The engimatic Ram Charan

Stumbled upon this really great article about the workaholic and world’s topmost business consultant - Ram Charan.  A must read.

Incubators in India

I have compiled a list of incubators in India.

IIM Ahmedabad

IIM Bangalore

IIM Lucknow

IIM Kozhikode

IIM Calcutta

SP Jain Institute of Management and Research

BITS Pilani

IIT Kharagpur

IIT Madras

TENET – IIT Madras

IIT Bombay

IIT Kanpur

IIT Guwahati

IIT Delhi

Nirma Labs

FMS Delhi

Entreprenership Development Institute of India (EDI), Ahmedabad

Center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), IIM-A

K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai

The ICFAI Center for Entrepreneurship Development, Hyderabad

Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA)

Wadhwani Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Hyderabad

JSS Institutions

NITIE

Erasmic

and the following one passed on to me by Arpit (an NIT Trichy Alumni, currently at SJMSOM @ IITB )

NIT Trichy

Techno-preneur has a great compilation of incubation centres in India. Check it out here

With the startup scene gradually gaining momentum, these incubators will be of great help to the up and coming entrepreneurs. With Government of India taking a very keen interest in creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem, it will help in building a great economy.

Please feel free to comment on any incubation centre that I might have missed and I would be glad to update. I will put it in a google spreadsheet sometime.

ION - a new startup

The team at ION has developed an iPod charger. As they say in their own words, get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss. For more on it, hear it from the creators themselves at ION.

Startups in India

I was part of the motley-crew that successfully organised BarCamp Bangalore 2.0. We wanted to create a platform for the innovators to connect, network and share their thoughts. With new startups springing up every day, it was indeed a vibrant year for the resurgent Indian entrepreneur. I was given the mandate to profile the list of startups, whom we would contact and inform about BarCamp Bangalore 2.0, so that they can choose to participate and enrich the audience with their product offerings or random thoughts on entrepreneurship.

Rajan had already prepared the groundwork for me and all I had to do was to build on it.The list I have compiled can be found here

I have left out a lot of “me-too” kind of companies. There are hoardes of companies that are yet to be profiled. Please feel free to edit the page. Accnt info: startup/startup.

I am back

Am back from a long hibernation, rejuvenated and flooding with new thoughts. Come back. A series of posts will follow…..

USB Cell recharger - A cool product

One of the coolest ideas ever. Recharge your batteries through USB ports and there you are…back and fully energized . For more information on the product check out USBCELL. It currently costs somewhere around 1K. Costs may drop with more innovation in the production line and with mass market adoption.

Mobile Monday Bangalore

Bangalore chapter of Mobile Monday got started with an informal gathering of 20 enthusiasts @ Aztec s/w. Albeit it is late enough to blog about it, better now than never. Of late I have been held up with so many things that there is hardly any time left for me to blog. Things will continue to stay the same till I get a broadband connection @ my room. Coming back to the post,

MobileMonday is a community of mobile professionals. The open community promotes the mobile industry and fosters cooperation and networking among industry people and their companies by providing opportunities for personal and virtual contacts. It originally started in Finland and since has expanded globally.

The first meeting basically was to get the Bangalore chapter started, inflow of funds, etc. The topics that were discussed ranged from Mobile TV and its implications to Emergence of Open Source Software for Mobiles. The discussion was lively and almost each one had something to say. MoMo is a wonderful platform for getting to know what’s hot in the mobile space and what’s gonna rock in near future.

AppLabs gets $10 mn funding from Sequoia

Most of the investments from VCs in Indian startups has been into already established companies rather than angel fund early-stage startups. Is it that the VCs are playing safe? Check out more over here on the AppLabs deal.

VeriSign acquires GeoTrust

VeriSign Inc., a provider of infrastructure services for Internet and telecom networks, said Wednesday it agreed to buy privately held GeoTrust Inc. for about $125 million in cash. Check out more on this here.

StumbleUpon - A cool site

I was going through my daily dose of Biz-Tech news on RedHerring, when I stumbled upon this. StumbleUpon offers a cool Firefox extension. Although this has been there for a long time, I stumbled upon it very late. Wish I had it long back :(. The founders have rejected funding from VCs and have instead gone in for Angel funding from the likes of Ram Shriram, Mitch Kapor, Josh Kopelman, Rajeev Motwani, etc. In my personal opinion it was indeed a very smart move from them. Leveraging the experience and guidance of such high profile angel investors will definitely see them scaling greater heights. With such large user base and going by the acquisition spree of all the biggies out there, this one may be somewhere on top of their list. We never know what's cooking in the acquisition space ;). Here is a snippet that I am pasting from their site which quotes the difference between the regular search and their offering.

"Search vs. Stumble: Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences."

There is more to it. Check it out, it is really cool. It already has more users than digg.