Philippines Digest: Find out who are the award winners this year, and more

Here are some startup news snippets from Philippines, not only in its capital, Manila, but also other startup hubs such as Cebu, General Santos City, Pasay, Quezon City, and many more.

(1) Hapinoy was among the five social entrepreneurs from Asia recognized by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as “Asian Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2011.”

(2) Erramon I. Aboitiz, president and CEO of AboitizPower, was named the Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2011 in an awards banquet held at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel.

(3) Davao-based entrepreneur Ferdinand Maranon is this year’s Emerging Entrepreneur. The president and CEO of Sagre, a company that exports microwavable frozen saba bananas, was given the award during the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Philippines 2011 in 12th October.

(4) Kalinga Coffee Cookies, the newest locally processed food product of Kalinga province was a nominee in the recent 2011 One Town One Product (OTOP) National Expo Philippines at SM Mega Mall. The province is vying for top honors in the presentation of best products in the country.

(5) In its 25 years of existence, Mekeni Food has endured and survived situations that would have forced other similar companies to close shop. The company started in 1986 as a backyard operation by a husband and wife team who were public school teachers as a way of augmenting their meager salaries. They became bigger and bigger by being resilient and overcoming hurdles.

(6) Remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFW) have been driving the Philippine economy. But while consumption generates economic growth, the government is also looking long-term. It wants more OFWs to invest their remittances to become entrepreneurs.

(7) Business solutions at a cost that is easy on SMEs are now available, thanks to various packages offered by Globe Business.

(8) A band of buddies doing some baking: that basically describes the idea from which this little home-based business was founded. Good friends ever since their freshmen years, the gang decided to go with the flow and allow their camaraderie to give birth to good-looking, great tasting cupcakes.

(9) AT the 99th anniversary celebration of the historic Manila Hotel last week, Pres. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III reiterated his support for the country’s tourism sector. PNoy made it clear that his administration will strive hard to improve tourism in the country with the help of stakeholders.

(10) More schools and institutions are now helping to nurture entrepreneurship among young Filipinos, and experts said this is the country’s answer to unemployment.

(11) Filipino ultra-marathoner and entrepreneur Cesar Guarin is helping to raise funds for street children as he embarks on the Australia leg of his run around the world. Guarin, president and general manager of CEJOGUA Sports Corporation (CSC), is set to become the first Filipino, first Asian, and fourth person in history to run around the world.

We thank nordicfactory for the flag image.

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An Evening Chat with Founders: From Ideas to Exit – 19 Oct

This Wednesday evening, MIT Enterprise Forum Singapore will organize An Evening Chat with Founders with the theme “From Ideas to Exit”. Eric Koh of JobsCentral (acquired by CareerBuilder), Kelly Choo of Brantology (acquired by Media Monitors) and Varun Chatterji of TenCube (acquired by McAfee) will share their experiences.

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Programme Details

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630pm: Registration, networking with dinner and drinks
7pm: Evening Chat (Questions will be taken from the floor)
830pm: End of Programme

 

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Event Details

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When: Wednesday, 19th October 2011
Time: 630pm-9pm
Where: Plug-In@Blk71, Blk 71 Ayer Rajah Crescent #02-18, Singapore 139951 (Map)
Register here.

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Movie junkies, we have good news for you

Feel limited by the present movie apps such as SGMovies,  Showtimes or those individual Cinema App  by Golden Village or Eng Wah Cinema? Popcorn is a free new movie app which help movie lovers search for showtimes, previews and even allows you to book your ticket through your mobile. Popcorn aggregates all the various movie showtimes from all the cinemas in Singapore on one app. Popcorn was founded by  Lee Ken Ming and his team who also launched Pocketdeals prior to this new project.

The design of the app is really clean, intuitive and easy to use. On the home page, simply just choose the date (currently there is only “Today”,”Tomorrow” and “Day after tomorrow”), the movie you want to watch, as well as the cinema of choice. Because it is an aggregator, you can find movie listing of all shows from major cinemas in Singapore. There is also a browse option to spoil you for choices, be it if you are searching for movies that are currently showing or upcoming ones.

What I like about the app:

1. Shows me all the available showtimes in the various cinema around Singapore
2. Really fast response time
3. I can watch Youtube Trailers on it! Cool stuff
4. There is this section in the app that shows you the promotions from the respective cinemas to help users enjoy savings. Thoughtful.

What I don’t like about the app:

1. The advertisements on the app
2. There are too many movies that are listed on the browsing list. Maybe there could be a “recommended movie” or a feature that allows me to sort the movie by popularity.

Overall, I love it! It pretty much provides me with almost everything I need from a movie app, and iMerlion seems to concur as well. However, I have yet to make any purchases through the app itself. Perhaps I am more comfortable with making monetary transaction through the web instead of mobile. So let us know how the experience is if you have done so.

The app is currently available only in Singapore, and was recently nominated as Asia’s Top 50 Apps 2011.

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Q&A with Wildfire: Singapore VC Association’s Most Innovative Company 2011

Wildfire Pte Ltd, a Singapore Word-of-Mouth Marketing company with operations in China, received the Most Innovative Company Award 2011 in the Interactive Digital Media category from the Singapore Venture Capital Association (SVCA) at the annual Gala Dinner event two weeks ago.

SGE wrote about Wildfire (XingXingHuo in Mandarin) before (exactly one year ago!) when they received their Series A.

A few days ago at the TechVenture 2011 Gala Dinner, I happened to sit next to one of the founders, Christoph Zrenner. We got talking and here we catch up on their progress.

What is the biggest thing that has happened to Wildfire in the past 12 months since we last wrote about you?

A lot of things have happened! When Benjamin Duvall and I started this together with a Chinese partner, Liu Kai, in 2008, we were the proverbial crazy guys with a crazy dream but things have really accelerated since we received VC funding a year ago. We’ve had two industry and China veterans join the team, Marc Rivoira formerly GM at Saatchi and Saatchi X in China, and Claire Pribula, previously VP Sales Asia at a listed consumer analytics company, Acxiom.

When you get those kind of people on board, it really takes the company to the next level. We’ve also taken another strategic investment a few months back from a private investor who is very well networked locally after having founded a number of highly successful businesses in China and SEA.

So things have just been coming together in many meaningful ways for Wildfire, in terms of repeat business from clients, developments on the technology, real strong talent on the team, a great group of investors. Looking back, there was a lot of luck involved, too.

How does it feel to receive the SVCA award?

Doing any start-up is really hard. Doing it in China, let’s just say there are very few examples of successful foreigners who hack it in China. And then, on top of that, trying to establish a new and innovative business model in a market that is growing so fast on all the proven ways of doing things, that’s actually a little crazy. So when SVCA recognized us for what we are doing on the innovation front with this award, it really meant something to all of Wildfire’s team, a recognition of the hard work we’ve all been putting in.

Christoph receiving the Most Innovative Company SVCA 2011 award for Wildfire.

In the beginning, you do a lot of the things you do on faith, because you believe in something, and a little external recognition actually goes a really far way!

What is the biggest thing you’ve learnt in the past year and how are you changing the company to deal with it?

If you look at the marketing industry, you see tremendous amounts of money being spent to bombard consumers with brand messages. Nobody gets fired for spending tens of millions of dollars on a TV campaign. Why? Because TV actually still works pretty well in China. So we’ve had to ask ourselves, what role is there for the sophisticated influencer word-of-mouth media that we provide. Our original motivation was to “fix a broken industry”, to change the way that brands relate to consumers in China where the kind of consumer cynicism you see in the West hasn’t set in yet. Ben’s work with BzzAgent during their early years in the US and Dave Balter’s books on Word-of-Mouth marketing, that is really what inspired us to build a media channel consisting of 100,000s advocate consumers who spread the brand’s message but authentically and in their own words.

Social Media is shifting the power balance from brands to consumers but for a brand to trust their advocates to do the talking, that takes guts. The decision makers on the brand side who took the time to understand the details of our process, how we find, educate, incentivize and measure the performance of brand influencers, they are real marketing heroes: Wildfire’s early adopters from Kraft Foods, The Campbell Soup Company, Bailey’s, Rexona, and others. What we’ve had to learn on our side is that influencer Word-of-Mouth is just one piece of the media mix puzzle and we’ve had to develop the tools to measure and prove how this component amplifies everything else the brand does, whether it’s digital, in stores, TV etc.

In fact, with the real-time tracking technology we developed over the past year, what we can do now goes way beyond word-of-mouth as a media channel: imagine you have access to 100,000 advocates, you know what they really and authentically believe, and you have the tools to deploy them to change ongoing conversations on-line and in the real-world.

Let’s talk a bit more about your technology: are you an ad agency, a media channel or a technology company?

Good question! What we are actually doing is a combination of two things, influencer seeding and social CRM: Influencer seeding means that we have a growing network of 100,000+ influencers (we call them Sparks) and the tools to identify, educate and incentivize the right consumers to spread the brands message (importantly, this is all authentic, they are unpaid volunteers!). Social CRM means that we have the tools to identify relevant conversations as they happen on the online space and in the real-world in Asia Pacific and China.

Based on these capabilities – a private network of people and a proprietary set of technologies – we offer three different products covering the whole product lifecycle. The first is “InfluencerMedia”, that’s using advocate consumers for reaching and impacting targeted consumers. The second is “InfluencerInsight”, which is using the conversations we capture for forward-looking real-world research (as opposed to focus groups and surveys), for example to answer the question of whether a product will succeed or fail in the market. The third is “InfluencerForce” which is the Social CRM product, but we need to keep the details about how this works confidential until the launch in November.

Do you have any general advice for startup founders with an eye on China?

China is hard and you really, really have to want it to succeed. If you can suffer (“eat glass” as one of the judges at Techventure put it today) and are prepared to put at least 3-4 years into an adventure with an uncertain outcome, China is the right place for you at the right time and there are plenty of opportunities to adapt investable business models from the USA to a Chinese context. (Another of the speakers at Techventure described opportunities as buses: don’t run after one you just missed, the next one will come and then you might even get a seat). All the usual advice applies: Build something that people want. Listen to your customer. Don’t run out of money. You can start alone, but don’t run the business alone, you need to have a partner you can rely on.

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iPhone 4S Available In India – For INR 42K (Onwards)

Last week, Apple announced the launch iPhone 4S and like a typical Apple product launch, India was not in the launch radar (Read: Is India A Dumping Ground For Apple Products?).

Following the trend, iPhone 4S (unlocked) is available in India at an exorbitant price of Rs. 41, 850 (for iPhone 4S 16 GB model) and goes up to Rs.58,650.00 for the 64GB model (here).

Well, we won’t say whether you should buy the phone or not, but be assured that that iPhone4S’ most talked about feature, i.e. Siri (voice recognition) will fall short of expectation in India, given the diversity in accents.

As far as the price of iPhone4S in India is concerned, this is expected to come at a premium as most of etailers are simply importing the device and charging a premium on top of it. What we however recommend is to grab it directly from HongKong or Singapore, i.e. if you are really keen (and if you do, please share your review with us, especially regarding Siri for Indian accent).

So all ye crazy ones – let us know if you really plan to buy an iPhone4S for INR 42,000.

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» iPhone 4S Available In India – For INR 42K (Onwards) @Pluggd.in.

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Day Parting – A Nifty Option In Digital Campaign Management

One very cool(but infrequently used) option in most digital marketing platforms is day and week parting.

This is how it works. You can choose to show your ads only on certain days of the week, or on certain times of the day, or on certain times on certain days.

This can give you incredibly powerful targeting options. Consider a few examples I’ve seen:

a.       A travel advertiser noticed his traffic was 50% higher on Monday mornings – and immediately used day parting to focus his budgets during the peak period.

b.       A food chain I worked with used day parting in a mobile campaign to show different banners at different times of the day. They showed banners for breakfast, lunch and dinner depending on what time of the day it was.

c.        Another former client noticed he had high traffic but no conversions at all on weekends. Cutting off his weekend traffic cut his costs 30% and improved his ROI significantly.

This, of course, is available on most major ad platforms and networks – Adwords, Facebook, InMobi, Admob all have this – you just have to look inside the respective interfaces.

What do you think of this? What are other digital tips and tricks that you can think of?

[Shamanth Rao is the head of campaign management for APAC at InMobi (http://InMobi.com ). You can follow him on Twitter here. His writings are at http://BywayStar.com .]

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» Day Parting – A Nifty Option In Digital Campaign Management @Pluggd.in.

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YFSE Social Business Forum for Youths – 18 Oct

Tomorrow evening, Youths for a Future of Social Entrepreneurship (YFSE) will organize their Social Business Forum. It is an opportunity especially for youths to discover and discuss the future of social entrepreneurship. The forum will start with a movie screening entitled “Bonsai People“, followed by a panel discussion with eminent local social entrepreneurs such as Aseem K Thakur of Give.sg, Bernise Ang of Syinc, Tong Yee of School of Thought.

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Event Details

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When: Tuesday, 18th October 2011
Time: 530pm-8pm
Where: School of Thought Auditorium, 222 Queen Street, Singapore 188550 (Map)
Register here.

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The Greenpeace of social entrepreneurship

When I spoke to French native Vincent Perrier-Trudov some weeks ago, two things stood out about him: One, he is very passionate about social entrepreneurship, and two, he comes up with bloody good analogies.

Vincent is the founder and international coordinator for Citizens for Social Business (CSB), an NGO started in July 2011 that aims to promote social entrepreneurship around the world.

Photo: Vincent (left) at the first CSB meeting in Paris. Courtesy of CSB

They have about 260 members now, and within Asia, they have representatives in Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Japan. 

Inspiration for his current pursuit started when he read ‘Creating a World Without Poverty’, a book by Grameen Bank founder Professor Muhammad Yunus. Motivated to do something about poverty, he was deeply involved in policy-making in Europe, and even helped successfully push through a non-binding resolution to recognize social entrepreneurship within the European Union.

With that achieved, his next step was to promote social entrepreneurship globally. He actually met Prof Yunus to talk about it, and he gave his blessings.

“Our purpose is to become the Greenpeace of social entrepreneurship,” he said. Greenpeace? I asked. You mean the organisation that sends ships in to disrupt whaling fleets?

“Oh, we’re not planning to do any of that stuff. We’re much milder,” he clarified. But there’s no doubt they are equally as passionate about their pet causes.

CSB has a two-pronged approach towards promoting social business. Firstly, they want to encourage governments to recognize social enterprises as a separate legal entity with a separate regulatory framework. And secondly, they hope to get governments to reserve five percent of their international aid fund for social enterprises.

I asked him about how he’s going to make his case.

On the first approach, social enterprises are fundamentally different from other corporate entities, he said. While the latter only has one bottom line to think about, social enterprises have two — profitability and societal benefits. And it goes without saying, social enterprises are largely different from charities — which rely mostly on donations.

Yet, he added that despite the differences, social enterprises are not given a separate legal status that addresses their unique objectives and methods. In Singapore, for example, social enterprises are essentially treated the same as commercial entities, and they have to register themselves as such.

“It’s like how a car is not meant to be driven backwards all the time,” he said, “it may technically work, but its not built to be driven this way.”

On the second approach, he says pouring funds into social enterprises promises better returns. When money is donated to charity, it’s gone. But when funds are poured into a social enterprise, it isn’t a donation; rather, it’s an investment.

He emphasized that both measures does not cost much for the government to implement: There’s no need to raise taxes or generate more revenue. All that’s needed is political willpower.

But while Vincent would no doubt love to directly appeal to government officials about this, he does not believe that it will work. Instead, CSB’s job is to create a network of citizens in various countries who believe in the cause. “They are the best people to appeal to their own government.”

Public education plays an important role in Vincent’s activism, since public awareness about social entrepreneurship is still low. A survey conducted by Singapore’s Social Entrepreneurship Association on 2,000 respondents in February 2010 found that only 13 percent of Singaporeans and PRs are aware of the existence of social enterprises.

In addition, 45 percent incorrectly stated that one of the aims of social enterprises was “raising donations.”

Vincent’s unwavering belief in social entrepreneurship is actually rooted in some realpolitik. Governments, he says, are becoming stymied by political division, economic uncertainty, and mounting debt. As a result, the government’s ability to alleviate poverty and fund social programs will be cut.

“People have to realize that they are powerful. They might have forgotten about it,” he said, adding that social enterprises not only lessen suffering, but boosts the economy by providing jobs and promoting spending.

However, for social enterprises to prosper and succeed, the right environment must be present.

“If you go to the supermarket and you see two different brands of orange juice, one produced by a purely commercial entity and another by a social enterprise, and if the price and quality are the same, which would you choose?” he asked.

The answer, to me at least, was obvious.

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Japan Digest: Handmade goods marketplace, Yahoo! Box, and more

Here are some startup news snippets from Japan, not only from its capital, Tokyo, but also other startup hubs like Fukuoka, Kyoto, Osaka, and many more.

(1) If you live outside Japan and are interested in getting handmade goods from this country, here’s your chance: A service called iichi, which launched in Japanese in July this year, just opened a site in English.

(2) Yahoo! Japan, the country’s biggest website, has launched a new online storage service dubbed Yahoo! Box.

(3) Gloops, Inc. which runs the social game “Dai-Sodatsu!! Legend Card” for Mobage, has released an English version called “Legend Cards”. They’ve also held an exhibition at the 2011 Tokyo Game Show.

(4) Social network Mixi is trying to expand their apps experience on more devices. On September 21, Mixi released an Windows Phone app, and on October 5, they launched the iPad version.

(5) Kanagawa Engineering College Kosaka Laboratory exhibited a game at the Tokyo Game Show called “Mommy Tummy” which simulates the experience of pregnancy.

(6) NTT West subsidiary NTT Solmare is planning to sell 100 e-comics from China in its home market of Japan, as well as Asia and the US. NTT Solmare partnered up with Zhejiang Publishing United Group and will initially offer two e-comics each in Japan and the US by the end of this year.

(7) Trend Micro Japan, which sells the Virus Buster software, started a dedicated site called “Cloud Girl” where “charisma” cloud girls talk about how they are utilizing cloud services with the PC and smartphone.

(8) In the months since the disaster hit Northern Japan, a number of innovative initiatives have sprung up to offer assistance and relief to the hardest-hit areas. The “Ehon Project” (Picture Book Project) is a mobile kids picture book library that is bringing joy to children who lost everything.

(9) You can tell a lot about a lady from the contents of her handbag, or so Japanese mobile provider NTT DoCoMo thinks. They have teamed up with fashion and lifestyle magazine “Tokyo Graffiti” for a new campaign, “Handbag Interview“, which empties out the private contents of girls’ handbags for all to see and judge.

We thank nordicfactory for the flag image.

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Go! Go! Nippon! -My First Trip to Japan- : Anime Novel Game Style Japan Guide

Japanese bishojo-game (pornographic interactive game with Japanese anime-style girls Wikipedia) maker Overdrive released a non-adult, all English, still Japanese-anime-style game which features foreigners Japan visit experiences, titled Go! Go! Nippon! (Nippon is how Japanese calls Japan in Japanese).

All texts are given both in English and Japanese, so it may be useful not only for people just to visit Japan but also interested in Japanese language.

The online download site selling the game told on its official Twitter account, "This probably marks history as the very first visual novel made by a Japanese company, for western visual novel and bishoujo game fans!"

The game runs on Windows PC. The price is $13.66 in US$ or €9.95. The game is not purchasable from inside Japan.

via Hevoluson [J]

Go! Go! Nippon! -My First Trip to Japan- : Anime Novel Game Style Japan Guide

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China Digest: Tencent Weibo English version, China.com filed for bankruptcy protection, and more

Here are some startup news snippets from China, not only in its capital, Beijing, but also other startup hubs such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and many more.

(1) China’s second most popular microblogging service, Tencent Weibo, launched their English version last week to target the international market. For the first time, non-Chinese speaking users can sample a little taste of the Chinese social networking phenomenon.

(2) CDC Corporation, the company behind China.com and many other businesses and the first Nasdaq-listed Chinese internet company has filed for bankruptcy protection, highlighting that the company’s years of struggle has finally accumulated to the extent that it couldn’t deal with them anymore. Stocks have gone down more than 50% on Nasdaq.

(3) Kandian, by Sina, is an online video site that allows users to create their own TV station, like Justin.tv.

(4) In a sure sign that Turntable.fm has made it, it now has its very own Chinese clone, Duomi.fm. The site, currently in closed beta, appears to shamelessly clone every aspect of Turntable.fm.

(5) Xiaomi Tech, the company behind Xiaomi mobile is said to be tapping into the digital reading market through MIUI, a 3rd-party customized Android ROM curated by the mobile-focused company.

(6) Streaming subscription music service Pandora will enter China and is head-hunting a capable CEO. This is definitely great news for music fans in China. But the question you may ask is whether this music streaming service can operate legally in China. After all, the environment here is kinda complex.

(7) Lashou is said to be the first Chinese group buying service to make a profit, according to people close to the site. Lashou refused to comment when approached.

(8) If Tencent’s penguin is hungry, it can be very dangerous and eat everything. When Taobao launched its B2C platform just a month ago, Tencent’s open B2C platform also launched.

(9) Pinju.com, a late-comer to the extremely competitive Chinese ecommerce market, made its debut with several group buying deals. The site is reportedly positioning itself as an online general store with catalogues ranging from cosmetics, clothes, maternity and baby products, electric appliance, home supplies, health products, 3C products to luxurious brands including Hermes, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Armani, Gucci and so on.

(10) Maimaicha.com, a Chinese B2C online vertical which sells tea today announced raising RMB hundreds of millions (US$15 million) in Series A funding from four domestic venture capitals.

(11) In a report by independent market research institute CNZZ, Sogou, the search engine curated by Chinese portal Sohu.com, tops Google China in user adoption.

(12) Who are the prime beneficiaries of the current ecommerce mania in China? To start off, consumers. They now have access to abundant choices with stunning price tags. Portals as well as website aggregators like hao123.com (acquired by Baidu) and hao.360.cn (by Qihoo 360) are also benefitting. Why? They pull in considerable amount of money by promoting these ecommerce services on their virtual properties.

(13) Xunlei, China’s online entertainer which offers a popular download tool and online streaming service filed to withdraw its IPO, citing deteriorating European debt crisis and gloomy U.S. economy as the main causes.

(14) Chinese social gaming vendor Happy Elements announced raising US$30 million in Series B funding from Legend Capital with previous investor DCM participating. The funding, according to its CEO Wang Haining, will go towards beefing up the team and speeding up R&D.

We thank nordicfactory for the flag image.

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Social Game Developer “One Of Them” Raises 300 Million Yen In Funds

ONE of THEM,Inc., [J] from October 5th’s fixed date deposit, has issued third party allocation of shares totaling about 300 million yen, through Globis Capital Partners and Infinity Ventures LLP.

ONE of THEM.Inc is a corporation established in January of 2011.  They offer planning and development of both joint and in-house contents centered on the feature phone and smart phone market.  As well as managing the feature phone social game “Umi No Ue No Kame Nouen” (The Turtle Plantation Over the Sea) for CyberAgent’s Ameba since June, they also have established a marketing center in Singapore from September.

The funds they have accrued at this time will be used for expanding and reinforcing their development for smartphone systems and applications, strengthening their management base, applications and contents M&A, developing their international marketing base, and growing their team of talented individuals.

 

Translation authorized by VSMedia

Social Game Developer “One Of Them” Raises 300 Million Yen In Funds

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Entrepreneurship Myth: You Require An MBA to Start-up

You hear this debate more often than not on coffee tables and amongst want-to-be entrepreneurs. Without being too diplomatic my take on this is ‘NO’ you don’t need one to start up and that has absolutely nothing to do with me being a non-MBA J

In more cases than not, ignorance is bliss. When I started off, I didn’t know a thing about how to make a business plan, how to manage cash flows, valuations and DCF, term sheets, employment contracts, product IPRs nothing! The only thing I had was passion and the fire to make a difference and to create value, and I never experienced a need of going to a B-School to come this far.

Just the other day I met a management grad at one of the start up events and I happened to strike a conversation with him. He had an idea around which he wanted to build a business but he was reluctant to even start off the same since he had been thinking more about the cash flows and business plans rather than focusing on the idea, prototyping it and getting it out in the market. And this case of over thinking and over analyzing runs really deep amongst almost all management grads I come across.

Starting up is really like swimming which you cant learn without experiencing it or jumping in the pool, it really cant be learnt in a B-School or mulling over complicated excel sheets.

In my experience being a technical or a domain guy is at a bigger advantage of starting up than a pure management grad for 3 reasons:

1. A techie can get the idea/prototype off the ground up and running on his own skill-set without spending a lot of money which can surely gets him in a good position to either recruit or convince a business guy to come on board or you simply learn the business side of things in your journey. On the other hand a pure management grad needs to burn cash on hire a developer or a designer and has to overtly depend on him to dish out a kick-ass product.

2. Secondly a management grad having spent time and money (maybe taking a loan with the ridiculously exorbitant MBA fees) has far more liabilities on him, and the time spent on having a start up is like a time bomb ticking and hence building immense monetary pressure which can make things go horribly wrong. (half baked product launches, taking up part time services and losing focus et all) My way to look at it is, if you know entrepreneurship is your way forward, its worth investing your time and money on starting up and taking your idea to the market rather than making it to a B-School.

3. Thirdly running a start up gives you a world of experience on the business side, be it sales or marketing or running your operations in addition to the technical or domain skills you would anyways have. Anyways learning marketing in a B-School won’t go beyond your usual Kotlers and sales not beyond the traditional 1.0 method. In reality, with the present strategic marketing taught in Kotler has taken a backseat with more of operational marketing taking center-stage and marketing automation is what works and also sales 2.0 is where the future is.

Also with the kind of management curriculum that exists, it’s worth giving your start-up a chance without an MBA (I call running a start-up as an alternate MBA course free of cost) and it will have more chances of making it big.

» Recommended Read (by Guest Author, Vivek Wadhwa): Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World?

More Entrepreneurship Myth:

• Entrepreneurship Myth– It Needs A Lot of Courage To Start Up
• Myths About Entrepreneurship – I will be my Boss

[About the author: Divyesh Kharade is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deltecs a company which endeavors to take employee and customer engagement to the next level through its flagship product DRONA. Having done his engineering from Mumbai University he also serves as an advisor on the board of one more startup. Divyesh is on Twitter at @divyeshkharade]

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» Entrepreneurship Myth: You Require An MBA to Start-up @Pluggd.in.

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WebEngage Secures Seed Funding From IAN

WebEngage, the Mumbai based startup that started with a web annotation idea and later pivoted into a customer engagement tool/feedback service has raised its first round of funding from IAN.

The funding was actually closed 3-4 months back, but has been announced officially today. The investors in WebEngage include active angel investors Rajan Anandan, Sunil Kalra, Sadeesh Raghavan, Ashim Mehra, Nitin Singhal, Pradeep Gupta and Harish Mehta.

Launched in May, 2011, WebEngage (rebranded from WebKlipper) has two core products focused on customer engagement – feedback and contextual surveys. While existing engagement tools like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction gather feedback, WebEngage goes deeper allowing publishers to create surveys that can be targeted at visitors on their website based on behaviour, geography and profile to seamlessly gather proactive feedback to improve their product offering and drive conversions.

When Pluggd.in last reviewed Webengage, here is what we mentioned:

An important feature present in WebKlipper to enable rule based notifications that will help publishers to create site alerts based on a certain rules:

• Target a question at visitors coming from certain geography(ies):
• You can ask a very specific question to a visitor from search engines (all major ones supported). E.g. This survey will only be visible to visitors who come via Google search.
• Target a question at visitors for a particular page(s) on your website: You can create a different survey for your product page and a separate one for your pricing page.
• Target a question at visitors spending x amount of time on your site.

The product does solves a serious pain and has grabbed customers like Cleartrip, JustEat, one97 etc. The key for WebEngage is to grow beyond the Indian market and ensure SAAS based pricing model (recurring payments) for overseas customers.

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WebEngage.com raises first round of funding from Indian Angel Network

 

Mumbai, October 17, 2011: Mumbai-based tech start-up, offering customer engagement tools for web businesses, WebEngage (http://webengage.com), has raised its first round of funding from Indian Angel Network. The funds will be utilized in expanding product offering, creating technology differentiators, marketing and human capital.

Launched in May, 2011, WebEngage has two core products focused on customer engagement – feedback and contextual surveys. While existing engagement tools like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction gather feedback, WebEngage goes deeper allowing publishers to create surveys that can be targeted at visitors on their website based on behaviour, geography and profile to seamlessly gather proactive feedback to improve their product offering and drive conversions.

WebEngage was founded by ex-engineering team members at burrp.com – the local lifestyle portal that was acquired by Infomedia18 in 2009. Speaking on the first round of funding from IAN, Avlesh Singh, co-founder & CEO, WebEngage said, “From concept to execution, we knew that WebEngage will usher in a new era in customer engagement on the web. We have already come out of private beta and closed deals with 400 web businesses including Cleartrip, Future Group, One97 and Just-Eat Global. This shows the faith that consumer centric companies have in WebEngage product and how we can create positive impact on their online businesses.”

” It is a privilege to have industry stalwarts as our investors and we are confident that the investment will help us accelerate growth and expand in markets outside India. We have added IAN member and lead investor Rajan Anandan to the company’s board”, Avlesh added.

The first round of funding has been raised from the Indian Angel Network, India’s largest organized angel network. The investors in WebEngage include active angel investors Rajan Anandan, Sunil Kalra, Sadeesh Raghavan, Ashim Mehra, Nitin Singhal, Pradeep Gupta and Harish Mehta.

Rajan Anandan, an active investor in early stage technology companies, who led the investment from the network said, “The worldwide web has now crossed two billion users and there are millions of web based businesses across the world. Deeply engaging with users is one of the most important priorities for such businesses and WebEngage provides simple, yet powerful SaaS based solutions to help businesses achieve customer satisfaction, marketing and sales objectives. We are confident that WebEngage will set new standards in customer engagement, and real time customer feedback.”

Indian Angel Network, early investors in WebEngage, is the first and largest pan-India Angel network comprising several of India’s successful entrepreneurs and CEOs who share a passion for early stage businesses. The Network has over 170 members and has made more than 25 investments across multiple sectors like IT, Mobile and Education and has made several successful exits.

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» WebEngage Secures Seed Funding From IAN @Pluggd.in.

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