Bubble or not, check out these WTFs

February 19th, 2011 | View Comments

So people are talking bubble and it seems it is not without reason : VC deals are coming across with an increasing frequency, the kind which make one think -

somebody’s gonna get a hurt real bad
– Russell Peters, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzKHQX59Wso

So I’ve decided to start making a list of those companies, would be interesting to look back and know how it fairs a couple of years down the line. To start with, here we go with people putting photos online and needing boat loads of money in the process.

These two are pretty similar

http://instagr.am/ – USD 7.5 million in funding.

http://picplz.com/ – USD 5 million in funding.

both of them are photo sharing apps. the big USP seems to be, they allow you to apply a filter to your photo before you upload it to facebook, flickr etc. Huge. Totally worth it. Isn’t it. If I had dollars, this is where I’d bet my money on. No brainer.

http://www.cooliris.com/ – USD 28 million in funding. They make a pretty slide show visualization. They also have a live group photo sharing yada yada web service. And yes you’re reading that right.. 28 million moneys.

http://1000memories.com/ – USD 2.5 million in funding. This almost made me spit out my coffee. This is a service to host free obituaries. Whoa! Didn’t you just think why you didn’t think of this awesome idea before. Yeah.. me neither. They are somehow supposed to not only make money for themselves, but to multiply and return that 2.5 million to the investors too.

hence the phrase – somebody’s gonna get a hurt…

Sources

Tags: bubble, investments, startups, wtf

Upcoming startup trends in India

October 5th, 2010 | View Comments

The final list of selected startups in Power of Ideas has been announced (I’m one of the participants and got in). This is one of the larger business plan contests in India. Out of 16,242 entries, 850 or so went into the second round, and this final shortlist of 74 startups makes for the final round, who’ll get to pitch to a large number of investors at an event in IIM-A.

I decided to color up the rather drab list here with some visualizations. While this does not make for an accurate representation of the trends (it is too small a dataset to derive conclusions), but it still has some interesting information. I think it may come close to representing what’s hot these days. Read on.

Cities in order of number of selections

City	Avg. age	Count
mumbai	35.8	16
bangalore	36.9	10
delhi	30.5	10
ahmedabad	28.4	7
hyderabad	42	7
pune	31.5	6
chennai	33.8	5
noida	33.3	4
gurgaon	39	3
coimbatore	40	1
ghaziabad	22	1
kolkata	37	1
kota	28	1
lucknow	22	1
vadodara	39	1

On the Map -

The size of the circles represent the number of startups selected from that location

The sectors in order of popularity

Sector	Avg. age	Count
it/web	30.3	16
healthcare / life sciences	35.6	9
education	34.5	8
mobile/telecom	34.3	8
cleantech/energy	36.1	7
media & entertainment	33.8	5
social enterprise	36.0	5
retail	28.5	4
electronics	38.7	3
engineering (incl automobile)	39.0	2
financial services	48.0	2
hotels / hospitality	40.0	2
agriculture/agribusiness	22.0	1
kpo/bpo	47.0	1
logistics/transportation	26.0	1

Observations :

As expected, IT/Web rules the roost. IT is a younger lot too, while healthcare, cleantech, social enterprises fall a little above the overall average age.
The NCR region combined makes for the most selections.
Overall average age – 34.3
Median age – 32
Ahmedabad is the youngest city at an avg. age of 28.4 (amongst cities with more than 5 selection), and Hyderabad is the oldest at an avg. age of 42.0

Interesting visualization of what these startups are talking about can be done with tag clouds (courtesy the awesome tag-cloud generator wordle.net), so for the top 5 categories, here we go -