Archive for December, 2008

“The Fallen Tomato Cart” an article authored by Subroto Bagchi inspired this man to taste entrepreneurship. Having run his local tabloid at Nanganallur in Chennai and his college magazine at the Madras Institute of Technology, he had a head-start on using entrepreneurial skills to raise funds at an early age.

Though he has IT experience in Infosys for 8+ years and short career stints in USA and @ Cognizant & MindTree, the entrepreneur inside him gave him the guts to make the jump off the cliff, but with self imposed conditions like: my venture should add value to everyone in India; mine will not be just another services company; will not just be doing another job; it should be a legal and highly ethical business.

In the year 2004, he designed and built his own feature-rich house at a cost of Rs.700 per sq. ft., but builders were charging upwards of Rs.1,200 per sq. ft. A back-of the envelope calculation showed that Rs.500 per sq. ft. is being sucked by the builder from your pocket in an invisible way. For a nominal 1000 sq. ft. basic house, the ‘extra’ benefit for the builder is a whopping Rs. 5 Lakhs.

“If proper planning is made at the micro level, you stand to get more for your money, if you find it difficult to do micro planning for your home, I am there to help you…”, tells Virupakshan, the founder of www.homeplanguru.com the self funded start-up from Chennai.

In a scenario where most of us, while buying a house go by the blind reliability of a builder, here is a guy who is setting the mast to hoist the “AWARENESS” flag for buyers on quality aspects of a house to be looked into while buying the service of a builder.

Since the concepts of “quality aspects in buying a home” and “micro planning of construction activity” are hardly heard of, Virupa finds it a big challenge in convincing his customers. On the other hand, for the customers who are willing to implement the suggested changes, there is resistance from the builders on implementation of these quality concepts as it results in hitting their profit margin.

Running the company single handedly, Virupa claims it to be Number One with a niche offering that has no competitors. “Electrical switches come with 10 years warranty and plumbing items come with 7 years warranty…”,  these are the facts being thrown out by Virupa, but most of us have never ever got to hear from a builder or plumber/electrician. He gives out services like “3D plan”, “Wall plan”, “Comfort plan”, “Safety plan”, “Futuristic plan”, etc., at charges ranging between 50 paisa and Rs.3 per sq. ft. Though this start-up is at an early stage, it already has 50 happy customers.

To complement his concepts, he is preparing a book titled:  “‘ABCD of getting your Dream Home…”

Though the economic slowdown is giving cold feet to many ventures, Virupa is in cloud nine since the market is bound to shift from being builder driven to a customer driven one.

His future plan is to reach customers throughout India apart from partnering with a good company to be a “Certifying Authority” for newly constructed houses. Having seen the quality of homes during during his career in USA, he is in a mission to make Indian Homes on par with developed countries in terms of comfort, safety and quality and at right cost.

Micro Blog: http://twitter.com/virupa
Network: www.Linkedin.com/in/virupakshan

During his teenage and having just completed his 12th Standard in his native, a three tier coastal town called Cuddalore, he indulges in entrepreneurship by starting a company in the year 1992. The company did IT training and also attempted to churn out projects for the factories setting up shop at the nearby SIPCOT area. Though it had its initial successful days, the experiment was not promising and he along with his partners disposed it off for Rs.1 Lakh during 1995.

Then he searches for a full time job with a vision to learn things and gets an important career break at Hewlett-Packard, in Bangalore. Gets involved in developing software that detects fraud on the cell phone network for Vodafone and from there moves on to work for a US Based, specialized, rule engine company called Selectica. Proves his mantle and gets two successive double promotions leading to Director of Engineering of eInsurance Division. Meanwhile the eInsurance division got sold off to Accenture.

But the steam inside this man with passion to work on products had enough energy to make an uphill drive. “Why not we start on our own?” this question laid the foundation stone of OrangeScape.com. He along with his former tech. lead makes the plunge to start the company @ Chennai in 2003, which has now grown to serving around 40 enterprise customers from around the world apart from establishing their own office in USA & Germany.

The entrepreneur we are talking about is Mr.Suresh Sambandam, the Founder & CEO of OrangeScape.com which churns out a unique, patent pending approach of using a spreadsheet like interface to develop sophisticated enterprise class web applications. Their product called DimensionN is a Do-It-Yourself platform which eliminates the gap between the business and technical knowledge. Without the knowledge of programming, one can make a powerful web-based business applications using their simple spreadsheet interface.

Suresh tells “OrangeScape platform would be the most easy and simple to use, yet it is comprehensive enough to build any type of business applications and neutral to vertical or domain! “

This Chennai based angel funded, public limited company employs around 50 people. Suresh feels a real challenge in finding the right employee and referral based employment works out fine for them.

Achievements of OrangeScape include, being recognized as the Top Innovator by NASSCOM for the last two consecutive years and being one of the 3 companies showcased as EMERGING companies in the NASSCOM Product Conclave. With 15 years of industry experience, Suresh has a passion towards entrepreneurship & technology startups and gets tied up with spending his time in the startup eco system. He mentors budding entrepreneurs at the E-Cell of IIT Bombay and he is one of the Advisors of NuVeda Learning.

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Till date in-text Ads are somewhat the usual thing used in the websites to make those extra bucks. Though there are a number of in-text Ad networks in the world, there is no control for the owner of the web site over the Ads being served at his/her own web site.

“We change it all !!”, triumphs Arun the CEO of hover.in. Arun & Bosky the founders of hover.in are churning out a new technology of its kind wherein the web site owners can decide on what Ads will be served on their website.

Boasting of the fact that they are the world’s first, this Pune based Indian startup Hover.in provides a new platform of in-text customized content and Ad delivery platform. The demand should see an expanding trend since the advertising model gives more control for the advertisers and the publisher. They are moving towards an action based online advertising model.
On the branding perspective Arun is optimistic that the viral concept in the product which is now in beta will make the selling by itself. Little or no marketing is needed to make the selling. The demand expands for an advertising model if the advertisers and publishers are having more control, tells the 33 year old entrepreneur.
Way back in the year 2007 when Arun was in USA, he stumbled with Bosky’s (Bhasker) pet project on in-text technology. After initial brainstorming for a couple of months the two decided to build a prototype to look at the feasibility of the project. Thus rolled out hover.in.
With seed funding for this Pune based start-up coming from a media company in April’08 they plan to reach the Indian market in the first year and subsequently going global.
While Bosky handles the tech side, Arun takes care of the business side of the company which now employs 8 people, with a former Google intern being their first employee to churn out the crawl engine. While employing people, Arun believes in attitude of people rather than skill sets. He believes that skills can be acquired, but not attitude. Of course he looks for the flexible and willing minds to take on new challenges to make hover.in create waves in the online advertisement segment.
Now in beta, hover is offered to select publishers. With more positive feedback from the beta users, hover will be public in a couple of months. Its available for free to any online publisher / blogger.

Arun’s blogs @ trak.in

Bosky blogs @ bhaskervk.com

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