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There are 5 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" DoT Makes Player Specific Changes To The 3G Policy ?Amidst news of companies launching iPhone and Nokia getting ready to combat that, how many of us actually take into account that we do not actually have a 3G infrastructure in place, yet, to take advantage of the goodies these Super-phones have to offer? Well, ofcourse we do have our Bluetooth enabled handsets and our very own 58888 service that lets us download ringtones. For most it kind of suffices. For many, it does not. 3G is supposed to be the haven for the techies and geeks who are waiting to download the songs on their handsets, on the go, within seconds. And Indian government, it seems, is improving in PR. What else could explain 1-3 news articles every week on policy matters concerning 3G? And that’s when the actual 3G implementation could take around a year or so! The government seems to have hired someone from Apple’s PR team. So, this week’s installation was supposed to be a small amendment to the policy. So, the policy is that only the players who have had Unifies Acces Service License (UASL), or a Cellular Mobile Telecom Service License or have had some prior experience of running these services could bid for the spectrum, reports Business Standard. So, someone who is a new entrant in the telecom space cannot bid for the license? Didn’t I read a few weeks back that DLF wanted to get into telecom? Looks like if it doesn’t has an experience of operating a cellular network already, it cannot bid for 3G! Well, once the new companies start operating for an year or so, I’m sure they’ll be having the required experience to bid for the 3G spectrum. The government’s reliance on the old player is what we have to live with, for now. What’s your take on this ? Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Online Travel Update: Cleartrip Lays Off 42 & Zoomtra Goes InternationalOnline travel is seeing some interesting news offlate. Right from launching of non flight services to going international to even laying off people due to the travel price hikes and slowdown in the economy. This space is seeing a downturn. So here are the updates on all thats happening:
The clear question that arises is that if the most heavily funded travel site is laying off people then this surely is a period of slow growth for the OTA space. (Source - VCCircle)
On the reason for choosing singapore Vikas Jawa, Director, Zoomtra.com said “As Singapore is one of the most important hubs for Asia, we are aspiring to cover Pan Asia through this portal,” Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Exclusive Interview With Morpheus Venture Partners On Their Model, Startups & Their Upcoming Fund!
Just yesterday we blogged about the second batch of Morpheus Venture Partners companies and there were some queries on their model So we decided to have an exclusive interview with Sameer and Nandini of Morpheus Ventures and asked them some interesting questions. Read on to know all there is to know about Morpheus Venture Partners - India’s self proclaimed YCombinator model.
Q) What is the ideology of Morpheus Venture Partners? Is it a Incubator? Mentoring Firm? Seedfund? A) MVP’s vision is to facilitate a startup revolution in India, by way of building strong businesses out of early stage companies. To have a closely knit startup community that learns from each other and helps each other grow and in turn grow the economy of the country. India is due to seeing a startup revolution and now is the genesis. 6-8 years from now, we will see a series of today’s startups make it big in the world economy either via M&A or IPOs Morpheus Venture Partners (MVP) is a Business Advisory Firm focusing on startups. MVP does not invest currently. However, we do have some investing partners who we can connect the companies with, for seed/angel investing options. We plan to close a fund of about 5Millioin $ by the second quarter of 2009, so that we can directly invest in the companies.
Q) What does Morpheus search for in eligible startups? A) This decision involves various factors: people in the team are the most important aspect, stage of the venture, working relationship between MVP team and the founding team, quantum of value that the MVP team could add to the venture and make an significant impact, etc. But the three main factors are:
Q) Given that you have now around 7 startups in your portfolio in the second batch what is your view of the startup scene in India? Do you think its over funded? Under funded? Which segments look promising? A) We are very bullish about the startup scene in India. We are seeing a breed of entrepreneurs who are fresh, smart, with strong education backgrounds, with experience of working with good startups and strong aggressive companies. These young entrepreneurs have a very balanced head and 'I refuse to fail’ attitude. There is still plenty of opportunity for investment and in early stage investments, things are just getting started. Some of the areas that are promising are SaaS (Software as a Service), mobile, gaming, financial services, education, recruitment, permission marketing, health and clean tech.
Q) Which are the VC Partners that Morpheus works with? You suggested that Morpheus would be launching a fund - How big would this fund be? What would be the deal size for funding? By when do you expect to raise this fund? As most MVP companies will be looking to raise 0.5-1 million USD, the main focus of our partnerships is on the various Seed Funds, Angel investors. We plan to close a fund of about 5 Million USD by the second quarter of 2009. Typical deal size will be 15 - 25K USD
Hope you enjoyed this interview. Do mail us at info@watblog.com if you want us to interview someone! Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Its Raining Funds: HCL’s Billion $ Fund For IT Co’s & Bharti’s 200 Cr Innovation Fund For Telecom Co’sIts fund announcement season and this time its not the regular VC firms which are announcing funds for investment in startups It two very large Indian homegrown companies in the IT and Telecom space that have ventured into becoming a venture capitalist for IT and Telecom companies.
Though the HCL news about a billion dollar fund is still unconfirmed it and its said to be in the planning stages it is still big news for the IT sector. HCL plans to raise this fund through an IPO which is now possible as the SEBI cleared Future Ventures India (of Future Group) as the first firm to raise money via an IPO and invest it in related firms. HCL has two divisions in HCL Infosystems (which is into laptops and other hardware) and HCL Infotech (which is software consultancy firm) so it can be expected that their focus would be both on IT hardware and software. Bharti on the other hand has already announced a Innovation fund with the corpus of 200 crore for telecom sector. Bharti Airtel Joint MD and CEO Manoj Kohli said that ‘The objective of the fund is to provide opportunities to the entrepreneurs to undertake innovation in the field of telecom with regard to content, software and technologies.’ This means Vas players could have a telecom operator funding them now instead of taking a lions share in revenues! Check the IAMAI MVAS Report to see how operators benefit the most from VAS revenues in terms of revenue share.
This is great news for the telecom space and also for VAS players who were anyways seeing increased interest from venture capital players with the telecom and mvas market booming.
Most Commented PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult [How To] Create a Online Reputation Management Tool for Your Brand, Using Google Docs SpreadSheets
Have you ever ego surfed? Do you manage a few blog sites? Do you have a brand image to maintain? Do you have any idea what the web-o-sphere is talking about the new Facebook application you created for your client? Are you working on an online reputation management project for some brand and weekly progress needs to be sent to your client by your team? Google Docs Spreadsheets does the job easy for you, combined with Google’s famed search engine and Yahoo Pipes!
Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact. So, how do we go about with the problem? 1. First, let us decide which search engines shall we use to monitor what the web is talking about our brand in question, iPhone. 2. We finalize on Google News and Google Blog Search (yup, you can call me a Google Fanboy). 3. On Google News, search for iPhone and copy the RSS URL from the results page. 4. Search for the term iPhone on Google Blog Search too and again copy the RSS URL from the results page. 5. Now, combine the two RSS feeds on Yahoo Pipes and copy the new URL. 6. Now, shoot up Google Docs and create a new Spreadsheet. 7. Type =importfeed(”rss-url”,,true) on the very first cell of the spreadsheet, with the URL you picked up from Yahoo Pipes to replace “rss-url”. 8. The moment you hit the Enter button, a pretty large table gets created with every row populated by the stories on iPhone. 9. This table can further be customized to suit your needs and can also be shared and collaborated with multiple people across the globe. 10. The data is dynamic and gets updated with latest stories and links to them, automatically. This is the power of Google Docs for you. A lot many people keep questioning the use of online collaboration tools and their effectiveness over traditional desktop clients. Here we come up with a little experiment that demonstrates the sheer power of such online word processing suites. By the way, just in case you are curious about other Google Docs commands and wish to suggest interesting ways of using them, you can check them out at Google Doc’s official help page.
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult More Recent Articles
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Cleartrip lays off 42 people - This news has caused quite a flutter in the online travel space. It was only recently that cleartrip had raised 18 million $ and by the admission of their own CEO this was more money than they required! Some organizational structural changes have also happened where the new CEO is Stuart Crighton who takes over from Sandeep Murthy who is now Chairman. Sandeep was christened the CEO when Cleartrip raised funding from Sherpalo (who was represented by Sandeep in India).
Zoomtra Goes International - Zoomtra.com the travel meta search engine that competes head on with iXiGo.com has launched itself in the global market with dedicated Singapore-India portal at (http://sg.zoomtra.com/) and very soon plans to expand to other important destinations like US, UK, Canada.
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