SimplyBooks.in is a new book portal launched today in World Book Fair'10, New Delhi. As the name hints the portal is online bookshop targeting Indian customers initially and at moment in beta stage. Simplybooks is launched by startup based in Gurgaon, India that also runs a Finance community portal called feeleminds.com The portal carries the same traits and features like to those online bookshop already exist in market however some features and an impressive UI which is comparatively far better than Indian books portal we see such as Rediff books, Indiatimes, flipkart.com etc.  The portal carries features such as book search - by author, category, book title etc. The portal also offer related products such as CDs, Magazines and Journals in one domain as I dont see any one portal in India which provide all of these. Keeping in mind the beta stage of portal Simplybooks.in looks promising in terms of number of books, user interface and more web 2.0 features than any existing in Indian market except that of flipkart.com. Morever, the entry of one more online bookshop portal will make the stagnant online book selling market to rise above, if changes due to competition is considered.

Are you building software products from India? Does the vision of being responsible for the next Windows ™ or Firefox™ or Oracle™ keep you up late at night? Do you believe that it is certainly possible to create world-beating products right here, right now? The flagship event for software product companies in India – NASSCOM Product Conclave 09 Mecca of Indian Product and High Technology Companies– happening in Bangalore on Oct 27-28 – in its 3rd successful year... ..Know more of NASSCOM Event »

DataQuest, one of an oldest and most read magazine on IT, in association with IndianWeb2.com has created well created list of Hottest Web 2.0 Startups in India, thanks to DataQuest Research team and Editor Shyamanuja. The Dataquest team and editors included those startups in India which become operational on or after 1 January 2007 and then refined that list to come with this list of prominent ones. The interesting part of the list is that, companies and startups have been excluded where collaboration and user particiaption, which is a main trait and feature of any web 2.0 entity is not prominent such as PicSquare, Zoomin and iTasveer.com where hey do have features such as sharing photos but they more rely on parameters other than what "Web 2.0" concept is i.e. photo print quality, time of delivery of their products etc. The "India's 25 Hot Web 2.0 Start-ups" is a cover story published in May issue of Datquest published by Cyber Media publication and circualted nationwide. You may get the the copy of Dataquest from any nearest book seller and get more insight of the story along with deatails of 25 hot startups with founders of respective startups throwing more lime-light on same. Update ...

MobME an Indian mobile 2.0 startup providing a platform for enabling picture sharing from camera phone to a social network and Sloka Telcom, a inexpensive and compact base stations for fixed and mobile WIMAX and 3G LTE providers have announced to get awards of NASSCOM Innovation Awards 2008 under startups category. For those new to NASSCOM, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) is a consortium that serves as an interface to the Indian software industry and Indian BPO industry. From the 24 companies shortlisted, 8 winners will be recognized and felicitated for their outstanding contribution to the Indian IT sector at the forthcoming NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2009, scheduled in Mumbai from 11-13 February 2009.  The winners were selected after a culminating process of 3 stage held at roadshows at Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi and Pune, though I feel pretty few cities are chosen for such event. The NASSCOM Innovation Awards serves as a platform for companies to showcase their innovation and to encourage innovative practices across the IT-ITES industry. These awards have been used as a yardstick by several Venture Capital and Private Equity firms when exploring investment opportunities In other category of 'Business Innovation' IndiaGames.com has been announced as ...

TestFreak a product review and comparison site has launched the dedicated website for Indian market as TestFreak.co.in as per its expansion plan to 24 local markets similar to Indian extension. TestFreaks was developed by founders of price comparison service PriceRunner.com launched in 1999. The website as said, aims to create a worlds largest product review database with 40 million visitors per month. The Indian version though have few products at moment as comparing to its US and European counter parts testfreak.com and testfreak.co.uk respectively. The reviews shown are aggregated from Indian reviewing sites such as Techtree, OneIndia.com, PC World India etc. for experts reviews and user reviews from sites such as CompareIndia.com. The sites integrate in itself Wiki through which registered users can add/edit product details, reviews and ask questions. In India MouthShut.com will be main competitor for TestFreak.co.in when it comes to product comparisons of all sorts. Noticeably, couple of months back TestFreak had raised $3 million in a second round of funding.

Yet another Indian start-up myMobile Ergonomics which is a Mobile Startup company based in Noida has developed new Mobile Texting technology - CleverTexting, which makes predictions based on the statistical nature of a language instead to that of a dictionary based predictions that we usually know as 'T9 Dictionary' in most of of our mobile handsets. CleverTexting make predictions on what characters you are most likely to type next based upon what have just typed before and armed with the probabilistic statistical tables of what is actually found in the language. This is an experimental model and apparently providing excellent results in the prototype that has been built. The CleverTexting prototype when installed in mobile Java enabled device make predictions that are shown on the screen and you use the numeric keypad to make the choices, always with a single keystroke. No multitap, no mode change, no disambiguation. That user interface , with no characters fixed to the face of the numeric keypad and dynamic allocation of characters to the keys is also new and the company has applied for a patent for it. Interestingly, CleverTexting predicts the most likely characters following what has been entered and placing them into positions easiest to ...

Large Scale Social Network BigAdda.com has one of a first Indian based social networking portal after Google's Orkut and has even manged to get large user base through excellent marketing strategies and brand i.e. Reliance. The portal is perpetually getting more user base even after months of its launch and one of a big reason being blog of Amitabh Bachachan on Bigadda.com. Social News Portal The ViewsPaper, a Gurgaon based web startup focussed at youth population of India and wants them to write for theviewspaper.net, in a concept of citizen journalism. with wide varieties of content to share with the paper in form of news, videos or anything that sounds a good opinion as youth voice. Mobile Applications Savitr TxtMe is successful custom mobile application in 2008 for varieties of use in Business, marketing, Website or social apps along with customized applications and solutions for startups & enterprises. Other worth to mention is RockeTalk.com. Mobile Search Zook.in is much hyped and growing search service in Indian mobile internet users. A Bangalore startup incubated at premier Indian management institute IIM, Bangalore has really impressed the users with its search capabilities over the mobile. Microblogging Service Kwippy is one mobile startup that has impressed me a lot in terms ...

Getgoaling.com is a new web start-up from Delhi, India providing platform that enables users to set goals and action plans necessary to achieve those goals. It enables sharing of experience among users having similar goals. Users can share goals with only few members of their choice who can support and motivate them, or with the community at large. They can maintain regular record of their progress on the goals with help of daily or weekly journals. Members having similar goals can come together by searching for goals tagged with relevant keywords. A user can have multiple goals and a user can authorize people of their choice to view his/her goals and comments by using the 'authorize' link on the Goal details page of that particular goal. The web based application has got simple yet pretty clean interface unlike to its website getgoaling.com though I would emphasize once more that UI could have been more better for simple reason of persuading more user base. The app has got few interesting features with unique USP of setting/ sharing goals. The app has 'Goal chest' which is a summary sheet of all active goals and their corresponding action plans. It also provides option to launch a ...

Taroby, a SaaS based messaging and collaboration suite from Kochi, India based software firm Advanced Millennium Technologies. Taroby enables sharing of email accounts among team members and here "Sharing" implies that emails are accessible to all team members working on a particular assignment or project, with the possibility to assign messages directly to individual team members. Taroby can be used online through internet browser for private and professional use, serving Clients, individuals, SME businesses, international companies and other global teams & work-groups. One can take a Test Drive of demo web app. In company's own words - "In traditional email clients, the inbox is a mere interface to read and write emails. Taroby however is something different: Through its innovative functions, it makes the inbox much more powerful than ever before, providing new strategies and a competitive edge to the user for working more efficiently and productively. It empowers normal inboxes with a complete work flow, task management and ticket system and thus helps organizations to holistically improve their internal and external communications. It is ideally suited for SMEs or work groups of any kind." Other than sharing of email accounts with others and assigning of messages to members in the team the other ...

When we think about online project management first thing comes in our mind is Basecamp or Zoho and to some extent Google Docs here in this list Zoho being an India's initiative by AdventNet, Inc. Now, DeskAway a new online project collaboration tool has infused some social networking elements in web based project collaboration along with in its look-n-feel too. Moreover, one can Import Basecamp data to DeskAway too. DeskAway is web startup by Synage Software Pvt. Ltd., a Synage is a Web company from Mumbai, India delivering software as a service (SaaS) over the Internet to the global audience. The online tool has some very interesting features along with sound graphic charts elements to show comparisons, timeline, reports etc. Deskaway has got tabbed interface divided into dashboard, projects, team, contacts and calender and social networking touch such as profile photo visible to all project team members and IM like status update feature which you could find on Facebook, LinkedIn also that allows to notify team members of your current activity/progress inspite of any email or message. DeskAway is a on-demand business software that can handle multiple projects available free and paid both.