Founded in year 2000, One97 is a delhi based mobile internet services company offering its services for consumers in India and delivers mobile content, advertising and commerce services to mobile consumers. One97 is the largest private independent provider of telecom managed value added services in India. Earlier the company has also got fundings from others investors ranging from Intel Capital, SAIF Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.

The founder of One97, Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an engineer, who belongs to town Aligarh, he has started first business venture XS Corps, a web solutions firm while he was in third year off his engineering. The start-up was later sold to US based technology firm Lotus Interworks in 1999. Afterwards he also worked togather with Bhari Airel as VAS (value added service) partner. In 2004-2005, his revenue was Rs 7 crore per year and than in 2005-06, he earned Rs 11 crore and in 2006-07, he acquired Positive Consol, a data services company in Noida, India. One97 is now a INR 250 crore company i.e. around USD$ 2.5 billion dollar revenue per year.

SAP ventures has also invested in JustDial, iYogi, Connectiva and Newgen among which are among SAP’s Indian portfolio companies. SAP venture is more keen on companies based in US, Europe, India, Brazil and China.

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In its press release Intel mention that – “Intel sees tremendous growth for India technology industry”, on the contrary to this earlier past week Intel Capital Managing Director said that valuations of local tech start-ups have reached a ‘bubble level’ due to too much capital chasing too few quality opportunities, similar to that if 1998 dot com bubble in US.

The companies picked up by Intel capital arm are:

1. Saankhya Labs
2. Testing Czars
3. Financial Inclusion Network and Operations (FINO)
4. What’s On India
5. enStage
6. Duron Energy

Among six, three of the Intel’s investments – Saankhya Labs, Testing Czars, and FINO have been finalized and completed. However, What’s on India, enStage and Duron Energy are on agreement stage with Intel Capital. The amount to be invested in each of these companies individually were not disclosed.

Interestingly, we here IndianWeb2, wrote about Best of Startups in 2009 and What’s on India was among them, now after Intel’s investment What’s On India is aimed at expanding its technology vertical. TestingCzars will fund development of its test automation technology. On the other hand Saankhya Labs will utilize funds to develop additional product offerings and fund expansion of worldwide marketing and sales operations. enStage will use the funds for expansion of the company.

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The participating 100 tech startups made a good use of this platform and demonstrated their products along with business plan and other related documents. The basic aim of the event was to honour startups under the category:- internet, education, products, mobile and services.
The awards were given to the deserving startups based on its company overview, the team, global plans, market needs, competitive positioning, current-status, investment options and customer satisfaction.

Here are the lists of best startups:-

Best startup in Internet Segment

VidTeQ: It is a Bangalore based startup which basically gives you a complete glimpse of Bangalore City via video maps. It is rather a unique concept where you just enter the source location and the destination location and see the route to destination with proper geo-tagging.

Best Startup in Product Sector

LeadForce 1:It has been just 4 months since it started and has already made a big mark in marketing field.
It has already made significant contribution in business marketing, sales automation, web optimisation, email marketing etc.

Best Startup in Education sector

Edujini-Labs: It was started in 1995 by few IIT professionals to give a proper shape to the upcoming graduates and is running pretty successfully. Currently, it also conducts training on .net, Java etc.

Best Startup in Service Sector

Prakat Solutions: It is a company which works on Software testing, cloud computing and virtualization. The software testing includes different stages of testing for optimising the performance of product. The company also focuses on open source testing and frameworks.

Best Startup in Mobile sector

160by2: It allows you to send free SMS to mobile users across India. Recently their world limit of 80 words got extended to 145 characters. Moreover, you can now send your messages outside India as well.

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Recently Sarah Lacy a blogger from famous TechCrunch interviewed N.R. Narayana Murthy the first person we can comfortably honor him bringing in tech revolution in India and able to list the company in NASDAQ as first from India. Murthy commented on Infrastructure in India as bad and rather deceptive than being effective. He added that – “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people economic freedom first and political freedom second and India chosen the opposite path.”

China currently has over 200 million entrepreneurs and it houses 200 venture capital firms comparing to some handful in India. The country accounts for 24.6% of the total entrepreneurship activities across the world, far ahead of Indian at 13.9% and the US at 14%, according to a survey by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

Recent hype in India that we all know and some of you might even fond of is – IPL Cricket backed by our own politicians, MPs, some businessmen and even actors poured in river of money for just a “Game” of Cricket (that sarcastically beating the ‘Game of Life’ ..). The IPL is listed as World’s Hottest League by Forbes and get bids of nice 711.47 million US Dollars (Rs.3,235 crore) just for two new teams and 627.46 Million US Dollars (Rs.2,853 crore) already been bid out for rest of the teams. IPL do have a full support of very nice people whom I don’t know personally but believe me they are very nice – Sharad Pawar, India’s Minister of Agriculture and Rajeev Shukla TV-anchor turned Minister of Parliament.

It feels too good when it comes to cricket that India is not that inferior in infrastructure and funds, so much money pouring in and out this season, BCCI as richest board in the world and all that.

One more unfortunate incident – India’s state Uttar Pradesh’s Honorable Chief Minister Sushri Shrimati Mayawati had come into attack from her enemies when she presented a rally which was reportedly cost mere 38.4 US million dollar (Rs 175 crore) of public money and a clean, beautiful garland of 5.4 million US Dollars (Rs 25 core) made of 1,000-rupee notes India currency.

That’s ridiculous allegation because she was so fair lady doing so much for her state and an entrepreneur must learn from her how to bring in money for your own good no matter how you do it because what matters at the end of the day is – damn important funds. (Think Positive, you know.)

There’s is so much money in India not if we see this time around but always atleast that much that we can comfortably cover our heads being the one of the most populated country. The efforts has to be made on which direction is money is going, how much productive and how can it multiple our economic freedom not just for tech-startup or entrepreneur perspective but in every means.

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In the event plus realty show those who are on verge of building any potential start-ups and having one or more business plans with themselves than after selection phase they will have to pitch their ideas to a panel of investors including top VCs in 15 minutes and if they like the idea than participants might get an on-spot express funding.

ET Now would be airing all three strategic events on a segmented basis on their show starting up in January next year.

Vultures nest is a three phase event. The first phase is an online submission of the presentation starting 10 Dec.’09 to 4th Jan.’10. The second phase will be between 16 Jan.- 17 Jan. 2010 which is a preliminary elimination round which is going to be held in 3 cities – Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The Final round will have 10 Finalist to pitch in front of VCs.

The format of show make it the first of its kind in India, however the similar format were being aired on western countries including an event in Seattle, US called Startup Junkies and similar one in New Zealand .

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IMImobile, an end-to-end provider of converged mobile and online value-added services for mobile operators, media companies and enterprises today announced that it has raised USD 13 million in a financing round led by Sequoia Capital and existing investor First Mark Capital. The funding will enable IMImobile to embark on its next phase of growth building on the impressive gains the company has made over the last few years. Spark Ventures plc, a founding partners of IMImobile is the largest institutional shareholder and had provided the seed capital.

MAPE Advisory Group acted as advisor to IMImobile for the investment. Sequoia Capital has enormous experience in consistently partnering with entrepreneurs to create global market leaders such as Cisco, Google, Apple SKS Microfinance, Cafe Coffee Day and Just Dial. Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India will join the Board of IMImobile.

Vishwanath Alluri, Founder and CEO of IMImobile said: “The new financing will enable us to develop our cloud infrastructure for Tier 1 telecom operators and allow us to expand our customer base and account penetration through acquisitions. Sequoia Capital’s global experience and strong local expertise will be a key differentiator as we look to launch into our next phase of growth”

“IMImobile’s unique and growing position as a partner in revenue generation resonates powerfully with global operators. Our ability to de-risk the launch of innovative services and offer them to customers on a turnkey basis differentiates us in the marketplace. The mobile data services market is both dynamic and highly competitive; constantly evolving network technologies, complexities of content sourcing, changing device capabilities and day-to-day operational activities need to be orchestrated effectively to offer successful data services. IMImobile’s DaVinci technology platform, managed services business model, 3rd party content & application aggregation capabilities and operational model with 24/7 tech support have a proven track record of delivering measurable value to our operator customers.”

In a clear illustration of the strength of this proposition, MTN recently announced a strategic partnership with IMImobile to deploy its DaVinci Service Delivery Platform on a managed services model to offer compelling services to 103 million subscribers across 21 countries in Middle East and Africa.

Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India said “IMImobile has witnessed tremendous growth over the years and continues to expand into diverse geographies as a consequence of their proven technology expertise Our investment gives us an opportunity to contribute to the fantastic growth path of IMImobile and also opens up significant inorganic growth possibilities for the company.”

IMImobile’s services are currently accessible to 500 million subscribers of over 40 operator customers in 66 countries. These services are powered by 450 high-end servers hosted in data centers in London, Miami, Dubai, Mumbai and Hyderabad and centrally monitored and managed from the company’s VNOC in Hyderabad. This reflects IMImobile’s thought leadership in pioneering a new operational mobile data model in a true virtual marketplace, and positions the company to leverage economies of scale in service delivery. The funds will enable IMImobile to further build its global service infrastructure to deliver solutions to leading operators and expand business through acquisitions.

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Canaan is an early-stage US venture capital firm with a focus towards Indian early start-ups. The company has also invested in Bharatmatrimony.com and TechTribe.com.

Accel Partners, a leading venture capital firm operating in Silicon Valley, Europe, Israel and China has formed Accel India Venture Fund in July this year with a strategy to strongly focus on early-stage venture investing in India.

ChakPak.com’s growing user base has persuaded the above venture fundings, this entertainment network has an Orkut app along with recently launched mobile website to add up more users in its bag. The website has given an strong emphasis on user generated content unlike to other B-grade networking portals in India.

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