Startup News, Views, Reviews and Funding in India

You are reading it here first: We have got tipped off from reliable sources that Media2win the agency which is part of the 2win group headed by Alok Kejriwal has invested in Hover.in an in text advertising tool which was showcased in the proto.in event in Jan this year.

The amount of investment is undisclosed though [...]

January can be termed as a Startup month.. With two of the biggest startup events scheduled to happen in January and both of them are going to be in Bangalore at the same venue.
Here are the event updates for this month:
Jan 9th-10th - Headstart and Compute 2009 - NIMHANS Bangalore - HeadStart and Compute conference [...]

Sabeer Bhatia is been pretty active in the last couple of months or so investing in new dotcom idea’s. The man behind Hotmail who is yet to see success with any of his other investments like Arzoo, Apnacircle, Instacoll or sabsebolo.com
Sabeer has not seen even 1/4th of the kind of success he saw with Hotmail [...]

This saturday we bring to you a startup which is founded by an entrepreneur who started  working at the age of 17 and started his first company at 19 and failed.. Then he worked across companies and has now decided that he will put the entire world on rent on his website. Yes he is [...]

Canaan Partners has funded Chakpak an entertainment and bollywood centric community site according to this article. The amount is not disclosed as yet but the news is confirmed. This is the third company in the consumer internet space that Canaan has invested in. The earlier two are Bharatmatrimony and Techtribe.

As far as talks in the [...]

Microsoft yesterday lauched the Bizspark programme which makes microsoft technologies and network easily available to the startup community in India. This programme is very much like Sun’s Startup Essentials programme which has been running in India for sometime now.

The BizSpark program will give a startup access to:

Design tools (Microsoft Expression Studio with MSDN Subscription)
Development test [...]

TiE Entrepreneurial Summit 2008 which is happening over 16-17 and 18 december at Lalit Ashok Hotel had its inaugural address by Azim H Premji, Chairman, Wipro who spoke about his journey as an entrepreneur with Wipro. He spoke indepth about the challenges and the successes of doing business from the wipro perspective. He took the audience down memory lane [...]

There have been quite a bit of anticipation regarding this month’s Startup Saturday, organized by HeadStart, in Mumbai. In addition to 2 startup demos by the founders of Librarywala and AdoRoi, there was also a panel discussion scheduled, with speakers like Mahesh Murthy (from SeedFund), Hemir Doshi (from IDG Ventures), Rohit Nalwade (Ex-CEO of ConsumerVision) and Gopal Krishnan (of Mobile2Win fame). The topic of the panel discussion was - What should a startup do in a slowdown?

We spoke to Jared Blank who recently took the difficult decision of shutting down his company Tripmela. We spoke to him on the 3 mistakes that a startup should avoid. Here is our interview with him.

WATBlog: 3 mistakes that entrepreneurs should be wary of making while running a startup?
Jared: If you only make 3 mistakes [...]

There are four special Startup Saturdays across the country, ie, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, this coming weekend 13th December. As you must have been tracking WATBlog has been covering the Mumbai ones regularly. But I guess we would need to expand our team inorder to cover 4 of them this week! I guess slowdown [...]

Red Herring Asia 100 recognizes the 100 “Most Promising” Asian Companies Driving the Future of Technology. Red Herring announced that 27 out of the 100 winners of the Red Herring 100 Award are from India. This is quite a high number given that China, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia were some of the other countries that [...]

Proto.in - The Startup Event which happens every 6 months and which we have been following since the first edition - Check our coverage of proto 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Now in its 5th edition Proto.in is being held at Bangalore at NIMHANS on the 23rd and 24th of January. They have opened nominations for [...]

Headstart is an event to showcase innovation. It focuses on getting the entire innovation ecosystem together: entrepreneurs, technologists, customers, investors and media. It was held in bangalore last year as well and this year the nominations for Headstart 2009 close in today i.e. on 7th Dec 2008. Do make sure that you don’t miss out [...]

This saturday we bring to you a startup which is founded by an ex Yahoo employee which looks at building a community around brands and products and is an impressive attempt to say the least.

One sentence description: A Collaborative community around products, services and brands
About Startup: BrandAdda is kind of in the same space as [...]

We did a WATShow to Raman Roy the founding member of Indian Angel Network (previously band of angels) at the recently concluded Nasscom summit and questioned him about angel funding, business plans, what’s critical for a startup and so on.
Check out the WATShow below.

Also check out other videos at WATShow.com .. We [...]