Office Space at the Heart of Mumbai at Bootstrap Prices [Sponsored]

Are you looking for a fresh and funky startup office at a swanky address right at the heart of Bombay, but don’t want to pay a bomb? Then read on and contact us to arrange a viewing.

Who we are?

You would be joining two young startups, active in the Advertising and Media space, En Route Media and Enthrall Media. We believe that work and fun do not have to be two totally separate entities and that an office can be a homely and creative environment, which inspires productive performance.

About ‘The Hangar’

Our brand new, colorful and un-corporate office, has been given the appropriate name “The Hangar”, because of it’s high ceilings and former use as a warehouse. The space sports a conference room, filled with bean bags and soon also with a playstation and a reception area.

The total carpet area is around 800sqft, which also includes a small pantry, two bathrooms and of course the main office area complete with gramophone, dartboard and guitar. Please refer to the pictures to get a better idea.

So if you are bored of working from home and really want to push your startup or project ahead then join like-minded entrepreneurs for only 8,000Rs/month (all inclusive with desk-space, free access to all office facilities, internet, full AC, etc.).

Contact Paul on 09930304088 or Varun on 09821164591 or just drop us an e-mail on paul.schwarz@enrouteinc.com orkunal.jain@enthrallmedia.com.

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IAN Invests in TaxSpanner for Significant Stake

Span Across IT Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs an online tax filing service, TaxSpanner, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN). The funding by IAN – for a “significant stake” – will be used by the three year old start-up to accelerate its growth and for product development. This is the first round of external funding by the Delhi-based startup.

While there are quite a few online tax filing sites, TaxSpanner’s USP is its privacy policy as it does not engage in cross-selling after obtaining client information.

Online Tax Filing in India – Stats

This year (2010), online tax filing in India witnessed an overall rise of 71%.

• e-filing for individuals having income from Salary/ Pension (ITR-1) has gone up by 136% from the same period last year to 12,22,275 in Apr 1 -Aug 4 2010.
• A minor category of ITR-8 for return of fringe benefits for persons who are not liable to file return of income but are liable to file return of fringe benefits has seen a 77% fall with only 26 e-filings.
• Almost no change in interest from individuals and HUFs not having income from business or profession (ITR-2).
• For individuals and HUFs having income from a proprietory business or profession the e-filing is up 76%.
• ITR 3, 5 and 6 e-filing have gone up by 56%, 40% and 7% respectively.
• Tax e-filing sees a 136% Jump For Salaried Individuals, Overall 71% Rise

The tax filing space has already seen some funding action in the past. BCCL has backed First Altus Resources and Networks (Taxshax.com) in an ad-for-equity deal. Accel and Mumbai Angels earlier funded Fin-e-ssential Infotech India Ltd.(Vegayan), which provides HR and payroll services besides tax filing.

TaxSpanner has tied up with more than 100 companies with clients like HCL Technologies, Accenture, among others (and clients like Citibank and Punjab National Bank, who use its services for their customers).

The funding will be used by the three year old start-up to accelerate its growth and for product development. Post investment, Sunil Kalra and Priyank Garg of IAN has joined the board of Taxspanner.

Recommended Read : Online Tax Filing in India – Insights and Observations on Consumer Behavior

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Dialify–Dial Enabling Everything , The Audio Game for Masses

So what do you do in a country where there are more than 650 million subscribers, but the mobile app reach is not even 2%. Each one of these subscribers are voice enabled and at the end of the day, voice drives 95% revenue of operators. Even the VAS industry is focused on the future of a few urban elite, while ignoring the larger base at the bottom.

Dialify, a startup by Nikhil Soman (ex-Zapak and BigAdda founder) strongly believes that sound/audio on its own is a very powerful medium and the company has launched audio gaming (IVR) products (first one being Cwicket).

                                                           Cwicket is an Audio Game designed for in-call delivery over telephony networks, bringing a new cricketing experience to all phone users across the country. NO Downloads, NO Data plans, NO GPRS, just a simple number to dial & play.

Audio gaming as a concept may sound odd – particularly because our lives are visually saturated. However Audio/Sound has some unique properties – sound perception includes spatial distribution awareness & multi-channel sensitivity, which implies multi-tasking. These are quite easily ignored or over-shadowed by the visual sense. Perhaps that’s why music is still such a big hit, and also why I cant imagine watching cricket on TV without the commentary & Movies sans music.

Built using CCXML/VXML, Cwicket is commentary of a cricket match that users play over a phone call (505101065 on Reliance GSM & CDMA Networks). Commentary is generated in real time, based on player(s) actions/Targeted placement points – specific actions, markets, player etc

The company has worked on building the next generation Interactive Voice Game Engine with support for turn based, strategy & role playing games. Future releases include dynamic environments, social publishing from within games, collaborative task completion, virtual items & Massively Multi-player Tournaments.

[Dialify is among the Startups Demoed at UnPluGGd]

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Bizosys–Building Scalable Solution for Enterprise Search

In Enterprise world, there are different products to handle data in an application –a database for structured data, search engine for searching data & content, content delivery network for serving content. There is no one-view of the data and that’s the problem statement, Bizosys is solving.

Bizosys provides a single product to store, search and serve both structured data and unstructured content and ‘Bizosys Data Layer’ provides a unified interface to store, search and serve web scale data on commodity hardware.

The product provides a solution to software scalability that comes with large amounts of data and high number of users. Prospective customers are from various domains that deal with high amounts of data such as content aggregators, social media analytics or large number of users like mobile applications.

An obvious question is in the comparison with existing search engine products. Take a look at the below comparison diagram:

As far as technology is concerned, Bizosys is built on Apache Hadoop and also provides real time search engine handling simultaneous read and write operations.

What’s your take on the product? Got questions for the team? Share it here.

[Bizosys is among the Startups Demoed at UnPluGGd]

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How DeNA Beats Facebook and Zynga

Do you think Zynga is the hot player in town? Think again.

At yesterday’s DeNA press conference, Founder and CEO Tomoko Nanba gave some great insight behind the seemingly unstoppable success of her company.

An incredible ARPU

With 20m users in Japan, Mobage Town, the social gaming network could be considered a small player compared to the 500m+ users Facebook boasts worldwide or the 210m active users (according to AppData). But when it comes down to the average revenue per user (ARPU), the picture is very different.

A whole lot different.

Mobage Town just dwarfs both its international competitors by an incredible margin. Its ARPU is 15 times the one of Zynga. Yes, fifteen times. And -wait for it- 30 times the one of Facebook.

Source: ITMedia

Real billions

You can now tame down you excitement regarding Zynga being valued more than Electronic Arts (the estimation game puts it a USD 5.5bn).

DeNA’s current market cap is over USD 4.2bn. Not in a estimation game, but now.

2009 saw DeNA’s make USD 500m in revenue, with a profit of 228m (that’s a staggering 44%).

In Q1 2010, the company announced almost USD 280m in revenue with around 140m in profit (an even more staggering 50%).

Make the quick calculation: DeNA is on track of the magic 1bn number and more for the end of the year.

With “only” 20m users.

Social Graph v. Virtual Graph

Now, I used the word competitor earlier for Facebook, but Nanba doesn’t think it is really one. She mentioned how Mobage Town and Mixi are peacefully co-existing in Japan. The latter is based on the social graph, a la Facebook, while her company is skewing towards what she calls the virtual graph.

I guess we could differentiate the two out of the nature of relationships that are created through the online experience: mostly mimicking the physical graph one on hand, while creating a totally new one on the other.

Nanda is betting that that virtual graph is the future of the mobile gaming market internationally as well, hence the decision to go and buy ngmoco last month.

At USD 403m, I’d say she made her point.

Her idea is that DeNA will bring its know-how and the virtual-based communities western social gaming is in dire need of to grow.

To get an idea of that possible know-how, let’s go back into numbers and look at the revenue segmentation. 78% is coming from what she calls social media. I preferred the older name: portal marketing. It better qualified what it encompasses: item billing, moba-coins acquisition & in-game advertising. Add 12% of avatar-related sales and you basically have 90% of the company built upon virtual goods.

Can Zynga say the same? I bet not yet.

2014 in sight

Nanba is slowly completing the full puzzle.

She has the keitai world covered. She’s racing to enter the smartphone world abroad (she called the iOS/Android application the greatest current business opportunity in her speech). She’s bringing the Mobage Town on smartphones in Japan soon. She has a foot in the US. A foot in China. An investment arm for new disruptive ventures. And she finally has the japanese PC world covered.

Yes, for a company that failed on the PC front for long, the bonus in the story is the relative success of its Yahoo! Japan joint venture, Yahoo! Mobage Town. Officially opened not even a month ago, membership has rocketed past the 8 million mark.

The financial goal of all this?

400 billion yen in consolidated sales for 2014. That’s more than 4 times the USD 1bn I made you calculate above.

Honestly, Nanba’s prediction is entirely realistic to me.

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Video: Shanzhai HTC HD2 runs Windows Phone 7?

Windows Phone 7 phones are just about to hit the market in a week, it’s really hard to believe Shanzhai phone makers were able to have Windows Phone 7 OS to run on its knockoff phones at this time. Words in the video say the phone runs real Windows phone 7, but we just keep our suspicion. Maybe there would be Shanzhai phones run Windows Phone 7, but it definitely won’t come this far. The Shanzhai HTC HD2 in the video no doubt just gets a fake UI that looks similar to Windows phone 7. Have a look, and make your own judgement.

[Source:M8cool]

• Cheap HTC Magic clone runs Android 2.1, Only priced around 800 Yuan
• MT6516 Powered HTC Hero clone, runs Android
• Video: HTC Desire clone Touch G7 gets Windows Mobile 6.5, dual sim support
• Video:Another HTC HD2 Clone, with A MTK6516 Chip And A Capacitive Touchscreen
• Shanzhai HTC HD2 with nice specs
• Video: HTC Hero clone runs Android, looks no difference
• HTC Tattoo clone with slider form factor
• HTC HD2 clone hands-on video
• Video: HTC HD2 knockoff phone features a 4.3-inch display
• HTC Hero clone with iPhone alike UI

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Motorola XT301 Android handset for China Telecom

Two days ago at its Halloween Day’s party in Beijing, Motorola showed off a new Android handset that’s named XT301. This phone supports EVDO radios, and would head to China Telecom. Information about the phone’s processor and storage is still not disclosed. It runs Android 2.1, coming with a 3 inches 240×320 display with multi-touch support, a 3 megapixels camera, a USB 2.0 port, and a 1170 mAh battery. The specified price is still not unveiled. Though home brands like Huawei and ZTE have released sub-1000 Yuan Android handsets in China, but it seems Motorola and China Telecom still take the price as one of the phone’s advantages and promoted it as ‘ The first sub-2000 Yuan Android handset from foreign brand’.

[Source: Sooyuu]

• Shanghai Motorola EM1 ebook reader with Android 2.1
• Motorola A1680 Android Handset Hands-on video
• Motorola Quench MB501 and Quench XT3 Android Handset Launched in Taiwan
• Spy spots of new Motorola Android handsets
• Motorola ME600 (Backflip) shipped in China, priced at 3998 Yuan ($587)
• Motorola XT800 officially launched in China

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Gree To Take Several Percent Stake In Singapore’s SMS/IM-based Social Network Mig33

Japan’s third largest social network GREE[J] announced today they would invest in Mig33 (by Project Goth, Inc.) who is a SMS and IM text messaging-based social network platform in Singapore.   GREE plans to invest several million US dollars in Mig33′s series C round and to acquire several percent stake.   This will be the first ever case investing in a non-Japanese company for GREE.   Mig33 is a social network platform designed for feature phones and has engaged 40 million users in emerging countries in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe.   The two companies are expecting to work together for developing a common platform that allows the third party providers to publish their apps and services on the both social networks.

GREE announed last month that they would take 4.2% stake in @cosme[J] (by iStyle, Inc.[J]), a word-of-mouth based marketing portal especially on cosmetics products targeting Japanese females in their 20s and 30s.

Prior to this round, Mig33 has accumulated 2.35 million US dollars fundraising from VC firms including Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM.


via: Second Times[J]

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