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Following are the startups that were showcased at proto.in conference under Internet and Web 2.0 Segment.

• Skilworth Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Cricketology.com)
• Genie Interactive
• Inasra.com
• minekey
• RouteGuru
• Pennywise Solutions Pvt. Ltd (Tolmolbol.com)
• Tyroo

Skilworth Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Cricketology.com)

Website   : www.cricketology.com
Location  : Chennai, India
Incorporation Year : 2007
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Cricko
Core Focus Area  : Gaming and Social Network application for the Sports and     Entertainment industry
Market / Segment : Internet / Mobile
Competition  : None currently. Secondary competitors in the form of cricket     portals like Cricinfo and Cricketnext
Team Size  : 3
Revenue   : Yes
Profitable  : Not yet
Founder   : Pavan Kachibhatla & Srini Kachibhatla
Summary   
Circko is a new media interactive cricket network which incorporates the philosophies of Web 2.0 and is amied at cricket fans worldwide. It’s a product of Skilworth Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Genie Interactive Pvt. Ltd.

Website   : www.genieinteractive.com
Location  : Bangalore, India
Incorporation Year : 1999
Stage of Funding : Self funded
Product   : Voiee
Core Focus Area  : UI design / development for the web & mobile; Internet product /     application development using open source technologies
Market / Segment : Internet / Enterprise
Competition  : canvas.nowpos.com, jott.com, spinvox.com
Team Size  : 18
Revenue   : As a company: Revenues / Profitable: Yes. For the product: No     revenues as of yet
Founder   : Aradhana Handa / Deepak Samaga
Summary   
Genie Interactive Pvt. Ltd is self funded and was founded on 1999. At proto they were showcasing their product Voiee. Voiee is an easy to use, cost effective, simple yet versatile voice mail and messaging platform. It allows one to seamlessly and creatively integrate audio (voice) into their WWW universe. Their aim to make VOiee as the default platform for lot of voice based services.

Inasra Technologies

Website   : www.inasra.com
Location  : Chennai, India
Incorporation Year : 2005
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Inasra.com
Core Focus Area  : Enabling users to book hotels online
Market / Segment : Internet, Enterprise
Competition  : Makemytrip.com, Cleartrip.com, Travelguru.com, Yatra.com
Team Size  : 8
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Yogendra Vasupal
Summary   
Inasra.com is an online hotel booking service in India. It brings 3500 hotels from 400 cities in India just a couple of clicks away. Inasra was founded in 2005 and is self funded.

Minekey

Website   : www.minekey.com
Location  : Sunnyvale, CA
Incorporation Year : 2005
Stage of Funding : First Round
Product   : Minekey
Core Focus Area  : Internet / Content
Market / Segment : End user
Competition  : Aggregate Knowledge, Loomia, Sphere
Team Size  : 10
Revenue   : Not yet
Founder   : Delip Andra
Summary   
Minekey is a Silicon Valley based VC funded start up incubated out of IIT Kharagpur. Minekey recomendations service makes the content discovery on blogs and websites a lot easier. It can help each of your sites visitors find the golden nuggets of content that would be most interesting to them, based on what they are currently reading or have read before.

RoutrGuru

Website   : www.routeguru.com
Location  : New Delhi, India
Incorporation Year : 2006
Stage of Funding : Seed
Product   : RouteGuru
Core Focus Area  : GIS, Consumer Internet
Market / Segment : End User , Enterprise
Competition  : RoadsofIndia.com, MapMyIndia.com, Google Maps
Team Size  : 3
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Avinash Agarwal
Summary   
RouteGuru is India’s #1 routing and driving direction services provider on the Internet and Mobile. It provides directions in the good old way.. i.r. using Landmarks. Their vision is to make geographical information accessible, usable and valuable in day-to-day lives of consumers and local businesses in developing countries.

Pennywise Solutions Pvt. Ltd (Tolmolbol.com)

Website   : www.tolmolbol.com
Location  : Hyderabad, India
Incorporation Year : 2003
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Tolmolbol.com
Core Focus Area  : Local social search
Market / Segment : Internet
Competition  : JustDial.com, Guruji.com
Team Size  : 8 (Pennywise - 70)
Revenue   : For Pennywise: Revenue - Yes, Profitable - Yes. For     tolmolbol.com: Revenue - Yes. Profitable - Not yet.
Founder   : Anand R. Morzaria, Rithesh R. Prasad
Summary   
Tolmolbol.com is from Pennywise Solutions Private Limited. Tolmolbol is a place to search for trusted local businesses, voice out yout opinions, meet interesting people in your community, communicate interesting events and advertise local classifieds and get free SMS with information regarding businesses, events and classifieds.

Tyroo Media Pvt. Ltd

Website   : www.tyroo.com
Location  : Delhi, India
Incorporation Year : 2007
Stage of Funding : First Round
Product   : Tyroo
Core Focus Area  : Digital Media Advertisement
Market / Segment : Enterprise
Competition  : Google Adsense, Tribal Fusion, Advertising.com
Team Size  : 18
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Aditya Khanna
Summary   
Tyroo is the largest self served Indian ad-network. It’s pay for performance contextual advertising network, provides a unique platform for advertisers and for publishers to come together and do business, including the smaller players who haven’t participated online before. The combination of Tyroo’s Self-Serve system interface, sophisticated targeting and optimization technologies and localized features are it’s biggest competitive advantage.

Following are the startups that were showcased at proto.in conference under Mobile Segment.

• Aumega Networks
• BUZZ Works
• Rarefind Engineering Innovations Pvt. Ltd
• Wifin Technologies
• Ziva Soft

Aumega Networks

Website   : www.aumeganetworks.com
Location  : Bangalore, India
Incorporation Year : 2004
Stage of Funding : Self funded
Product   : Lukup
Core Focus Area  : Search, Grid and P2P computing
Market / Segment : Mobile
Competition  : MakeMyTrip, Naukri, Shaadi
Team Size  : 11 (Lukup)
Revenue   : No (for the product). Starting to execute pilots with two known     companies in India
Founder   : Kallol Borah
Summary   
Aumega Networks was founded in 2004 and they are in proto to showcase their product Lukup. Lukup is a mobile search application that indexes very frequently updated data and provides precise and up to date results to mobile users. Lukup is based on the Indus SDK which is a peer-to-peer, network and device neutral, software-as-a-service development platform. This platform is being licensed by Aumega since 2005.

Buzz Works

Website   : www.buzzworks.co.in
Location  : Hyderabad, India
Incorporation Year : 2007
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Bolo
Core Focus Area  : Telecom VAS
Market / Segment : End User
Competition  : Onmobile, Pyromobile, Mauj telecom
Team Size  : 2
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : V C Karthic
Summary   
BuzzWorks vision is to create a Indian mobile voice search engine that helps people publish and search for extremely localized information. Their factor of success is making our mobile device that gets us business, without any knowledge of technology. Currently they are rolling this service out in Hindi and English with roughly more Indian languages in the pipe.

Rarefind Engineering Innovations Pvt. Ltd

Website   : www.mocodile.com
Location  : Bangalore, India
Incorporation Year : 2003
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Mocodile
Core Focus Area  : Mobile Content Exchange
Market / Segment : Enterprise
Competition  : Soonr, 24access, ORB
Team Size  : 7
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Ajay Rajasekhar
Summary   
Mocodile® is a mobile content exchange service that uses patent pending technology that is unique and simple. Mocodile is a friendly software to send photos, documents, audio & video from a PC to a mobile phone, anywhere in the world, across any telecom provider, in any language. Mocodile is from Rarefind Engineering Innovations Pvt. Ltd. group.

Wifin Technologies

Website   : www.wifintech.com
Location  : Chennai, India
Incorporation Year : 2003
Stage of Funding : Seed
Product   : Mobistream
Core Focus Area  : Mobile Applications
Market / Segment : End User / Enterprise
Competition  : e-Signal, wizdom.in, livemarketwatch
Team Size  : 22
Revenue   : Profitable
Founder   : Ragavendra Prasad
Summary   
Wifin Technologies was founded in 2003 at Proto they were showcasing their product Mobistream. Mobistream offers live, streaming market information on mobile devices and PDA’s with secure trading capability. They visiion is to see this product as the most preferred trading medium by the discerning investors.
Apart from this, Wifin also has a desktop/browser-based streaming solution, mobile banking product, Learning solution.

Ziva Software

Website   : www.zivasoftware.com
Location  : Bangalore, India
Incorporation Year : 2005
Stage of Funding : First round
Product   : Zook
Core Focus Area  : Mobile Search
Market / Segment : End user
Competition  : Mobile search companies and mobile search networking companies.
Team Size  : 10
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Ajay Sethi
Summary   
Ziva Software is a VC-backed company that has developed an innovative and intelligent platform for mobile search and access. Ziva’s platforms are being used by a number of market-leading companies. Ziva’s flagship “search networking” service (called Zook.in) provides exact and actionable answers to mobile users. It not only provides quick and precise results to user but also enables them to get information and relevant updates from their friends.

Following are the startups that were showcased at proto.in conference under Development Platform Segment.

• Brite Soft
• Pramati
• Tekriti

Britesoft Solutions (M) Sdn. Bhd

Website   : www.britesoftcorp.com
Location  : Kula Lumpur, Malaysia
Incorporation Year : 2002
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Briteworks
Core Focus Area  : Software / Business Applications
Market / Segment : Developers
Competition  : Secondary competitors include Misrosoft Visual Studio tools,     Eclipse IDEs and Ruby-on-Rails. There are some tools such as     Magic, Tenfold, OutSystem that do similar things
Team Size  : 18
Revenue   : Profitable
Founder   : Fazel Naghshineh
Summary
BriteSoft focuses in the business of Highly Rapid Application Development Tools that eliminate coding. With it’s extensive application development experience, BriteSoft has changed the rules of the game when it comes to programming and building applications. Tot’s flagship product, BriteWorks is an award winning platform that helps customers deliver applications 20 times faster, yet with higher quality and hugely reduces costs. Developers need not know Java, VB, C++ or any other programming language or technology.
BriteSoft’s philosophy is ’sero code generation’ and ‘develop once, run everywhere’ (i.e. client server, web, PDA).
BriteSoft has a series of lin-of-buinsess applications that have all been powered by BriteWorks.

Pramati Technologies

Website   : www.dekoh.com
Location  : Hyderabad, India
Incorporation Year : 1998
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Dekoh
Core Focus Area  : Desktop Web Integration
Market / Segment : Consumer / enterprise web 2.0
Competition  : Adobe
Team Size  : 25
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Jay Pullur
Summary   
Pramati Technologies founded in 1998 has many products and one of them is Dekoh. Dekoh is desktop platform for applications that deliver integrated experience of web and desktop. Along with free Dekoh Desktop, comes a gallery of personal media applications and Dekoh Network service that helps users share content/applications directly off their PC. Dekoh is a product of Pramati Technologies.

Tekriti Software Private Limited

Website   : www.tekritisoftware.com
Location  : Gurgaon, India
Incorporation Year : 2005
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : TekMedia
Core Focus Area  : Web Media Publishing, Video Publishing, Video Management, Low     cost, High quality white labeled video platforms
Market / Segment : Internet
Competition  : Blip.tv, revver, vidavee, VideoEgg
Team Size  : 4-5
Revenue   : Tekmedia - Not Yet (Tekriti Software is a profitable entity)
Founder   : Ashish Kumar, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra
Summary   
Tekriti Software is a New Delhi based startup founded by Ex IIT’ians, Ex Microsoft and Ex Infosys employees. They were showcasing TekMedia a product for Video Publication, Syndication and Community Portal System. TekMedia is a set of reusable technology components that can be used to add rich media functionality to existing or new websites.

Following are the startups that were showcased at proto.in conference under Enterprise Segment.

• Altrion Technologies Private Limited
• AuthMe
• Multimedia Display Technologies
• TISS MSC SDN BHD

Altrion Technologies Private Limited

Website   : www.altrion.co.in
Location  : Chennai, India
Incorporation Year : 2006
Stage of Funding : Seed
Product   : ALTRION BUSINESS PERFORMANCE SUITE
Core Focus Area  : BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Market / Segment : Enterprise
Competition  : SAP - Pilot Works, ORACLE - Daily     Business Inteligence, HYPERION
Team Size  : 70+
Revenue   : Yes, Not Profitable
Founder   : Jagannathan Vaman
Summary   
Altrion Technologies is a Chennai-based global IT services and product company. After an extensive research they have created a software product for proactively analyzing and managing the Business Performance of an Enterprise called ALTRION Business Performance Suite (ALTRION BPS)

Altrion-BPS helps align Individual Goal to Organisational Goals, Pro-actively drive for performance at all levels in the organisation and achieve the functional and organisational goals. It also aligns with a lot of management models like Balanced Scorecard, TPM, TQM, Six-Sigma, etc. and provides a single window control for driving these initiatives. Altrion-BPS is built on flexible open framework and can be implemented in multiple verticals and functions.

AuthMe

Website   : Not provided
Location  : Hyderabad, India
Incorporation Year : 2007 Stage of
Stage of Funding : Self-Funded
Product   : AuthMe
Core Focus Area  : Securing Online Tractions
Market / Segment : Banking and Enterprise Applications
Competition  : RSA, Arcot
Team Size  : 3
Revenue   : Not Yet
Founder   : Aditya.K
Summary   
Auth Me focuses on Secure Online Tractions. AuthMe secures all the three entities in any authentication infrastructure namely the Client, the Server and the Channel (Medium). Auth Me secures client from trojans, key loggers and other client side attacks by user to keep a cognitive based one time PASTCODE. To protect the channel from Pharming and Man in the Middle Phishing attacks. Auth Me uses a new patent pending method, where user authemtication is tied to the secure session empowering the organization and the clilent to see when they are connected by a direct link without integration.

Multimedia Display Technologies Sdn. Bhd.

Website   : http://www.mmdt.cc/
Location  : Lumpur, Malaysia
Incorporation Year : 2000
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : Mi-RFiD Radio Frequency Identification Products
Core Focus Area  : RFID, ICT and Display Technologies
Market / Segment : Enterprise, End user
Competition  : Merit in Best of Communications Category, Apicta 2006
Team Size  : 18
Revenue   : Yes
Founder   : Liew Choon Lian
Summary   
MDT (Multimedia Display Technologies) has overcome the breaking point of providing low cost RFID readers and low cost RFID tags for the consumption of target industries as well as mass consumers. This cutting edge technology and cost advantage will enable the company to promote the use of RFID technology in almost all targeted applications. String engineering resources have helped developed innovative RFID products, being patented in Japan, China and eventually worldwide markets.
Besides offereing reader module to potential reader makers. MDT also offers full fledge RFID solutions in terms of system configurations and infrastructure deployment and integration of software system. Involved in other industry such as advanced display and software engineering to provide competitive edge in terms of technical application know-how and new market opportunities.
Set with a madate, in exploring new technologies for providing low cost chipped and chipless tag that will further tap into new markets that are previously hindered by cost.

TISS MSC SDN BHD

Website   : www.tiss-msc.com
Location  : West Malaysia, Malaysia
Incorporation Year : 2003
Stage of Funding : Self Funded
Product   : T3 Security Key
Core Focus Area  : IT Security
Market / Segment : Enterprise
Competition  : Not provided
Team Size  : 14
Revenue   : No not yet profitable
Founder   : Mr. Graham Baldwin
Summary   
TISS MSC was founded in 2003 to compliment the business of Millenium Hallmark Software as the sales and distribution arm of the organization formed in 2001. MHS found it’s niche in the market place in the Internet Content Security product and began it’s distribution oprtations in October of that year.
TISS gained much Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) status in March 2003, for it’s contribution to ICT development in Malaysia. TISS continues to fulfull it’s passion and obligations under this status umbrella.
TISS primary business is to provide protection, (preventive) security and control for users of desktop computers, laptops, email and internet browsing by utilizing TISS’s unique integrated, portable Total Internet Security Solutions (TISS)

Only 22 startups became the finalist out of 100+ nominated companies for the Proto July 21st and 22nd 2007 conference. For those of you who don’t know, proto.in is a premier event to showcase new products, technologies and companies to a selected gathering. The products presented at proto.in are most likely to have a significant impact on the market trends in the coming year. Got to proto.in to learn more about proto.

The 22 startups have been categorized across 5 segments Enterprise, Development Platform, Mobile, Internet / Web 2.0 and New Frontier. I have created the following presentations with the summary of each startup that were showcased at the Proto event.

Activeciti.com is an online event management platform which lets you create events and manage them extremely quickly and easily. After registering, you could easily create new events and invite your friends to your events.

Some of the key features are

• Once you log in it displays the list of events that you have created
• Invite people directly from your friends list
• Invite non ActiveCiti members by specifying their email address
• Add polls to your events - to ask the opinion of invitees on any topic you can think of
• Track the responses of your invitees - whether they will be attending the event, not attending, etc
• Specify tags for public events, by which your event becomes easily searchable
• Add organizers to your events who can better help you organize
• Discuss event details with other organizers in the private forum
• Discuss other details with all your invitees in the public forum
• When important details of an event are changed - an update is sent automatically to your invitees
• Choose whether the invitees can see others that are invited

I really loved the UI design. It’s very neat and here are some screen shots of the application

And finally, I just have one question to you. Do we need another application like evite.com? Evite.com is also an online event management platform which has more features that activeciti.com.

DiscountsIndia.com is another deal site for India. It provides the online deals and as well as in store deal information. It has all the regular stuff a deal site provides. You could register for free, search for deals using keywords, and submit deals to the web site. You could also add reviews to a deal and view reviews. The features like setting an alert, emailing a deal are missing. The UI is neatly designed.

DiscountsIndia.com joins the following deal sites in the Indian Market

Admanya.com is the India’s first consumer education and advocacy website which claims it has brought new hopes to the Indian consumers to raise their voices against a consumer product or a company. It completely depends on consumer participation. Admanya revolutionizes consumer rights by empowering Indian consumers to take action against companies and firms that sell inferior goods and provide poor service.

In this website you could read reviews about a product and can get educated about it before making a decision to buy a product. You could also submit reviews about a product and also comment on other reviews. There are over 700 products currently listed in the website. One good part is you don’t have to register to read or write reviews about a product. You could stay anonymous and could participate in the website. There are also forums where you could discus and debate about hot topics of interest.

I believe this is the first ever C2C (consumer to consumer) portal in India.

For those of you who don’t know what Digg.com is, it’s a web application/platform that allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page. When a user submits a news article it will be placed in the “unpublished” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page.

Recently I came across two new sites DoctorWorld.NET, a Digg for medical news and Talkingtarmac.com, a Digg for aviation industry in India.

DoctorWorld.NET is a user powered medical news portal. On this social content voting site, all news is submitted by its users. The content will be promoted or buried depending on how much it is liked by the community. It’s powered by CoRank. CoRank allows to create your own social content site like Digg.

TalkingTarmac 2.0 is a site for the aviation industry in India. It’s a Pligg implementation. Pligg is an open source content management system which will allow you to create sites like Digg. And it’s free. Pligg is based on PHP and MySQL.

With CoRank.com and Pligg.com you could easily create social book marking / voting system, like the ones mentioned above. And it takes no effort.

DO not come after me for saying that, however seems like that’s what you will be hearing from your bosses if you are working for IT/BPO companies. The reason is to combat the negative effect of the appreciating rupee on the company’s topline and bottom line, reports TI.

The Indian companies now get fewer rupees for every $1 contract. So major IT/BPO Company’s like Wipro, Infosys, etc are talking about increasing the hours per work week to 50. They are planning to have 9 hours a day during the week days and 5 hours on Saturday resulting to 50 hours a week.

One Wipro employee asked a very obvious question, “When the rupee was depreciating, the company never thought of giving us more time to relax. So how can they do this now?”