Tag Archives: startups

Company Profile: hover.in

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Go Ergo has an interview of the founders of Pune-based web startup hover.in. Excerpt:

Q: Hover.in was born out of constant frustration that most bloggers and web publishers face regarding their content presentation and monetisation. Could you explain how hover bridges this gap?
A:? As a professional blogger, one of my main problems has been monetising (making money) from my blog without compromising on user experience. Normally, a visitor does not like to see too many ads on a blog or a website. Most of the new visitors will turn away from the blog on seeing too many ads. Hover was born to address this pain point!
Hover.in is an in-text “customised content” and “customised ad” delivery platform for websites and blogs. It enables web publishers to link and monetise keywords or phrases within their existing content.
Till date, in-text technology has been primarily used only to display contextual ads – mostly automated, without any publisher control. However, with hover.in, publishers can create and customise the content appearing within the hover bubble (hoverlet). Hover.in goes even further, allowing the publisher to change the look and feel of the hoverlet as per the theme of the website or blog.

Read the full interview.

hover.in provides web publishers and bloggers with in-text customized content display. It also provides opportunities for contextual in-text ads for increased revenues to publisher. More information about hover.in from the PuneTech wiki:

Key Features

  • Complete control of what appears within the hover window, via an administrative panel
  • Publishers can choose between hundreds of 3rd party contextual widgets or browse applications within the hover.in community
  • Improve reader engagement by displaying targeted content for particular key phrase of choice, or choose default applications
  • Customize the interface, add your own content or integrate advertisements from third party ad networks

Hover.in is currently in closed alpha and will be opening up shortly to selected beta users.

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POCC meetup – Footprint Ventures and Google M&A – 3 July

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together. Informal meeting with Footprint Ventures, and Google Corporate Development and M&A.

When: Thursday, 3rd July, 6pm.

Where: Seed Infotech’s office in Erandawana

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone. Register at upcoming.

Details:

Hemant Joshi, of nFactorial would like to invite POCC members to an informal get-together with special invitees: Footprint Ventures, and Google Corporate Development on 3rd July, 5pm.

Footprint ventures will be there to meet startups and talk about what they look for when considering Series A investments.

Neeraj Arora will be representing Google’s Corporate Development and M&A division and will be there to interact with Startups.

The venue will be Seed Infotech’s office in Erandawana.

The complete address is:
Seed Infotech
Nalanda building, Opposite Gandhi Lawns,
Erandwane, Pune

Many thanks to Naredra Barhate, CEO of Seed Infotech for arranging place for the meeting.

Footprint Ventures are an early stage venture capital fund, based out of India. (http://footprintventures.com/index.htm).

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Footprint Venture entrepreneurs meeting – 3 July

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Update: See the updated post on the latest details (including venue, and Google M&A’s participation).

Hemant Joshi, co-founder of nFactorial Software, writes:

Footprint Venture will be visiting Pune in next week, 3rd July. They are an early stage venture capital fund, based out of India. (http://footprintventures.com/index.htm ). I am trying to arrange their meeting with POCC members where they can informally interact with POCC member and talk for a few minutes on their prospective, what they look for, etc. The tentative plan is to have this meeting from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The venue is TBD. I will confirm the venue and meeting in a few days. If anyone can arrange for place, it will be great.

Footprint is an early stage venture capital fund, based out of India. They are targeting entrepreneurs seeking Series A investment.

The fund is the brainchild of Neill Brownstein, a co-founder of Bessemer Venture Partners. It aims to invest in companies with a strong India focus, i.e. companies with offerings that are either exclusively for India or for India & international markets.

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Pune OpenCoffee Club Meeting – 14 July

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What: Meeting of the Pune OpenCoffee Club – theme: startup mentoring, incubating and collaborations

When: Saturday, 14th June, 5pm

Where: Barista, Law College Road, opposite IndSearch

This is the (loose) agenda:

  • Synergising startups through Service Provider – Client relationships or just good old Fashioned Business Collaboration.
  • Freeman Murray will lead a discussion about the possibility of Y!Combinator style startup incubation in Pune
  • Hemant Joshi from nFactorial software will talk about his experiences and thoughts on mentoring startups and entrepreneurs in Pune

Reconnex named a leader in DLP by Forrester

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(Newsitem forwarded to punetech by Anand Kekre of Reconnex)

Reconnex, has been named a “top leader” in the data leak prevention space by Forrester in its DLP Q2 2008 report.

DLP software allows a company to monitor all data movements in the company and ensure that “sensitive” data (i.e. intellectual property, financial information, etc.) does not go out of the company. Reconnex and Websense have been named as the two top leaders in this space by Forrester.

Forrester employed approximately 74 criteria in the categories of current offering, strategy, and market presence to evaluate participating vendors on a scale from 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

  • Reconnex received a perfect score of 5.0 in the sub-categories of data-in-motion (i.e., the network piece of DLP), unified management, and administration
  • Reconnex tied for the top scores in the sub-categories of data-at-rest (i.e., discovery) and forensics

“Reconnex offers best-in-class product functionality through its automated classification and analysis engine, which allows customers to sift through the actual data that the engine monitors to learn what is important to protect,” according to the Forrester Wave: Data Leak Prevention, Q2 2008 Report. “This solution stands out because it is the only one that automatically discovers and classifies sensitive data without prior knowledge of what needs to be protected.”

For more information about this award, see Reconnex’ press release.

For more information about Reconnex technology, see the punetech wiki profile of Reconnex.

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PubMatic Launches Default Optimization Service to Recapture $1 Billion in Lost Advertising Revenue

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A large number of websites rely on advertising as their primary source of income. Typically the ads are served by third party ad networks (for example Google’s adsense). When an ad network is unable to find an appropriate ad for a specific page being served to a specific reader, they put in default or public service ads (PSAs). This is not good because the website makes no money from PSAs.

Ad optimization service Pubmatic, says that more than half the ads that get shown at an average website are PSAs:

Over the past several months we’ve studied just how severely default ads are affect our publishers and the numbers are jaw dropping. We found that ad networks defaulted 56% of the time on average and as much as 87% of the time. We also found that that the traditional static daisy chain of ad networks may be effective at reducing blank ads but is highly ineffective at maximizing a publisher’s revenue. Between 20% and 30% of publishers’ ad inventory is going to waste.

(Source.)

This is of course terrible, if true.

Now Pubmatic has just launched the default optimization service that automates the process of contacting other ad networks whenever the ad being served by the primary network is a PSA

PubMatic’s default optimization service automates the reselling process, allowing publishers to instantly redirect unsold ad inventory back to PubMatic, which fills that inventory with the highest paying ad impression every time. PubMatic’s new service is an automated solution for the billion-dollar loss that plagues the industry.

For more details, see the press release.
Related articles:
Pubmatic and Komli to power all eBay.in ads
PubMatic releases AdPrice Index: Sensex for Online Ads
See also:  The PuneTech wiki profile of Pubmatic , and Mukul Kumar, head of engineering at Pubmatic (based in Pune).

Monkiri adds Blogger/WordPress support – becomes more useful

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When Pune-based social web-clipping service Monkiri had launched a couple of weeks ago, I had complained that it’s utility is very limited because it does not allow posting the clips to the user’s personal blog. They have moved quickly, and fixed the problem. They now support Blogger and WordPress blogs. That should certainly increase its adoption rate.

See also: SocialMedian, a personalized news recommendation service, whose development is being done in Pune. There are some similarities with Monkiri (i.e. the social bookmarking aspect), but significant differences too (i.e. the personalized recommendation part). The other big difference is that SocialMedian has a world-wide focus, whereas Monkiri appears to have an India-only focus.

Talk by Jason Goldberg Founder+CEO social|median & ex-Founder+CEO Jobster – 12 May

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Jason Goldberg Headshot

Serial entrepreneur, Jason Goldberg, who founded and headed Jobster, and who is now on to his next startup, social|median, a social news website, will share his past experiences as an entrepreneur and then Jason and Nishith Shah, CEO of True Sparrow Systems will talk about their experience in working on social|median development with Jason in New York and the team in Pune.

When: Monday, 12th May, 6:30pm
Where: True Sparrow Systems office, near e-Square
Detailed Location: See http://www.truesparrow.com/location

About the Speaker

Mr. Goldberg is the founder and CEO of socialmedian, a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information. Founded in January 2008, socialmedian is currently in alpha stage.

Previously, Mr. Goldberg founded Jobster, where he served as CEO from 2004 to 2007. Mr. Goldberg is currently Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors at Jobster.

Prior to founding Jobster, Mr. Goldberg launched and helped run several new products and services for T-Mobile and AOL.

Mr. Goldberg has a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Stanford University and a BA from Emory University with honors and Phi Beta Kappa distinction.

From 1991 to 1998, Mr. Goldberg spent most of his twenties working for President Bill Clinton, first on the 1992 Presidential campaign and then in the White House from 1993 to 1998. At the White House, Mr. Goldberg job was to help keeping the trains running on time.

About social|median

See the PuneTech wiki profile on social|median for more information and links. social|median is currently in an invite-only alpha – however, special invitations have been opened up for PuneTech readers. Use invitation code “punetech” at the social|median sign-up page.

Company Profile: Monkiri – Webpage clipping service

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Pune-based Monkiri is a browser plugin (IE & FF) that enables a web user clip portions of a webpage, comment on it, and post it to a blog hosted on Monkiri.

Literally Monkiri means the Japanese art of paper cutting. Monkiri lets one read and write blogs about any item published on a website. At this time, this facility can only be used to post to a blog hosted on Monkiri.

[edit] Features

With the help of the Monkiri button a user can snap required portion of the item on the webpage and blog it. The user can then give a comprehensive review of the same and add on his comments. The ‘View Entries’ feature from Monkiri menu enables other interested users to visit the blogged item and comment on the same. In this way everyone visiting that page can review the comments giving one a potentially large audience. Over a period of time users can build up an online journal of articles of interest. In other words, Monkiri makes blogging and sharing a simple affair.

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Final Thoughts

Monkiri is entering a very crowded space which has had established players for many years. <s>Also, restricting users to only post the clippings on Monkiri hosted blogs (as opposed to the users’ own blogs) is a serious limitation</s> (Update: Monkiri now supports posting to blogger/wordpress). In my mind, Monkiri joins FlockPod in the list of Pune-based companies that are doing something in the “commenting on other websites” space, but who need to figure out exactly what the value proposition is.

Proto.in online startup meet – May

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Compared to how things were a few years back, the Startup Community has come together in such a fabulous way. We have OpenCoffee Club meets, Startup Lunches, Startup Saturdays, Mobile Mondays, Barcamps, Ideacamps etc, etc, and the plethora of other activities that organizations such as TiE, NEN, NASSCOM, etc are providing to benefit this same target audience.

All that said, we understand that most of these benefits are enjoyed by those who live in the major cities, and in most cases in the cities down south. There hasnt been much activities going on in cities such as Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkatta, Ahmedabad or any where in Kerala to bring the community together and to share, ask questions, and receive support from one another.

In an attempt to bridge that, we are hosting an online meet this Saturday at 3pm at http://chat.proto.in. Most of you would know how to login, and the process is quite simple. Visit the URL, enter a nickname and you could join in.

If you would be participating, do send a reply to this mail, and feel free to ask any questions if you do have any. You are also more than welcome to invite your friends, should they be interested, and ask them to join.

I look forward to seeing you there this weekend.

Posted by Vijay Anand over at Pune OpenCoffee Club