India Startups

15
Sep 09

iMo – the TC50 finalist from India

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.




India Startups9 comments


14
Sep 09

Perfios hopes to become the Mint.com for Indian market

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.

perfios

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2
Sep 09

Dhingana launches app for iPhone / iTouch

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.

iphone_newReleases




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31
Aug 09

OCricket shuts down

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:

ocrick

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.




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14
Aug 09

Morpheus Venture Partners announces its latest batch of startups

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.

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India Startups10 comments


5
Aug 09

iJiny provides micro classifieds for India

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.

ijiny

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.




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5
Aug 09

iAccelerator startup BeeVolve launches social media analytics

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:

tagcloud-olddesign

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India Startups4 comments


30
Jun 09

MeraMaal – classifieds site for Indian cities

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.

meramaal

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).




India Startups10 comments


29
Jun 09

EduCell is a startup by IITians for aspiring IITians

educellEduCell 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).




India Startups9 comments


17
Jun 09

iTweet2Win lets you run contests via Twitter

itweet2winiTweet2Win 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.




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