December 20, 2006 on 12:27 am 2 Comments
Matrix Partners India has invested an undisclosed amount of funding in a stealth mode startup company, Four Interactive. The startup, co-founded by Kiran Konduri and Shriram Adukoorie, is looking to build easy-to-use services that are at the intersection of mobile content and the web. That is the information I have right now.
However there are couple of intriguing points I gathered from 4 Interactive web site. According to their site the plan ”To build the next generation of Web 2.0 compliant rich internet applications”. I didn’t know that Web 2.0 had become a standard that need to be followed. Also, all of their job requirements state “Computer science degree from IITs or NITs”. If people from IITs and NITs could solve all our problems, world would have been a better place. Look beyond IITs and NITs guys and you will find enough smart people to work with.
Links:
4 Interactive
October 13, 2006 on 11:02 am 2 Comments
Sequoia Capital has invested $7 million in an Indian search startup Guruji.com. Previously Guruji.com had received angel funding from Suvir Sujan who was the co-founder of Bazee.com(acquired by eBay). Guruji located in Bangalore, India is co-founded by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Misra. According to Gaurav Misra-
“The technology is built on a distributed architecture and crawls the web, indexes the data that it gathers and provides the user with a simple keyword based interface to get to the data quickly and efficiently”
I will be back with more details about their technology and future plans soon.
Links:
Guruji.com
Tags: StartupSquad - Funding - Search - Sequoia - VC - India
October 13, 2006 on 12:22 am Comments Off
This post has nothing to do with startups but does relate to India and Technology. Few months back I had searched on Google Video and Youtube for ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ but there were hardly any videos out there. Today while digging around I found that GandhiServe Foundation has uploaded 430 video clips and full-length films featuring Mahatma Gandhi onto Google Video. These videos totaling over 20 hours of playtime also include personal film recordings of Gandhi’s family and a remarkable 5 hours 10 minutes documentary. Located in Berlin, Germany, GandhiServe Foundation possesses the largest audio visual archive on Gandhi ji. I think Indian people should be thankful to GandhiServe Foundation for their efforts in making such a great part of history available to everyone.
Links:
News Release
5 hours 10 minutes documentary
GandhiServe Foundation
Wikipedia page on Mahatma Gandhi
Tags: StartupSquad - Video - Gandhi - Media
October 5, 2006 on 11:23 pm 1 Comment
Rediff launched new version of its IM client ‘Rediff Bol‘. New version easily allows people to chat in English as well as Hindi. You need to choose Hindi from the list of languages on the IM client, which is available as a dropdown menu to use ‘Rediff Bol in Hindi’. Smart feature from Rediff is that both people in an IM conversation don’t need to have newer version of Rediff Bol. If you send messages in Hindi, your friend can still view those messages in English.
I think this is great move from Rediff that will help it gain a greater share in the IM market. However Rediff Bol has all the qualities of easily being classified as a spamware. After installing the Rediff Bol, my homepage got reset to Rediff.com. Also Rediff toolbar got installed on my machine without any prompts, and some junk script from Rediff kept on trying to reset my default search engine to Rediff Search. If their search engine and toolbar features are that great, most the people would have already been using them. Thanks to all these spamming features, Rediff Bol is off my machine right now.
Links:
Rediff Bol
Rediff
Tags: StartupSquad, Rediff, IM, Chat, Hindi
October 3, 2006 on 3:18 pm No Comments
Yahoo has announced that it will be launching 6 new portals in regional languages in India. These portals will come through acquisitions and partnerships with local Indian companies. Yahoo has been in discussion with Indian companies and will officially make announcements in 6 months to 1 year timeframe. In August Yahoo and Canaan Partners had invested $8.65 million in matrimonial portal Bharatmatrimony.Com.
I feel Yahoo might be entering a tough market which is dominated by numerous players for any regional language who operate at very low margins. Trying to undercut them will require much more than the Yahoo branding.
Links:
Yahoo India
Tags: StartupSquad, Yahoo
September 23, 2006 on 11:37 pm No Comments
GoYaar is a recently launched a social networking site targeted at Indian user base. GoYaar is founded by Phalgun Raju.
Borrowing on the ideas from highly successful social networking websites in US, GoYaar offers most of the standard features. Users can create their profile, create albums, upload photos, add friends to their network, invite friends, browse public events, create events, join user groups, create new groups, create blog posts, browse blogs, embed video code from YouTube/Revver/Grouper, and report abuse. One nice feature from GoYaar is that if a user registers using a company email address automatically validates a user as a member of a company community.
However the site falls short on number of features as compared to standards set by other Social Networking sites. Take the case of uploading photos to personal albums where only 1 photo can be uploaded at a time and has no slideshow functionality. In case of blogs there is no support for RSS feeds, or permalinks of blog posts. User profile pages cannot be customized so you need to stick with the not so great UI of GoYaar. While registering, you are required to give out your school name, but not the city and state. So, when you browse your profile, this school name is hyperlinked that is supposed to take you to the school page created at GoYaar. Now, there are thousands of schools in India, with same names in different cities. How will the users know that the school page they are on is for their school? Also if users don’t upload a photo to his profile, a big question mark shows up instead. Off course the UI some of the other features also require rework.
Personally I feel sites like GoYaar have to offer a compelling set of features in order to succeed. Otherwise I don’t see a motivation for users to switch from US based site to a less featured Indian site. On the other hand, if any of these sites can come with a very strong mobile-based social networking model, they can really grow in the next 1-2 years. Indian mobile ownership is expected to cross 100 million in 2007 and also there is the impending upgrade of mobile networks to 3G.
Links:
GoYaar
September 21, 2006 on 2:09 am No Comments
Picsquare, India based photo sharing and printing startup has received angel funding of $25,000. Picsquare is based out of Bangalore, India and was founded by Manish Agarwal and Kartik.
Picsquare can be used to store, view, and share photos. Picsquare utilizes a java based file uploader so that multiple files can be uploaded at once. Uploaded photos can be tagged and shared on per tag basis. Storage policy is pretty relaxed right now with no limitations on data storage. Photo prints can be ordered in different sizes and print finish. Users can also create personalized greeting cards, which can be delivered anywhere in India.
Although lot more options are required, but still a nice effort from a 2 man team.
Links:
Picsquare
