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Microsoft BizSpark Launches India Startup Challenge 2012, USD100K Up For Grabs

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

YourStory.in is happy to share an exciting opportunity for all the entrepreneurs in the cloud and mobile space to consider. Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge is an effort to find entrepreneurs with innovative business ideas that can significantly impact their markets. The search is for fresh ideas and vibrant leaders who can help shape the future of Cloud computing and Mobile application. This is a platform, for those start-ups or individuals who leverage the power of these latest technologies to build applications that impact the future of business. Microsoft is looking for a business plan that is innovative, has scalable market potential and the team behind the plan should be able to articulate a vision and execute their business plan. The business plan being submitted should include an Executive Summary, Management/Founders Biographies, Business Description, Market Analysis, Competitive Overview, Business Risk Summary and Financial Projections. The submissions need not be lengthy and may describe the business with a link to the actual app or website. The selection would be based on a combination of the business plan and the application. At the finals, the selected participants would briefly present its business and demo the app What’s in for the Winners? The challenge offers an opportunity for Startups to win huge grants to realise their business plan. The 16 Finalists will be shortlisted on the basis of ingenuity, creativity and innovation of the submitted plans. 1 st and the 2 nd winner of each category stand to win a grant of USD 30000 and USD 15000 respectively. The 4 runners-up in Cloud category will receive a grant of USD 1000 each and 3 runners-up in Mobile category will receive a grant of USD 1000. But most importantly, the challenge is an opportunity for the BizSpark Community to build and deepen connections, share ideas, network partners and celebrate the individual successes of member startups. Who can participate? Participants who currently have product/IP startup that fulfill all the following criteria are entitled to participate in the challenge Product/IP startup (with defensible technologies) which are leveraging Microsoft technologies to create impact in the marketplace, Viability of the product/IP startup (Market opportunity, Competition, etc.), The disruptive role the Product/IP startup plays in the IT landscape, the unique value proposition, Product/IP startup must have the following focus areas: Cloud Computing OR Mobile Applications Evaluation Criteria All business plans will be evaluated on a number of criteria, including: Merits of innovation: At Microsoft we know a thing or two about innovation- after all, innovative spirit has shaped the past 35 years of our business. While we are interested in ideas that will impact the future of Cloud computing and Mobile application, what is most important is the ingenuity, creativity and innovation intrinsic to your business plan. Market potential: Does your product or service scale and address a sizable market? Management capabilities: We are looking for teams that can articulate a vision and execute their business plan. G Score: Framework developed by Guidewire group. To view, please click here Please ensure your business plan includes an Executive Summary, Management/Founders Biographies, Business Description, Market Analysis, Competitive Overview, Business Risk Summary and Financial Projections. Contest at a Glance Categories Cloud Computing & Mobile Application Eligibility 18 years or older citizen or legal resident of India Winning Criteria 1. Innovation2. Market Potential3. Management Capability 4. GScore Prizes Each Category1st prize: $30k 2nd prize: $15k Seven Runners-up prizes: $1k Important Submission Date Last date of submission: May 15, 2012 If you have any query/ suggestions please write to me at shradha@yourstory.in , will be happy to discuss.

Tagged as: cloud news, kiran-kumar, mobile news, password, php, podcast

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“We Wanted to Show Consumers What Gourmet Products Really Mean,” Parvati Gianchandani, Yzury.com

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

When it comes to premium gourmet food, Indians seek a quality experience which is exclusive and goes beyond value-for-money. The rapid growth in urbanization, the rising income levels, the exposure to global culture and the growth of specialty restaurants are the key drivers of the Premium food market in India. The section of consumers seeking a luxury gourmet experience is growing very quickly and so far, high quality food is only available in 5 star hotels. Strongly believing that the demand is higher than the supply and the market is evolving slowly, but by offering more imported products at very high prices rather than high quality foods at reasonable prices, Luxe Corporation in India decided to launch its retail branch www.yzury.com for all Indian consumers and Foodies. The Grand opening was on February, 6th, 2012 in Bangalore. YourStory.in finds out more with Parvati Gianchandani , Founder, Luxe Corporation. What prompted you to enter the B2C market when Luxe Corporation was already doing great in the B2B market? After supplying the B2B market, principally the Hospitality market, for 2 years, with European Food & Beverages through Luxe Corporation in India, we noticed the lack of choice for consumers in supermarkets and even in specialized shops. We think that the consumer in India has the same right to have access to Gourmet products of high quality as does everyone else in the world! We also noticed the multiplication of retailers and e-retailers who used the word “gourmet” to qualify the quality of their products because they are imported and/or expensive. These retailers and e-retailers lie to the consumers. A Gourmet product is characterized by the use of high quality ingredients and authentic processing and usually caters to the connoisseur. That’s the first reason why we decided to enter the B2C segment; to tell consumers what gourmet actually means. We decided to open our products directly to all Indian consumers with three main purposes – to give them the opportunity to taste new flavours with authentic products which directly come from international producers; to give them a better choice with a large range of products in the same family; and to widen the price range proposed to the consumer: Thus, we offer systematically, a first price very low to discover the product, several intermediary prices, and a high price for very high quality. The ecommerce format is ideal for a gourmet shop project because it makes the product more accessible, both in terms of the variety of products available at the ease of ordering from home and also the number of people who can buy products irrespective of their geographical locations. Is the COD service in-house or do you use third party services? What percentage of your customers use the COD payment mode? All the customers pay in COD as only this service is available on the e-boutique. The COD service is in-house. We have divided Bangalore into 4 zones and hired 8 people to assure to the customer that he can be delivered very quickly whatever his area in Bangalore. Generally, when a customer orders in the morning, he’ll be delivered in the afternoon on the same day. If he orders in the afternoon, depending on the hour, he’ll be delivered on the same day in the evening or the day after in the morning. The most important thing for us is to assure a very good quality of service at any time for our customers. What’s the USP or differentiating factor of Yzury? Thanks to our subsidiary in France, Luxe Corp France, we have a dedicated team of experts in Europe to select directly the products that our customers want. All our products come from small artisanal growers and producers which we select with lots of attention. We visit all the farm producers to see the manufacturing of the product from the beginning to the end and we taste all of the products before proposing them to consumers; thus, we can guarantee the good taste and the quality. Then, we import all the products through our own group, again to guarantee to the customers the management of the shipment and the freshness of the products. We decided for the selection of our first range of products to, shop in the culinary capital, Paris, to offer a range of Gourmet products with rich flavors and vivid colors, most of them are new products in India. We have selected classic products as Chocolate, Cookies and Jams and more sophisticated products as Truffles, Candies, and flavoured Vinegar and Oil.We want to be transparent with our customers and show them how we have selected the product, where the product comes from, who manufactures the product and how to consume it. What is the size of the market you are targeting? Revolution is taking place across the nation and consumers want to have access to the best international cuisine. The range of gourmet foods has expanded over the last 5 years. There is no official estimation on Gourmet food market size in India, but we can foresee it around $16 billion with, according to our estimation, a CAGR of 25% each year. From an economic point of view, the top three segments – globals, strivers and seekers, comprising around 40 million households in 2011, are existing and potential shoppers for Yzury.com. From a “Food Lover” point of view, we try to open the Gourmet market to whoever loves high quality products whatever his/her income. When you talk about Food, you talk about passion! How are you generating revenue at present? Are you also looking at raising funds? After 2 months, 50% of our clients are Indian and 50% Expatriates. For the sweet section, chocolates, cookies and teas constitute the best sellers head trio. We have just launch 2 days ago the return of the French cheese in Bangalore with 11 different references; it’s already a success! We have launched Yzury.com with our own capital. We’ll go for funding with our future development is Asia. Tell us something about the team behind Yzury. From the General Manager to the delivery staff, via the marketing Director, the craftswomen who hand make the baskets or the people in charge of gift wrapping, everybody at Yzury feels they have a real mission: showing that they are proud to work in the delicatessen business to continue a tradition of authenticity, of refinement and elegance which characterizes Yzury.com. Yzury specialists, with their international culture and expertise, select for our customers the best products all over the world. The Yzury Team which selects the products all over the world includes Mr. Lionel Falcoz, Mr. Olivier Canu and Mr. Alexandred’Hautefeuille. Where do you see Yzury five years from now? In the second semester of 2012, we’ll open products in Chennai and Hyderabad. Then in 2013, we’ll bring the products in Mumbai and Delhi. Yzury.com in the next five year needs to be strong in the tier one cities market before increasing its development in Asia. We want to become, in the next 5 years, the reference in India in term of Gourmet products and High Quality Food. After that, we’ll export the concept in others countries in Asia, mainly in Malaysia, Vietnam and others. The business model of Yzury.com will remain online to be competitive when the 100% FDI in multi-brand will be open. However, in parallel with the online store, we prepare the launch of a showroom to give the possibility to the producers all over the world to expose their products in India. Check out Yzury to know more and also WowDining and MADOrders for more food for thought! Authors – Meghna Chhabria & Abhilasha Dafria

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Can Online Classifieds Portals Capture a Major Chunk of Online Advertising Revenue in India?

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

Online advertising has three primary categories, namely search advertising, display advertising and classified. Classified portals cater to various categories like job listings, real estate listings, automotive listings, yellow pages and some even cater to multiple categories. As internet user base grows in India more businesses will be driven online and spending on online classified will increase. According to an Edelweiss report the global online classifieds segment stands at USD 10.5 billion, which translates to 17% of global internet ad revenues. The size of India’s online classified industry is about INR 11 billion and is expected to grow to INR 31 billion by 2016. The report also says that the growth potential in segments such as real estate, cars and general classified is ripe to be captured. However, the supply side is not adequate to meet such large demand despite the readiness of users. Further, the online classified industry in India has grown through vertical sites in different segments unlike the US where the biggest classifieds site is Craiglist, a horizontal portal. Some of the Indian classified portals working in with a horizontal model are OLX.in, Quickr.com and Clickindia.com. Most classified sites generate revenue through content creation or content access. So if a business advertiser makes itself available on Justdial.com then it is an example of content creation and in case of content access an apt example would be Naukri.com, where candidates access a database. Advertising is another revenue channel. “Advertising will remain our main revenue model. We also have Featured Listings that users can buy to get a value added placement on top of the listings or on the home page of the site,” informed Amarjit Batra , Country Head , OLX.in . Online classified is expected to hit newspaper revenue as well. In USA internet is second only to television as an advertising medium according to a report by Emarketer. China also had similar experiences, where internet revenues are expected to cross newspaper revenue in 2012 as per iResearch report. In India the share of print advertising revenue in the total ad revenue dropped from 44% to 42% in 2010 according to a Pitch-Maddison report. But the internet market is still comparatively small in India and local language content is very limited, and that is where newspapers still hold the upper hand. The Edelweiss report also projects that SMBs will emerge as top spenders in online advertising in India. There are 35 million SMBs, of which just 0.2 million have an online presence. Online advertising will help them reach their target audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertisement and they will also be able to track return on investment. The report sums it up by saying, “Thus large potential market is there with factors like huge benefits of Internet advertisement, low cost of advertising on Internet, increasing awareness about this sector, increasing global competition as well as opportunity of targeting global market they will emerge as big spenders in near future. This is largely the potential for horizontal classified models.” “Presently and in the near future, the online classifieds space is clearly going to shift to the horizontal classifieds model as these sites are free to search, free to post ads, free to interact and free to transact; thus providing immense value to users. Moreover these sites are local which is where most of the transactions are sought and completed by an average individual,” said Amarjit. Indians are spending a significant amount of time on these classifieds portals.

Tagged as: india, kiran-kumar

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iTrans Technologies Endeavoring to End Vehicle Security Issues with Tcop

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

The iTrans Technologies journey began when founder, Mallesh Reddy , was working for Sony. During his stint at Sony, Mallesh got interested in the consumer electronics space. At Sony he handled both product management and product development duties. The company offered him an option to enroll for a MBA course, which he completed in 2004, and returned to try his hand at intrapreneurship at Sony. In 2008, Mallesh returned to India with an intention to startup. Transportation and telecom were two areas he was passionate about. He wanted to come up with a product or solution that was relevant to the Indian market. “I was staying in Bangalore and my car was broken into twice and some of my things were stolen. I realized that a number of car owners face similar issues. That is when the idea struck! Why not develop a product/solution which connects the car with the mobile,” said Mallesh. There are a number of hardware and software companies addressing this issue, but there is little or no integration between the two. “We developed Tcop keeping this in mind. Once you buy and install Tcop in your car, you do not need any other hardware component, software or firmware upgrades, GP, etc. It also comes with a built-in SIM,” informed Mallesh. “We completed developing the prototype around end-2008 and early-2009 and in December 2009, we began production of Tcop. By May 2010, we reached out to all major car brands operating in India and got the product installed in demo cars. The feedback we got was encouraging, so in August 2010 we made Tcop available to the consumers,” added Mallesh. Tcop sends a SMS alert to the owner if the car is either moved, the ignition is switched on, any of the doors are opened or if there is an intrusion in the car, where the car is opened without a key. The SMS alert contains the current location of the car and the date, time and place when the car was moved. “You have given your car to a friend or relative for the weekend, but want to keep a virtual eye on the whereabouts of your car. Tcop can be programmed to send you route details and location of the car ,” said Mallesh. Two-way communication is also possible with Tcop. So, when you discover that your car has been stolen or moved, without your knowledge, you can remotely turn on the siren. In the financial year ending 31st March 2011, iTrans reported sales of INR 1 crore . For the financial year that ended on 31st March 2012, their sales target was INR 2.5 crore , which they comfortably reached. Currently, Tcop is available across the southern part of India. iTrans has plan in place to expand into the north Indian market this calendar year. A recent census conducted by the NGO Mumbai Environment Social Network revealed that in a city like Mumbai the growth rate for vehicles is 9% per annum , which basically means that about 60,000 new cars are added on the roads every year . The numbers are similar for all the major cities in India. “Car owners already have buying power that is the reason they were able to buy a car. Car owners are also mostly knowledgeable consumers and definitely own a mobile. This makes the market opportunity for Tcop quite large,” said Mallesh. So far they have sold over 2700 devices in less than 2 years . In Bangalore alone iTrans sells around 200 devices each month. “Our target is to reach 1% device sales in every market we operate in,” informed Mallesh. iTrans has attracted investment from both Public Ltd and Private Ltd companies, which includes a well-known automobile manufacturer. Currently, they have sales and marketing offices in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Cochin. Over the next few months they will be opening offices in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi. Speaking about the future plans of iTrans and Tcop, Mallesh concluded, “So far we have developed the product keeping solely the consumers needs in mind. Now we need to take care of our partner and associate needs. We need to ensure that installing Tcop in a car is an easy and fast process. It takes about 10 minutes install the product presently; we are working on reducing that time down to 1 or 2 minutes. This will take Tcop to the next level.” To find out more about iTrans, visit http://www.tcop.co.in/

Tagged as: disclaimer, enterprise, guest columnists, kiran-kumar, partners, password, podcast, popular-on-cloudstory-in

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Picovico, a Morpheus Gang Company, Lets You Collate Photos&Make Memorable Videos Easily

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

Let’s begin with a trivia: Photo uploads per day on facebook, instagram and flickr are in 100’s of million, with 250 million photos on facebook only per day! That’s a crazy number to grapple. But to look at it, over the past few years smart phones / digital cameras / mobile apps and social networks have completely changed the way people communicate. How they create and consume photos has also changed significantly. Photos we click always have a story, a memory and a context around it. And Picovico aims to provide tools that help keep that context intact, bring the story together and share a memory beautifully. Picovico intends to change the way people share their photos on internet by providing an easy and fast way to create beautiful videos from your photos. You can blend your photos along with text and music to create the video or Picovico, as they call it! They strongly felt sharing photos isn’t complete unless the narrative behind it is brought out. So, they merged the concept and thought of creating video alongside the story. With Picovico, your friends just click play and sit back to view your pictures in a nice story format, with handpicked background score. They also made sure making the video is not a herculean job. They designed Picovico with simplicity in mind, so that even a small kid can create videos without anyone’s help. While it is simple for users, behind the scenes their system creates videos at the speed, that they claim, none of their competitors could match. They built powerful GPU based rendering platform to make this happen. Picovico is free for now, as they are focusing on growth and traction currently. Once they get that, there shall be many possible revenue models to explore. Currently, they allow upto 30 photos per video and the video quality is restricted to 360p (standard youtube quality video). Besides that, they have released API for developers, photographers and others. After an initial period of free usage they plan to charge per video for API with no up-front fee. The Idea of Two Nepali Engineers Picovico is the brainchild of Manish and Suraj , two computer engineers who enjoy writing code. Both of them are from Nepal and moved to Bangalore about a year ago after being accepted by startup accelerator – The Morpheus. “We were selected in 6th batch of the Morpheus in July 2011. Those four months of incubation with the Morpheus helped us grow a lot and took us to greater height,” Suraj tells Yourstory. Having launched the public beta on 25th March 2012 , i.e in less than two weeks, they have seen usage with 500+ users / 400+ videos and 3000+ views across all videos. “People love to watch videos. But making a video is the last thing they want to do. They have the ‘complicated process’ fear in making videos. We have simplified it extremely at our end. Though changing the mindset of the people could be our biggest obstacle, looking at usage of the product so far – we are confident that this hurdle can be triumphed over with an awesome product!” Suraj, on behalf of PicoVico, concludes. To find out more, visit Picovico . Also Check out SecPanel , another Morpheus Gang company in the field of serer security.

Tagged as: cloud, creative entrepreneurs, disclaimer, enterprise, guest-columns, lose-something, partners, password

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SMBTechEdge from Safew Labs: An Open Source Business Solution

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

SMBTechEdge , tag-lined as the complete business solution provider, gives a comprehensive IT infrastructure solution for companies of any domain and size. A product of Safew Labs , SMBTechEdge claims to reach what is called the ‘last mile’ of the consumer base of IT products and services, thereby bridging the digital divide. Being an open source software, it is available free of cost, and the only cost that customers would have to bear include those of implementation and customization. “SMBTechEdge is a single window for IT Infrastructure to state in very simple terms. We being canonical (the parent company of Ubuntu Linux) partners were involved in migrating several small businesses from proprietary platforms (Microsoft Windows, Office, IBM Lotus Notes , Microsoft Exchange, Autodesk Autocad etc.) to Open Source based platforms” , says Saurabh the co-founder of SMBTechEdge. The inspiration behind creating the product SMBTechEdge was three pronged. Firstly, it was observed that most of their targeted customers use pirated software knowingly or unknowingly and end up getting chased by companies. Secondly, there were multiple vendors for multiple operations. On a bad day if more than one of these services would fail, it could quickly turn into a horror for these customers. Finally, a lot of locals use proprietary platforms to build apps, thus locking them further into an ecosystem that forces them into piracy. Talking a bit about how it all started out, Saurabh says “We had 3 pilot customers and there were a host of others joining the list soon as we had multiple installations going live. The sectors we’ve covered so far are finance , manufacturing, pharma and optical . Our case study, also published on OpenStack website( http://www.openstack.org/user-stories/safew-labs/ ) , was with Geecon Fx, a company that deals in forex trading.” The Team The SMBTechEdge team is a small and dedicated one. Besides founders Saurabh and Raghav SK , Sudhir VIshwakarma and Hasmukh Rathod handle the app development. Chetan Tandel is the system admin who handles the cloud development and virtualization side of things while Alankar Misra is the designer for the team. ERP Tool Besides SMBTechEdge, the team had embarked on an ambitious project of developing an ERP system called ShoonyEk. The origin of its name is interesting since ShoonyEK is Shoonya + Ek (0+1) and it is meant to bridge the digital divide. Customers of this product up until now range from real estate companies to cotton vendors and optical shops. Alongside the fact that being an open source platform is a huge plus, SMBTechEdge believes in providing a solution that is completely flexible, technically as well as in terms of price. Applications like ERP, CRM and Payroll are all on top of private cloud solutions of OpenStack. All these components can also be managed and remotely serviced through this dashboard. Also, the complete source is present on github.com, so that developers can customize it for their own purposes. Apart from this, Saurabh adds, “we believe in openness and transparency. We provide training to selected people from the company and train them on basic troubleshooting. This creates a first line of defense, something like first aid in case of emergencies and till the time support responds to the query.” Logistics and Marketing The cost of product would vary from company to company, but the average price range being dealt with would be around 2.5 to 3 lakhs for installation. The revenue model is precise and works on two things – customization and installation charges, followed by support. A service level agreement for a year can also be set up. Marketing a product, which quite often is the make or break process as far as startups are concerned, was done with the help of two techniques – road shows and referrals. “Referral is the key as our work speaks for itself. So we ask our customers to educate their peers. We offer them group discounts and build products with similar customizations for all of them, so that it’s profitable for us and they get to avail a certain discount,” says Saurabh. The obstacles faced by any software based product would primarily revolve around making people understand the benefits of the product and justifying the pricing. Also, making customers resist change and having end users adopt the product would be a huge challenge. Looking ahead at the future, the team feels that there is a definite need to increase the strength of their technical and marketing teams. With the evidence of their success so far in terms of expansion, one wouldn’t be wise to bet against them making it big in the IT solutions industry. Website: http://smbtechedge.com/

Tagged as: cloud, guest-columns, india, kiran-kumar, lose-something, password, php, popular-on-cloudstory-in, tech, tech entrepreneurs

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Savaari Car Rentals Secures INR 5 Crore Funding from Inventus Capital Partners

by Paul Joseph April 3, 2012 Featured

Savaari Car Rentals Pvt Ltd, India’s largest online chauffeur driven car rental company has received its Series A funding of INR 5 crore from Inventus Capital Partners. This is a first for any online car rental organization in the country. Since its inception, Savaari has grown to a network of over 100 operators across 60 cities and has clocked an experience of over 7 lakh trip hours and 75 lakh trip kms. Savaari Car Rentals is targeted at corporate users, retail users and online travel agents. Clients of Savaari opt for day trips as well as multi-day, multi-city trips. Savaari has/will invest in these three areas: A robust integrated backend engine that allows easy bookings management, as well as giving automated billing for its customers. Further investment in technology solutions to deliver superior travel experiences to the customer. Savaari will also use the funds raised to hire top marketing talent, and grow its business across cities by establishing a robust sales network. “We are excited to have access to Inventus and their entrepreneurial experience. We believe that their support and direction will help us innovate and establish ourselves as the leader in the online car rental space in the country. The funds will be utilized to expand our reach within the country and in building a valued, scalable & innovative business” said Gaurav Aggarwal, Founder & CEO of Savaari. Founder, Gaurav Aggarwal “In Savaari we found a passionate entrepreneur who had boot-strapped the business to make it a significant pan-India operation. Inventus believes the highly fragmented car rental market is ripe for aggregation, and Savaari is well poised to become the leading player in this space” said Samir Kumar, Managing Director, Inventus Advisory Services. “Inventus has used Savaari for over 50+ trips across multiple cities, and we’re very satisfied customers ourselves”, he added. Samir Kumar and Parag Dhol from Inventus Advisory Services (India) will be joining the Board of Directors at Savaari. More about savaari here and read about the interview with Gaurav here

Tagged as: bulletin, cloud, disclaimer, india, kiran-kumar, microsoft, partners, password, php, podcast, popular-on-cloudstory-in, press releases

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Amazon Web Services Launches “The Lean Cloud” Program for Start-Ups in Asia Pacific

by Paul Joseph April 2, 2012 Featured

Program brings the AWS Cloud to the ecosystem of start-ups, venture capitalists, business incubators to help startups accelerate their business Amazon Web Services (AWS) launches its regional “The Lean Cloud” program at the Australian Technology Park (ATP) in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday, April 3, 2012. Dr Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon, will be delivering an opening keynote on how aspiring start-ups can use AWS Cloud to power a lean lifecycle when running, scaling, and innovating on their products or services. Guest speaker, Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup”, will outline the concepts in his book and share how this new approach to business is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. They will be joined on stage in a panel discussion by Stuart Richardson, Founder & Managing Partner of Adventure Capital; Andrew Stead, Business Development Director of ATP Innovations and co-founder of Sydney Angels; Australian entrepreneur Nathan Brumby, CEO of Deputy.com and Hong Kong-based Technology Director of 8 Securities, Francis Otshudi. This event will also be streamed online live across Asia Pacific at 3:00 p.m. AEDT. To watch the event live, visit http://aws.amazon.com/apac/leancloud/livestream/ Many aspiring entrepreneurs have often spent time navigating routes in starting a business. Many require help and resources to bring ideas to fruition in a short timeframe. Start-ups have also been traditionally constrained by the availability of technology infrastructure to develop their products and services. Since launching publicly six years ago, AWS has enabled hundreds of thousands of companies of all business sizes in over 190 countries to free up their precious engineering resources to focus on their core competence that truly differentiate their business, rather than worrying about the infrastructure. This has helped level the playing field for start-up companies to leverage the AWS Cloud to easily and quickly experiment their ideas at a low cost, build their businesses and compete in the global marketplace. Many of these start-ups have grown into large global businesses such as Flipboard , SmugMug , Etsy , Foursquare and Playfish . In Asia Pacific, many start-up customers like 8 Securities, 99Designs , FilterSquad, Deputy.com, Dropmyemail.com, Dolphin Browser, Olaworks , Paprika Lab , Papaya Mobile , Myntra and redBus are running their businesses on AWS Cloud. To support the growing start-up movement, AWS in Asia Pacific launches “The Lean Cloud”, a program that aims to provide education, training, and the global exposure for promising start-ups. The program will include business mentoring, technical workshops, networking events etc which start-ups can leverage AWS Cloud to develop their product faster, accelerate time to market and monetize their offerings as their business grow. For more information on the program, visit http://aws.amazon.com/leancloud With the global ecosystem of AWS customers, venture capitalists and business incubators, “The Lean Cloud” program brings together the key stakeholders in Asia Pacific that enable aspiring start-ups to learn quickly and provide access to the resources, expertise and cloud technology that help their businesses to be successful. “Many of the Amazon Web Services’ customers have grown from start-ups to global businesses at a rapid rate as they are able to use cloud services to focus on their core competence instead of worrying about the infrastructure,” said Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon. “We are pleased to provide the learning platform with ‘The Lean Cloud’ program in Asia Pacific for the vibrant start-up community at their early stages to enable them to accelerate their journey to success. With AWS Cloud and our global ecosystems of venture capitalists, business incubators and start-up customers, we are excited to bring these resources and knowledge in one platform that makes it so easy for the entrepreneurs to gain access quickly.” Quotes from venture capitalist, business incubator, AWS customers in Asia Pacific Venture Capitalists’ Quote “When we fund companies, we are investing in the founding team and their ability to execute. We need them to focus on acquiring customers, generating revenue, and minimizing costs”, said Stuart Richardson, Founder & Managing Partner of Adventure Capital. “Amazon Web Services removes the barrier of infrastructure investments and management, allowing startups to focus on growing their business. Furthermore, their pay-as-you-use pricing model and continuous price reductions help to minimize the costs of experimentation, development, and scaling out.” “Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) invests in start-ups that can grow very fast so scalability is crucial. Amazon Web Services enables this scalability on a global scale, allowing some of our portfolio companies to reach customers globally in an easy and cost effective way,” said Songbo Li, Partner at DFJ Compass. “For fast growing start-ups, building your business on the cloud is a no-brainer, and AWS is a logical choice.” Business Incubator’s Quote “Amazon Web Services is a start-up’s best friend,” said Niki Scevak, co-founder, Startmate. “Not only have they taken a large upfront cost and turned it into a small pay-as-you go fee, they have also taken the time to understand each Startmate’s business and their founders and introduce them to useful people.” AWS customer based in Sydney, Australia “Deputy.com is a young company looking to truly exploit the paradigm shift in technology that cloud infrastructure has enabled. We believe we have a disruptive solution to a very common problem confronting employees and employers every day – how to connect and communicate better,” said Nathan Brumby, CEO of Deputy.com. “In working with Amazon Web Services, Deputy.com has a cloud platform, an expert team and a global presence through AWS cloud to remove some of the challenges that typically confront small companies. We know we offer an enterprise quality cloud solution, we know we can gain access to help when needed, we know we can be anywhere in the world to grow our customer base, and we know we can realize our vision to be a truly ubiquitous application.” AWS customer based in Singapore “Once we decided on Amazon Web Services, it took us one day to move all of our workload on AWS Cloud. We couldn’t scale with our other providers but with AWS, there is no limitation. If we get a lot of traffic, we just scale up; and if we have less traffic, we just scale down, and we only pay for what we use. That’s really important to our business. We just don’t want to fail,” said, John Fearon, Founder & CEO, Dropmyemail.com. AWS customer based in Seoul, South Korea “Now that we have gathered experience and working knowledge of managing AWS Cloud with our existing product, we believe we can accelerate our time to market for future products, and free ourselves from the burden of managing a physical server infrastructure,” said John S. Kim, Founder and CEO of Paprika Lab.

Tagged as: amazon, cloud news, codewalla-com, games, guest-columns, india, lose-something, microsoft, news, php, rakesh-raju, tech news

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Ludovic Ulric on Microsoft’s BizSpark Plus program for India

by Paul Joseph April 2, 2012 Featured

Ludovic Ulric from Microsoft’s BizSpark team outlines how startups in India can enter the BizSpark program. BizSpark was launched in 2008 with 12 entrepreneurs and has helped more than 50,000 entrepreneurs and 80,000 developers worldwide since then. Moving forward, BizSpark plus has been launched in India wherein a select group of entrepreneurs would be given up to $ 60,000 worth of Microsoft products. BizSpark has locally partnered with Accel Partners and TheMorpheus to recognize the potential startups from India. Here’s more about the program and entrepreneurship from Ludovich: http://yourstory.in/yourstory- tv/ludovic-ulrich-global- program-manager-microsoft- bizspark/

Tagged as: chances, codewalla-com, games, guest-columns, india, kiran-kumar, lose-something, microsoft, php, podcast, rakesh-raju, tech news

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Do You Find Data on the Web Too Cumbersome? Dataweave.in Simplifies The Problem

by Paul Joseph April 2, 2012 Featured

Data and gaining insights in data are crucial for any business: Be it in creating applications or gaining insights from data, any developer or business has to get the “right data in the right form”. Though lots of valuable public data exists on the Web, this data is hard to use. Businesses often manually collate this data which is time consuming and costly. To ease this, Banglore based DataWeave provides easy-to-access data APIs over data that exists on the Web. It helps users discover, monitor and visualize public data on the Web in a uniform format: data APIs, dashboards and visualizations. Data examples that businesses find useful are pricing data and open data.The ideal of DataWeave is, “Data must be easily accessible and readily available to all users”. Operational from April 2011, DataWeave creates datasets by aggregating data (both structured and unstructured) from disparate sources that are continuously changing, extracting relevant data from these sources and making them available through easy to use data APIs. Users get data in json format, now, but can be provided with data in any of the standard formats (xls, csv, xml …) Currently, they are concentrating on two data verticals: Pricing data and open government data. PriceWeave.com , a price aggregation and monitoring engine, is the first product that has been built using DataWeave’s API. As a whole, data sales is a $100B industry in the US. $2.3M worth applications are built using open data. With the Web as a distribution channel and including open data into their offerings, Dataweave feels this field can be disrupted. While US Companies like datamarket.com , factual.com , semantics3.com necessarily operate in the same space, Dataweave concentrates on providing data related to the APAC region. Indiatimes Shopping, Easyration, Hoopos and Zigwheels are currently using their dataAPIs. Their customers fall broadly into the category of Application developers, Market research firms, Media orgranizations, Data Analysts and eCommerce companies. The revenue generated is of a monthly subscription based model, where users pay for the number of API calls they make. Currently, they are working on their pricing model and create a pay-as-you-use model. Starting Up: A team of 4 currently, Dataweave was conceptualized by : Karthik B. R.- who completed his masters in information retrieval from IIIT –Bangalore in 2007. He worked at the internet arm of Network18 for a period of 3 years. Vikranth Ramanolla - who worked at the internet arm of Network18 for a period of 3 years. He was responsible for building huge distributed data processing systems. DakshinaMurthy BM , who completed his masters in operating systems from IIIT –Bangalore in 2009. He worked at the internet arm of Network18 for a period of 2 years. Then worked at Glam Media for 1 year. At Network18, they realized that though a lot of public data exists, people don’t know how to access and extract this data into a usable format. That was when they hit on this idea of providing aggregated / curated datasets using a data-as-a-service model. They raised a sum of 10 Lakhs INR from TLabs and are looking to raise more funds. “ It is relatively a new market that people are beginning to notice now. Designing APIs that lets businesses / developers easily access this data. Tapping into the developer community is also a challenge. The technology stack has to be robust to handle big data problems. We need to efficiently extract data from various different formats and represent them efficiently ” Karthik, on behalf of Dataweave , tells Yourstory.

Tagged as: chances, enterprise, india, kiran-kumar, lose-something, microsoft, php, tech, tech entrepreneurs

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