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Best of the Week – UID, IPL 2010 [and more]

Editorial — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:33:25 PDT

This week, IPL has pretty much taken over the conversation and even Google India used the IPL wave to promote its IPL-YouTube partnership.

Startups/Funding Related Stories

Technology

Jobs

For Google, IPL 2010 is Damn Important [Starts Promoting from Homepage] For Google, IPL’s YouTube partnership is so important that they...
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For Google, IPL 2010 is Damn Important [Starts Promoting from Homepage]

sinha — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:37:51 PDT

For Google, IPL’s YouTube partnership is so important that they have started promoting a specially created page for IPL.

Worldwide, Google has promoted a few products (like Droid) on the homepage, but I believe this is the first time, Google India is promoting a landing page from Google.co.in.

IPL Online - Google IPL Ad

The special landing page created for IPL 2010 is nothing but a major attempt to promote the IPL’s YouTube channel [read: Google India/Youtube Grabs 2 years Exclusive Web Rights to IPL].

Interestingly, the video (as of writing this post) is about SRK watching the IPL match – talks of Google making a tectonic shift from being a technology company to a ‘media’ company.

Also see: Watch IPL – III on Youtube for Free [Live Streaming]

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eYantra Raises $7.8mn – To Acquire 3 Companies, Expand into Office Supplies

sinha — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:18:57 PST

Corporate Gifting and Brand Merchandising firm, eYantra has raised $7.8mn in second round, led by Argonaut Private Equity.

This Series B funding also saw Chennai-based Ventureeast Proactive maintaining its pro-rata investment, which was $2.1 million (Rs 9.5 crore) in March 2008 and $1 million (Rs 4.54 crore) in September 2008, into eYantra. [source]

The company plans three acquisitions in the coming days [Bangalore based Hourglass Essentials which is going to be an all-cash deal;Chennai-based online product customisation company and a New Delhi-based basic office supplier] and will expand into several other businesses like office supplies.

An interesting growth strategy – from corporate gifting to providing ‘staple’ solution like office supplies.

If you look at several companies that started in this business, only few have survived the recession. Infact, most of the online consumer service hasn’t taken off in a big way – and what has worked is tie-up with retail chains like Shoppers stop/Lifestyle etc.

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Take IPL Polls with Missed Calls

sinha — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:48:49 PST

IPL 2010 has begun and here is your chance to participate in the polls (unofficial polls) by giving a missed calls.

The website, IndiPolls will throw a question, possible options and each option will have a phone number associated with it.

All you need to do is to just give a missed call and to the number [associated with a particular option] and bingo – your vote is recorded.

The Missed Call Platform

The platform short circuits the operators’ SMS route and the team is into something bigger. If the platform takes off, it could end up competing with operator’s one of the most significant money making business – voting/polling for reality shows.

Voting in reality TV shows is the most popular contest type urban Indians participate in by sending SMS to preserved short code. 45 million urban Indians mentioned voting in reality TV shows, the most popular SMS contest/vote type followed by voting in news polls (31.64 million).

[source: Mobile VAS subscribers in India – Insights/Prediction]

If the platform achieves traction, expect a sue-dom game from operators.

Do give IndiPolls a spin and share your take.

Also see: Indian Premier League (IPL) and Digital Media

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Indian Premier League (IPL) and Digital Media

Kanupriya Sindhu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:40:25 PST

While earlier seasons of IPL have been hot favorite of traditional media (primarily television) but this time, it definitely seems to be attracting mega bucks for digital medium too. Google has announced the list of sponsors now for its first main sports event which will be streamed live on YouTube. Royal Challengers IPL Team, HSBC India & HP India will be the premium sponsors along with some other big names like Airtel, Coca Cola and Samsung who have also taken the key sponsorship slots. Sponsors’ ads will appear throughout the 60-match tournament, across several ad formats, including pre-roll and mid-roll ads, YouTube homepage ads and banner ads next to the Live player and on video watch pages. For final matches, Royal Challengers’ IPL team will take the main slot whereas HSBC India and HP India will cover the semi-finals. Ads from sponsors will appear in all countries where YouTube is available except the United Kingdom. Sponsors ads will also get featured on the IPL-branded Orkut community page, which will host team and player interviews, contests and match polls to engage fans and audiences. (via: campaigndia)

We had earlier written about IPL live streaming on Youtube though the commercial part of the deal was not clear then, but now with such big names in league for sponsorship of it, there is no second thought on the acceptance as well as commercial success of this new digital distribution initiative.

Not only YouTube, in fact other sports websites are also bullish on season 3 of IPL. As per the latest comScore report, traffic on sports sites have almost doubled in January this year to 10 million, from 5 million visitors in the same month last year. The IPL’s third season, which will start from today, is only expected to increase the traffic more.

India had an estimated 37 million active internet users in January 2010 – which is 15 per cent plus from 32.5 million last year. Yahoo! Cricket leads the pack among sports sites. With nearly 4 million visitors in a single month, it has become the most visited sports destination online. ESPN’s Cricinfo is at the second spot with 3.5 million visitors, followed by Sify Sports with more than a million visitors.

The report also revealed that the total time spent and number of pageviews in the sports category websites have doubled in the last one year. An average sports category visitor spent about 30 minutes at sports sites, viewed 41 pages of content and visited the sports sites nearly 6 times throughout the month (January 2010). In the same month in 2009, an average sports category user spent about 29 minutes, checked 39 pages and landed more than 4 times on sports category sites. Increased pageviews and time spent by visitors can be a positive indication for these sites in their monetization strategy during IPL fever.

With IPL starting from today, it would be interesting to observe the trend in traffic & engagement across different websites. Though there is already a buzz and eagerness amongst internet users to catch the live streaming of IPL matches on YouTube, but as we mentioned in our earlier post, will this affect the traffic of some other popular websites esp. in the lights of new restricted content distribution policy of IPL?

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Hygiene in UID Project [Technical Analysis]

arvind — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:47:40 PST

In this piece on UID, Pratyush & I discuss on some Hygiene issues that would make or break the UID system. And we will definitely refer to the Technical Scope of the recent tenders as well. In our last post, we had someone from the UID team telling us about the sarcasm in the post against philosophy of two-bid tendering system. Not really, it is not sarcasm. But an effort to look through the direction, the technical inconsistencies and ‘hygienically worrying lack of attention’ to the details. For example, check page 18 of this document which mentions the eGovernance platform and we refer -

Quote:

The eGovernance Platform will consist mainly of 3 layers:

1. Back Office layer

2. Infrastructure layer

3. Operations layer

4. Persistent store (database) layer

Unquote

Hey didn’t you just say 3 layers? Thats what we are talking about! That’s just one of the ‘hygiene reason’ enough to be dissatisfied about. In case of UID there seems plenty of super-high-level talk where we believe that the ‘competition in prices’ would be as skewed as interpretation of the Technical Scope.

Picture this: “In December 2009, UIDAI had invited bids from companies to become its project management consultant. Seven companies that includes Booz & Allen, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, KPMG, Capgemini, PA Consulting and Ernst & Young responded to the tender. Only three made it to the final list — Ernst & Young, PA Consulting and Capgemini — as the other four companies were disqualified on technical grounds!” via

While the size of the contract awarded is not known (so much for transparency), Ernst & Young quoted Rs 7.05 crore to emerge the lowest bidder; Capgemini came next with Rs 8.6 crore, and PA Consulting quoted Rs 51 crore. Observe the range of skewness in this bidding from 7.05 crores to 51 crores in just three qualified bids! Funny competition we say.

Hygiene factors are defined clearly in Herzberg Two factor Hygiene – Motivation theory. In short these are design factors that dissatisfy a user (as opposed to satisfying him which Herzberg observed is independent). For example, in an office scenario this might be the cleanliness of bathrooms or availability of stationery or time taken to process payments etc. which might potentially rub people the wrong way and cause them to leave a job unfinished. Half-ass, in other words.

In the UID project we believe there are plenty such factors and we will try to note a few. A lot of it is ‘techie stuff’ – an easy escape statement for most wannabes & noobs out there - but hey this project is about technical stuff and so is the post on it. We will generally avoid demographic inequality or behavior of the census officials as a factor in the analysis.

Hygiene factors -

Issue no. 1: Non transferability – Numbers should be non transferable. This seems like a no-brainer. But like cellphone numbers, thinking 40 -50 years ahead, with two generations born (and some dead), there will be the issue of newer random numbers being generated and some numbers getting “free”. How does UID think of handling those situations? No mention anywhere at all. Microsoft faces a similar issue for its device keys with 4×4 numbers already (they have a lot of products). There has to be a very well thought out story on the “life-cycle” of such identifiers and associated numbers.

This is why the association of cellphone numbers (or as a rumor said – cellphone being the UID) should be thought through very carefully. There are several issues with having cellphone numbers as identifiers – although they still are the best way to have an “unique ID”. They have entity based identification listed in their document, which is a good idea. However UIDAI’s document dismisses outright the re-usability of numbers and quantum of numbers e.g. on page 9 of this document it says “That is 80 billion — is plenty of space”, which we believe is highly underestimating the task at hand (as we were reserving only 1 for entities).

Issue no. 2: Non identifiability of groups – No one should be able to say “My name is Khan – and my UID starts with xxx—-”. On a serious note, no ethnic or religious identifiability / regional identifiability should be possible – hence total randomness should be followed for number allocation. As we had briefly mentioned in our last post, this is a sure-shot game killer. There should be absolutely no way to identify “groups” of people based on their UIDs. This leaves the door very open to racial / regional profiling in a diverse country like ours. Hence number allocations should be almost totally random. Which is why we cannot follow a state based system like the US has for SSN. Imagine MNS activists looking at some ‘Northie UID’ and beat him up!

Issue no. 3: Easy rememberability or atleast retrievability for user – Apart from giving the user a card (with biometric inputs), they should explore alternate methods of rememberability of UIDs and retrievability. India still has a sizeable illiterate population and the physical manifestation of the UID (see we didn’t call it a card) has to incorporate these attributes for the user. Is biometric the only way out here? we do not think so – for the checks with biometric capabilities is costly – although one might argue scales coming into the game and making them viable.

Issue no. 4 Levels of access – (This one is a shocker) – In one of the documents shared by the UID team in the tenders, they refer to Government, private agencies and users in the same breath in terms of access to data. We hope this was an oversight and an exception. The levels of access should be crisply defined and according to the privileges of the different types of users or agencies. The read and write permissions will vary widely across the spectrum of government agencies, semi-public, private agencies (like Banks vs educational institutions). We will talk about updatability later.

Issue no. 5 Resident’s address – From pages 10-12 and again at page 20, the document talks about address as an essential parameter. However, as most of India becomes younger and is urbanized, the flux of people on-the-move is going to only increase and in such a situation, the efficacy of a ’single address’ is questionable. Therefore, permanent address (oh that funny Indian requirement – someone had once told me) is what should be the permanent entry in the DB table and there should be provision to update only the temporary addresses table. Following from the point above (Issue no.4), secondary access bodies should be able to pull and update temporary addresses (along with proof of verification) only. The fact that this doesn’t appear in the document again is slightly surprising (IMHO).

Issue no. 6 Secondary identification – As with all forms of primary identification, there should be secondary identification mechanisms. Let me give an example. If someone has your ICICI bank card, can he withdraw money from your account? The answer is NO – as he would need to know the PIN at the ATM. In case he is doing it online, he would need to know the grid behind your card as well as your online password. We strongly believe that for all “data pulling agencies” (for example verification-by-tax-authorities on the basis of UID) tomorrow such a secondary validation process should be compulsory. This is a huge issue in the US already and we shouldn’t ignore it for UID. But yeah, no mention at all.

Well, so much for Technical Analysis on UID. We do not want to digress beyond this point Do you?

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ClipWeave -Video Analytics Solution To Help You Monetize Better

naman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:45:46 PST

ClipWeave.com is a Noida based video analytics startup that helps extract information from videos so that it can be used for better targeting and monetization. Clipweave claims to use proprietary technology to extract text (credits, ticker, subtitles etc), convert speech-to-text, detect a change of scene etc. from videos. Such information can be used for better Indexing and SEO of videos and also for inserting contextual ads.

Clipweave is targeted as a enterprise solution for Video Publishers and Video ad networks. Such technologies cannot be 100% percent accurate but even by partially automating the whole process of video tagging, cost and turn around time could be reduced. Youtube recently introduced captions for videos which is ultimately aimed to provide the same solution as Clipweave but Youtube is only concentrating on the audio part of the clip where as Clipweave’s solution needs to dig deep into the visuals, analysing every frame.

One challenge in acquiring clients, which the founding team is aware of, is the cheap work force available in developing countries like India where the whole process can be done manually at a very low cost. Already companies like Castingwords are outsourcing such tasks over Mturk at low price but surely with help of automation the prices can be brought down further.

If you are a video publishing platform or an ad network Clipweave’s technology can be of great help to you.

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Startup Hiring in the Face of Receding Recession [Startups]

arvind — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:04:04 PST

Good hiring is always a tough task for any startup. And receding recession could mean even more challenge in the situation, when talent within starts looking at options outside. For greener pastures or simply for the sake of change. Operationally speaking, the cash pay-out of hiring goes way too higher than the recession days and it becomes increasingly challenging for business owners to buy dedication from their employees.

Another aspect of recovering economy is surge of multinationals (for example Zynga coming into India declaring hiring of about 100 odd gaming employees) into the local market and playing a spoil-sport. But that’s a bitter truth one has to live with, and honestly speaking its good to compete.

So how can startups retains talent or hire good guys who would dedicate oneself against the lure of money? Tough question that is but here are some ways which can help:

1. More often than not good developers work only for work satisfaction. Providing tasks which give thrill of execution will surely keep the steam going. (This works even without any extra money for that matter).

2. Do not generalize performance or qualification of individuals and cast them against reports or studies conducted by traditional media. For example: “…80% IITians leave IAS jobs when recession is gone – TOI”. Such reporting makes you lose the other 20% too.

3. Luring with equity might not help. This runs the risk of lowering the perceived value of your equity and will not give any clear objective to developers coming from this part of the world. Simply for the reason that business environment over here is not as matured as in the Valley.

4. Show your solidarity and positivity towards economic recovery. Ramp up your sales strategy coz only sales can fix (by and large) all other problems. Good hiring is only one of the problems, you’d agree.

What more can be adopted to keep the engine chugging. Any suggestions?

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Short QnA with SMSGupshup Team on Appshup Revenue Share, Roadmap

Ashish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:00:11 PST

SMSGupshup recently announced the formal launch of its Appstore, Appshup and since we have been receiving a few queries from our readers, we just passed on the questions to SMSGupshup team.

Here is a short QnA with the team on Appshup:

Qn: What is the revenue share percentage between SMSGupshup and Developers?

70-30 (70% for the developers, 30% for SMS GupShup) of what the carrier pays (payments are held until it crosses a nominal threshold, for administrative convenience)

b. Please share the operators/circles where you have the partnerships.

Pan-India: all circles/operators

c. How are you planning to market the app directory?

On SMS GupShup’s community of 27 million users

d. Any plans to go premium SMS route?

The app platform runs on a premium short code (On a one-off basis, we can offer to run apps on longcodes too. In this case, there may be additional fees for the developer)

e. Please share the API roadmap

The current feature set is fairly rich. You will see a broad variety of new apps launching on the platform over the next few weeks – including many interactive, multi-user games, built on the current platform. We intend to offer more interactivity and better reporting in the next version. We are open to developer feedback on new additions.

Please send in your queries and we will have the SMSGupshup team respond to the same.

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Google Launches Apps Marketplace – 80% Revenue Share with Developers

sinha — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:41 PST

Google has launched Apps Marketplace, an app store for Google apps users.

The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Installable apps are easy to use because they include single sign-on, Google’s universal navigation, and some even include features that integrate with your domain’s data.

Apps installation is easy – it takes 4 steps to install the app and there are apps across various categories – right from accounting/finance to productivity suite, project management etc.

This is a milestone for the online office space, as Google has the muscle power to bring all the existing competition [except MS] under its marketplace.

But what’s really lacking is the discovery of app. You do not go to app marketplace to look for apps – the whole experience has to be deeply embedded into the core product, i.e. Google Apps.

Few months back, Zoho too launched Zoho Apps marketplace [Zoho Launches Marketplace for Apps, Pokes Google] and this time, Google has upped the bar with its revenue sharing deal – Google will keep only 20% of the revenue.

Watch this intro video of Google Apps Marketplace

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Dunnitt- Micro Collaboration Tool (Review)

naman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:41 PST

Dunnitt is a micro collaboration tool. It lets you create threads with a micro message (140 chars) and share it with a collaboration group. Each thread could be Text Only, YesNo, Question, Sign Up Sheet, Multiple Choice or Meet Up. And with proper input fields for each of them.

Dunnitt- Micro Collaboration Tool

Dunnit is aimed to be a device independent collaboration tool. The idea behind this as the team shares is:

Twitter is Many-to-Many Information Sharing in Real-time.

What if you had Many-to-Many Activity Sharing and Updates in Real-Time, from anywhere, any place and any device?

The tool is dead simple and the use cases are strong. But the problem i see with Dunnitt is that they are moving away from emails and SMS etc. whereas it would be better if we could use existing communication tools itself with Dunnitt working in the background. These once-in-a-while tools are generally lost when not used on a regular basis. For days if there is no update on Dunnitt then i would probably not check often and then completely forget about it. (The frequency of your checking emails depends on how regularly you receive emails.)

Issues with the current tool:

1. One serious issue is privacy related but is actually a feature. While creating a task you can collaborate with anyone on the Dunnitt platform. When you start typing the collaborators for a task, an auto suggest list is thrown revealing all the IDs and emails registered at Dunnitt. It hinders privacy and also has scalability issues on the technology front. It would be better if one could chose the list of collaborators from Gmail, Twitter, Linkedin etc. accounts.

2. The interface needs to be worked on. At times it seems some parts are totally disconnected from the others. The look and feel of the site is dull and they have already placed ads at all the places which is not a way to grow with a new product. Such attempts tend to prove that you are building a website and not a business.

3. The reporting system is very weak. Quantifying responses from other users is important.

Overall a nice idea but weak execution. Pebble Talk is a SaaS tool based on same idea but with stronger execution.

Do give Dunnitt a spin and share your experience.

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Women’s Reservation Bill – Passed in Rajya Sabha

arvind — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:40:22 PST

Okhey, this post is a little off-beat. Women’s Reservation Bill giving 33 percent representation to women in parliament and state assemblies has been passed in the Rajya Sabha with 186 ayes & 1 noes about an hour ago! Yet another historic & welcome development in the Indian politics as women really need empowerment in modern day scenario. Besides if reservation is up on cards for the historically suppressed class of society, then women are the most deserving group for such an initiative.

Of course this bill @Rajya Sabha was not passed without drama & walk-outs. But what is more important is to visualize the impact of such a step on the woman-workforce in future. I will quote from one of my previous post last October on Gharkamai where the first paragraph read as following:

In our society, it is so acceptable and understandable to see a highly educated woman settling down as a home-maker raising kids, watching TV soaps, cooking great food etc. Scarcely does one (read men) understand what it feels like when a girl who was taught to become a professional since childhood is forced to become a housewife. Sshhh, and does anyone even know the loss that the country incurs by depriving such a large population of skilled manpower from work.

This is totally an awesome decision @ Parliament and Pluggd.in wishes all women for the new future.

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ReviewGang – Consolidated Reviews of Hindi Movies [We need it!]

arvind — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:43:44 PST

Next time when you decide on a Bollywood flick, do not refer to just one or two reviews here and there. Drop in at ReviewGang and see all major reviews by all the stakeholders of Bollywood. Better still, contribute with your own reviews on movies as well for the general benefit of population. Both Bollywood & we really need it

ReviewGang aggregates reviews by known & trusted critics (editors) and gives a consolidated critic rating on a movie too. For example, on ‘Karthik Calling Karthik‘ you can find all reviews spread across National dailies, TV channel reviewers and Internet based media. What I personally found useful is the official synopsis from ReviewGang, which like looking at behind of a book/DVD before buying into the movie.

Another kickass feature that I found was that of evaluating the behavior of trusted critics – i.e. editors of media cos. Check out comparison of critic’s ratings in the pic below. One reviewer belongs to newspaper industry, another to television media and another to Internet(digital media):

Observe the area around My name is Khan!

ReviewGang also allows you to listen to full albums from the latest bollywood releases free and legally. It is pertinent to mention here that Cricket & Bollywood – two biggest entertainments for Indians – are all game over the internet now. We at #Pi really liked the simple interface of the website, which seems more like a cool mashup of IMDB & RottenTomatoes. It would be great if ReviewGang went further, allowing user comments under the reviews sourced by trusted critics and also if it thought a little about encouragement (along with curation) of ‘User Generated’ reviews. Engagement with the market is the mantra.

Dear Pi readers, do give ReviewGang a flick!

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InfiBeam PI eBook Reader – Pictures/First Look

sinha — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:04:33 PST

We have just started playing with InfiBeam’s PI Ebook Reader [PI@PI] and here are a few pictures

PI Specification

Internal Memory of 512MB RAM [SD slot up to 4GB]
Reads all your PDF/Word doc/HTML Files
Currently doesn’t supports WiFi
All books bought from InfiBeam are DRMed

PI Features

Turn page forward/backward
Jump to a specific page
Progress bar to display position in the book
Increase font size and reflow text automatically
Add bookmark to a page
Screen Rotate for landscape / portrait views
Search inside a book or document
Sort documents (Date, filename, Catalog)
Game Play by Function Key & Navigation for Soduku

Over the next few days, we will share our review of PI – meanwhile feel free to ask questions regarding the device.

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Startup Jobs : Flex Developers, Facebook Programmers, Instructional Designers

Editorial — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:40:00 PST

Latest Jobs from our job board

Sr. Flash/Flex Developer
We are looking for an expert flash developer, who must have an experience of at least 1-2 flex projects. Ideal candidate should have worked on some good products and should have few impressive flash applications beforehand. You must be passionate about technology and must have zeal to learn new technology.

Facebook / PHP Programmers

We need full time PHP Developers with full skill and previous notable experience of Facebook apps, especially Games.

Working time: 8-10 hours a day (remember, this is for a start-up).

Pay: 20K+ (if you’re skilled, talk to us).

Instructional Designer Job / Freelancers [Urgent]

We are looking for a freelance writer to storyboard/script curriculum books for vocational training.

–

Submit your job requirement, if you want to reach out to the most advanced geeky, marketing & sales fellas.

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Confirmation Bias – What are Startups Doing about it?

Guest Author — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:47:00 PST

The CEO of the startup was conducting due diligence on a potential acquisition target. The Board (including him) had prepared a list of questions they wanted detailed responses to. These answers would then need to be cross-verified by the appropriate experts, lawyers and accountants. The founders of the potential acquisition target were known to the CEO for several years and they had done business together as well. The CEO believed that the acquisition would benefit his company and desperately wanted to make the acquisition happen as he believed it would double the size of his company, enhance offerings and customers and of course, provide some bragging rights since an acquisition tends to (at least initially) be an ego-booster. As the diligence process began, it started becoming apparent that the financial position of the target company wasn’t as healthy as had been conveyed or imagined. In addition, the customer base and sales pipeline too didn’t look as attractive. The Board started having second thoughts on the deal. The CEO aggressively pushed for the acquisition, so much so that he started rationalizing the deficiencies and gaps thrown up by the diligence. He also downplayed “bad news” (eg loss of a customer) or kept the information only with him. The Board wanted the CEO to look for other targets and options as well but having invested so much time and energy (emotional and otherwise) in trying to make this acquisition happen, the CEO wasn’t in a mood to listen.

The VC and the entrepreneur knew each other from over 10 years back. They had high regard and respect for each other’s capabilities. They had worked together at the same firm for over 7 years. Over the past 10 years, they had kept in touch socially. Both were well known professionals and who occasionally sounded each other out. Now the entrepreneur was raising money for his startup and the first VC he called was his former colleague. The VC wanted to do the deal as the team was high profile and the proposition though risky looked attractive. He was excited since this would be a proprietary deal without any other VC being aware of the opportunity. It would be a coup. He was very eager to close the deal at the earliest; the entrepreneur too, given his public standing, wanted to get the deal done quickly. Both had already laid out the PR release and the inevitable press conference that would follow the announcement of this high profile deal. The VC pushed the deal through his partnership, convincing them that there wasn’t any reason to do a detailed diligence as the team was well known to him, the proposition was attractive and that the terms of investment were attractive.

The acquisition, in the first instance, didn’t take place since the Board couldn’t reach a consensus. As more details of the target emerged, it started becoming apparent that there wasn’t much business sense in an acquisition; in fact, there would be a serious financial hit that the acquiring startup would have to take. The CEO who was adamant about consummating the deal and the Board had an acrimonious relationship thereafter, one which took a long time to heal. In the second instance, the high profile deal quickly soured as the VC’s friend just wasn’t cut out to be the CEO of a startup. There was a huge mismatch in expectations and styles of working. The high profile startup blew up leaving bruised egos all over.

Why do such things happen?

It was important for the acquiring CEO and the VC to remain dispassionate and detached so that they could take decisions in the best interests of their respective firms. However, they allowed their biases and preconceptions to overwhelm their usual decision making process. In fact, in such cases it is not unusual at all for a person to actively seek out information that reinforces these biases and preconceptions (eg by selectively recalling anecdotes) and ignore or overlook alternative view points. This is “confirmation bias”.

Companies too suffer from this bias. They believe their own PR and marketing hype and ignore dissonant customers and negative market feedback till it is too late. They don’t hear the little boy who shouts about the lack of clothes on the emperor!

All of us are guilty of this bias. But what’re we doing about it?

________________________________________________________________________

Sanjay Anandaram is a passionate advocate of entrepreneurship in India; He brings close to two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture investor, faculty member, advisor and mentor. He’s involved with Nasscom, TiE, IIM-Bangalore, and INSEAD business school in driving entrepreneurship. He can be reached at sanjay@jumpstartup.net. The views expressed here are his own.

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And now, Vodafone Launches App Store in India

sinha — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:03:22 PST

Telecom operators are under a peer pressure to launch App stores.

After Airtel’s app store, and Aircel’s announcement of an about to be launched App store, comes an App store from Vodafone.

Vodafone Essar has rolled out its app store and can be accessed by sending a message APP to 111 [toll free number].

There are close to 800 apps on Vodafone, under various categories like Entertainment, Utility, Finance, Social Networking, Games, etc. Majority of Vodafone app stores are priced between Rs.5 – Rs. 30 and and Vodafone claims that 15% apps will be free.

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Is this girl Cute? -The New Low for Desparate Traffic

naman — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:30:31 PST

Guess the Advertiser?

This ad has been making the rounds on Facebook for quite some days now. Take a guess on the advertiser.

Try another

It is not a porn chat site or an adult friendship site. It is India’s biggest matrimonial site, Shaadi.com. Shocked?

There is no doubt that such ads work. Not for the brand but for the campaign manager. It allows the incompetent campaign manager to show that i got you so many clicks for so little money. They get you the clicks but does it fulfill your real target? Does it get some one to register? These ads don’t work in short term or in long term. They only give an illusion of doing so. Most of the times brand managers do not track anything beyond Cost Per Click or total traffic. Those are very favorable but that was not the campaign’s real aim. Ever bothered to check the bounce rate or cost per registration for such traffic?

Already, Facebook as an advertising platform does not work for advertisers, as it is the costliest (compared to Google Adwords and few Indian ad networks). The reason why Facebook is chosen is because it’s the new in thing for the fat advertisers. By placing such banner ads they believe their brand is now into the new world of social media marketing. The truth is, such ads are not even close to social media marketing, only that they are on a social network. And by allowing such sleazy ads, with no information about the landing page, Facebook will only lose credibility as an advertising platform.

Startups, never do this. You don’t have a brand positioning yet and this is certainly not the way to build it.

If you think Shaadi.com is Playing Akele (pun intended), well here’s one from Bharat Matrimony.

Seen this girl before?

The basic problem with this ad is that BharatMatrimony does not allow free chat as mentioned. But a bigger problem is that this pic has made the rounds before on chain mails as an Infosys employee. I am sure many of you must have seen it (NSFW). So I doubt if it is licensed. Thankfully BM is a little better for users, with atleast disclosing the site in the ad copy.

Are there ads that work better than these? Data suggests the following to work very well.

1. Use contrast colored background and text. Red and white work best. Such ads get high attention independent of the product. Blue does not work as it gets camouflaged with most sites. (Not sure how high attention is defined or measured but makes sense.)
2. Use flash even if the whole ad is static.
3. More than 3 key frames in flash ads perform lower. The attention span is not so long.
4. Auto replay works better than no replay in flash.
5. Ads with more information about the advertiser have least bounce rate but the least CTR also.

Hope this is of some help and will keep you away from making such desperate attempts. They can afford to do so but not you.

Got more info on the kind of ads that work? Please share.

Note: The post is based on official ad performance data provided by a campaign manager.

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Best of the Week – UnPluGGd, UID [and lot]

Editorial — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:33:41 PST

What a week! We had the first edition of UnPluGGd and as far as PI content is concerned, we covered quite a few interesting articles on UID.

Tech

Startups/Entrepreneurship

Startup Jobs

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UnPluGGd | Thank you Sponsors, Speakers, Participants and the Team

sinha — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:48:25 PST

“most awesome start-up event in India #UnPluGGd : http://bit.ly/aqC0eC [@vpsingh]

@pluggdin Congrats for hosting the wonderful event and Twitter updates to inspire all (also to be) #entrepreneurs [@Pulkit_Lakshya]“

Feedback has started pouring in and overall, I am satisfied with how UnPluGGd went.

We could have easily done a ‘showcase top 15 hot/warm/lukewarm startups in India’, but decided to do something different. We decided to bring a content focused event with no element of hype [for instance, no non vegetarian food in the lunch ]

We had a limit of 200 people (internally, we kept the numbers to 170) and we were pleasantly surprised to see the turnout, 220. Few guys came in as early as 8:30 AM, few flew from Pune, Delhi for the event.

Considering that this was our first event and the format was completely new, I am humbled by the interest shown from the entrepreneurial community.

I’d like to thank several people who made UnPluggd’s first edition possible.

First of all, a few ‘well known’ names in VC/Angel space, who said

“You need to hype up to get sponsors/audience. You need to show ‘new new things’, otherwise people will not come. An event where bunch of entrepreneurs sharing their journey is bound to fail”.

Well, you guys just challenged me to ensure that we prove you wrong!

And we did!

And now, my sincere vote of thanks to all those who made UnPluGGd possible.

Sponsors

Thanks to Dell India, Honeywell for supporting us. Both of these companies were quick in trusting us. They did not ask too many questions (sponsor’s fav questions are ‘who are the other sponsors’ ) and showed the true spirit of supporting the ecosystem.

Enablers

I’d like to thank NovoJuris, Neev Technologies, MetaYage and NetBramha (design partner) for supporting us. You guys should give their service a spin.

Also, Picsquare/InfiBeam team sponsored the tees and they do deserve a special thanks!

The Team

We were a lean team and a whole lot of friends supported us during the event. My vote of thanks (in no particular order)

Sanjay Anandaram
When I was deciding on UnPluGGd’s event content/format, Sanjay happens to be the first person with whom I shared the idea. Over the course of last few months, he supported me in deciding on companies/speakers.
Pratyush Prasanna
PP is part of the PI team, and helped in anchoring. I had a severe sore throat [if you have been reading my tweets] and PP took good care of anchoring.
Kunalkant Sen
He efficiently managed the entire registration process, along with Shawnik [of SIBM].
Kanupriya
She is part of PI team, and took care of tweeting. Infact, she was pretty much on her toes to ensure that great content is shared on twitter.
Satpal Paramar
Satpal volunteered for the event and managed a whole lot of operational aspects.
Mahendra Baid
Mahendra made some great connections/introductions that helped us a lot.
Bloggers/Partners
Arun (of Trak.in), Venturewoods, Alootechie, Ticketing partner(Ayojak) & several other organizations for helping us reach out to their audience.
Amarinder Singh
Last, but not the least – Amarinder is the partner for the event and he took care of whole lot of stuff – he pretty much did a lot of Project Management and ensured that we are on track.This is not the complete list – there are a whole lot of people who helped us during the course of the event; so thanks to them as well.

Speakers

Last 1.5 months, I have interviewed close to 30 entrepreneurs and closed on the final 12. We had several factors in mind while selecting the speakers.

No BS. Ready to Share. Ready to talk about failure. Willing to spend effort in preparing for the event. No media-trained fellas.

All the speakers had great insights to share and I hope the audience had their doze of inspiration.

The Audience

When you have a focused event, only focused audience will turn up.

And that happened with UnPluGGd too. All in all, 90% of the audience were entrepreneurs [no social media heroes] and I’d like to thank the audience for their participation.

This was our first step towards building something really useful, something tangible for the ecosystem. We plan to conduct UnPluGGd more frequently [with different themes, but all focused on startups], so do join our Google group for updates on UnPluGGd.

Areas of Improvement

We do know that there were certain areas where we could have done a lot better – for instance, moderation, time management – so be assured that we take care of these aspects from the next edition onwards.

On an interesting note, PluGGd.in witnessed a major traffic on the UnPluGGd day and our hosting partner, E2E Networks ensured that we stay live!

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Woot! @UnPluGGd

sinha — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:06:21 PST

The event is over and feedback will tell you what we witnessed today

Attended an entrepreneurship event after a long time. Amazing talks by @ashwinnaik@ksrikrishna and more. Great job @cnha #unpluggd [@shashanknd]

Kudos to @cnha and Amarinder for getting superb been-there-done-that speakers who just had to tell their story to wow the audience#unpluggd [@swaroopch]

“..I had came here with minimum expectations as such events often have more noise and less signal but it was indeed a great event personally for me as I was able to get connected to lot of people, the number of people there were perfect and the event was very well organized,” – Pushkar.

“you have upped the bar for other startup events in India. Time they focus on awesome content” – Amit

Personally speaking, I had real fun at the event – all the speakers were super-awesome and so was the audience.

All in all, we had a total of 220 people, 90% entrepreneurs – Serious Content. Great Speakers. Awesome audience.

Woot!

More pictures/videos/event anecdotes later.

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UnPluggd kicks off this morning [House Full]

arvind — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:16:00 PST

Around 4 years now, Pluggd.in has been constantly and consistently building a community around Technology startups. This encompasses everyone who wants to make a difference in the digital landscape in Asia – developers, entrepreneurs, investors and even users of internet products. We’ve been contributing in all national or local events on a continuous basis catering to the community and our aim is to help the various members of the startup ecosystem connect with each other.

And value each other. So we conceived Unpluggd.

And the efforts of last few months, has begun to pay off. Unpluggd started off with houseful junta today morning. See a couple pics here:

Mukund Mohan took the stage first. His key mantra for entrepreneurs was as simple as “never,never,never,never,never…never give up!”. Some much for everyone to feel the conviction. And following him was Sony Joy of Mobme who emphasized on ‘right hiring‘. He stressed on hiring freshers coz they are more suited and adaptive than experienced ones. Freshers listening? The bottomline for startups from Rudrajeet of Ideacts was that those who r interested in building an internet based business must save cost for long time & increase the mass.

Joining us now on stage is Phani, CEO of RedBus.

Here is the discussion online or if are in Bangalore you can drop in right now!

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@UnPluGGd – Your Last Chance

Ashish — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:14:08 PST

Ladies and Gentlemen

The UnPluGGd event is pretty much sold out and we have very few seats left.

If you want to attend the event,you can either pay online and confirm your seat [link] or register & pay at the venue.

We will send out an email to all those who have already registered (via either means) by today evening. In general, please take your registration as confirmed (if you have registered) – so like entrepreneurs, do not wait for ‘things to reach out to you’. Just come over.
Session detail is out [link]
The event venue is Honeywell Office, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore [venue map]. Please note, it is not the well known HW office @Bannerghatta Road.
Those who have decided to pay at the venue, please reach there by 8:30 AM.
You can walk in tomorrow and pray to get a seat, but we strongly recommend that you choose one of the below mentioned options.
For media peers, please contact me [ashish at pluggd.in]

Contact Numbers

Ashish – 98452 06443.
Amarinder – 93431 71420
Satpal – 97421 90747

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Party UID – The Big Opportunity IT Services Industry!

arvind — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:14:03 PST

OK 19 bids have been received against UIDAI’s tender invitation to engage and Application Software Development, Maintenance & Support Agency (ASDMSA) via.

TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and IBM are few among the participants in the competition.

Now before I set to dissect the exercise, let’s take a look at the following sequence-of-events in the tendering process adopted by UIDAI to spend a cool Rs. 190,000 lac in 2010-11 alone. Yeah, you got it right we are discussing the tendering process here.

Progress:

The fate of UID decided with agreeable competition in roughly 24 working days! Or not quite.

The Philosophy:

Anyone, who is in Business today easily understands the rigid & often biased process of Tenders (Bid invitations). The process was developed centuries ago during the era of World Wars when concepts like mass production, supply-chain, competitive bidding took birth etc.

For UID too, the same process was applied. Of course there must have been some work from UIDAI Technical team prior to the dates of tender mentioned above, but those are background processes whose sanctity one could only guess or make out from the nature of competition which one usually sees in similar Government/Corporation tenders.

Information Technology did not exist during World War.

Applying such an old philosophy, in a modern day situation and that too for a Technology driven project where technology itself is advancing at a break-neck pace is nothing less than – (IMHO) – making a fool of oneself. Time and again Government & big organizations have failed to keep up with quality & technology in such an environment. Read this & this if you are not convinced.

In midst of tenders, the checks & balances in the British borne system of Indian Governance (through Vigilance & Technical examiners) are post-facto methodologies and do not help in prevention nor recovery of the lost tax-payer’s money. And the situation is no different from that in some of the most advanced states around the world. Take California, for example. In a recent post on BusinessWeek Prof. Vivek Wadhwa explains how billions of dollars are being wasted with pathetic services and infrastructure because of legacy systems.

He writes “I wrote about California’s IT challenges and encouraged Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to come to the rescue. I cited an example of one system for which the state has budgeted $50 million over several years, which I believed could be rebuilt for less than $5 million in less than a year. I received several credible offers.”

Now is the situation India worse or better than this?

Game the UID project.

Coming back to our subject, in case of UID project too the assumptions of the tendering process make the overall situation look terribly flawed. Seriously. 19 bids may seem enough competition to believe that everything is going fine. But a simple mathematical evaluation & a close look at social tree of industry today can show us that it’s very easy to ‘game the tendering process‘ or at least ‘fool oneself‘.

In case of projects where Government (or technical evaluators) is not very clear about Technical scope of work, they normally adopt a two-bid system and/or hire a Consultant as a stand by. To draft the scope then, the Government offices rely more on “Competing Agencies ” and more often than not almost completely depend upon them. Thus comes in the perfect loophole in the system.

For UID also the situation was no different.

The technical scope is not easy to define and the one which was drafted in hurry and contribution from “competitors” might be manifest with several opportunities for the bliss-mongers. Even in a completely non-ideal situation where the UID work is distributed equally among all the 19 bidders (A Few Good Men, that is) the profit-per-party in work would amount to Rs. 190,000 lac/19 parties = Cool Rs. 10,000 lacs! Amazing figures, to play with right?

Understanding the Social Tree of IT Industry.

IT industry is a big social network. Let us have a close look at the format of human connections and relations here. People in IT industry think alike, work alike and are mostly well connected. Not that there is corruption everywhere (for I fully believe in integrity of these big competing organizations) but is there any “competition” in true sense in this tendering process at all?

It is quite often seen that man-power of TCSes, Wipros and Infys are poached, exchanged and sometimes joked around as well. In such a situation there is very remote chance that marketing wings of the competing agencies are not closely knitted (or aware of information). Now this does not mean that a cartel is place, but if one guy makes a mistake in preparation of Technical scope, the other guy being a participatory member will not correct it unless the opportunity affects his chances of winning the business. Thus making a unoptimized situation.

Here are some flaws in ASDMSA tender that we highlighted earlier, for example.

Predicting the Next

Well I leave this question open for now. Is there a replacement for tendering process? Any strategy which could alleviate us – the tax-payers – over the incumbent mess of tenders. Is there any buyer for this question in the first place?

Anyone around the world if the situation applies.

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Announcing the Speakers for UnPluGGd Event

sinha — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:30:33 PST

And finally, here is the speaker list for the upcoming UnPluGGd event.

Mukund, Founder of Buzzgain
Sony Joy, Founder of MobMe
Sachin Bansal, Co-Founder of Flipkart
Rudrajeet Desai, Co-Founder of Ideacts
Phanindra Sama, Founder of RedBus
Sanjay Swamy, ex-CEO of mChek
Ashwin Naik, Founder of Vaatsalya
Shrikrishna, earlier cofounded Impulsesoft and is now running Zebugroup
Sunil, Co-Founder of Mango Technologies
Sridhar, ex-Founder of Yulop
Gaurav Jain, Founder of Mast Kalandar
Yusuf Motiwala, Founder of TringMe

The session details and topics will be announced by today evening.

If you haven’t registered, please do so. We are running out of seats. So book your seat Now!

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Opera Mini goes Native on Windows Mobile phones

arvind — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:16:50 PST

Opera Software – Oslo, Norway – has struck out a native version of Opera Mini 5 beta for Windows Mobile 5- and 6-based handsets.

In their official statement the Opera confirms that “by integrating Opera Mini with the Windows Mobile platform, Opera is able to deliver an optimized version of the popular Opera Mini browser that dramatically improves performance and the overall user experience. While Opera Mini traditionally requires Java, the new Windows Mobile version does not, which means that Opera Mini will work on any Windows Mobile phone.

Windows Mobile 5 & 6 users can download the native Opera Mini here.

What is remarkable about this deal is the impeccable timing of the move from MicroSoft; who barely a few hours ago declared their hug with Google’s Android platform for their mobile application Tag. It seems that love is in the air for MicroSoft lately, even though this one seems more in acceptance of “defeat” for the Internet Explorer on mobile handsets.

Dag Olav Norem, Vice President of Products, Opera Software confirmed the following in light of their deal with MicroSoft: “Windows Mobile deserves a mobile browser that looks better, handles better and delivers better than the default browser“.

He adds “that even though Opera has 50 million satisfied Opera Mini users, we always seek ways to improve our browser for each and every mobile phone user out there. Now, we are pleased to offer the world’s most popular mobile Web browser as a native Windows Mobile application.”

Of course the mobile users do get a better browsing experience on Opera Mini.

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Lower Number of Investments in Year 2009 [@ USD 475 million]

arvind — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:55:42 PST

Venture Capital firms invested approximately $475 million over 92 deals in India during the twelve months ending December 2009. The number was considerably lower compared to 2008 which had witnessed $836 million invested across 153 deals.

Among the deals

South India accounted for about 50% of all VC investments (47% by value) during 2009 with Bangalore being the favorite destination among VCs attracting 29 investments in companies headquartered here.
Startups based out of Hyderabad bagged approximately 9 deals over the year.
Wstern India accounted for 25% of the pie in 2009 (29% by value) where Mumbai based companies grabbed over 15 investments and Companies based in North India accounted for 15% of the investments in 2009 (12% by value).
Delhi & National Capital Region (including New Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida) accounted for 11 investments.

VC firms however begun to increase their pace of investments in Q4′09, making 42 investments worth $265 million – significantly higher than that during the same period in 2008 (23 investments worth $102 million) as well as Q3′09 (19 deals worth $74 million).

Even though the 2009 figures stood as close as half the number deals that happened in 2008 there are indications of morale recovering from the recession towards the fag end of the year.[details here]

As far as 2010 is concerned, things are looking much brighter – do check out our coverage of startup funding.

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SMSGupshup Formally Launches its App Store, AppShup

sinha — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:12:59 PST

We covered the launch of SMSGupshup’s developer platform earlier and the company has now formally announced the launch of AppShup, the SMS App platform.

Appshup developer platform allows developers to develop sms-based applications and services quickly and easily; and requires developers to have only a basic knowledge of any programming language, understanding of web applications and familiarity with JSON and XML

Unlike other developer networks, AppShup reduces the launch time from months to only days by pre-enabling carrier approval processes hence reducing the launch time from months to only days by pre-enabling carrier approval processes.

Moreover, AppShup aims to solve many of the current issues that developers face today. These issues include Interfacing with multiple mobile carriers, accessing application development resources and tools, dealing with the carrier approval process, integrating with the mobile networks and launching the application.

SMSGupShup Raised $12mn From Globespan Capital Partner, CRV and Helion in the month of January,2010 (total of $37mn funding raised), and the company claims to account for 5% of all SMS traffic in India.

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