Pune-based startups, Onion.tv & Dubzer launch on the world stage – at TechCrunch50 and DEMO09

TechCrunch50 and Demo.com are easily the top startup conferences in the world and a chance to launch there is a huge opportunity that is available only to a handful of selected startups from all over the world. The bulk of these startups happen to be from the US/Europe, and it is rare for an Indian startup to feature in these conferences.

So it is a great feeling to be able to say that there are two “pure Pune” startups there this year, onion.tv that’s been selected for the TechCrunch 50 demopit, and dubzer.com that will launch during DEMO.com’s AlphaPitch next week. Both of these events are very difficult to get into, and being there will be a huge boost to these startups in terms of visibility, contacts, networking, feedback.

Onion.tv is the startup of POCC regulars Prashant Sachdev and Nilesh Diane, and it allows companies to publish out enhanced videos – with tags, and text and tables of content to give the users (viewers) a much better experience. Here is their pitch in their own words:

The content companies can integrate relevant information with audio / video and make their media more rich and useful. For example, educational companies can integrate a simple DVD-like table of contents with the videos, or even synchronize notes, code section and related material like Wikipedia pages with the video. This will help users enhance their learning experience. On the other hand, event companies can integrate tags, notes, comments to the event video and even synchronize a presentation with the video. This will help their users skim, filter, and search or even share parts of video with others, thereby making event videos much useful, as events typically cover wide range of topics and have diverse audience. Similarly, content companies in news, entertainment, and advertising can integrate their media with relevant content to enhance the experience of their users.

Here’s a tour of the features they offer.

Dubzer is the next venture of the team that brought us Bookeazy and Lipikaar. This time around, they are incubated by Persistent Systems, and as one of the 10 teams selected for AlphaPitch they are one of “the coolest earliest-stage companies around” according to Matt Marshall, Co-Executive Producer of DEMO. And as one of just 10 companies selected for AlphaPitch, they get:

  • sixty second pitch to the entire DEMO audience in the general session ballroom,
  • kiosk space in the DEMO pavilion,
  • two passes to attend DEMO, and
  • extensive promotional support on site and after the event on demo.com.

Unfortunately, they cannot tell us what they do until September 22nd (i.e. until after they’ve officially launched at DEMO), because that is one of the rules of launching at DEMO. Maybe we can have a fun contest guessing what they do (based on what we know about the founders – Santosh Dawara, Anjali Gupta and co., and their past activities.) Maybe it’s a software that allows easy dubbing of English movies into Hindi and easily creating subtitles for them in 18 languages (by people who don’t understand English). That will be fun!

(Note: we are not looking for “accurate” guesses here. We don’t want to encourage inadvertent breaking of their embargo. But it would be fun to get funny guesses. I think we can bring pressure upon Anjali to give a free Dubzer T-shirt to the funniest guess.)


Update: Dubzer has launched. See this PuneTech article for details. Shashikant and Rohan had posted comments that came too close to the truth for comfort, so we held them back in the moderation queue for a few days until Dubzer officially launched.

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10 thoughts on “Pune-based startups, Onion.tv & Dubzer launch on the world stage – at TechCrunch50 and DEMO09

  1. Hi Prashant/Nilesh,
    Congratulation on your success. Hope everything goes well on the RED CARPET of startup’s.
    Looking forward to see you sharing your experiance.

    Anand

  2. Guessing from their twitter stream : http://twitter.com/dubzer

    The product seems to have something to do with website translation – primarily from English to major European and Asian languages.

    I guess, they have developed some kind of cool glasses which lets you view a webpages in your favourite language. It may have a small earphone which will read out the webpage (of course, in your language) for you, just in case you are tired of reading.

  3. Let me take a guess for dubzer…
    – Website Translation made simple kinda stuff
    – Something like google translation but much simpler so that a website can use it/change the language(dub it) and become available to a whole new set of audience.

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