatory for US banks that mint.com used to basically pull all the info for a single user across multiple accounts in one place; to provide analytics etc...These standards are read-only so thats somewhat reassuring for finicky folks... How does that work in the perfios case? Do they scrape info by having crawlers/scrapers log in? I wonder how comfortable people are with that.. About the need/convenience for such a service, there is no question! Just simple first order analytics eg how do I spend now compared to say a year ago -- is something that my bank doesnt provide me...!
• September 15, 2009, Rajat commented: Does it store the password of the user in their database (like mint.com did). If it stores the password on the servers, i will think twice before putting the details of my bank account with a startup that might or might not exist tomorrow.Mint.com clearly told this thing on their site.Not sure whether perfious mentions it clearly or not. But i am sure people who donot know of that or are unware of that will start using the service and might get used to it also.Mostly young people would use it that what i think.
• September 15, 2009, pranav commented: i think it does -- or rather, it needs to. Else, i dont see a way by which it will be able to pull the needed info.
• September 15, 2009, Rajat commented: Yes you are right Pranav. By the way i had been researching this area lately myself as i had been writing a similar product, but it will run on client machine (offline mode) and it will be free . I am going to launch it from www.letthebucksgrow.com (the site doesnot give much details currently) . Seriously need help on improving the overally look and feel, if anybody visiting here wants to join in please ping me at rajat.me@gmail.com. Right now we can upload and parse ICICI transaction in my product and categorize and view graphs.Hopefully might support qix format later.
• September 16, 2009, Prasad commented: Hi Rajat and Rakesh, I have been using Perfios for quite some time now and as expected it took time for me to get convinced on the security and privacy issues. Let me tell you what I have learned from many interaction with them . They do not store the password on their servers, they have a patent pending technology which actually allows them to encrypt the password on the user's PC. I even gave it a try by using another computer for my account, after entering the credentials on my laptop. it did NOT autoupdate, and also a pop told me that I am not using my system!! You can interact with Aditya (adi@perfios.com), who is the sales/marketing fellow there. regards, Prasad
• September 16, 2009, Meghana commented: Hi All, Good to see that people are really talking about Perfios. Let me tell u guys, its an amazing website. It has completely automated my accounts, I can forward Mutual Fund and credit card statements, categorize transactions and generate reports like how much did I spend on grocery - compare with last year and many other things!! I have loved it coz its new to me! I guess, its an invite only service as of now. website has all the details. ~Meghana
• September 16, 2009, pranav commented: @ Prasad and Meghana it doesnt take long for someone to figure that you're somehow affiliated with perfios. nothing wrong with it - but if you publicly make that disclosure with your comment, people will take you more seriously rather than perceiving your comments as spam.
• September 16, 2009, Aditya commented: Hi All, If you have more questions on Perfios, please send me an email, I would be glad to answer all of them - adi@perfios.com.
• September 25, 2009, Rajesh commented: I have used Perfios in the past, but somehow it does not feel secure. I even contacted them thorough feed back mail with some security related queries. No response from them till date. Not a good sign.
• October 2, 2009, Kunnath Santhosh commented: Rajesh, Sorry, we did not see your mail. Must have missed it somehow. There is no doubt that one has to be extremely careful about what one discloses on the web and more so if one has to use one's financial institution's credentials. Perfios has highlighted its security model in its site as well as its application (surely, we need to talk a lot more). To reiterate...unlike many online sites, we DO NOT store any financial institution credentials on our server. All userids and password are encrypted and stored locally on the user's machine. To protect your privacy, we do not ask anything more than an email id and the same is not shared with anyone. The data stored in your account is protected and accessed (not viewed) only for the perpose of taking backups. A user is free to take out all the data he has, in an excel format, delete his accounts and walk out any time she wants. That is the level of transparency and flexibility we would like to provide for our users. Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Perfios. Regards --Santhosh
• January 28, 2010, prabhu commented: guys, look at adviceamerica.com , fantastic product, citibank is using that big time.
• September 23, 2010, Hitesh commented: Hi, yes but last one year i am using Invest Plus solid product with tons of features and very easy to understand interface also major pluspoint is direct import Brokerbill no need to manual entry, easy to maintain my trading portfolio with share accounting

Dhingana, in its constant zeal for upping the game, has released an app for iPhone / iTouch. You can listen to songs in the background while accessing other applications on the iPhone. And obviously, you can access all the other features like playing top songs, access playlists, search for songs etc. via the app.

The best aspect of the app that I liked is that it runs in the background while you can continue to access other apps on the phone.

• Dhingana wins the best OpenSocial app award at WeekendApps event
• Centilian launches Bollywood streaming app for the iPhone
• Dhingana launches games, awesome new UI – interview with founders

Comments

• September 2, 2009, shiva commented: pranav... your previous blog theme was better.... also please put the latest comments in the right column.... it was useful...
• September 2, 2009, raj aryan commented: pranav, this is exciting news. is it just me or did u miss to add in the url to get dhingana app on ur iphone? ur help would be appreciated.
• September 3, 2009, AG commented: Phulki (http://phulki.com) released its iPhone web-app earlier this year. Check out this blogpost for more details - http://phulki.com/blog/2009/03/22/phulki-on-iphone/
• September 3, 2009, pranav commented: comments are back...i somehow managed to overlook the widget not being added to the sidebar..
• September 27, 2009, FK commented: I AM NOT ABLE TO CREATE A PLAYLIST FOR MY IPOD TOUCH 2G
• February 19, 2010, amar commented: radio fm india and all songs
• May 26, 2011, samim commented: i love to injoy

OCricket, the Django based cricket social network, seems to have shut down or in their own words, ‘gone into hibernation’.   Their first blog post was in August 2008 and they managed to consistently launch new features for cricket fanatics.

Meanwhile, it seems that they’re upto something else as per a recent tweet:

If they dont intend to pursue OCricket further, it would be great to hear about their experiences on their launch, operations, stats etc. and the reason behind the shutdown.

• OCricket launches cricket scores via SMS and other new features
• Ocricket is a social network for Cricket fans
• Morpheus Venture Partners announces its latest batch of startups

Comments

• September 1, 2009, Brajeshwar commented: Ah! Caught us? I thought blogs and other media are not that interested yet. I'm lip-tight at the moment but I'll definitely come up with explanations on the happenings with oCricket and its future. The short and sweet reasoning is that we got much bigger opportunity for the team to execute our Cricket idea and much more beyond.
• September 1, 2009, pranav commented: good luck buddy..
• September 1, 2009, shiva commented: I put in a comment on this blog about ocricket going away... what is it you are planning now ??
• September 1, 2009, genie commented: good... it was useless site anyways.
• September 1, 2009, Anonymous Coward commented: Genie: Thanks for your encouragement! I think it's because of people like you that India doesn't have any startup to be proud of. oCricket folks are probably sorry to have tried to do something new. The ball is on your court now, show us what you can do.
• September 2, 2009, genie commented: if you call getting a couple of pathetic writers who rewrite cricinfo articles and post them on multiple websites as innovative...... great!! barring a couple of features (which looked good) the site looked like a blog to me....
• September 20, 2009, Shabda Raaj commented: Genie, We have too many armchair consultants. WHat we need is more people who will startup, (and fail, and startup again). So, with all respect, startup or gtfo.
• June 29, 2011, sumit commented: hello everyone here

Morpheus Venture Partners, the YCombinator styled Indian incubator, has announced the launch of its latest batch of startups.

This latest batch of startups includes:

1) Adscoot – An outdoor advertising startup targeted towards SME’s. Yet to launch publicly, the startup allows advertisers to buy adspace on remodelled scooters, assign a route that the scooter travels and track the campaign live.

2) EasySquareFeet - A full service real estate startup with the aim to make real estate rental / sale / buying easier.

3) InterviewStreet - Helps students to prepare for their placement interviews via mock interviews for the companies they’re interested in. Interviewers are industry professionals who sign up as a interviewer and get paid for every interview conducted.

4) Naabo – Naabo provides SaaS based product TurboDoc, which helps doctors manager their clinics and medical practice. Currently TurboDoc has support for Opthalmologists and dentists and has signed up about 100+ clients in Bangalore.

5) ReachTax – Provides professional tax filing and related services to SME’s in India. They have established a client base in Chennai and intend to expand nationwide.

6) RetailVector – Provides mystery shopping services to merchants and retailers. Retailers can get an exact idea / feedback on what quality of service is being provided by their employees

7) RobotsAlive – Aims to provide Indian education institutes with a cost effective alternative to reach robotics. They provide the complete package – ie, equipment, education, support for making robotics more accessible.

Scopial – Along the lines of Threadless, where users submit designs in contests and the winning designs are printed on T-shirts.

9) VeriCar – Vericar provides verfication and certification services for used cars. For a fee, they will evaluate / assess a used car and provide an indepth report of the condition of the car and its worth

10) Picsean – Still in the concept phase, Picsean hopes to become a thriving community of contributing photographers where, the content will be used to publish and offline travel magazine

MVP also provided an update on their existing portfolion companies:

* 1 exit – food@home was acquired by a larger catering company in march 2009

* 3 Series A funding – CommonFloor, Crederity, Instablogs

* 4 profitable – Deskaway, Fachak, Lifemojo, Sutra People

* 1 shutdown – Moblf (founders moved on to other ventures)

Additionally, Indus Khaitan, the former CTO of SezWho, which was accquired by JS-Kit, has joined the MVP team as a partner.

What do you think of MVP’s latest batch of startups ? Which one do you think has the biggest potential ? Do leave any feedback you might have.

• 100floors provides real estate marketplace for Indian cities
• mMail provides access to your emails via SMS
• Morpheus Venture Partners second batch of companies

Comments

• August 17, 2009, Rajat commented: I liked ReachTax the most and i think this business can be profitable without funding as well from day one. Vericar is a nice concept too but their website looks horrible, infact pathetic. This idea has great potential if they use it well and build credibility like CARFAX in US. I liked Adscoot as a unique idea. Are they going to use the fund money to buy scooters remodel and print Ads.How are they going to charge each client, who will drive those scooters, they will use the fund money to pay those guys monthly salary.The idea has potential and i think this kind of idea does require funding, its a costly proposition.
• August 17, 2009, Rajat commented: Nabbo is good too. Just read there blog on http://naabo.com/blog/?p=10...all must read this 'Shashank is still a student', the one who launched this service.
• August 21, 2009, bipin commented: I am not sure some of these startups can really scale . Anyway , good luck to MVP!
• September 17, 2009, Sunil Narayanan commented: I think its a very interesting set of companies for MVP. I am not much experienced but I am an executive search professional and what I can say with whatever little experience is it all boils down to the set of "people" (1st layer & 2nd layer) who would run the show. Its people who really matter! Good luck MVP, wish you make it big. :-)
• October 7, 2009, Tarun commented: By the way Morpheus Venture does not really invest any money in companies. They take a 4-8% stake in your company, in return for giving you some guidance etc. Is it worthwhile?
• February 20, 2010, joji commented: Established in 1997, St. Gregorious Edu-Guidance is a leading education consultancy services providing exemplary service to students all over India. We deal in Admissions to all major professional courses in Premier Institutes across India. We are your one step solution for all career related needs, it may be MD, MBBS, any other courses. We provide personalized career solutions on an individual basis keeping in mind the aspirations of our client as well as the affordability factor. FOR ALL CAREER RELATED NEEDS CONTACT US : St. Gregorious Edu-Guidance, #2, 2nd Floor, J J Complex, Above Chemmannur Jewellers, Marthahalli - P O, Bangalore - 560037 Karnataka e-mail :jojishpaily@gmail.com Contact: +91 9448516637 +91 9886089896, +91 9449009983 080-32416570, 41719562 WEBSITE: www.stgregoriousedu.com
• February 20, 2010, joji commented: Established in 1997, St. Gregorious Edu-Guidance is a leading education consultancy services providing exemplary service to students all over India. We deal in Admissions to all major professional courses in Premier Institutes across India. We are your one step solution for all career related needs, it may be MD, MBBS BE, BTech (ALL BRANCHES), , MDS, BDS, BPharm, BArch, MBA, MTech, MS, , PhD or any other courses. We provide personalized career solutions on an individual basis keeping in mind the aspirations of our client as well as the affordability factor. FOR ALL CAREER RELATED NEEDS CONTACT US : St. Gregorious Edu-Guidance, #2, 2nd Floor, J J Complex, Above Chemmannur Jewellers, Marthahalli - P O, Bangalore - 560037 Karnataka e-mail :jojishpaily@gmail.com Contact: +91 9448516637 +91 9886089896, +91 9449009983 080-32416570, 41719562 Website: www.stgregoriousedu.com
• July 2, 2011, bims commented: .) An impressive share, I just given this onto a colleague who was doing a little analysis on this. And he in fact bought me breakfast because I found it for him.. smile. So let me reword that: Thnx for the treat! But yeah Thnkx for spending the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love reading more on this topic. If possible, as you become expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more details? It is highly helpful for me. Big thumb up for this blog post!
• July 4, 2011, granit küp taş commented: .) This really answered my problem, thank you!
• July 4, 2011, granit küp taş commented: .) There is noticeably a bundle to know about this. I assume you made certain nice points in features also.

iJiny is a new, bootstrapped service that attempts to replicate Twitter’s concise format success to the classifieds market. Its a ‘micro classifieds’ service, where users post and discover classified ads that are only 160 characters in length. Their goal is to extend the service ultimately to the mobile phone and leverage the high SMS usage in the Indian market and provide an easy access for users to post and search through classifieds.

The UI aside, I think the biggest hurdle for them will be to evangelize the service.  The target market size maybe large – but without sufficient / appropriate marketing, it’ll be difficult to get traction.  Besides, as in Vakow’s case, leveraging SMS could turn out to be a costly proposition without a concrete revenue model.

• MeraMaal – classifieds site for Indian cities
• Perfios hopes to become the Mint.com for Indian market
• VoiceTap connects you with experts to get answers

Comments

• August 13, 2009, promdresses commented: Appear to be a good service.only in india????
• August 17, 2009, Bharat commented: I think its nice to have such a form of classifieds. I always wondered the REAL use of Twitter like concepts. I love the fact we can know what others are doing real time but frankly twitter is mostly made up of businesses and marketing people. Who wants to keep track of what strangers are doing every minute anyways :) I hope this catches on and the site becomes popular, would be nice to see similar ones here in US chao

BeeVolve, an iAccelerator incubated startup, has launched its social media analytics product into pre-alpha. The platform ‘mines’ user sentiment from consumer shopping and review sites, twitter, blogs and mainstream media to provide insights into products and brands. Unlike services provided by other competitors, Beevolve provides a ‘feature level’ analysis of products / services, thereby providing a ‘sentiment analysis’ of the product.

For example, consider their sample case study of Times of India’s recent redesign. After mining content from twitter and forums, they provided the following analysis:

Tag cloud for the old Times of India design:

Tag Cloud for the new TOI Design:

Sentiment Ratings for the old and new design:

I think Beevolve has some great potential for success if it can get an initial roster of clients.  As recent surveys have shown, social media usage for the younger generation is exploding – and Indian brands will sooner or later need to wake up and need some means to tap into that chatter.

• YouSuggest helps companies crowdsource ideas from users
• EduCell is a startup by IITians for aspiring IITians
• TweetKnot enables you to form groups on Twitter

Comments

• September 2, 2009, Nilesh Trivedi commented: Try http://brandpeek.com to see conversations around a brand. It's a personal project of mine.
• July 2, 2011, sandviç panel commented: I just find out something extra complicated on various personal blogs on a daily basis. It'll always be stimulating to read articles from other authors and exercise a little something from their store. I’d prefer to use some of your respective content on my web site in case you don’t mind. Of course I’ll provide you with a hyperlink on my site. Nice one for posting.
• July 2, 2011, bims commented: .) There are some interesting points in time in this article but I don’t know if I see all of them center to heart. There is some validity but I will take hold opinion until I look into it further. Good article , thanks and we want more! Added to FeedBurner as well
• July 4, 2011, granit küp taş commented: .) I’m impressed, I must say. Really rarely do I encounter a blog that’s both educative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on the head. Your idea is outstanding; the issue is something that not enough people are speaking intelligently about. I am very happy that I stumbled across this in my search for something relating to this.

MeraMaal is a new site, attempting to gun for the Craigslist of India. It has the usual fare that you’d expect from a classifieds site with various sections categorized by different Indian cities.

While launching a classifieds site isnt too difficult, the main challenge they will have in execution – how to attract users to post classifieds. Currently, they have very few listings on the site and till they solve the classic ‘chicken and egg’ problem, they’d fast fade into oblivion (as is the case with any classifieds site).

• iJiny provides micro classifieds for India
• VoiceTap connects you with experts to get answers
• Hiraj – an online baby journal for Indian parents

Comments

• June 30, 2009, analyst commented: They just re - designed their site ..... they are not new..... an old site.... now with a copied theme from quikr (kijij.com) they have no traffic at all .... just like any other classifieds site in india classifieds do not work in india..... people just leave it and dont waste your time.
• July 1, 2009, Aanchal commented: Analyst, Looks like you had a pretty bad experience with this site. I have used them for a while for posting my accupunture services and i did get some response from people. They look like old player with new design. I don't think they look like quikr.com at all. Looks very different to me. Lets wait and watch to see how far they go with this. Aanchal.
• July 1, 2009, analyst commented: look at their alexa ranking..... they have no traffic at all....
• July 1, 2009, Aanchal commented: Analyst, I am not very much aware about how alexa works. What is the the basis of Alexa ranking and what ranking is supposed to indicate the site is doin pretty well ? Aanchal
• July 1, 2009, Rajat commented: My 2 cents.Actually there is a market out their if they integrate their site with other media as well. For e.g if they allow people to pay and post ads on News Papers / TV or Local Cable channels , Magazines or print and distribute pamplets at some important points. In India News Papers/ TV/Local Cable channels are still a much stronger medium then just putting Ads Online.
• July 19, 2009, Sachin commented: Hey........ u say they dont have any ranking in alexa, i just checked and they are ranked 96406. And even if a website is not having a good alexa ranking but are earning good from sponsored ads is more then enough for a good startup........ don't judge any startup with rankings, its a startup it will definitely take time for them to get some ranking.
• July 27, 2009, Kevalsing commented: I am also in a process of starting a new classifieds site. would like to invite suggestions for getting the traffic.
• July 28, 2009, Buvanesh commented: This Classified site looks quite good............:)
• August 23, 2010, 24needs commented: We just started a new classified website www.24needs.com Please check it, its very user friendly and easy to post.. Thanks 24needs Team
• September 18, 2011, Jessie Gill commented: India just the best PIND : RURKA KALANNNNNNNNNNNNNN

EduCell is a startup founded by IIT currently enrolled IIT students with the goal of mentoring students who hope to ‘crack the IIT- JEE’ exam. Around 200 IIT students provide mentoring sessions to IIT aspirants and guide them through their preparations. The USP being that having ‘been there, done that’ in the recent past, they’re in a much better position to guide and mentor other students.  All registered students get personalized guidance from current IIT students and also are provided with sample tests, study material and motivational CD’s.  You also get notes used by JEE toppers, with the hope that the notes help you to score well at the JEE.

Other features on the site include tips-tricks via mobile, video sessions by IITians, live chat with IIt students and discussion forums.

I think this is an amazing idea – with their unique USP, they definitely have the ability to stand out in a crowded market. The market size for IIT-JEE preps is huge – and even if they make a tiny dent in it, they stand to make some solid gains of it.

I guess some from the IIM’s needs to get inspired and needs to port over this brilliant idea to the CAT exams as well — I’d say that’d be an even bigger success story (I believe CAT exam market / test preps is more larger and lucrative – but dont quote me on it).

• Find a mentor using Mentorpolis
• Ocricket is a social network for Cricket fans
• Go Green with edible cutlery

Comments

• June 30, 2009, Kishor commented: Can we get details of promoters of Educell..? Do they have franchisee at Nashik ? rgds kishor vyas
• June 30, 2009, pranav commented: kishor you can contact them via their website. thnx.
• July 1, 2009, Ruchir Gupta (Educell Team Member) commented: Hi guys, You can know more about Educell, and regarding applying, at the following website : www.educell.info. Alternatively, drop off a mail to contact@educell.info, or call +91 0771 4033954. We do not have any "centres" so as to say. Our main office is located in Raipur, Chattisgarh. Since we help students on phone/send material by post, we do not have local centres. Ruchir Gupta Manager Web Educell
• July 2, 2009, Selva commented: >>"I guess some from the IIM’s needs to get inspired and needs to port over this brilliant idea to the CAT exams as well " A couple of guys from IIM-K have done just that, albeit in a small city - Coimbatore. They are called Focus Academy and can be found here www.focusacademy.in I am based out of Trichy and I know for a fact that the CAT market is untapped in Trichy and Madurai (two tier-2 cities in Tamil Nadu)
• July 20, 2009, Kriss commented: Have been seeing lot of startups now-a-days which includes a long list of startup as www.voicetap.in, www.mentorpolis.com, http://educell.info etc. Will be really excited to see the "USP" mentioned here. Why so many startups and all in start up stage still. Is everyone's USP claim really USP.
• November 8, 2009, kiran commented: hiiiiiiiiiiii
• January 4, 2011, Shreyansh Jain commented: Please contact me via mail we can go through it
• March 12, 2011, IITJEE commented: I think this is an amazing idea – with their unique USP, they definitely have the ability to stand out in a crowded market. The market size for IIT-JEE preps is huge – and even if they make a tiny dent in it, they stand to make some solid gains of it.
• September 18, 2011, Jessie Gill commented: GippyGrewalNet just the besttt of besstessssssssssssss

iTweet2Win is a new startup from the founders of Pringoo, and enables users to run contests via Twitter. Once you sign up, you can create your contest, the questions and decide the prizes. You get a url to the contest on the iTweet2Win site and you tweet that url to your followers. Contest participants can indicate their participation by tweeting your custom message in their twitter stream.

They offer a free basic version as well as a premium version for $9.99. For the paid version, you can customize your content look / theme and brand it as per your requirements. You also get advanced analytics about how your contest is being received by other Twitter users.

Once the contest end date is reached, you can select the winner by going to the contest page on their site.

You can take a look at a sample contest here.

I think if they can get the word out there, they’re onto something here. Leveraging Twitter’s massive user base and its inbuilt virality might just work great for iTweet2win.