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Serving hungry surfers; Order your dinner online withJusteat.in

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

So, you want to pick up some food from your favourite restaurant on your way back home, but don’t have the time to wait after placing the order? A website called Justeat.in helps you place your order online and even reserves tables across 1500 restaurants, serving 52 different types of cuisines. Started by IITian Ritesh Kumar Dwivedy, Justeat.in, not only allows you to search and locate restaurant of your choice, but also provides with restaurant listings and reviews of over 10,000 restaurants across 10 cities. Yourstory catches up with Dwidvedy and finds out more on how Justeat is catering to the hungry surfers and the response so far. How did Just Eat happen? Why a food based venture? When I was working as a developer in 2004-2005, often we would work on weekends, when the cafeteria food was not available. We used to order food from nearby restaurants, but faced a lot of problems due to unavailability of a quality guide. We also found it difficult to communicate our choices with the restaurant as the order takers are usually too busy to listen carefully. This experience planted the initial seed. Like many others, soon I also got bored with my job and decided to take the plunge. It was not a hasty decision though, a lot of time was spent on finding if the model was viable and if a market exits. Where are your offices? We currently operate out of 3 offices in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. These offices also work as nodal centres for the respective regions i.e. South, North and West giving us presence in 26 cities in India currently. We have a 60 member team currently and will be 100 by end of Q1 2012. When was your venture established? The journey has been very difficult but enriching. Hungry Zone, which is the former name of Just Eat, was started in 2006. We always knew that growing this business wouldn’t be easy, but we also knew that later on it will become our USP. Tell us a bit about the market size that you are trying to capture via your website? The organized restaurant industry in India (excluding street food) is valued at $15 billion, growing at 21% per annum. However, the share of online orders is very low. With increasing real estate cost, restaurants too are focusing more on takeaways to grow their business. The advent of international brands has also spurred the growth in takeaways and home deliveries of food. All these augur well for a seamless one stop platform for food ordering. How has the response to your portal been so far? We are very strong in Bangalore and have been growing by 50% month on month in Mumbai and Delhi NCR. Although, registration on our portal is not mandatory, we have now over 100,000 registered users and 300,000 unique users. Do users have to pay for your services? What is your revenue model like? Our services are free to users. We charge a commission from restaurants on confirmed orders. Our margins usually vary from 10-15% of order volumes Which are the main regions that drive your business? We are operational in Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai and 23 other cities through our partners. Currently, Bangalore is our biggest market as it is our oldest. However, we expect Delhi and Mumbai to take over soon due to their sheer size. What were the challenges you faced while setting up Just Eat? We are the first-of-its kind in India. There was no model to emulate and the technology to handle the unique business requirements was difficult to build. We have strived very hard and have successfully built a scalable solution. For more information, visit www.justeat.in Author: Rohit Rohan

Tagged as: account-details, great-angel, guest columnists, guest-columns, learning, learning-market, management, non-tech, startup, technology, unsexy-startups

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How Social Entrepreneurship Is Helping to Improve Education Worldwide : McGraw-Hill Research Foundation Policy Paper

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

‘How Social Entrepreneurship is Helping to Improve Education Worldwide’, a McGraw-Hill Research Foundation policy paper, outlines specific ways in which social enterprise is improving education in the U.S. and in developing countries. Written by Rupert Scofield, President and CEO of The Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), a global microfinance network, it underscores the power of harnessing philosophies of for-profit business to create organizations that are mission-driven, innovative, sustainable, and effective. Scofield shows how social entrepreneurship is playing a key role in devising innovative ways to improve access to and quality of education both domestically and abroad. He uses case studies from four organizations: Genesys Works, The Women’s Housing and Economic Development Fund, DonorsChoose.org and The Mann Deshi Foundation to illustrate the effectiveness of the social enterprise model and the impact social entrepreneurship can have on the issues plaguing the education sector including: Improving early childhood and youth education in low-income communities Introducing alternative channels of funding for education and redefining traditional methods of giving Providing basic education and business skills training to underserved and at-risk populations Increasing income opportunities for people living in poverty through financial services that allow for start-up or expansion of microenterprises, enabling them to afford education for their children To download a copy of How Social Entrepreneurship is Helping to Improve Education Worldwide, click here http://bit.ly/Social_Entrepreneurship

Tagged as: account-details, accounting, disclaimer, graphics, learning, learning-market, popular-on-cloudstory-in, startup, technology

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India 6th Biggest Country in terms of Twitter Accounts : 19% ‘Active’ Users

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

Geolocation analysis of Twitter accounts by Semiocast revealed some interesting numbers and patterns. The U.S. still top at the 1st place on Twitter in terms of accounts with 107.7 million accounts. Brazil is now the second country with 33.3 million accounts, surpassing Japan now third at 29.9 million. Semiocast has analyzed 383 million of Twitter user profiles created before January 1st 2012. Drawing from its experience with previous studies, Semiocast used its proprietary platform, databases and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information (free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets). This study reveals that users from the Netherlands are the most active within top countries. 33% of accounts located in the Netherlands posted at least one public message between September 1st, 2011 and November 30th, 2011, making the Netherlands the top country with the highest rate of Twitter users posting tweets, before Japan. The global average is only 27%, as many Twitter users mostly use the service to read tweets from others. This number for India was 19% which is 8% less than the global average. Semiocast is a company based in Paris, France, providing data intelligence and research on social media.

Tagged as: accounting, education, graphics, great-angel, guest columnists, guest-columns, learning, lose-something, startup

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Attention to individual kid is the USP of Funtoot, an intelligentpersonal tutor

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

Rajeev Pathak, Suryaprakash Konanuru, Haris Poonthala, once part of Wipro, quit their respective jobs to give wings to their startup dreams. Haris says, “I was interested in teaching. I was teaching as a part of voluntary educational projects and am keen on educational aspects.” What they have on offer is FunToot, an intelligent and adaptive personal tutor that observes, assesses diagnoses, interacts, encourages and helps every child based on each child’s individual characteristics. Suryaprakash says that they started building this product to create a global education technology company out of India.. Even more important is their belief that ground up innovation has not happened in technologies for children. Another reason is giving back to society as the three of them are from a middle class background. Artificial Intelligence for individual kid development They had conceived five products originally for education space and took it to 100 schools across India through conferences. “We realized that we have to address fundamental issues rather than some superficial things. Static content, ERP and Interactive white boards are being done by a lot of companies. But we wanted to understand what the fundamental issues are in education system. We discovered, “ It was individual attention to each child, ” says Suryaprakash. He reasons why AI was used by explaining, “ Treating everybody as equal in a class is okay but not sufficient as every child is different. That made us think that we need to provide a personal tutor. If you want to provide a personal tutor there are ways to do that and we found AI to be the significant technology element.” Partnering with select schools, they started off their journey. A few products out of the original five fell by the wayside due to market research and user feedback. The partner schools adopted their products and gave continuous feedback. Explaining the challenges, Suryaprakash says, “ Ours is not only a disruptive technology product but it’s an intersection of education pedagogy, artificial intelligence and cloud computing . Complimenting strengths in pedagogy, AI, Cloud, and animation is important to build the product”. Suryaprakash points out, “Having the right skills in each one of the areas is the key – to bring the best teachers, best usability experts, to bring the pedagogy experts and the best technologists, has been critical success factor for us so far. Each has value and each has to work together. One cannot override the other guy.” Haris adds, “ children, by nature, like to experiment and handling children is a challenge. As more data is given as input, more intelligent our product becomes.” Finding a way to understand each child Using features such as ‘Discovery’, ‘Observation’ and ‘interaction’, FunToot adapts to each child’s unique characteristics. Suryaprakash says “FunToot knows the child’s characteristics and what the child has done until yesterday and until now. So, it has all the information about the child –, based on which Funtoot helps the child in the same way as a good human tutor will do in one-on-one scenario. How was Funtoot developed? Aided by a full-time pedagogy team to design subject matter, Funtoot is capable of self-correction of a problem thanks to the robust effort of the R&D team. Another USP of the product is “it can accept input in numeric form, text form and in geometric form, which is a pretty complex procedure. Three schools have signed up already and 20 more are in the pipeline for next academic year. So far, 1000 students have used the product. All the schools have given impressive feedback on the product. Science and English are waiting to be added to the repertoire of Funtoot, which now has content in Mathematics. FunToot is Device Agnostic eDreams is not focusing their effort in hardware, as the innovation in intelligent personal tutoring is the focus and not the devices. Rajeev says, “We are partnering with device vendors to take FunToot on to multiple devices like PCs, Tablets, Notebooks and Netbooks” and FunToot is device agnostics and can run on any device through private, public and hybrid cloud models. Trends in education as captured by eDreams About trends in education, Rajeev says, “One major trend which we are seeing is a holistic development of a child, rather than being traditional rote type of learning. Every parent expects their child to get best possible education. So the parent pressure on school and schools in turn changing themselves seems to be a good development.” Another interesting development is curriculum that matches global standards in good private schools, and students from South-East Asia and Middle East are coming to India for studies. The residential schools of this type are only in the premium segment though. Private schools are preferred even in rural areas. Big private schools such as Edify, VIBGYOR, and Euro Schools are setting a new benchmark in the educational space in India, according to Rajeev. Talking of rural forays, Rajeev says, “In future, we desire to work with Government, NGOs etc to localize the product and take it to rural masses. Rural primary and secondary education is constrained by the non-availability of good quality teaching staff. FunToot is our attempt to help address this issue. Learning Made Fun It has been a big challenge and lot of hard work for the eDreams team to build FunToot, but it gives immense happiness to the team when they see kids enjoying and learning with FunToot. FunToot is a bold venture in a niche segment of education and we at YourStory.in wish eDreams all the very best in their endeavours. Website: http :// www . edreamssoftware . com / In News : Recently raised first round of investment from Mumbai Angels. If you are an early stage education startup, then apply now to join the Edustars – a YourStory.in initiative powered by Accel Partners & Intel AppUp to recognize and showcase outstanding education startups.

Tagged as: account-details, disclaimer, education, graphics, great-angel, guest columnists, india, learning, learning-market, startups, tech

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When Are You Ready? – The risks of the Mark Zuckerberg strategy

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

What if Mark Zuckerberg were 40 Years Old? Throughout my past four years in the Indian startup ecosystem, first with mChek and now with my company ZipDial , I have had the honor of speaking at various entrepreneurship events at business schools and engineering colleges. Over just these few years, not only have the audiences grown in size, but also the average age of attendees gets younger by the year. When I’ve polled various audiences of students about when they want to start up, many aim to be an entrepreneur immediately out of college, and the majority of enterprising youngsters have goals to start a company within five years. Almost none plan to wait more than 10 years before starting up. The enthusiasm for entrepreneurship among students and young professionals in India is promising and inspiring. However, this trend also gives cause to stop and reflect on when is the right time to start up. In such scenarios, I immediately jump to quote Vivek Wadhwa , a technology entrepreneur and academic of global repute. Wadhwa’s research shows that the average age of Americantechnology entrepreneurs is 39 years old . Surprise and disbelief fills the room – What about Mark Zuckerberg?! Of course there are impressive cases that break the trend, including young successful entrepreneurs from the Indian market such as Vishal Gondal of Indiagames and Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts who both founded their first companies at the ages of 16 and 17, respectively. However, these unique cases are just that – unique. Learn on Someone Else’s Budget I personally believe in building up at least a few years of work experience before starting up, and I believe this is particularly important in India. In the American culture I come from, it is extremely common to start working early in life. For example, I had my first job at the age of 13 as a babysitter, and around the same age, my brother started a small business stringing tennis racquets for a few local clubs. By the age of 18, I had an internship in the International Marketing department of Gallo Winery, the largest winery in the world by volume produced, and this was before I even started college. By the time I graduated from Stanford I had completed a total of seven internships ranging from sales to legal to manufacturing operations to investment banking. By graduation, there was no doubt that entrepreneurship was in my future, but even after the exposure and experience I had, I knew I needed more, and it was only after working six more years in technology companies and startups that the timing was right to start up on my own. By contrast, the typical student in India only gets their first job after finishing college, and many go straight into an MBA program without any work experience. This path focusing exclusively on academics is also a good one, but like any path, it has its limitations. Working for someone else first means you get to learn and make mistakes on someone else’s budget, not yours. I personally believe it is essential to have work experience before starting a company, and therefore caution graduates to think hard about the timing that is right for them. What Are You Waiting For? Once you know you want to start up, what are you waiting for? Is it the idea, the money or the people? This is another favorite question I ask among aspiring entrepreneurs. The typical majority is split between “the idea” and “the money”, with the response of “the people” being a distance third. Again, I disagree with the majority! Running a company is never a one-person show, so whether it’s co-founders or founding team employees, I strongly believe that having the right people ready to start up with you is critical. The right people will attract the money to fund the company. Furthermore, the original idea for a business is very often takes twists and turns along the way, so it is the people who will not only innovate in the first place but who will continue to evolve the idea as the market changes over time. Power to The People Having experience before starting up is not only beneficial for learning but also for networking. This is important for success on a few different levels. Co-Founders Most first-time entrepreneurs, especially young ones, start their companies with friends. Second-time entrepreneurs are more likely to find the right people who complement their own personal expertise and skill sets. While trust, and the kind of trust that exists between friends, is incredibly important between co-founders, it is also important that members of a founding team bring distinct and complementary skill sets to the table. Startups don’t have spare resources for redundancy. While you and your business school or engineering college classmates are relatively homogenous, the more time you have spent in a cross-functional work environment, the more likely you are to build a network and trust with people whose skills complement yours. These are even better potential co-founders. Employees Trust in your early employees is almost as important as trust among co-founders. When your company is brand new with no customers and no revenue and no brand name, your first employees will be convinced to join based on nothing other than trust in you. People whom you have worked with or managed before may be the only people with sufficient exposure to your working style and potential for success to you know and trust you enough to join your brand new company. If you wish to hire people with whom you have no past working relationship, then your background and professionals success must be compelling enough to merit such trust. This only comes with experience and time. Investors If you plan to rely on more than your own personal savings and revenue to run your company, then you will need to convince investors that you are worth funding. The number one question that any investor at a Seed round or Series A round evaluates is the founding team. All investors will do reference checks on you and your co-founders, so having industry experience and a successful track record are essential for building this confidence. There are many arguments in favor of starting up early in your career, including the energy to endure the ups and downs, the lack of family and financial obligations, etc. However, I firmly believe that starting up too young or too inexperienced is unnecessarily risky. Building experience and a network is valuable for finding the right co-founders, early employees, investors, and ultimately for promising a more successful outcome for your and your company. Valerie Rozycki Wagoner Founder & CEO, ZipDial twitter: @valrozycki

Tagged as: account-details, education, guest columnists, guest-columns, india, learning, learning-market, lose-something, popular-on-cloudstory-in, tech, technology

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Aksharit: The Hindi answer to Scrabble

by Paul Joseph February 7, 2012 Featured

MadRat Games, makers of the first Hindi word game, Aksharit Word games have captivated millions across the globe. English has numerous such games and the most popular of them, Scrabble has been made in more than 30 languages. But despite of being the 3 rd most spoken language, Hindi does not have any word games. Rajat Dhariwal, an IIT Bombay and Carnegie Melon alumnus, always had a proclivity towards teaching and was enthusiastic about education. After having worked for a few MNC’s, he realized where his heart was and had an impulse to make a mark in the education field. Along with Manuj and Madhumita, Rajat started researching and trying to find a reason as to why this gap exists. English has just 26 alphabets while Hindi has about 600 characters and this had proved to be the biggest deterrent to the existence of word games in Hindi. Manuj, a design graduate from IIT Guwahti played an intrinsic role in ideating the board game. Rajat and Madhumati, both holding degrees in Computer Science paved the way for taking the board game to the next step. The board game is being used in more than 300 schools for imparting the necessary language skills to students. Rajat and Manuj Dhariwal, Madhumita Halder, Saurabh Mehta The development of the physical game as well as the digital went on parallel but the breakthroughs made while designing the board game resolved a lot of issues that existed. Nokia had recently come up with its phone N8 and it wanted 10 unique applications for the Indian market. This is when the digital Aksharit was revealed. After Nokia, came in Intel and the Chrome web store. The venture, Madrat Games is bootstrapped with an initial investment of Rs 30 lakhs and the company soon broke even and generates a close to 100 lakhs in revenues now. MadRat has other games on similar lines and also have a math game in the pipeline which is set for release in the next quarter. Madrat has come a long way since its 5 years of existence and has made many proud. More about them here and the beautiful video at the beginning of the site can be found on Youtube here .

Tagged as: accounting, disclaimer, guest-columns, india, learning, lose-something, management, popular-on-cloudstory-in, startup, technology

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TaxMantra.com: Say Bye To All Tax Worries as Taxation now Goes Online

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

They say, to have a smart wife is a luxury, but to have a smart accountant is a necessity. Bearing testimony to this proverb, Alok Patnia founded Taxmantra.com, an online platform that aims to understand and address the pain points of individuals, businesses, companies and new start-ups by providing timely and quality tax solutions in the most hassle free manner. In conversation with Abhilasha Dafria for YourStory.in, Alok, a qualified Chartered Accountant and a commerce bachelor from St. Xavier’s College, tells us more about how Taxmantra.com lives by the motto of “Experience Excellence” and “Stay Hassle Free”! Please introduce Taxmantra.com to our readers. Taxmantra.com provides a one stop solution platform to individuals, Startups and businesses to resolve their pain points with its unique and hassle-free services such as tax return filing, Company/ LLP creation, accounting, company law compliances and such other day to day business maintenance services. So how did you come up with this idea of starting a venture in the taxation space? I noted something very interesting during my stint with the big 4 accounting firms in Bangalore, that even though clients were locally based, we hardly met them face-to-face. Client delivery used to happen via exchange of mails, with post discussions either through video conferencing or con-calls. Startups, new businesses, SMEs or for that matter even individuals have to still take time out from their work to visit a local consultant, as it is a common knowledge that not all can afford to hire big accounting firms. Thus, it thrilled me to start a service wherein, we can address the pain points of individuals, startups, by using internet as an enabler to reach clients irrespective of their locations with excellent service at the most affordable price Could you tell us in detail about the services you offer? Taxmantra.com provides complete taxation, accounting & financial solutions to individuals and businesses. The sole objective of Taxmantra.com is to bring full gamut of accounting, taxation and financial service on a single platform under three broad service heads; (i) Individual Taxation Services, which includes services like Online return filing services, Tax planning and save taxes service, Tax refunds services, ITR Rectification Assistance in allotment/ Correction/ Surrender of PAN number/ Issuance of Digital signature certificates and all other services related to individual taxation, covering both Salaried and Non-Salaried Individuals. (ii) Business Incorporation or Startup Services includes services such as creation of private limited company, creation of Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs), Start-Up Counseling and all other services related to business incorporation like local registrations. (iii) Business maintenance Services includes services such as accounting, auditing assistance, Taxation, Company Law (ROC), Service tax and all other services related to business maintenance covering both Corporate and Non Corporate Entity. How many clients have you had so far? Without stating the actual number for obvious reasons, we can say that we are able to engage thousands of salaried & non – salaried individuals in filing their tax returns and also helping them in solving their tax issues. We are also assisting a good number of new businesses, startups, SMEs and some major businesses in handling issues relating to taxation, accounting, auditing, company law, service and such other issues. What is your clientele like? Could you share some demographics and tell us about your tie-ups if any? We have clientele based from metro cities, from B tier cities in India and also NRI clients from outside India. Our clientele includes Individuals (salaried and non-salaried), Startups, Businesses, Corporate and other businesses. We have associate tie-ups in Bangalore and Hyderabad and wish to extend our presence to other cities as well. What is the market-size you are trying to capture? With internet technology taking the centre stage, the government has made company law compliances including incorporation of company, LLP, service tax returns, sales tax, vat, TDS Compliances, to name some, fully automated now and is taking added effort to make these more seamless and hassle free. Also, to give you some data for Financial Year 2010-11, more than 15 million tax payers have preferred to file their returns through online medium. There is increased eagerness amongst Entrepreneurs, Start-Ups and other corporate and Non-Corporate businesses to prefer online medium for availing services due to paucity of time and hassle of visiting local consultants. Thus, we think that there is a huge market for us to cater to, though initially there may be some bottlenecks. How many people visit your site every day? Tell us about the traction on your site. We have a targeted visitor of around 6K to 8K on a daily average from all virtually all parts of India and also non-resident Indians from abroad. Are there other players in the market doing similar things? What is your USP? Without naming any one in particular, we know that there are number of online service providers in this segment, with few of them providing only online tax filing for salaried individuals and then there are few engaged in rendering business incorporation services or accounting services and such others. But, what is so unique about Taxmantra.com is that, it brings all, salaried individuals, non-salaried individuals, Startups, businesses, SMEs on a single platform, wherein they can avail different services without getting into hassle of visiting different consultants for different set of services. How does the revenue model work? Our revenue model is very like any other service industry; that is, to provide excellent service fully customized to the needs of our client’s at most affordable price. For us client satisfaction is top most priority, and we believe that client retention is as important as new client acquisition. Since when are you operational? Where are you based? We are operational from first quarter of 2011. We have a fully functional integrated client delivery office in Kolkata and associate tie-ups in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Dhanbad.

Tagged as: enterprise, innovation, learning, non-tech entrepreneurs, online marketing, password, social-media, technology

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Exploiting Innovation for market dominance: A case for Technology Startups

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Government of India has declared this decade (2011 -20) as the “Decade of Innovations”. Manmohan Singh has promised to increase R&D spending from 0.9% to 2% of GDP by 2017. MSMEs are economic growth engines for developed and more for the developing country like India. With this notion, InnovAccer – an Indian Innovation Management firm collaborates with Yourstory.in to create awareness of Innovation and Intellectual Property amongst startups. Starting from today, InnovAccer will release one article every week for 20 weeks to help startups gear up to innovate in the right direction and protect intellectual property at its best. Anyone can run a business, but running a sustainable business depends on whether you provide cost advantage to the customer or present to them new innovative products or services. With fluctuating economy worldwide, cost advantage is no more a reliable strategy. Even China who is a master of providing cost advantage has initiated innovation strategies after rise in their labor cost. Multi-National Corporations have huge assembly lines and supply chains in process to release out a product within months, while startups have to rely on their innovative technology which is unique in the marketplace. Thus, Innovation and protecting that innovation is a key to sustainable growth of a technology start-up. Let’s shift our gears to economic advantages of obtaining a patent besides its value for exclusive right protection. Consider a scenario below, wherein figures represent cost of production. Company II is playing on cost advantage and ruling the market share. Now assume that company I obtained a patent. Whole market scenario changes from thereon. Company II and III have to give license fees to Company I and thus Company I has cost advantage over Company II and III. A company like company III which has neither cost or innovation advantage loses the race. While innovation company I always wins the race. Future posts will cover stimulating and resourceful articles on how to exploit patents to create & benefit your business and make it into a sustainable model. About InnovAccer InnovAccer (Innovation Accelerated) is an innovation management and acceleration company focused and dedicated to provide high quality innovation management services to accelerate every step of an innovation life-cycle. InnovAccer was founded with a vision of people in the fields of Intellectual Property, Business Innovation, and Technology to change and accelerate the creation of innovation ecosystem in India. InnovAccer’s team comes from a varied background of engineers graduated from IITs, intellectual property specialists graduated from Franklin Pierce Law Center, USA, analysts, statisticians, and business innovation experts. Website: www . innovaccer . com

Tagged as: accounting, enterprise, india, innovation, internet, learning, marketing, online marketing, social-media, startup, technology, the-wachox-way

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YCombinator vs. 1M/1M at 114th 1M/1M Strategy RoundtableForEntrepreneurs

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Today’s roundtable, as usual, was an international affair, with entrepreneurs presenting from different parts of the US, India, Israel, and many other geographies. Before I share what we heard from them today, I want to highlight an important aspect of 1M/1M that is repeatedly underscored in these roundtables: the international, inclusive, democratic nature of the initiative. In fact, one of the best ways we can delineate this phenomenon is by contrasting 1M/1M with YCombinator. This short video explains how the two programs differ: Bottomline: YC, superb incubator, is a program that applies to less than .01% of entrepreneurs, whereas 1M/1M is an inclusive, global program. The businesses we will discuss today will put this distinction in perspective. Hooduku First, Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas pitched Hooduku , a professional services business that already has significant revenue from cloud integration work. Hooduku is a 1M/1M premium member and is interested in moving away from pure services toward a product+services model. Sudhi presented the idea of a platform that bridges between Microsoft Azure customers who are also using RackSpace and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers for their content management and delivery. He uses a classic and highly successful mode of building products, that of being deeply immersed in customer situations through services projects and using that domain knowledge and relationship to identify opportunities for building products. A major example of such a company is Appirio, which went on to get funded by Sequoia Capital and has since built a strong product-services company in the cloud integration domain. My advice to Sudhi is to not position his company as a ‘platform’ but rather pitch the value proposition as an ‘integration framework’. These subtle wordings make a huge difference in how a company is viewed. Buy Or Boycott Next Doug Lowenthal from Jacksonville, Florida presented Buy Or Boycott , which he came up with at the recent Startup Weekend program. Buy Or Boycott wants to offer consumers an easy way to avoid buying products that have major issues, be it political or environmental. However, the user experience that Doug described to deliver this was not convincing. He proposes to offer a mobile app with which to scan every product in your grocery store shopping cart. I don’t believe consumers would do this. When we stand on grocery store lines after a long day or week, the last thing we want to do is scan a bunch of products with our mobile phones. NXI Group Then Kaushik Mitra from New Delhi, India, pitched the NXI Group of Companies , a custom hardware vendor that presented itself as a laptop and tablet company. It took me a bit of time to parse through the details and figure out that NXI is NOT a laptop or tablet vendor competing with HP, Dell and Acer. Rather, it is developing custom hardware for consumers with specific needs. For example, they are in the midst of developing RFID-enabled tablets for the universal ID effort by the Indian government. Kaushik’s company already has $400,000 in revenue, and while the business is not a typical venture-fundable one, I see no reason why the company cannot continue to grow in its niche. Koolaring Last, Edoe Cohen from Tel Aviv, Israel pitched Koolaring , a SaaS solution for building private alumni networks a la LinkedIn. I have seen numerous startups with this general idea. It makes perfect sense for universities to have their own private alumni networks, and it is only a matter of time before they do. Whether Koolaring will be the winner in that space or not will depend on execution. So you see, I just shared with you four businesses, none of which would suit YCombinator for a variety of reasons outlined in the video. However, 1M/1M is delighted to help any and all of them. If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program . If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs . If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

Tagged as: facebook, learning, lose-something, online marketing, social-media, sramana-mitra, technology

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Bullets for your valentine (Fired from the internet)

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Bullet Points that might help you decide what to gift on Valentine’s Day We’d all want every day to be a Valentine’s day but reality always has an interesting take on things. This makes it mandatory for us to earmark a day for love. So, Valentine’s Day will always remain a day when hearts pound hard and so do the ring of the cash register (now replaced by data packets over the internet). With only a week to go before V-Day, one must have a fair idea about what he/she would be turning up on the big day. Lovers will gift flowers and chocolates till the times we run out of cocoa or something goes terribly wrong with pollination but with the advent of the internet, there are a gazillion other things to spruce up your love life. Here are some of the options followed by the ever green red options. Players like Chumbak or a lesser known but equally interesting Shopo.in come with a unique offering for Valentine’s Day wherein they add a lot more meaning to a gift. Shopo has an interesting serivce wherein LoveGuru Aisha would be online in the evenings to suggest gifts.” We’re celebrating the season of love which started from January 20 and we’re seeing amazing response which was very much expected. Usually it’s a wee bit difficult for girls to find something for their men but we have a special offering this time around exclusively for men as well”, says Krithika Nelson, founder at Shopo. Deal sites like Vouchersmate also have an interesting offer. “Our Valentine catalog for 2012 is exclusive greeting cards collection with selected flower bouquets and range of gift vouchers from top brands, a complete gift box for everyone you love and care” informs Amit, Founder Vouchersmate. And if you for some reason you don’t believe in gifts, you can do something special like go for a desert making workshop! This, if you happen to be in Bangalore, can be done at Chaipatty. And if your hormones within have started whispering about how experimenting can ruin it sometimes, here’s a more conservative list. Flowers The world’s flower trade is pegged at $100 billion which makes it very easy to believe that the first thing that would crop up in one’s mind when one picture Valentine ’s Day is a red rose (and a heart). You can always get a red rose on any other day but if you’ve woken up too late, you would be lucky to find a rose stem which could signify the purity of your love. Be prepared and get your flowers before hand from the likes of FernsNPetals. A TOI report says the highest price that a rose could fetch was Rs 36 last year. But the quality of these roses which have been stored and treated for the special day (to fetch rosy prices) is contentious. In this age where every Romeo, Laila and Majnu knows about the buzzword- innovation, flowers don’t fit in the bill. it always works as an accompaniment, but you need a plan A. Perfumes The market for perfume in India is huge now where a luxury mall can expect to do a sale of Rs 50000 on a normal day. And a well informed decision about a fragrance can definitely earn oneself some brownie points wherein the polished connoisseur part of you is to be showcased. There are a number of e-commerce companies like Perfume2order catering to this need where you can find perfumes from a Chanel to a Nina Ricci. Perfumes might burn a few holes in the pockets but it definitely mends the heart. Chocolates The chocolate market in India is Rs 2000 crore as of 2011 in which Cadbury has 70% and Nestle has 25% of the market share! But the dark horses (or the chocolates) in these race are the ‘home made chocolates’ which are no longer only made in homes but have a very high gift value. Many ventures including startups like Chocofthetown have special packages for Valentine’s Day which see huge business. Lingerie A bold option but for a fast moving India, certainly a hot topic with e-commerce players like Zivame and MyLace doing really well. The discounts for the Valentine’s season are as high as up to 85% which would surely be enticing. And the other plus here is that both the parties involved so this might be the option worth trying wherein both the parties would benefit. Zivame founder Kapil Karekar says, “We started the campaign in the third week of January and the response has been overwhelming!” Here is a compilation of the websites mentioned in the article (the list is solely an indicator to the possible service providers in the various segments): FernsNPetals (MD, Vikas Gutgutia’s romatic story about finding FNP), Perfume2Order , ChocOftheTown , MyLace , Zivame , Shopo , Vouchersmate and Chaipatty . Hope you find the match for your match! – Jubin Mehta

Tagged as: accounting, business, education, internet, learning, marketing, online marketing, social-media, unsexy-startups

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