Britannica closing down its print publication after 244 years to focus on online version!  The number of Internet users in India – estimated at around 140 million today – exceeds the number of TV sets in our homes. Facebook, with its 44 million Indian members reaches more of us than any single TV channel, Doordarshan included. While YouTube, with over 31 million Indian viewers a month, is far and away our largest English television channel. Meanwhile Twitter and Google Plus each get to about 14 million of us in a month – a number that is twice the circulation of India’s largest newspaper.  Is Digital Content be next wave in the internet world post e-commerce / mobile vas …

What will work in Digital media and what won’t. With new paradigms of tablets, Apps and micro payment gateway  reshaping the CPM economy , its time to explore and understand new business model which will drive Digital Media in new age !

Meet / interact and understand key issues surrounding digital content at “Digital Content : What’s NXT”  conference and understand these issues from leading Venture Capitalists and digital publishers / editors about the future of Digital content in India.

Speakers 

1.  TCM Sundaram , MD & Co founder IDG Ventures

2.  Sanjay Trehan, Head MSN India

4.  R Sukumar , Editor Mint

3. Alok Mittal, Cannan Partners

4.  Sreekant Khandekar , Chairman & CEO – Banyan Netfaqs

5. Mukul Singhal, VP SAIF Partners

6. Shailesh Vickram Singh, Executive Director, SeedFund ( Moderator)

WHERE

Taj Vivanta ( Taj Ambassdor) Near Khan Market, New Delhi

WHEN

Tuesday, 3rd April 2012,

Register Now.

Register here at  http://bit.ly/GPLAHM

Seedfund and TiE presents the secrets of fast-growth startups.

How did CarWale vault to the no.1 position among car portals? Or Redbus do to grow to 10,000 tickets a day from just 10? What ’s Edusports secret sauce in signing 100 school customers in 10 months? TiE invites you to ask founders.Seedfund comes to NCR. mash Murthy talks with Mohit Dubey, Phani Sharma and Saumil Majumdar.Venue : India Habitat CenterLimited Seats . Please register at seedfund.in/fast

I also take this opportunity to announce launch of Seedfund office in New Delhi – NCR Region. With presence in Delhi / NCR, Seedfund will be looking at investment opportunities in North India region.

Quote”

Since Drupal.org only provided a directory of possible assistance, we wound up dealing with an Indian outsourcer my partner was familiar with.

Their claim of expertise was false. I spent months trying to explain what we needed, and each iteration of the software grew worse. We finally got things rolling after another consultant turned us on to the new, stable Drupal code base.

“ Unquote

This brings an interesting debate as I have met many startups who are really really struggling on tech front and rue lack of good tech development capabilities in India. So it is great opportunity for SAAS model in India or a grim reality where it is really hard to get a very good technical competent team to do your technology development (read software development) ?

I was wondering if I can get first hand perspective from Entrepreneurs /  Techies on this?

In India where private equity markets has taken off like anything, angel / seed or early stage investing is still at a very nascent stage despite all the talk, and these business plan competitions help to fill this space and provide much needed platform to stratups to approach investors as otherwise the only way a entrepreneur can reach a VC is by mailing his 10 MB business plan with 60 slides and 10 pages of excel sheet to info@whateverventurefund.com which is never opened as some bored secretary religiously delete these 100 mails per hour.

i2i business plan competition which stated way back in 2001 (incidentally I was involved with i2i in 2001 as a mentor to one of participating team from SPJIMR) has come a long way since in terms of scale, scope and of course prize money or say seedmoney. For more details check out http://www.iimcal.ac.in/i2i/home.htm

Some of important points related to i2i are as follows

How is i2I different from any other b plan competition in the country?

a.i2I’08 is open to students as well as working professionals, a somewhat greater chance of concepts and plans idea to transform into a start up venture.

b. i2i does not just assess the business plan but the team profile and the seriousness and sincerety to actually startup, taking away the academic nature from the contest, to usher in enthusiasm, and serious business

c. i2i does not offer cash prizes to the best business plan but seed investment to the deserving entrepreneurs. The real money comes to you only if you really start up. Entrepreneurship is serious business and i2I means business. As a partner, Seedfund may offer startup investments up to INR 1 Crore and above, to plans which have not gone even into execution mode. With their stellar track record of investments and returns hitherto, we can already see some deals all set to take place at i2I ’08.

d. Typically, in a real startup process, a complete business plan takes time to evolve and requires expert assistance. With i2I, the first and second stage don’t demand a comprehensive business plan and the finalists are coached and mentored extensively by a panel of relevant experts from different walks of life. The resources made available in terms of inputs from our jury panel about their expectations and key parameters shall help students learn to match the level of their working counterparts and stand a real chance to win in the investor marketplace.

The team actually interacts with a judging panel during its second stage, which will be a round of 10 minute presentations. This will be held across 4 cities, and will help in enabling a thorough and systematic filtering process.

Stages of i2I ’08:

Launch of the event: November 24th, 2007

Stage 1: Submission of Executive summary with team profile and statement of purpose

Deadline: December 14th, 2007

Announcement of selected plans: December 31st, 2007

Stage 2: A pitch to a panel of investors in your zone – Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore

Pitch: January 14th, 15th (in Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi)

Announcement of teams for the Grand Finale: January 16th, 2007

Mentoring: Mentoring of the final 10 teams: January 16th – January 31st.

Stage 3: Grand Finale – A detailed presentation to a panel of investors

Grand Finale: February 1st, 2008

mGinger enables advertisements including offers, vouchers, news and more, sent in the form of SMS on consumers’ mobile phones. These advertisements are specific to consumer interests and demographics mentioned during sign-up and received only in the timings that consumers specify. An additional value-add for consumers, is the earning potential of receiving these advertisements, which is redeemed through a gift cheque from mGinger.

The susbcriber of mGinger gets 20 paisa per sms and can refer his / her friends and family on mGinger. For every advert that referred mobile receives, main subscriber gets 10 paisa and 5 paisa for every advert that friend’s friend receives. Thus mGinger aims to created a pyramid structure mobile advertising list by using referrals and incentive scheme ( smart way of using word of mouth publicity).

This service is akin to Chequemail.com which used to pay users for reading their email and used to sell advertising space. Chequemail which received funding from ICICI venture in dotcom haydays finally closed down (though domain is still active but has no website as there is no name server listed against it).

DFJ which is a early stage / seed stage investor has recently opened its Bangalore Office with Mohanjit Jolly as Director and Sateesh Andra as Venture partner. DFJ other investments in India are seventymm, Komli etc

GVK BIO started operations in 2001 at Hyderabad and has established itself as a leading Contract Research Organization in India. Currently GVK BIO is the only Indian CRO that provides an integrated service platform ranging from Informatics, MedChem and Biology services in Discovery research to Clinical Research and Data Management services on the Development side and further to Process Research and Custom Synthesis.

GVK Bio was G.V.K. Sanjav Reddy in 2001, while Dr D.S.Brar joined GVK Bio as promoter chairman in 2004. Previously Dr Brar played a significant role in building Ranbaxy (India’s largest Pharma Company) into a globally recognized Generics company with a pipeline of specialty and innovator (NCE) drugs. Dr. Brar is also involved with several international Pharma/Life-sciences companies in consulting/advisory role through Davix Management Services Pvt. Ltd

GVK BIO intends to use these funds to expand capacity in Drug Discovery services, build a state-of-the-art Campus at Hyderabad on a 25 acre site. provide new service offerings in Pre-clinical and Clinical space, and pursue growth opportunities through mergers and acquisitions.

Sequoia Capital has nominated Mr. Sandeep Singhal to the Board of GVK BIO.

Dimensions Consulting of Gurgaon were the advisors to GVK BIO for the transaction.

Ticketvala, headed by Harnath Lokanadham, aim to capture the unorganized bus ticketing system in India as road transport in India remains the largest mean of transportation. Further with improving road infrastructure, and increasing Volvo bus circuit, this segment is set to see much increased volumes.

Tickevala has also launched its call center services in both English and other local languages so as to capture non internet using population.

The other player in bus ticketing system in Redbus.in which is being mentored by the TiE-EAP (Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program).

RedBus claims to have the largest network of bus operators in their list (150 and growing) and some 2000 destinations across India. At present Redbus.in tickets can be booked at some 10,000 outlets.

Footprint Ventures, the investor in Ticketvala.com is the brainchild of Neill Brownstein, a co-founder of Bessemer Venture Partners. It aims to create an India–US–Israel triangle that brings together funds, entrepreneurs, technology and markets. The firm looks to put $2-4 million in lifestyle, retail, financial services, security, education, clean technology and life sciences.

As of now Footprint has funded two startups including ticketvala.com after going through some 150 proposals.

Instacoll which is led by Sabeer Bhaita, has earlier raised funding from Softbank (read Sabeer Bhatia back to business, Instacoll raises funding from Softbank).

Live Documents is a full-featured suite of online Office productivity applications offering functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any common browser on any operating system from anywhere. Live Documents uses a Flash-based user interface that offers a richer and responsive user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications.
In addition, Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications – Live Documents converts Microsoft Office applications from static standalone software to smart clients that are connected to the Internet and facilitate in-context document sharing (multiple people can edit a document at the same time) and management (security, access control and revision control) without requiring users to give up their familiar user interfaces. The Live Documents desktop client also ensures offline access to documents – a key failing of current online Office applications.
Instacoll had earlier launched hosted services for business users and with its live-documents.com it aims to expand its usage and build visibility for the product while directly competing with Google Docs and other online office productivity suits.
Sabeer Bhatia, who became a poster boy of dotcom era after successful sale of hotmail to Microsoft for a reported USD 400 mn, is yet to taste success post hotmail. His earlier venture Arzoo.com folded where the investors had to write off their investment in Arzoo. Sabeer reincarnated Arzooo.com in 2006 as a travel portal in order to capture a share in India’s booming online travel industry without any success.

Sabeer Bhatia also launched a social networking site called apnacircle.com which again seems to be floating somewhere in already crowded social networking space.

Hence whether Live-documents will create waves like hotmail and might become an acquisition target for Microsoft / Google / Yahoo or will follow the path of Arzoo, is a question which only time will tell.

The investment by Capital18 will be used for scaling up operations( team expansion and probably locations) and fuel growth.

Interestingly Webchutney founders team also manages an incubation company “Goosefish Media Venture” where they aim to incubate a series of blogs/ websites dedicated to a particular niche area.

As quotes on Goosefish Media site :
“As dumb as it may sound: our publishing focus is founded with the idea of incubating a whole bunch of vertical content websites / blogs’ using a Nanopublishing model. We want to partner with good writers to write each of them, hopefully draw a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising around it.”

And this is probably the real killer as Indian digital space is practically empty with hardly any big brand like Gigaom etc in this space and it looks like Webchutney team is going to get their next pot of Gold from Goosefish Media. As of now Goosefish has incubated Alootechie.com, Bombaybitch and JuxtConsult.

This news is bound to create excitement in Indian Internet market as it provides an important yard-stick to the ever-optimistic entrepreneurs, who are now bound to measure their own ventures in terms of Desimartini’s valuatuion.

Desimartini.com, launched by Pahwa Knowledge Based Services late last year, is funded by the Pahwa Group of Companies. It was claimed that Desimartini has a membership-base of around 250,000 with traffic of around 2.5 million page views a month.

The traffic numbers as claimed by Desimartini, if true, indicate a good traction for website, but somehow the actual traffic does not seem to be that high, as per external indicators.

Desimartini, which regularly advertises on TV, Internet and other medium, has an Alexa ranking of 77,467 while its Compete ranking is 889,553 with around 1000 US visitors per month. Incidentally, Alexa rankings overall are not considered trustworthy as they can be engineered to generate high ranking. Hence, generally speaking, a high Alexa rank doesn’t mean much, but a low Alexa rank certainly means that there is no big traffic on this site.

The sites which are in same Alexa league get traffic of around 600k to 800k page views a month with around 200k unique visitors a month and, hence, the claim of Desimartini having 2.5 million page views is highly suspect.

Hence, to think that a Fund Manager will pay around US $ 10 Million for a site with marginal traffic, no great brand loyalty (the site is just a year old), no great business model (just another social networking site), makes the whole thing a little suspicious, as it strongly suggests that either there is something more on the table beyond Desimartini.com, or HT Media for some reason is really desperate to get into action without wasting a day.

Further details of this deal will be available in some time, as HT Media, being a listed company, would be required to inform the Stock Exchange regarding this transaction.

The Hindustan Times Group had dabbled with Internet earlier as well in 2000 dotcom boom (almost near to the time when the great Internet bubble burst), where it hired a high-profile team from banking and consulting industry, and had a big-bang launch for go4i.com headed by Mr. Piyush Gupta. Go4i was launched in association with Chase Capital Partners and the HDFC Group. The Hindustan Times and Chase Capital Partners each held 38 percent in the venture, while the HDFC Group had 8 percent. The total investment in the venture in the initial phase was reported to be US $ 15 Millions.

Also, at that point of time, go4i.com had plans to launch some other portals – related to career (go4career.com), cricket (go4cricket.com), movie ticketing (go4ticket.com), and so on and so forth.

And for all those who care for historical data-keeping, this was the quotable quote as given in The Hindu in year 2000.

‘“We (go4i) are hopeful of a turnover of Rs. 30 Crores in the second year of operations,” Mr. Gupta said, adding that go4i.com would break even in the next two years, and become profitable in the year thereafter.

“We (go4i) are planning a public issue of the portal in the next couple of years. Whether to go for an overseas float or a domestic one would depend on the prevailing market conditions at that time,” he said.’

The above statements by Piyush Gupta were made in 2000 in a truly style of forward looking statements (this is another matter that they really turned out to be forward looking qs whole go4i venture was shut down after some time).