The Entrepreneurship Cell of IIM Calcutta has announced its business plan competition- i2I 2008 - “ideas to Implementation 2008″ which is being held in association with The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), National Entrepreneurship network (NEN), and Seedfund. This business plan contest is open to not only students but also to working professionals, thus giving seed / early stage startups to reach out to VCs/ Investors directly and secure that first round of cash which makes all the difference between to be or not to be.

In India where private equity markets has taken off like anything, angel / seed or early stage investing is still at a very nascent stage despite all the talk, and these business plan competitions help to fill this space and provide much needed platform to stratups to approach investors as otherwise the only way a entrepreneur can reach a VC is by mailing his 10 MB business plan with 60 slides and 10 pages of excel sheet to info@whateverventurefund.com which is never opened as some bored secretary religiously delete these 100 mails per hour.

i2i business plan competition which stated way back in 2001 (incidentally I was involved with i2i in 2001 as a mentor to one of participating team from SPJIMR) has come a long way since in terms of scale, scope and of course prize money or say seedmoney. For more details check out http://www.iimcal.ac.in/i2i/home.htm

Some of important points related to i2i are as follows

How is i2I different from any other b plan competition in the country?

a.i2I’08 is open to students as well as working professionals, a somewhat greater chance of concepts and plans idea to transform into a start up venture.

b. i2i does not just assess the business plan but the team profile and the seriousness and sincerety to actually startup, taking away the academic nature from the contest, to usher in enthusiasm, and serious business

c. i2i does not offer cash prizes to the best business plan but seed investment to the deserving entrepreneurs. The real money comes to you only if you really start up. Entrepreneurship is serious business and i2I means business. As a partner, Seedfund may offer startup investments up to INR 1 Crore and above, to plans which have not gone even into execution mode. With their stellar track record of investments and returns hitherto, we can already see some deals all set to take place at i2I ‘08.

d. Typically, in a real startup process, a complete business plan takes time to evolve and requires expert assistance. With i2I, the first and second stage don’t demand a comprehensive business plan and the finalists are coached and mentored extensively by a panel of relevant experts from different walks of life. The resources made available in terms of inputs from our jury panel about their expectations and key parameters shall help students learn to match the level of their working counterparts and stand a real chance to win in the investor marketplace.

The team actually interacts with a judging panel during its second stage, which will be a round of 10 minute presentations. This will be held across 4 cities, and will help in enabling a thorough and systematic filtering process.

Stages of i2I ‘08:

Launch of the event: November 24th, 2007

Stage 1: Submission of Executive summary with team profile and statement of purpose

Deadline: December 14th, 2007

Announcement of selected plans: December 31st, 2007

Stage 2: A pitch to a panel of investors in your zone – Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore

Pitch: January 14th, 15th (in Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi)

Announcement of teams for the Grand Finale: January 16th, 2007

Mentoring: Mentoring of the final 10 teams: January 16th – January 31st.

Stage 3: Grand Finale – A detailed presentation to a panel of investors

Grand Finale: February 1st, 2008

mGinger, a permission based mobile advertising network has received $2 million funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and NEA-IndoUS Ventures. The company will use the fund for its business growth, build up their technology stack and ramp up their marketing and sales force.

mGinger enables advertisements including offers, vouchers, news and more, sent in the form of SMS on consumers’ mobile phones. These advertisements are specific to consumer interests and demographics mentioned during sign-up and received only in the timings that consumers specify. An additional value-add for consumers, is the earning potential of receiving these advertisements, which is redeemed through a gift cheque from mGinger.

The susbcriber of mGinger gets 20 paisa per sms and can refer his / her friends and family on mGinger. For every advert that referred mobile receives, main subscriber gets 10 paisa and 5 paisa for every advert that friend’s friend receives. Thus mGinger aims to created a pyramid structure mobile advertising list by using referrals and incentive scheme ( smart way of using word of mouth publicity).

This service is akin to Chequemail.com which used to pay users for reading their email and used to sell advertising space. Chequemail which received funding from ICICI venture in dotcom haydays finally closed down (though domain is still active but has no website as there is no name server listed against it).

DFJ which is a early stage / seed stage investor has recently opened its Bangalore Office with Mohanjit Jolly as Director and Sateesh Andra as Venture partner. DFJ other investments in India are seventymm, Komli etc

GVK Biosciences Private Limited (GVK BIO), a Pharma & Biotech research and development outsourcing company, today announced that Sequoia Capital a leading global private investment firm has invested Rs.100 crores in GVK BIO.

GVK BIO started operations in 2001 at Hyderabad and has established itself as a leading Contract Research Organization in India. Currently GVK BIO is the only Indian CRO that provides an integrated service platform ranging from Informatics, MedChem and Biology services in Discovery research to Clinical Research and Data Management services on the Development side and further to Process Research and Custom Synthesis.

GVK Bio was G.V.K. Sanjav Reddy in 2001, while Dr D.S.Brar joined GVK Bio as promoter chairman in 2004. Previously Dr Brar played a significant role in building Ranbaxy (India’s largest Pharma Company) into a globally recognized Generics company with a pipeline of specialty and innovator (NCE) drugs. Dr. Brar is also involved with several international Pharma/Life-sciences companies in consulting/advisory role through Davix Management Services Pvt. Ltd

GVK BIO intends to use these funds to expand capacity in Drug Discovery services, build a state-of-the-art Campus at Hyderabad on a 25 acre site. provide new service offerings in Pre-clinical and Clinical space, and pursue growth opportunities through mergers and acquisitions.

Sequoia Capital has nominated Mr. Sandeep Singhal to the Board of GVK BIO.

Dimensions Consulting of Gurgaon were the advisors to GVK BIO for the transaction.

Ticketvala.com, a portal for bus ticket booking has raised USD 2 mn from FootPrint ventures, an early stage venture capital fund, based out of India as per report published in Mint.

Ticketvala, headed by Harnath Lokanadham, aim to capture the unorganized bus ticketing system in India as road transport in India remains the largest mean of transportation. Further with improving road infrastructure, and increasing Volvo bus circuit, this segment is set to see much increased volumes.

Tickevala has also launched its call center services in both English and other local languages so as to capture non internet using population.

The other player in bus ticketing system in Redbus.in which is being mentored by the TiE-EAP (Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program).

RedBus claims to have the largest network of bus operators in their list (150 and growing) and some 2000 destinations across India. At present Redbus.in tickets can be booked at some 10,000 outlets.

Footprint Ventures, the investor in Ticketvala.com is the brainchild of Neill Brownstein, a co-founder of Bessemer Venture Partners. It aims to create an India–US–Israel triangle that brings together funds, entrepreneurs, technology and markets. The firm looks to put $2-4 million in lifestyle, retail, financial services, security, education, clean technology and life sciences.

As of now Footprint has funded two startups including ticketvala.com after going through some 150 proposals.

Indian software product company, InstaColl today announces the launch of Live Documents, a hybrid online-offline Office suite of applications.

Instacoll which is led by Sabeer Bhaita, has earlier raised funding from Softbank (read Sabeer Bhatia back to business, Instacoll raises funding from Softbank).

Live Documents is a full-featured suite of online Office productivity applications offering functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any common browser on any operating system from anywhere. Live Documents uses a Flash-based user interface that offers a richer and responsive user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications.
In addition, Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications - Live Documents converts Microsoft Office applications from static standalone software to smart clients that are connected to the Internet and facilitate in-context document sharing (multiple people can edit a document at the same time) and management (security, access control and revision control) without requiring users to give up their familiar user interfaces. The Live Documents desktop client also ensures offline access to documents - a key failing of current online Office applications.
Instacoll had earlier launched hosted services for business users and with its live-documents.com it aims to expand its usage and build visibility for the product while directly competing with Google Docs and other online office productivity suits.
Sabeer Bhatia, who became a poster boy of dotcom era after successful sale of hotmail to Microsoft for a reported USD 400 mn, is yet to taste success post hotmail. His earlier venture Arzoo.com folded where the investors had to write off their investment in Arzoo. Sabeer reincarnated Arzooo.com in 2006 as a travel portal in order to capture a share in India’s booming online travel industry without any success.

Sabeer Bhatia also launched a social networking site called apnacircle.com which again seems to be floating somewhere in already crowded social networking space.

Hence whether Live-documents will create waves like hotmail and might become an acquisition target for Microsoft / Google / Yahoo or will follow the path of Arzoo, is a question which only time will tell.

Indian digital media space seems to be in thick of action. After acquisition of Quasar media by WPP, Webchutney, known for its creative virals (Webchutney, headquartered at Delhi with offices at Mumbai, Bangalore and KualaLumpur is an online ad agency operating in interactive media, web development and web analytics), has got an undisclosed amount of investment from Capital 18, venture capital arm of Network 18 group.

The investment by Capital18 will be used for scaling up operations( team expansion and probably locations) and fuel growth.

Interestingly Webchutney founders team also manages an incubation company “Goosefish Media Venture” where they aim to incubate a series of blogs/ websites dedicated to a particular niche area.

As quotes on Goosefish Media site :
“As dumb as it may sound: our publishing focus is founded with the idea of incubating a whole bunch of vertical content websites / blogs’ using a Nanopublishing model. We want to partner with good writers to write each of them, hopefully draw a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising around it.”

And this is probably the real killer as Indian digital space is practically empty with hardly any big brand like Gigaom etc in this space and it looks like Webchutney team is going to get their next pot of Gold from Goosefish Media. As of now Goosefish has incubated Alootechie.com, Bombaybitch and JuxtConsult.

Firefly e-Ventures Ltd., the wholly-owned Internet subsidiary of HT Media Ltd., has acquired social networking site, Desimartini.com, as per the news reported in Hindustan Times. Though the financial terms are not disclosed, HT Media said that the deal was for less than US $ 10 Million (Rs. 39.3 Crores), which makes an interesting reading, since less than US $ 10 Million could be anything from INR 1.0 Lakh to INR 38.0 Crores (so whether HT Media is trying to peg a value to Desimartini.com or just building hype in case of further sell-off or acquisition, is anybody’s guess).

This news is bound to create excitement in Indian Internet market as it provides an important yard-stick to the ever-optimistic entrepreneurs, who are now bound to measure their own ventures in terms of Desimartini’s valuatuion.

Desimartini.com, launched by Pahwa Knowledge Based Services late last year, is funded by the Pahwa Group of Companies. It was claimed that Desimartini has a membership-base of around 250,000 with traffic of around 2.5 million page views a month.

The traffic numbers as claimed by Desimartini, if true, indicate a good traction for website, but somehow the actual traffic does not seem to be that high, as per external indicators.

Desimartini, which regularly advertises on TV, Internet and other medium, has an Alexa ranking of 77,467 while its Compete ranking is 889,553 with around 1000 US visitors per month. Incidentally, Alexa rankings overall are not considered trustworthy as they can be engineered to generate high ranking. Hence, generally speaking, a high Alexa rank doesn’t mean much, but a low Alexa rank certainly means that there is no big traffic on this site.

The sites which are in same Alexa league get traffic of around 600k to 800k page views a month with around 200k unique visitors a month and, hence, the claim of Desimartini having 2.5 million page views is highly suspect.

Hence, to think that a Fund Manager will pay around US $ 10 Million for a site with marginal traffic, no great brand loyalty (the site is just a year old), no great business model (just another social networking site), makes the whole thing a little suspicious, as it strongly suggests that either there is something more on the table beyond Desimartini.com, or HT Media for some reason is really desperate to get into action without wasting a day.

Further details of this deal will be available in some time, as HT Media, being a listed company, would be required to inform the Stock Exchange regarding this transaction.

The Hindustan Times Group had dabbled with Internet earlier as well in 2000 dotcom boom (almost near to the time when the great Internet bubble burst), where it hired a high-profile team from banking and consulting industry, and had a big-bang launch for go4i.com headed by Mr. Piyush Gupta. Go4i was launched in association with Chase Capital Partners and the HDFC Group. The Hindustan Times and Chase Capital Partners each held 38 percent in the venture, while the HDFC Group had 8 percent. The total investment in the venture in the initial phase was reported to be US $ 15 Millions.

Also, at that point of time, go4i.com had plans to launch some other portals - related to career (go4career.com), cricket (go4cricket.com), movie ticketing (go4ticket.com), and so on and so forth.

And for all those who care for historical data-keeping, this was the quotable quote as given in The Hindu in year 2000.

‘“We (go4i) are hopeful of a turnover of Rs. 30 Crores in the second year of operations,” Mr. Gupta said, adding that go4i.com would break even in the next two years, and become profitable in the year thereafter.

“We (go4i) are planning a public issue of the portal in the next couple of years. Whether to go for an overseas float or a domestic one would depend on the prevailing market conditions at that time,” he said.’

The above statements by Piyush Gupta were made in 2000 in a truly style of forward looking statements (this is another matter that they really turned out to be forward looking qs whole go4i venture was shut down after some time).

Internet web giant (or web giant of yore) Yahoo! has announced that it had taken around 35% stake in an Indian web advertising company Tyroo for an undisclosed amount.

Tyroo Media Pvt Ltd is one of the leading Indian self serve ad marketplace and has around 1000 publishers as its clients. Of the late Rediff.com is also working to roll out its own ad network and is busy signing publishers.

Earlier there were rumors that Yahoo is planning to launch its Yahoo publishing network as some publishers of Google have received enquiries from Yahoo India about Yahoo publishing network. ( Read “Yahoo publisher network in India”), but it seems rather than developing its network from scratch, it has decided to go M&A route to get direct access in the market and pose some challenge ( if there is any) to Google Indian advertising operations.

Indian online advertising market is presently dominated by Google which has been able to bring Indian advertisers as well as publishers on its fold followed by rediff. Due to increased attractiveness of Indian market, all internet majors are trying their best to catch the action in India including AOL ( it launched its India centric site aol.in sometime back though without much success).

Yahoo, despite being an early entrant in the Indian web-space ( around 2000) has not able to demonstrate any success so far, and its performance in term of content, stickiness or technology has been pathetic. Majority of Yahoo traffic is driven by yahoo mail which has remained the most popular email service so far, though Gmail, which has come out of its beta just 4-5 months back is now almost breathing on its neck.

Hence by acquiring Tyroo, Yahoo will be able to gain much needed foothold in Indian advertising space immediately, which is right now dominated by Google, but how far this strategy will bear fruit , is anybody’s guess. But there is one thing that is “In internet space, market shares are not factor of M&A and relationships but a function of management vision and technology”, and unfortunately on both part, Yahoo! yet to get that zing at least in India.

Nexus India Capital (website) has closed a $100M Venture Capital Fund to invest in opportunities across sectors in India. Nexus plans to invest in both technology start-ups as well as companies with business models not driven by technology. The funds investors include top tier institutions and strategic family offices from North America, Europe and Asia.

The fund and its portfolio companies will be advised by successful entrepreneurs and investors in the Technology, Media, Outsourced Services, Retail and Consumer sectors. The founders of the fund and its advisory companies include industry veterans and successful venture investors, Naren Gupta, Sandeep Singhal, and Suvir Sujan. Bill Davidow, Senior Executive, Intel and Co-founder of a highly successful venture fund is a special advisor to Nexus.

Naren Gupta founded embedded systems software company Integrated Systems Inc. in 1980 and was the President/CEO of the company through the IPO process for 15 years. Integrated Systems later merged with WindRiver Systems, where he serves as Vice Chairman. Naren also serves on the boards of some of the world’s most innovative technology companies such as RedHat and TIBCO. Over the last decade, Naren Gupta has invested in several successful technology ventures that include Speedera Networks, E-Tek Dynamics, Numerical Technologies and RightNow.

Sandeep Singhal co-founded the leading Indian Health Care outsourced services company, Medusind Solutions and is a well-recognized leader in Indian venture capital. Prior to Medusind, Sandeep Singhal founded eVentures India, a Venture Capital Fund that invested in Indian industry leaders including Makemytrip.com, Contest2win.com, Customer Asset (now part of FirstSource), Netmagic, and Mentorix.

Suvir Sujan co-founded Baazee.com, India’s leading e-commerce company that merged with eBay to form eBay India and has also been an active advisor and angel investor to consumer internet, wireless and retail ventures.

“After the first wave of investing in companies based on cost arbitrage, India is finally ready for venture capital in companies driven by innovation. Some of the best employees at companies in India such as Google, Microsoft and Intel are thinking about starting their own companies,” said Sandeep Singhal. “Moreover professionals in large Indian corporations and in companies around the world are stepping into Indian entrepreneurial ventures targeting the burgeoning domestic economy. They need risk capital; the timing to back them is now.”

“Smart entrepreneurs realize that they need more than just money,” said Suvir Sujan. “We are successful entrepreneurs who have founded, built and exited companies successfully in the technology, services and consumer arenas. Nexus India Capital truly understands the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs and hopes to play an active role in helping companies succeed. Our entire team of advisors in India and Silicon Valley is accessible to all the entrepreneurs we back for support on strategy, operations, organizational building, sales, etc”.

Nexus has already invested in Dimdim- Free web meeting software and mobile2win - a company from Contest2win stable.

StartupAvenues : Offline meet at Delhi

Finally it happened, after too many misses, delayed email responses etc etc and after a gap of almost 3 years, StartupAvenues offline meeting did happen at Connaught place New Delhi and surprisingly of the total attendance, three people namely Umesh Sethi, Nalin Savera & Shailesh were also involved in previous meetings ( held in 2003).

Following is the detail of event which has been logged by Umesh Sethi of CreativeSparks who was kind enough for agreeing to minute the event.

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On a bright and sunny afternoon on 30th June, startup avenues meetup was held in C.P . I would like to thank all who made it or RSVPed. Here is a short recap of the meeting.

Event Photograph

There were 8 of us : Shailesh our moderator who works in a private equity funding company, myself and Manish Pahuja running our own web solutions consultancy, Jaspal working in an NGO in handicrafts exports, a gentlemen whose name i can’t remember (my apologies) working in in a software company, Siddarth , an Human Capital consultant with a big consultancy firm, Rakesh running his Property company and Nalin , running a software consultancy.

We first had a round of introductions in Cafe Coffee Day and then when it was getting bit crowded , we moved to Banana Leaf, next to it, on Rakesh’s suggestion , which was a nice and spacious South Indian Joint.

Shailesh told us about his and his partners experiences in starting and running coolavenues which were pretty interesting and humorous. Of how they managed to negotiate with big companies, run the company while working in a fulltime job and keep their expenses low. How they had to finally exit the business on a nice profit . All in all i guess it showed that the company succeded because it was solving a problem and had a revenue model attached to the solution.

We also talked about the fear of some VC’s copying ideas and the fact that this practice is unfortunately prevalant here. We talked of whether funding is needed or not and how seed funding is neither easily available nor at time needed. There were some jokes and we remembered a couple of times we had met 3-4 years back.

All in all, i think it was a pretty nice experience atleast for me., I got to know 2-3 people who i feel may be able to advice and assist me in some future plans . We closed the meeting at 7.00 and i think all of us were happy with meeting once a month. Shailesh clicked a couple of snaps and perhaps we shall see them soon somewhere on startupavenues.

Going forward i would like to put forward some points for open discussion as i felt arose from holding this meeting and other experience i have seen in networking meetings abroad.

1. While meeting in coffee day or restaurants is great, one to one interaction is bit difficult. Most networking events have a group presentation or discussion or introduction then informal one to one circulating and talking to people who you may share area of interest with. Ideal place for that is a small hall or something with snacks and/or soft drinks available on tables. If someone has any suggestion how this can be acheived without bearing any cost for hall etc. in Delhi, wouldnt this be a good option ?

2. I would suggest we have a proper contributory ticket for events like this IF they take-off. I know some people have disagreed with this. But honestly it is a bit embarrasing to either go one by one and order when sitting on same table or let a guy order for all then exchange fifties and tenners on a table or outside or let the guy forget it. Its a professional meeting with bit of food and drink - whats wrong with charging a basic 50-60 buck ticket… if less are spend on a meeting they can go into the meetup’s bank. someone can keep track of bills.

3. In terms of organizer , rather than having a fixed organizer or organizers i think this should be voluntary and by rotation. Reason for this is i believe the organizer comes in contact with multiple people before meeting on phone and is generally first people who the guys meet, so its good if everyone becomes an organizer one so that the whole group feels involved, and more and more contact is generated.

Well, thats my opinion on the whole issue. Networking is a great way to meet new people, share ideas, get domain knowledge. Perhaps we can discuss on see how we can make our networking events productive, interesting and successful.

Regards
Umesh Sethi
Creative Spark Solutions
98680 81408