Category Archives: News

GSF is looking for an EIR: Good opportunity for some Pune Techie

February 18, 2014Miscellaneous, Pune Cityfounders, funding, pune, startupsNavin Kabra

@thinkSantosh (Santosh Dawara) points out that the GSF (Global Superangels Forum) is looking for an Entrepreneur in Residence, and hopes people from Pune will take this opportunity to increase their network, increase their exposure, and help improve Pune’s presence in the Indian and Global startup ecosystem.

More information about the EIR@GSF program is here.

What are they looking for?

An EiR (Entrepreneur in Residence) is a misfit, a rebel and a leader, who sees an opportunity for change everywhere he/she looks. An EiR is restless, looking for his/her next challenge, while engaging with the best and brightest startups in India. An EiR is a humble, go-getter, rolling his/her sleeves up to get the job, any job, done.

EiRs will anchor GSF’s startup accelerator programs in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai by scouting, evaluating and aiding selection of the best startups from different regions of India. They will explore and drive strategic partnerships and expand GSF’s already robust mentor network of top entrepreneurs and executives in the tech community across the four cities. EiRs will also be responsible for designing and executing programming, managing logistics and buddy mentoring startups from MVP to Demo Day to eventual funding. EiRs are also awarded equity into the startups selected for GSF Accelerator.

See additional details in this YourStory article on GSF EiRs!

What qualifications are required?

For its inaugural program, GSF Accelerator inducted 17 EiRs who have have been entrepreneurs, students, investors, and ex-consultants. They have worked at some of the most exciting companies in the world and have educated from top tier educational institutions. Till date 30 EiRs have been part of GSF Acceleration program. For more details, please see the profiles of the GSF 2013 EiR
Team, and the GSF 2012 EiR Team.

Why is this being shared here?

Santosh says this:

I have no direct affiliation to GSF. But here’s why I suggested this,

In the near term an EIR is not a bad thing for an entrepreneur who is in-between ideas and is looking for a filler, or to simply grow his or her outlook, network.

In the long run, it will help us all immensely if any serious incubator were to consider a presence in Pune. If I may remind everyone, we are still missing the institutionalization of failures and successes of Punes startups. It helps to have one roof. As a result, every yr startups get going and attempt to reinvent without the benefit of what’s already been figured out by previous startups.

An incubator in Pune is atleast a step in that direction. If not that, having direct connections is the next best thing.

Can someone help me with the application?

Again, Santosh writes:

If the applicant is serious and has some of the necessary qualifications, I think there’s a lot of people on this list who will be willing to help in whatever way they can.

Pune’s Pubmatic gets $13MM funding; preparing for a $1B IPO?

February 11, 2014Money Matters, Newsfunding, ipo, pubmatic, startupsNavin Kabra

Pubmatic, a software product company with solutions in the cloud and mobile advertising space, which is fully developed out of Pune, has just received $13 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, along with existing investors. This takes the total amount of funding raised by Pubmatic to $76 million.

Excerpt:

The company plans to use the investment raised to improve its platform and for International expansion. PubMatic CEO and co-founder Rajeev Goel is also quoted in the press release as saying this investment will improve its ”direct market access by plugging into the global NGP (Nokia Growth Partners) and Nokia presence.”

The more interesting, and speculative, report comes from the Wall Street Journal article, which claims that Pubmatic is getting ready for an IPO, and are hoping for a valuation in excess of $1 billion.

We have been hoping for a Pubmatic IPO for a couple of years now ever since they hired a CFO who specializes in IPOs. However, it appears to be taking a little longer than expected.

Let’s hope that Pubmatic soon becomes Pune’s first software product IPO.

References:
– Medianama
– Wall Street Journal

@PersistentSys acquires @CloudSquads – Pune/California based enterprise social media startup

February 6, 2014Featured, Money Matters, Newscloud, funding, persistent, social-media, startupsNavin Kabra

Pune’s Persistent Systems has just acquired CloudSquads, a Pune and San Francisco based startup that builds social apps for the enterprise market.

After cloud-computing and mobile, the new hottest trend in the industry is SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), and CloudSquads is smack in the middle of this trend. CloudSquads builds products that help companies like E*Trade, GE, Autodesk to use social media for customer support, sales, marketing. In addition they build apps that can be used for providing private social networking features within the enterprise.

From the press release:

CloudSquads helps companies develop a strategy for engaging with the modern social customer across all customer facing functions including brand, marketing, sales and support. The company implements platforms which provide rich capabilities that transform these interactions into healthy communities and then integrates those platforms with companies’ internal systems allowing them to better know and serve their customers.

and also:

“Social communities are the natural next step in the evolution and enhancement of external systems of engagement with customers, following the 1-800 number and corporate web presence,” said Ashish Seth, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “CloudSquads helps global brands unlock the power of social to realize dramatic increases in employee productivity, double digit improvements in marketing and sales effectiveness and dramatically lower support costs, said Henry Bruckstein, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “Combining the global reach and broad technology capabilities of Persistent Systems will allow us to multiply the transformative impact in the market.”

Why is Persistent buying CloudSquads? According to Ranga Puranik, President of Persistent:

“CloudSquads complements our software product development and SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) technology expertise with consulting, IP connectors and implementation services around social community platforms and is perfectly aligned to better serve our ISV and enterprise customer base.”

Persistent had recently reported that it had created “Persistent Venture Fund”, a venture fund to invest in early stage startups, mainly in the SMAC domain. Persistent Venture Fund’s first investment was in US-based ustyme, a free video call app for the iPad.

According to Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent, the fund will only invest in startups that are strategically interesting to Persistent’s business.

“We consider two aspects for selection. First is the technology area of the start-up and its similarity to our interests, and second the customers that it needs to align with our customer eco-system,” he added.

Pune’s Cuelogic acquires California based mobile apps development company

January 28, 2014Newsentrepreneurs, mobile, pune-shining, startupsNavin Kabra

Pune based services company Cuelogic Technologies has just acquired the services arm of California based company Evolutionate, Inc. Excerpts from their press release:

The acquisition came out through a prior strategic partnership between the two companies in which Cuelogic offered Evolutionate and its customers, mobile application development services, cloud computing services and advanced testing services for their customers in enterprise and consumer software domain. Also, Cuelogic helped Evolutionate and its customers boost their internal team’s capacity and capabilities by providing them iOS and Android developers and designers for temporary and long-term assignments.

Last year, Cuelogic also acquired AU Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a mobile and web based game development company to boost and add game development services to the portfolio offerings.

Read the full press release

SEED Infotech launches “SEED IT Idol 2014” for college students

January 22, 2014Newseducation, hiring, jobs, recruitment, studentsNavin Kabra

Pune based technology training institute, SEED Infotech, has launched the 4th edition of “SEED IT Idol 2014”, a test of ‘C’ programming knowledge, for all students of engineering in the University of Pune, reports DNA India.

Excerpts:

The information technology (IT) Idol in Pune is being organised by SEED Infotech in association with the University of Pune (UoP), wherein students of engineering, MCM, MCS, MCA and all other computer-related educational programmes from all colleges affiliated to the UoP are eligible. The first round of the competition has already began.

Speaking about the initiative, executive director, SEED Infotech, Bharati Barhate, said, “Our aim is to tap the huge talent across colleges and make it industry ready. This year our target is to reach out to students across Maharashtra and for the first time to certain regions in Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Jaipur and Bangalore.”

Read the full article

Pune’s LinguaNext, a localization software company, raises Series A funding from Helion

January 15, 2014Featured, Money Matters, Newsfunding, localization, products, startupsNavin Kabra

LinguaNext, a Pune-based company that provides a “langauge management platform” for software products, has raised a round of funding form Helion Venture Partners, reports VCCircle.

LinguaNext creates software products that allow enterprise software to be “localized” to one or more languages without requiring any change in the source code of the software.

What is Localization?

Most software in the world first gets written with English as the language of interfacing with the user. The menus are in English, and the messages, and labels on forms, and user interface buttons are all in English. If the same software needs to be used by a Japanese person who does not understand any English, she will either have to memorize the meanings and locations of the various English menu options and buttons, or the software needs to be modified such that all the English in the interface is replaced by Japanese. The same thing needs to be repeated for every major language in the world (where the company has customers).

This process is called Localization

Why is Localization Hard?

All the places in the source code of the software where English might be embedded, and all the images used in the user-interface need to be replaced. This is a huge task, because often, enterprise software contains millions of lines of code.

And this has to be done for dozens of languages, if not 100+.

And this can’t be done just once. Because every time the original software is updated, the various localized versions need to be updated.

Sometimes, the source code of the software might not even be available, or it might be too difficult to change.

What does LinguaNext do?

LinguaNext has products that allow their customers to localize the software they sell without having to modify the source code of the software. They can attach themselves to running programs, and modify the user interface screen of the software on the fly, and replace the English text with the appropriate text from the target language. Similarly, with web-browser based software, they can modify the HTML/JavaScript that gets generated by the software and do the language replacement before the webpage is sent to the user.

How LinguaNext Works — This is how LinguaNext works. Note that the original application (in blue) is not modified at all. Instead, when the original app is sending data to the screen (technically, the screen buffer), or to the printer, LinguaNext intercepts it, replaces the English Text, and sends the modified data to the screen. (Click for full-size image.)

This is excellent for the customer. Being able to localize a software without having to modify the source code is a dream of the marketing department (which, otherwise has to deal with the tech guys before they start selling any version of any software in a new country).

But, there are lots of little problems that need to be solved to make this a reality. For example, consider this tricky problem: what happens if the space on the screen (in the menu dropdown, or on a button) isn’t wide enough for the new word that they want to put there. i.e. if the Hindi word that replaces a particular English word is very long and it won’t fit. They solve this problem by having language experts who are able to suggest alternative words that are smaller, or by developing special narrow fonts to fit in words like these.

Although technically LinguaNext was started only in 2010, the core technology for LinguaNext, and the CTO of the company (Rajeevlochan Phadke), both come from an earlier company called Image Point that was around – doing similar software – since 2002. In other words, they have been developing, fine-tuning and selling this software for a dozen years.

They do this with Oracle or SAP Applications, HR Applications, Cloud Apps, Windows Desktop Apps, and now Mobile Apps are the next big target. LinguaNext already has customers such as SBI (State Bank of India), Punjab National Bank, and sofrware maker SAP.

What will they do with the funding?

According to the press release, they will use the funding to “expand in international markets, hire talent and scale up its mobile platform.” Going to Japan and Europe is likely to be one of their major priorities. India has lots of local languages, and lots of need for localization, but really, Indian companies don’t really like paying for software. Japan and Europe has the non-English speaking people who pay lots of money for software. And of course, as any website owner will tell you, mobile apps are taking over the world, and soon, localization of Android and iPhone apps is likely to be a huge market.

CoEP unrolls online health management portal for 1800 hostelites

September 1, 2013Newscoep, education, healthcare, startups, studentsNavin Kabra

COEP – The College of Engineering Pune, has unrolled a program called AyushDeep – an online health management portal for 1800 students living in hostels with the help of a local software company Ayushman aka IndiaOnlineHealth.com.

The portal will hold an electronic medical record of the students online, which can also be viewed by parents and doctors, and it is hoped that the students will continue to use and update this record for the rest of their life.

“The first and most obvious motivation is the identification of any health problem in our students that require special attention. Secondly, we want students to inculcate a habit of building their EMR, which will form the core of continuity in healthcare for them for the rest of their life. The platform of connected healthcare we offered to our students can render them help from appropriate specialists, if needed, using the online health platform,” college director A D Sahasrabudhe said at an Idea Exchange held at The Indian Express office here.

More info:

Read the full article
AyushDeep Brochure
AyushDeep Fact Sheet
Other programs by Ayushman – AyushCare – for Senior Citizens and AyushCorp for large companies

TiE Pune Chapter wins the “Best Turnaround” award at TiE Global Retreat

July 9, 2013Newscommunity, entrepreneurs, TiEPuneNavin Kabra

TiE Pune, the Pune Chapter of TiE the worldwide community of entrepreneurs, has just won the “Best Turnaround” award at the TiE Annual Global Retreat in Athens Greek. They competed with 61 chapters globally, and were selected from 5 finalists.

5 years ago, when PuneTech and the Pune Open Coffee Club started, TiE Pune was dormant, and used to have one event per year (or less). In fact, it could be argued, that neither Pune Open Coffee Club nor PuneTech would have actually gotten started if TiE Pune had been active.

In any case, in the last few years, there has been a remarkable rejuvenation of TiE Pune. Here is proof – in 2012, these were the activities of TiE Pune:

23 My Story Sessions (where entrepreneurs like the founder of Redbus.in talked about their startup story)
19 Breakfast with TiE sessions – morning meetings with a discussion around a theme
18 half/full day workshops were conducted on various topics related to startups
7 Stree shakti fellowships were awarded
2 6-month long “Nurture” programs were conducted to nurture young entrepreneurs

To support TiE Pune in these activities, you should consider buying a TiE Pune membership.

For more information see the TiE Pune website

Pune’s Rolocule games (Motion Tennis App) covered in TechCrunch

July 4, 2013Newscompanies, coverage, gaming, mobileNavin Kabra

Pune-based game development company Rolocule was covered in TechCrunch last week for its latest game, Motion Tennis App.

Here are excerpts from the article:

It’s not Rolocule’s first foray into virtual racquet sports, but it is the first that turns your iPhone into the controller and Apple TV into a gaming console.

The Motion Tennis app, which costs $7.99, uses the iPhone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer to track the phone’s motion, so players can slice and slam shots across the court. All you need is an Apple TV and an iPhone: hook the two up, open the app, and you’re playing tennis.

And also:

Rolocule raised an angel round in India last year with Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures, though Gupta would not disclose how much they raised. He said that they might be looking to raise again, especially if they want to become leaders in this technology. I wouldn’t put it past them.