Zoment is an app that converts dumb reminders into smart and timely messages. It is aimed at people who have to constantly remind people, and consider the task as a thankless and painful one. It is also for people who tend to forget or are too busy to remember and act at the right moments.

The best part about Zoment is that scheduling can be done by time or location.

So when you set a reminder, it would reaches a friend at a given date and time of your choice or reaches when that friend arrives at a chosen location, such as a mall or market.

Another great use of this app is to alert loved ones automatically that you reached a particular location safely.

An interesting use case of Zoment is that you can set location specific tips for your friends. So if you visit a new place you can set tips for places to see, food to try, things to buy etc and when they visit the location they will be shown the tips automatically.

Features

We tested the Android app using a Galaxy Nexus. To use the app, one needs to log in using their Facebook or email. This is a great way since you will be able to discover other Zoment users using your Facebook or searching by their email.

Just like other messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat and hike you can send messages over a data connection free. You can also send voice messages, something WeChat has had for some time and hike released just yesterday.

The UI of the app is very basic and definitely needs some work on so has to keep users interested.

Scheduling a message by time is simple. As far as scheduling by location is concerned, you first choose whether the message should be sent by your location or by the receiver’s location and you get to choose the place on a map as well as a radius.  Considering that Google recently announced new geofencing APIs, we hope the app developers incorporate this in the app.

The Team

Zoment has been built by uFony Services Private Limited. The firm was founded in founded in IIM-Cal by Ashish Chaturvedi in 2012.  The company has been funded by The Chennai Angels.

Future Plans

One of the major issues with this app, like most upcoming instant messaging apps is getting new users aboard the platform. To tackle this app developers are working on an option where the sender can send the scheduled message to receivers as a SMS if the receiver is not a Zoment user. The user has to just set the time or location of his when the message has to be sent. It won’t work in the reverse way, where the message depends on the receiver’s location.

The team also plans to integrate a way to schedule Facebook messages from the app directly.

Our Take

While the basic concept of the app is great, gaining traction is something this app is going to contend with and while the SMS option does sound interesting the implementation of this will be key to making other users aware of this app. This app will probably never be able to replace apps like WhatsApp, Hike or WeChat but could find a niche audience for scheduling messages especially for messages based on location.

So you want to wish your friend at 12 in the night, but can’t stay awake, then Zoment might just be the app for you.

Download: Android, iOS

The preview option allows customers to make full-text searches, zooming in and out, and provide them with a preview of the book.

Google Preview is essentially a book viewer that can be embedded right into a website or blog. You can set up the viewer for one or for multiple titles, for every book that has a preview in Google Book Search.

Besides books for general reading, Bookadda also offers preview to Acadzone – a single-click buy for all curriculum course material for various competitive exam and school study material needs. With this Bookadda is the only online bookstore to have Google preview feature in India.The feature will be quite handy for academic books and reference material as users can check out if what they are looking for is really in the book or not.

Backed by former Infosys director TV Mohandas Pai and his partner Ranjan Pai, Bookadda claims that it sells a book every 2 minutes and has the capability to ship to 3500 locations in the country.

A quick look at Online Book Sales in India

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen interesting development in the books category. The most notable development was that e-commerce giant Amazon launched its marketplace in India with books movies and television shows. The online retailing giant currently offers more than 7 million titles across 6 sub categories.

Flipkart recently said that it sold a record 1 lakh books in a single day. The company says it holds an average of 40% – 45% in terms of value when it comes to the organized books market in India.

The stores will be called Android Nation and India would become the second country after Indonesia to get these dedicated stores.

The internet search giant is partnering with BK Modi’s Spice Global to set up the stores in various Indian cities. This first store is slated to open at Select Citywalk in New Delhi later this year reports The Economic Times. The store will be approximately 1,200-1,500 sq ft in size.

The Android Nation store in Indonesia. Credit- Erafone

The Android Nation stores serve as an Android experience center where customers can find out more about the latest Android apps, get help from experts, download software updates or check out the latest accessories for their devices. The stores display and sell Android phones and tablets from multiple manufacturers including HTC, LG, Asus, Sony and Samsung. If the Indonesian stores are to go by, the stores will be shaped like the Android logo.

There are two Android Nation stores in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, opened in partnership with electronics retailer Erafone. While the first store only in July, the second one opened in December and both are located in malls.

While Spice currently operates 900 Spice Hotspots in the country, it plans to convert 50 of these into Android Nation stores to rapidly expand the franchise. BK Modi’s son Dilip Modi will head the Android Nation rollout in India.

Internationally both Apple and Microsoft have standalone retail outlets. There are rumors that Google plans to open standalone stores in the US to showcase Android and Chromebook by the end of the year.

At present Google mainly sells it range of Nexus devices online on the Play Store. Google began selling the Nexus 7 on the Indian Play Store at the end of March. So far it has not added any more Nexus devices to its store but the Nexus 4 is being sold by LG in retail stores and also online retailers are carrying it.

In India while there is no Apple Store run by the company, the company has tied with companies like Ample Technologies and Reliance Digital to set up Imagine and iStores respectively.

In April, we had reported that a group of Chinese manufacturers were planning on opening their own retail stores under the brand name Android Guruz to sell Android phones. It looks like that company has now moved to an online only model and stocks and sells a number of Chinese Android phones.

Android is already the market leader in the smartphone segment in India, and with Samsung’s marketing push and also the entry of the Android Nation stores they can further cement their position. An IDC report in March said that India has over 218 million smartphones and the market was growing 16% y-o-y.

Developed by Karthikeyan Kuppuswamy, a student at IIMB, the app adds a tiny box to every Gmail thread with a short summary of your email that you can tweet.

The Google Apps plugin will creates tweets using your email subject lines and links within messages.

The app can automatically detect if the mail is worth tweeting. It does this by analysing the subject line, message body, sender address, recipient address and other links in the body of the Gmail. If the subject line is blank or too short or if there are no useful links in the body then the app ignore the mail and does not produce a short tweet.

Once the app is installed in your business Gmail account, open an email that you have received in your inbox. Now look below the body of your mail and you can find a box called ‘Tiny Email’ with 2 sections. The first (top) box has the email shortened into a tweet for you to tweet with a tweet button below it. The second (bottom) box displays the last tweet from the sender along with retweet and follow buttons. TinyGmail does this by analysing the sender’s email address and finding their Twitter account.

Here is a short video demonstrating the product

The plugin is very useful for business’ that deal with lot of sales, marketing emails and wants to stay up to date with the latest business updates from the sender. It also works as a perfect tool to quickly promote new clients or business interests. In a way it also saves us the hassle of figuring out the right tweet in 140 characters.

I receive a lot of press releases, product releases or updates from companies I follow. Now all I have to do is scroll down to the bottom of the mail and click the tweet button if I feel like talking about the product. And that’s it: one e-mail less to deal with.

TinyGmail also ensures that the privacy of your contact list is maintained, by figuring out personal emails and preventing them from being shared on twitter. The plugin works well for users who want to stay awesome on twitter without leaving the Gmail page.

The app is available for free with no obligations. Since it is not meant for individuals, the app cannot be installed on personal email accounts or be found in the Chrome app store. For business users the app can be downloaded only from the Google App marketplace. TinyGmail has been also listed as Top New App in productivity section.

You blog about it and share the blog update with the social world (Tweets/Facebook).

But what about your existing app users/site visitors? How will they come to know? After all, they are your ‘captive’ audience and there has to be a non-obtrusive way to tell them what’s new with your product.

Enter WhatsNew.io, a fresh perspective to bringing blog updates to your site/app. Developed by SupportBee team which basically was scratching their own itch with the product and wanted to create a feature that would simply help them share product updates with SupportBee customers.

Ofcourse, big players like Asana etc have inbuilt systems, but WhatsNew.io is a SAAS platform play for app/site developers who do not have bandwidth to create a similar system for their product.

All you need to do is to put the RSS feed of your site, copy the javascript code in your website and you are done! WhatsNew will automagically take care of everything (blog updates are polled every hour). The product handles unsubscribe as well, so as to not get too obtrusive.

WhatsNew shows updates to your users in your app depending on when they last visited (using cookie information), unlike plain vanilla tools like HelloBar which show the same content to everybody visiting the site.

Plus, the JS is 100% async ensuring that the utility doesn’t impact your site download speed.

The beauty of WhatsNew.io is the analytics part – you get a detailed analytics about what’s being viewed and clicked. Using these actionable insights, you can define your inbound marketing strategy (you can also tag the links with utm_source and other variables to reflect in your Google Analytics dashboard). And yeah, if you still want to customize WhatsNew, you can do so using the product’s JS API (link).

WhatsNew Dashboard

An obvious question is why can’t notification tools like WebEngage do the same? Well, yes- they can. And they should have done this by now, but then startups are all about opportunities!

Do give WhatsNew a spin and share your feedback. 

The funds will primarily be used for a marketing efforts and product development. The deal was first reported by Techcircle. This is the second round of angel funding for Little1 coming within less than six months of the first round. Earlier it had raised $80,000 from an angel investor.

Little1 offers parents or relatives to create children profile, record memories and share them with family and friends. It also allows users to keep medical and health record of their children with features like milestone calendar, growth chart, dental tracker etc. Importantly by using Little1 one can send birthday invites and can also buy relevant gift items from it.

Started by Naresh Baid and Sabarish Nair Little1 is currently adding 1,500 members a month and aspires to touch mark of 25,000 members by the end of this financial year. The startup had released Android app (link) and plans to launch an iPhone app in coming months. Little1 also won Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge 2013 from Kolkata.

Every year around 27 million babies are born in India. Assuming that 10% of babies are born to parents who are online, Little1 is going after a fairly large segment, as it solves pain points of parents in aggregating special memories of their children. The data is also highly valuable.

At present the platform allows multiple login including Facebook, however nowadays parents tend to share more about their children on Facebook – so maybe the team should think of launching a Facebook app?

The online baby care category looked promising until last year when investors were falling over each other to get a piece of the action. However this year investors seem to be wary while investing in this category. On the back of a cash crunch, Pune based Babyoye merged with Hoopos and raised $12 million from Helion Advisors, Tiger Global and Accel Partners.

The walkie talkie feature is a push to talk kind of service using which users can send quick voice messages to each other. The new version also includes a mode- last seen, which lets users share messages with chosen friends when they were last online.

Earlier in April this year, the messaging platform had launched hike 2.0 version with a few nifty updates, most notable were status updates using moods.

Bharti Softbank, a joint venture between telecom major Bharti and Softbank have invested $7 million in the app company which claims to have crossed 5 million users since its launch in December last year.

As of now hike does not support any of the regional languages while another cross messaging platform Plustxt offers support to seven regional languages including Gujarati Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil. Plustxt also comes with privacy controls for you to decide if a picture or text can be copied, forwarded or saved. You can even text without disclosing your real phone number.

In June 2012 Tencent partnered with ibibo to launch WeChat app in India, a free mobile voice and text chat application that provides features like multimedia communication flexibility and convenience with text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast messaging, photo/video sharing, location sharing and contact information exchange.

While WeChat is pushing aggressively in India, Hike is shooting for a global play. Important to note that the WeChat is under the Indian Government’s scanner because its a Chinese company. In the past, SEBI has objected to WhatsApp and BBM conversations.

Previously, we covered a report on usage of apps in India and surprisingly, women use chat apps like WhatsApp three times more than males. And very recently, Nimbuzz, the IM company announced relocating its headquarters to India and also opened up the messenger API.

Television channel CNBC, citing sources reported that the following rules are likely to be implemented

1. Angel fund must invest in a company for at least 3 years.
2. Angel investors must invest in companies not older than 3 years
3. Investee companies must be unlisted with a maximum turnover of Rs 25 cr
4. Investee company can’t be related to a group with revenues more than Rs 300 cr
5. Angel fund should have no family connections with investee company
6. No scheme of angel fund can have more than 49 investors

We think that these rules will be applicable to pooled angel funds that want to apply for “tax pass through,” under the alternative investment fund regulations, 2012.

The finance minister had promised during 2013 budget that angel Investors will be recognized as category I Alternative Investment Funds (AIF) once the Securities and Exchange Board of India comes up with the guidelines. Pass through tax means that the fund itself will not be taxed and each partner will pay taxes individually based on their income from the fund.

These regulations are not likely to affect individual angel investors or individual syndicated deals.

If you have more insights/perspective into this, please feel free to share with NextBigWhat audience (connect with us)

Recommended Read: Angel Investors To Qualify for Tax Pass Through, SMEs Can List on SME Exchange without IPO

Anand Ramachandran, the founder of Fantain has had a similar journey. In this short conversation he talks about  how he left the corporate world to start on his own, how he adapted to the changes and a bit about Fantain.

Image: Songbird Website

One of the early entrants in Online music streaming industry, ‘Songbird’ is shutting down its services with effect from June 28th 2013, announced Eric Wittman, CEO,Songbird via a post on company’s blog.

The open source media player, made by Pioneers of the Inevitable was founded in 2006 and at its peak, made $2 million in revenues. The player was compatible with Windows, Mac and different platforms and could play pretty much any format you threw at it.

Initially the open source player was targeted for Desktops as an alternative to iTunes which aimed to make money by licensing white label versions of the product to Original Equipment Makers (OEM) such as Philips,HP. That did not work. Much later in 2012, company understood the increasing market need for mobile based music services and then pivoted to Mobile with presence on Android and iOS .

Company went through a rough phase in 2009 losing its founder Rob Lord amid changes for the monetization strategy. Since then its been a hard road for the open source media provider as the market just kept becoming more competitive with players such as iTunes,Pandora and Spotify. Restructuring in 2012 left the company with 11 employees in total and Eric Wittman was promoted as the CEO from being SVP, Products for more than a year.

In an email interaction, Eric Wittman answered some brief questions for us highlighting that what went wrong leading to the sudden demise of once popular and a million plus monthly user service. He also stated that how hard it was for the company to cash in on the open source feature.

1. What was the monthly traffic in terms of unique visitors?

Songbird had 1.2 Million monthly unique users as per the latest data in May.

2. How much traction did you have from India? What is the number of streams songbird plays daily?

India was our fourth largest country after US, German and UK. Because content comes from 3rd party services like YouTube, Facebook, SoundCloud and Twitter, we don’t measure number of streams.

3. What went wrong ? Can you elaborate the major reasons?

From my point of view, there were three key things that really hurt the company from reaching its potential:

 A). It’s hard to monetize free open source software. There are examples where this has been done extremely well on the enterprise side when you can wrap high margin professional services around it however there are very few successful examples in the consumers space (Mozilla being one).

b) The company was extremely late pivoting from a primarily Desktop focused strategy to a mobile / cloud centric product strategy. When I joined in June of 2011, 95% of the company’s efforts were providing Desktop software to OEMs like Philips, HP and Vodafone. Meanwhile, the market and consumer demand for mobile music applications was reaching exponential acceleration. The company was late to the game and we did our best to sprint as fast as possible to make up for lost time.

c) Debt – in 2008 the company decided to take on a significant amount of venture debt to fund the business. While taking on venture debt is not unheard of, it’s usually taken as a means to accelerate growth of a business. Unfortunately it fuelled very little growth and became a massive albatross from a financial operating standpoint where at its peak it was consuming over 1/3 of the company’s monthly cash. Imagine how many more engineers or impactful marketing activities we could have conducted with that money!

4. What was the initial and then evolved Monetization strategy?

Original monetization strategy was to license a “white-labled” version of the Desktop product to OEMs. While it was a good idea in theory, there were a limited set of OEMs who could afford to pay for this and the bigger ones already had their own software teams working on internal solutions.

Where we were moving to, and were making decent progress on, was building out a critical mass of consumers where we could monetize in two areas:

1. Targeted advertising – because we knew an individuals music interests based upon what they consumed, we could provide very specific and relevant advertising to them.

2. Premium services – there were many “power user” features that had been requested that we began to work on that folks were willing to pay. We found that 23% of our Desktop users were willing to pay an annual subscription of at least $19.99 a year for premium features in the product

5. What number of Android and iOS app downloads did the company witnessed since the launch of mobile apps.

Downloads are a bit of a “vanity metric” given that it doesn’t really tell you about active usage but we can safely state we had over 1M downloads for Android and iOS combined

With over 11 million USD of investment by Sequoia, Atlas Venture and Phillips, Songbird was left out with little cash with unable to fund the further business operations. As for the users, company is suggesting an alternative open source desktop media player ‘ Nightingale’, built upon Songbird’s Source code.

“In 2007, one year after our launch, we asked for 12 more transponders. We should have got those by 2009. But the launch of GSAT 10 kept getting delayed. In September, 2012, the GSAT 10 was launched; it went into orbit and was tested. But today in June, 2013, seven months after the satellite was launched, we still haven’t been given the 12 transponders,’ said Harit Nagpal, MD & CEO, Tata Sky in an interview with Business standard

Under the original deal signed between the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the DTH provider, the space agency has to allocate additional transponders within 2 years upon request.

Indian DTH providers that have been using Indian satellites for transmission have moved on to foreign satellites citing technical snags with Indian ones. DTH operators like Dish Tv, Sun Direct and Airtel are all now on foreign satellites.

The government is also taking on revenue losses on account of this. ISRO stands to lose around $1 million per month in rent from Tata Sky, Nagpal said.

The GSAT 10, the heaviest satellite India has ever launched, was hailed as major step to improve communication, DTH and navigation services for India with its 12 Ku-band, 12 C-band and 6 extended C-band transponders. Until its launch, ISRO had been leasing foreign transponders to meet Indian requirements.

Tata Sky has had to restrict the number of channels it airs, an advantage its competitors have now, because it chose to stay on with Indian satellites. Changing to a foreign satellite is also not an easy option as its is not a mere matter of retuning but it also involves physical repositioning of subscriber’s antennas.

Legal option is the final door Tata Sky plans to knock on.

Meanwhile the company is migrating to MPEG4 technology enabled set top boxes, which will help them increase capacity by around 70% for now, the only way it can match up with its competitors.

According to a new report, government agencies or private companies meeting “certain criteria” and specifications would be able to use the brand.

The report says that an inter-ministerial panel has finalised a set of specifications for tablets and is in the process of laying down a procedure to license the brand name Aakash. What a waste of time and energy.

The Business Standard quotes Rajat Moona, the Director General of Center for Development of Advanced Computing

“The entire Aakash project was a government of India initiative but several companies are driving mileage out of its publicity by selling anything in the name of Aakash.”

Aakash is a brand that has taken a beating like no other. As we’d written earlier, the Aakash project has had stumbling blocks right from the very start.

The project began when Kapil Sibal, then Union Minister for Human Resource Development, announced his grand vision for the future of education in India: A $35 Tablet. Despite proven failure of previous such attempts, the Government went ahead with the so called plan.

Soon, it would appear, that the plan was to announce the project, put together some specifications and float a massive tender to get these devices manufactured by a private player. Fair enough.

Six months in, only 10,000 units were shipped where as nearly 4 million orders were claimed. Technical snags irritated early buyers. And negative press followed. The government tried to save the project by laying out new specifications and calling it Aakash 2.

So what’s the new plan? The same as the old one. Decide on specifications, float tender, outsource.

Again, the manufacturer, DataWind, had trouble meeting deadlines. Customer complaints were in plenty.

Finally, when President Pranab Mukherjee launched the second generation Aakash, we anticipated that things would get better. But that wasn’t the case. In other words, shit hit the Reports soon pointed out that DataWind was simply importing Chinese equipment and selling it to the Indian government at a mark up. Although DataWind did everything it could to refute the claim, the damage was done.

Brand Aakash, was battered. And government now wants to license it.

*And radio plays : ‘hum honge kaamyaab  ek din..man mein hai vishwas aakash’

Recommended Read: Dear Mr Tuli, we’d be grateful if you could start shipping: An open letter to Datawind CEO

The postal department has entered into strategic partnership with India’s national carrier Air India to transport goods between 15 domestic airports to provide airport to airport, city to city and door to door services. [Source]

The partnership is geared to tap into the growing e-commerce business for which logistics is still a pain point. The fledgeling $10 billion e-commerce market has seen some heavy investment flowing in over the past 3-4 years.

The department of posts, has plans to set up 20 mechanized warehouses and booking centers to cater to growing demand from e-commerce companies.

Also see: DTDC Launches Specialised Logistics Services for E-Commerce

India Posts Logistics Service is a Big Deal

This is totally a big deal for e-commerce in India. If India Post delivers on its promise. If, and a big if, at that.

India Post will charge 6% of the value of a product to deliver an item. As it stands now: there won’t be any extra charges to handle cash or return.

Currently, logistics companies usually charge between Rs 65- Rs 75 for outstation delivery and an additional Rs 35- Rs 45 for cash on delivery. Returns could cost another Rs 40- Rs 55. In comparison with private players, India Post will be undoubtedly cheaper as it will not charge for cash handling.

The service will go a long way in solving the logistics problem. The department of posts has more than 150,000 post offices, a majority of which is in rural areas. If this services takes off, last mile delivery to tier 2 & tier 3 cities, a holy grail Indian e commerce companies have been chasing for long, will become simpler.

The department also has lots of experience in dealing with cash on delivery.

Now comes the big IF part: All the courier companies would be out of business if India Post was so good at what it does. The reliability of India Post is a big question mark. For instance, thousands of letters remain undelivered every year. Express services take much longer than expected in many cases. E-commerce companies which are already taking a beating on poor customer service, might want to tread with caution.

Recommended Read

Costs of Setting up an E-Commerce Business in India [Analysis]

Now open your online store and start selling in 10 minutes sans any hassle with Zepo

The tremendous wave of startups in India is on. A lot of these startups are early stage startups by fresh students or recent graduates. Although we have seen a lot of such startups turning big later, sadly the success ratio of such startups is too low. A lot of them fail in the very first year of their journey. You call it lack of experience, market strategies, funds or market research.

In this blog, I would like to share similar experience with my first startup. The startup rose to become a famous talk in the initial stage but eventually had to shut down after some time due to some reasons. Though the startup failed, it gave me lot of insights and experiences into this field, which drives what I do today. Below is a compiled generic checklist for any such startup to keep in mind:

1) Get an Awesome Team

From all the priorities, I consider this as the first one in the list for any startup, as this is what drives the rest of your journey. Having a wonderful co-founder ideally helps in idea generation, managing and work distribution. Discuss your long term goals with your co- founder or team to make your vision look clear. Hiring the right people and putting them to work is one of the biggest challenges for any startup.

2) Consider your audience

Your audience is the one who will drive your startup. Before plunging deeply into any implementations, get in touch with your target audience. Get some surveys done. Ask them questions about what they think of your idea and what more can be done. Now this doesn’t mean that you are going to implement every idea you listen, but this will surely throw light on some grey areas you might be missing.

BillGrid offers software as a service (SaaS) based solution for billing and time management meant  for freelancers and startups. It allows users to generate invoices, estimates and accept payments with handy tools like time tracking and payment reminders. On top of these, it lets you to customize invoices’ look-and-feel with style, color, formatting, multiple companies and logo support for folks running multiple businesses under one entity.

The company was founded by a team of software entrepreneurs with experience in many Fortune 100 companies. “We are trying to solve the problem we’ve hit ourselves by creating a client billing, time and expense tracking in the cloud,” said Anton Mar, co-founder, BillGrid.

BillGrid assists small businesses right from creating a quote to initial invoice (prepayment) logging time/expenses and ultimately payment. Nearly one fourth of its business comes from the United States and the rest from India, Canada and UK. The company sees India as potentially big market, which contributes 10% of its clientele.

BillGrid Pricing

Compared to Zoho invoice and BillBooks – BillGrid is fairly cheaper. It currently offers two monthly subscription plans “professional” and “company” priced at $8 and $20 with features like unlimited invoicing, online payment gateway and bank level security. For multiple staff logging the businesses will have to choose the later plan ($20 one). Zoho Invoicing offers two paid subscription plans standard and professional which cost $15 and $30 respectively while Pune based BillBooks charges $10 for 20 invoices, $35 for 100 and $60 for 200 invoices without any expiration date of bought credits.

Future plans

The company has plans to support more payment providers, add customisation, local languages and a few features they aren’t ready to reveal yet. So far the company is bootstrapped by founders and is not looking to raise any investment.

In June last year, CloudByte received $2.1 mn Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Kae Capital.

Funds from this new investment will be used for expanding global sales and marketing in addition to product development, the company said. Earlier this month, CloudByte appointed former SanDisk General Manager Greg Goelz as its Chief Executive Officer.

CloudByte has a patented storage solution which delivers scalable commodity storage to customers. The startup was founded by a team of senior technology professionals from Novell, NetApp, HP, Juniper Networks and other companies in 2011. Its flagship product CloudByte 5.0 can be configured to run as a storage controller or a storage device.

The California and Bangalore based company has also launched ElastiStor, a solution for new age data centers. ElastiStor breaks the need for hardwiring storage to get the desired performance levels with its on-demand facility, which the company claims to cut 80-90% cost  with simplified management to enterprises and CSPs.

Gaana, which first released mobile apps across platforms in January this year, launched its premium service Gaana + in April, and the iOS app saw an update to include the service.

The Android app, which was left out, has now gotten the premium offline listening feature. The new version brings a much more refreshed and polished user interface and also a few new features.

The app basically has two flavors – Gaana 2.0 and Gaana+. The Gaana 2.0 app is a free upgrade to previous app and brings with it new features like multi-bit rate (32kbps, 64kbps and 128kbps) streaming.  It also has a better search. Based on connection speeds users can choose the quality of playback.

The premium paid subscription service Gaana+ lets users download entire playlists on their Android phone, which can later be played back offline, without internet connectivity but using only the app. Gaana+ also users to download a song at 320kbps quality. Upgrading to Gaana+ also removes the ads.

To access Gaana+ on your phone, users need to subscribe to Gaana+ from within the app and then activate Offline mode in settings. A playlists then has to be created by searching for a song and adding it. One can then go to the playlist section and cache the playlists for offline listening. Users can choose the quality for downloading the songs.

In the settings, there’s also an option of switching on the Offline mode. When you turn this on, only playlists that a user has created for offline listening are available. Search and streaming features won’t work. This helps a user to save on data costs.

On using the app we found it easy to use the premium features and also found the UI to be more polished than the previous version. In our previous experience with the app we use to get pixilated album covers but that seems to be taken care of now.

There is a 14-day free trial of Gaana+  after which the subscription will be $2.99 per month (Rs. 170) for Indian users and $3.99 per month for users outside India.

Other services like Saavn and Hungama also have premium offerings. Hungama removes ads while Saavn allows offline listening. The premium features of Saavn are not available on the Android app.

Last week, Gaana had introduced Singalong, a karaoke feature on its website. We hope this feature quickly finds its way to the mobile apps soon.

Chinese phone maker Huawei which is now a known brand in the affordable phone category has entered the premium segement in India with the lanch of Ascend Mate, a 6.1 inch phablet selling for Rs 24,900.

The device which was first unveiled at CES at CES earlier this year, will have a 6.1-inch IPS (720×1280 pixels) display with Magic Touch technology. This is similar to the one on Nokia Lumia 920 that allows users to use gloves on the screen.

The Ascend Mate is powered by a quad-core Huawei K3V2 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz and has 2GB of RAM. It has an 8-megapixel rear camera, 1-megapixel front camera, expandable memory up to 32GB, and a massive 4,050mAH battery that has a fast charge mode. It runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean coupled with Huawei’s Emotion UI and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

The phone comes with a few innovative features. The battery is said to last up to two days on a single charge and can act as a power pack  to charge other smartphones. The power control system boosts the battery life of the handset by 30%.

The keyboard of the device can be reduced in size and moved towards the left or right, so that users find it easier to type on the large screen even with just one hand. This feature is also found in the Samsung Mega phones.

The Ascend Mate will go up against other phablets like the recently launched Samsung Galaxy Mega series but the specs on this look better.

The Ascend Mate is the costliest Huawei device available in the country. The company usually releases only lower mid-range and entry-level devices.

Specs

• Display: 6.1-inch IPS HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass
• OS: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
• Processor: 1.5 GHz quad-core Silicon K3V2 processor
• Memory: 2GB of RAM
• Storage: 8GB of storage with microSD card
• Camera: 8.0-megapixel rear camera, 1.0-megapixel front HD camera
• Battery: 4050 mAh battery
• Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi, DLNA, Bluetooth v4.0 LE EDR
• Dimensions: 163.5 x 85.7 x 9.9 mm, 198 g

1.

Let us take a look at the latest quarterly results of all the major telecom players (see chart below). Most of them have at least doubled their 3G customer base over the last year. On a quarterly basis, all four major telcos we looked at, have had healthy double digit addition to their 3G consumer base.  This makes it obvious that new customers are signing up for 3G services very quickly.

Source: Quarterly Reports

 2.

Data subscribers add to the revenue of operators. It’s in their interest to make it work. For instance, the average revenue per user from a data customer for Airtel grew to Rs 55 by the end of March 31, as compared to Rs 47 in the previous quarter. That’s a healthy 16% quarterly growth and a 25% year on year growth. Meanwhile, average voice revenue per user grew to Rs 159 per user at the end of March 2013. That’s a mere 1% year on year growth and 4% quarter on quarter growth. This comes at a time when the total customer base has show marginal increase or even decrease in some cases (see chart below). Of course, we must make allowance for the fact that percentage growth in the case of 3G subscribers is on a lower base compared to that of total subscriber base and hence will look bigger. 

3.

As part of overall growth strategy, operators across the board are betting on data based services for future growth. Don’t believe us? Lets hear it from the horses mouth. Here’s what the operators had to say.

“Innovation with a focus on 3G data and m-commerce continues to be the next growth frontier. Airtel is focused on 3G through the roll out of new sites across markets to increase user base.” — Airtel, Quarter Report Ending March 2013.

 

“For Vodafone in India, driving data opportunity is a key priority. Vodafone’s data revenue grew 29% year on year in the quarter ending March 2013 and 6% quarter on quarter.” — Vodafone, Quarter Report Ending March 2013.

 

“We hold an opinion that there is still a lot of potential for growth in data ARPU and $1 per blended basis and $2 on a 3G basis is far too low. Going forward, we are expecting this number to go up.”– Idea, Quarter Report ending March 2013.

Reliance of course has plans for 4G because they are the only ones with pan India license for 4G.

Data Customers in India (Source: Quarterly reports)

What does it mean to 3G usage? Simply put, it means that telcos will push hard to improve 3G penetration.

While the concept of augmented reality has been around for some time, the advent of smartphones has the brought the  concept closer to reality and a lot of app developers have used it to create some futuristic apps. Here is our pick of top augmented reality apps.

Layar

Layar is one of the oldest and best AR apps present on the app stores. The user interface is simple and easy to learn and navigate even for a novice.  The app also allows you to scan QR codes and newspaper/magazine pages to add an added element to print content. The beauty in this app is the various layars one can choose from and overlay your reality. There are layars which give you tourist destinations, local search and photos of an area. By rotating your phone around one will get to see stuff pop up on the screen based on the direction you are looking at.

Download: Android,  iOS

Wikitude World Browser

This is similar to Layar and has been an awarding winning app for four years. The app gives you a completely immersive experience by being your third eye. One has to just hold up your smartphone to engage with your immediate surroundings and get information on places, find restaurants, discover people and play games . Wikitude has over 100 million places listed and also has interactive content from thousands of content providers or so called “Worlds”.  Using this app one can also create their very own AR World and share it with friends.

Download: Android, iOS

Smart Tools

This apps can measure short distances with just your phone. The app displays distances on screen by using your smartphone’s camera and overlaying the measurements on screen with live pictures from the phones camera. The picture adjust in real time to measure whatever is in front of your camera. Super cool tool if you don’t have a measuring tape around.

Download: Smart Tools (Android, $2.50)

Ingress

While there are a number of AR based games, nothing comes close to the complexity of Ingress. Ingress was built by a team inside Google. The game puts players into two factions — the Enlightened and the Resistance — and has them fight for control of virtual territories in a giant game of  king of the hill. Players can obtain a material called Exotic Matter (XM) by simply walking around, and can use that XM to take over virtual portals. If a team takes over three or more portals, they gain control of that area.

Download: Ingress for Android. You will need an invite to play.

Car Finder

Do you often forget way you parked your car especially in a crowded mall or parking lot. Well then this app is for you. It remembers where you have parked your car and all you need to do is pull out your phone and it will direct you to your car using AR.

Download: Android ($2.60), iOS (free)

Star Chart

This is liking having a virtual planetarium in your pocket and one can just point your phone in the skies to get the name of visible stars and objects. Even if it is not visible one will get an idea of where a particular celestial object is located in the sky. It also has search functionality.

Download: Android ($2.99), iOS (free)

Nokia City Lens

While most of the above apps are for iOS and Android devices, Nokia has released Nokia City Lens for Lumia Window Phone devices. It gives dynamic information, through the phone’s camera display, about users’ surroundings such as shops, restaurants, and points of interest, shown as virtual signs overlaid on or above buildings. It even shows the distances to these places so once can easily navigate oneself to these locations. It even has a Sightline feature which allows you to narrow your view to just what’s in your direct line of sight, making it easier to spot great places that are right in front of you.

Download: Nokia City Lens only for Windows Phone Lumia devices.

While the above list are just apps for smartphones, the ultimate level of augmented reality can be felt with emerging technologies like Google Glass, which will take AR to an all new level.

The placement season is some of busiest times during the final years of college. A lot of time is spent frantically browsing notice boards, putting documents in order and scrambling to make sure you are prepared for the interviews. Companies and placement cells also go through a lot of paperwork. Camplace is a cloud based campus recruitment automation platform which aims to streamline the whole process.

The platform is designed for students, colleges and companies as well. You can use the platform all the way from applicant organisation till the candidate is selected and the final offer is released. The solution has different communication facilities available, you can communicate using voice, video and text based messages, through live interactions. This feature comes in very handy especially when the companies and colleges are located geographically far apart, thereby reducing logistical troubles of the candidates or companies involved having to travel.

To test students, Camplace has included tools that contains MCQ based tests, coding simulators, subjective tests, video based group discussions and personal interviews. This feature is very helpful and can be used for assessing candidates remotely. The company has also included candidate preparation modules, a full fledged data management system and analytical reports within the platform that will help keep track of updates and progress.

Himanshu Jain the Director of Camplace says that the startup has over  7500 students of which more than 2000 have authenticated profiles and are available for recruitment. “We have managed to place 800+ students through Camplace,” he added.

Here are some of the key features available on the platform

Features for College

• Colleges can create their own mini website within the portal to show their reputation and achievements.
• Easier interaction between college Training & Placement Officer (TPO) and any company personnel available on the portal.
• Colleges can conduct their own mock tests, interviews and group discussions.
• Scheduling mechanism to manage multiple companies at a time.
• Generating various types of reports required by the regulatory bodies and the college management.

Features for Companies

• Access to verified data of candidates of all  registered colleges.
• Company can create their own mini website within our portal to showcase their profile.
• Communicate with the colleges online and schedule the candidates for different events simultaneously.
• Search the candidates by using multiple criteria search.

Features for Candidates

• Automated resume generation by filling up different parameters.
• Edit and update your resume anytime.
• Mock tests to get you the feel of a real recruitment process.

The platform has already registered 70+ colleges, 20+ ITIs and 130+ corporates for the platform. Some of the main companies who registered with the service include AXIS Bank, PIAGGIO Vehicles Pvt. Ltd, UNITED SPIRITS Ltd., AEGIS Ltd. Companies using the portal will also get access to larger talent pool to select from, and help them make hiring more effective and organized.

The service will compete with recruitment agencies and job portals for data management. The company plans to take on the competition with its complete cloud based total solution structure and unique referral model for channel partners, consultants, colleges and companies.

Delhi based startup CoCubes, founded by IIT B grads Harpreet and Vibhor, also provide similar placement services for students, colleges and companies. Last year CoCubes, funded by Ojas Ventures, had acquired skill assessment firm, SQuotient Analyzers. This acquisition gave the company in-house capability to generate assessment content for corporates to use for student evaluation on campuses.

With the ongoing lull in the (campus) job market and the fact that existing players haven’t made a huge impact, reliability and performance of the platform will matter. Also getting established colleges (IITs/IIMs etc) and companies as registered partners will give the platform a boost.

But what, Tofu Technology has done is create a simple, useful and free tool to reach out to a larger audience at same time on Facebook. The tool is called TrendifyThis.

The company which has developed a number of products like photo sharing apps, retail apps, private social networks (Sibling app) and a couple of websites has used this tool to great effort and has now released a version for others to use.

One could say I can tag friends, but this would be fine for a small number, but when then is a large number TrendifyThis makes the task simpler. Also one can only tag a limited number of friends in a post.

Facebook, itself has admitted that when you post something on your wall only about 12-20% of your friends are likely to see it. This is because of the new Newsfeed algorithm which decides who sees your posts based on factors like how close you are to certain friends, how many friends you have in common, whether your friend is going to find your post interesting, etc. So it is mostly likely that your friend will miss the post.

The algorithm that TrendifyThis uses, learns from everyone that uses the tool and how their social graphs are inter-connected. To make sure that everyone sees your post there is a fallback which messages a friend instead of posting to their wall. But the tool aims to post on 80% of your friends walls.

How it Works

Visit TrendifyThis.com and log in using your Facebook log in.. You will then be prompted to download a Chrome extension.

You start by giving it a name and can then add the text for the wall post and also attach a link. One can then get a preview of the wall post and also the inbox message.

After this you move on to the setting page which lets you see the estimated time the process takes. TrendifyThis posts at intervals so that Facebook does not think you are spamming. You can select which friends you want to post to here and then hit start and let the TrendifyThis algorithm go to work.

You can track the progress and see who gets the post on their wall and who in their inbox. The algorithm also figures out if someone is likely to see the post if it is shared with someone else and instead inboxes that person.

Once the process is completed one gets a summary which shows you the estimated reach and there is also an analytics option which would show you how many friend have clicked on a link you have shared.

The Team

Tofu Technology was founded by Shubhendu Sharma and Karam Lakshman . The company raised seed funding from iAccelerator- IIM-A’s tech fund at CIIE and a few individuals from JustDial and Intel three years ago. The company has built over 15 products so far.

The railway’s online ticketing subsidiary, will use sms, interactive voice response (IVR) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) based methods to enable ticket booking from July, the government has said.

How SMS Railway Ticket Booking Work?

The ticketing service provider, IRCTC, will have a dedicated number on which an sms can be sent to book tickets from a registered mobile number. The passenger has to type the train number, destination, journey date, class and passenger details like name, age and gender in the text message to book a ticket. After sending the message, a the sender will receive a transaction number which must be used at the time of making a payment.

Paying is easy. The buyer has to send another text message by typing “PAY” followed by the transaction id, the mobile money identifier given by the bank at the time of registering the telephone number and the password.

The buyer will receive a confirmation message and has to travel with a valid photo identification card. Ticket cancellation works in a similar way.

The service, which will go live from July, will not be available between 8 am – 12 pm.

Last week IRCTC launched sms based complaint booking service to receive passenger complaints on hygiene on trains. To improve ticket booking experience by passengers government proposed a major overhaul while presenting railway budget. The idea is to be able to thrice the number of bookings per minute and 6 times the number of simultaneous users. The railways will invest around Rs 100 crores to upgrade its existing infrastructure.

This move by IRCTC is undoubtedly a big leap as it empowers non-Internet savvy citizen to book railway tickets. The big question is: would it be able to weed out pain of 25 million people who wait in queues or in front of computer screens for Tatkal rail ticket? We think it will help.

Recommended Read: Five things IRCTC ticketing site must fix: A geek’s wishlist for IRCTC/Indian Railways

The move will add another payment option to customers. Some sites, like Coke2home, Justrechargeit and Futurebazaar have already started accepting RuPay payments.

Backed by leading banks in the country, RuPay is a card payment service like Visa or Mastercard which is accepted by merchants.

RuPay Cards On Ecommerce Stores

Payment gateway company CCAvenue has confirmed that they are one of the companies authorized by NPCI to process RuPay debit cards.

RuPay competes with international card companies such as Visa and Mastercard and has plans for a global roll out in partnership with Discover Financial Services.

China has a similar payment mechanism called the China UnionPay card with a base of 1.8 billlion issued cards accepted in 26 countries. By end of March 2013, there were more than 3 million RuPay cards issued in the country, according to recent reports.

RuPay Roadmap

The national payments corporation has plans to launch EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) cards, contact less cards and credit cards in two phases that are yet to come.

Here is a conversation with Anupam Agrawal, cofounder, Koolkart:

You had a very strong product. What went wrong?

There was a failure on our part to build the brand in the way we envisioned. While we were strong at technical execution, marketing turned out to be a weak area for us.

It also became clear over a period of time that running a profitable b2c business in the ecommerce space is incredibly hard. The clearest signal came from the lack of risk appetite from Indian venture capitalists. There were small sums of money available for experimentation, but nothing significant enough to allow planning an operation at some sort of a scale that allows a chance at profitability.

How did you get into a cash crunch? Was there no investor interest?

Ecommerce is a business that is hammered on both sides by front loaded costs and low margins that improve with scale. There is slow ramp up without significant investment. Given we were self-funded for almost 2 years, it became untenable to proceed beyond a point. There was always outside investor interest, people followed us for signs of a breakout that unfortunately never materialized.

What was the traction like?

There was reasonable traction for price comparison – over 200K monthly uniques. The designer marketplace did not scale beyond 50K monthly uniques. Sales stagnated at a certain point which was way below break-even, and scaling up from there looked like a loss-making proposition.

Do we see more casualties in the price comparison space? Seems like its over crowded now?

There is no business model there. Price comparison is a good model to generate traffic. For a small market like India, supporting more than 2 players is not going to be viable. Monetization from the traffic is restricted to ads and commissions through sale on other sites – that are tough to realize from the partners. While it was exciting to start generating traffic quickly on the back of a price comparison service and SEO, it was a mistake to jump in without thinking much about the revenue model.

In hindsight, do you think a stronger brand recall & presence would have helped Koolkart to become the starting point for shoppers since the entry barriers to the business are low?

Stronger brand presence would have helped. Partnering with existing online players was tough due to strong technology teams in-house. One of the directions we explored was a hybrid model of going offline and selling online both. It could be possible to build such a business in strategic partnership with existing offline players.

Marketing turned out to be a blind spot, we thought we had the capability to grow beyond a certain point but it clearly fell short. It was a mistake on my part personally to not build the right team for it.

Anything else you’d like to add.

Indian market is tougher than US markets for tech entrepreneurs, and startups in general. Venture capitalists have low risk appetite and are cautious of making investments at an early stage. Regulatory and infrastructure bottlenecks dont help as well. Basic service providers such as 3G services and broadband are taking forever to scale up. There is a set consumer mindset that borders on mistrust. Very slowly that is changing, but these biases should be kept in mind when planning any business.

It is also important for startups to be clear about what value proposition they bring to the table. There are some inherent strengths in every team, and how it works is a function of how well these abilities are understood and deployed in the achievement of that ONE GOAL. It can get tough for new entrepreneurs to manage expectations of family and build a business at the same time. It is important to be aware of these influences before starting a business. This has been an area of learning for us.

What are the future plans?

I love building businesses and being close to the process of understanding and solving consumer needs. There are big changes happening in established markets. Online businesses are causing disruption at a scale never seen before. Google, facebook and apple are a few examples that have caused us to change our habits completely. Building a business is about taking the time to appreciate these changes. I have a new exciting role at Walmart labs that gives me the opportunity to do just that.

_______________

We have been covering Koolkart right from launch to targeting the long tail of ecommerce. It had that disruptive potential in the space that brings ecommerce and social together. However, it could not garner enough interest from investors, leading to an untimely demise.

What is your opinion? Is this a good sign? Would you term this as a learning-from-your-mistakes failure? Do you think they could’ve done something to prevent the downfall?

This is a great move by Google to tap into the growing e-commerce space. In India, e-commerce companies have been advertising heavily on Google to acquire customers. Now that e-commerce companies have slowed down on online ad spending, this is a great way to cut into the action.

Product listing ads were originally meant to point to Google Shopping, the search giant’s shopping service. However, the company seems to have tweaked the model in India. Ads are charged on a cost per click basis or conversion focused cost per acquisition percentage basis.

Will this impact the price comparison sites?

There will be an obvious impact that Google will cut out some of the middlemen involved. Price comparison sites which haven’t moved beyond SEO traffic are bound to see some loss in traffic.

Having said that, Google needs to massively tweak it’s algorithm to match the correct products (for the ad to be relevant), as a search for ‘galaxy S4′ also brings up Duos and the entire gamut of Galaxy products.

Thoughts?

Lava Mobiles has confirmed to NDTV Gadgets, that the company is indeed working on Firefox OS based phones.

The company’s co-founder and director Hari Om Rai told the website that Lava was working on a Firefox OS-based smartphone, and that the company is looking at pricing it below Rs 3,000, when asked if the mobile manufacturer was looking at any other platforms.

Rai did not state by when the devices would be available or given any specification of the devices. The company currently makes Android smartphones and tablets.

It is an interesting strategy to see Lava say they will be making a Firefox OS phone for under Rs 3,000. Most Android phones are now priced at above 4k, so this could make for an interesting battle especially if the Firefox phones can offer a better experience at that price point.

Mozilla had announced its Firefox operating system for mobile phones during the Mobile World Congress event in late February. Mozilla had said it would launch handsets based on the OS in around 18 countries of Latin America, China and Europe by June this year. But they seemed to have missed that deadline.

The first developers devices Peak and Keon made by a Spanish company Geeksphone.went on sale in April and were instantly sold out.

At the Mobile World Congress, companies like Sony, LG, ZTE, Alcatel, and Huawei committed to develop phones on the new operating system. The Firefox operating system uses HTML5-based apps and is targeting entry-level devices.

Lava’s Current Position

At the launch of the Lava Iris 504q this past weekend, Lava announced that it had revenues of Rs 965 crore in FY 2012. It also said it sold over 9,00,000 units in May 2013. It is targeting sales of 15 lakh devices in October 2013. It has distributor strength of over 700 and is present in around 30,000 multi-brand outlets. The company is the biggest Indian mobile company in Nepal selling 25,000 units a month.