The investment will support nivio’s mission to bring the magic back to computing, by expanding engineering efforts in nivio’s Palo Alto office and further roll-out of the cloud platform across nivio’s operating regions in Europe, Middle East, India and Australia.

nivio sets the standard for cloud desktop performance with a downloadable, rich client experience for any device. nivio’s clients for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac will be available later this month along with the Ubiquity client, which delivers the entire desktop over any HTML5 browser. The Ubiquity client delivers the Windows OS and productivity software (such as Microsoft Office) from nivio’s Cloud to any device, eliminating the need for users to download anything. nivio’s App Store (nApps) lets users rent regular desktop software on any screen, and the nDrive provides 10GB of free storage into which they drop their files and have them synced across their devices.
nivio was founded by two friends Sachin Dev Duggal and Saurabh P Dhoot, who is Videocon chairman Venugopal Dhoot’s nephew and post funding, nivio will also get an access to 1,000 Videocon stores and reseller network to sell its desktop virtualization suite.
Watch this intro video.

In the last round (Nov 2010), Myntra raised $14mn and in 2008, raised $5mn from NEA-IUV, IDG Ventures and Accel. Myntra started as a custom gifting service and later morphed into an online store fashion store selling lifestyle products.

The latest round of $20mn funding (Series C) will be used to build its logistics service (they have already started their own logistic service) and expansion into new categories.

More details as we get them, but if you are in the know – feel free to share here (even anonymously).

Recommended Read: Flipkart to acquire LetsBuy–Here is what really happened with LetsBuy

Lateral: The Art and Science of Negotiation [Explained in a sentence]

————

Update: Press release from Myntra.

Myntra.com targets Rs 500 crores revenue for the next fiscal

Myntra.com, the largest online retailer of fashion and lifestyle products in India, is aiming revenues of Rs 500 crores in the financial year 2012- 2013. The company which entered the lifestyle and fashion retailing segment in December 2010 has registered a 10 fold growth in 2011 and is relatively, the fastest growing company in the e-commerce space in India.

Mr. Mukesh Bansal (Founder & CEO) said, “Myntra has undergone phenomenal growth in the last 12 months and has emerged as the clear leader in Fashion/Lifestyle space. We have been consistently doubling every 4 months and have now reached a scale where we ship up to 10,000 products every day. We are planning to cross revenue of Rs 500 crores in FY 12-13 which will further strengthen Myntra’s leadership position in the lifestyle category. This is an exciting category with the total market size projected to be over $100 billion in 5 years with mid single digit portion being online, making this, possibly the largest online category in India.”

He further added, “We have built the largest catalog in fashion & lifestyle category with over 200 brands, have very extensive supply-chain capabilities including world-class warehouse in multiple cities and our own logistics network in large cities. We will continue to invest aggressively in our technology platform, supply-chain and the Myntra brand to rapidly scale the business.”

The e-commerce company has received overall funding of $40 million through top-tier Venture Capitalists like Tiger Global, IndoUS, IDG & Accel Partners.

Myntra.com is among the Top 5 e-commerce companies with over 2,00,000 daily visitors to the site. The company has already reached out to 10,000 zip codes across the country and is constantly expanding its network to support the growing demand.

Gamiana or House of Games, derived from Games and Aashiana (house), is one of the first companies in India to offer multi-player platforms and the ability to play games real time. This will address the new markets created by the synergies between the increase of internet on smart-phones, online gaming and social networking across the globe.

Post this investment, IAN member Chetan Shah has joined the board of Gamiana.

Gamiana is focused on many developing markets like Brazil, Turkey, and the Philippines and will use this investment Gamiana to grow its customer base, enhance gaming software development for existing games–Jamia Online and Vinashi–and bid for new gaming contracts in overseas markets.

Mint reports that Flipkart has raised $150mn at a valuation of $850mn from existing investors, i.e. Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management.

Before this, the company raised $31 mn in three rounds and the revenue has grown from Rs. 11.6 CR (in 2009-10) to Rs. 50 Cr and aims to reach $1Bn within the next 2 years.

Given that Amazon is launching its ecommerce service in India (this quarter and from what we know, Feb month itself), Flipkart needs to ramp up at the earliest and quickly build presence in Tier-II and Tier-III cities.

Flipkart or Amazon? Do you have a brand loyalty or you will go after the one offering lowest price?

India’s e-Commerce Story

About 150 million people in India or around 75 million households are ready for ecommerce in India today. However, less than 10 million are engaged in active ecommerce today. The potential of consumer e-commerce in India by 2024-2025 is likely to touch around 594.8 million individuals or 297.4 million households [read this report on ecommerce in India].

Recommended Read: The Flipkart Story

Video

Set up by a team of management graduates with extensive experience in the FMCG sector in the Human Resources and Sales Management, Peel-Works offers customized as well as productized solutions for very large to medium size companies in FMCG, telecom and insurance sector that conduct their business using indirect sales force.

Founded by former Hindustan Unilever HR and Sales professional, Peel-Works focuses on enhancing the productivity of the indirect sales force of large FMCG, telecom and insurance companies that contributes to almost 80 percent of the revenues. Using Peel-Works cloud based model, a disengaged indirect sales force can be converted into a high performance sales force by tracking their performance, training them for higher roles and rewarding them with sales incentives accurately and on time.

The investment will be utilized in expanding product offering, creating technology differentiators and human capital. Productized sales force consulting and transformation solution is planned to be hosted on the cloud and will be charged on pay per use basis.

Two of IAN members–Sadeesh Raghavan and Srikant Sastri–who will be joining Peel-Works board.

Aside, Peel-Works seems highly inspired by Apple website (design/typography).

Freecharge has developed a unique business model (hint: they are not in the business of recharge)and the company has partnerships with more than 50 retailers (Café Coffeeday, McDoanld’s, Domino’s Pizza, Croma etc) and have attracted quite a few clones as well. The funds will be used to add new products, add merchants who can use Freecharge to target consumers, and to advertise the service to consumers. The company received a seed investment from Sequoia Capital in 2011, followed by a Series A more recently.

What’s really interesting about Freecharge is the cult status they have developed among college students, given the business model of ‘freebies’. In terms of coupon sold, Kunal Shah (founder & CEO of Freecharge) mentioned the following (on a discussion at Pluggd.in forum: Freecharge copycats):

If you look at FreeCharge carefully there are many coupons which are not available anywhere and we distribute/sell more coupons than all daily deal sites put together in India.

We are aware of atleast 5-10 new sites trying to imitate FreeCharge, and we do have a patent pending status for our business model to protect it

In its current form, the market is wide open for atleast 4-5 coupon players, but the key for couponing sites is to not sell coupons, but to upsell coupons. And Freecharge knows it very well.

Aside, Freecharge was part of Pluggd.in’s most promising startups of 2011 list.
» Follow the discussion: Freecharge copycats for more on Freecharge’ business model/copycats.

BlueStone is founded by Vidya Nataraj and Gaurav Kushwaha and offers latest jewellery designs and a wide range of products.

Gaurav Khushwha was earlier the CEO of Chakpak (which was later acquired by Flipkart). Vidya Nataraj is an MBA from INSEAD and earlier worked with family-owned Landmark Ltd (a books and lifestyle pan-India retail chain later sold to TATA Trent).

The funding was actually closed 2-3 months back and even Pepperfry, the ecommerce startup by ex-eBay India head is betting big on selling jewellery online. Earlier, another online jewellery store CaratLane raised $6mn from Tiger Global Management LLC.

Recommended Read: 5 Reasons Why There Is No E-commerce Bubble in India [Hint:Women Have Yet To Begin Shopping Online]

The company claims to have over 40,000 clients across different sectors (including Pepsi, P&G) and the current round of funding will be used to expand in different geographies (Thailand/Brazil).

At the heart of Knowlarity is a cloud telephony platform called “Knowlus”. This end- to- end platform has been developed in-house using open source technologies. Knowlus has proved faster and flexible than any of the competing platforms. Company’s mission is to deliver ground-breaking telephony solutions over knowlus to improve the way businesses use phones in India.

At Pluggd.in, we have used the service and while the service works phenomenally well – we’d recommend the team to revisit the pricing, which is current done on an annual basis (and potentially defeats the purpose of SAAS based service).

How much would you like to pay for an online FAX based service?

If you look at the IT cost of SMB segment, almost a half goes in procuring PCs/Laptops and networking solutions and almost 20% goes towards servers, printers and peripherals – a branded support/service surely has a huge growth opportunity in India.

“A service platform unavailable to Indian consumers & SMBs till now, eTechies.in provides instant support at the door step or remote over the internet with capabilities to service, support, and repair computing devices like PCs, MACs, Servers, Printers, Routers, iPads, etc.” Rohit Chaudhary, Co-Founder & CEO, eTechies.in. “While the Consumers & SMBs so far had to rely upon the disorganized service providers offering limited tech support & without the surety of timely professional services and accurate resolution to problems; eTechies.in offers cost effective professional full suite of end-to-end service, support and repair. For SMBs, where manpower cost is a major hindrance towards setting-up efficient internal IT teams, eTechies.in steps-in to provide holistic and customized IT solutions and support. With certified trained engineers, eTechies.in attends to and helps resolve problems within stipulated enterprise class SLAs, never before experienced.”

John Dougery and Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital will join the eTechies’ board.

Headquartered in N. Delhi, FICCI is one of the main organizations to fund and support many governmental and non-governmental educational institutes. It was founded by GD Birla and Purushottam Takkur in 1927, on the advice of Mahatma Gandhi.

The $15mn fund will be have Vijay Mahajan (BASIX CEO), Infinity Innovation Fund (IIF), managed by Saurabh Srivastava and DST (Department of Science and Technology) as the key stakeholders.

The contributions will be through a range of vehicles and financial assistance like grants, loans, technical collaborations and even equity investments in four key sectors: health, food security, climate change/energy and education. The alliance aims to raise $50 million (Rs 260 crore, approx) in the next 12 months from other corporate sponsors, foundations and government bodies.

Our take: It’s one thing to float a fund and another thing to execute. Most of the government aided funds end up as grants with no RoI (and very little value creation). We certainly believe that the time has come for industry bodies like FICCI to create investment vehicle to spur India growth (especially infrastructure segment) sans bureaucracy.

Canaan’s one-fund approach to venture investing will allocate approximately two-thirds of Canaan IX to technology investments in digital media, consumer internet, enterprise, mobile and communications companies in the U.S., India and Israel. One-third of the fund is designated to healthcare investments in biopharmaceutical, medical device and healthcare infrastructure companies. General partners in Canaan IX are Brent Ahrens, John Balen, Stephen Bloch, MD, Wende Hutton, Maha Ibrahim, Deepak Kamra, Warren Lee, Guy Russo and Izhar Shay; in addition, the fund is advised by Alok Mittal, Managing Director of Canaan India.

In India, Canaan Partner has invested in cellcast, Bharatmatrimony, Chakpak, e4e, Equitas,HappiestMinds, iYogi, Naaptol, MotorExchange, mCarbon and UnitedLex.

We had a quick QnA with BigIndianWedding founder, Ashish Abrol on site’s current traction and future plans.

BigIndianwedding : Current traction

Ashish Abrol: In terms of the product, BigIndianwedding  offers online listings across 11 cities and 31 categories eg. wedding venues, wedding caterers, makeup artists, ghoriwala, etc. The site currently has 6100 listings and aims to increase to 10,000 listings over next few months. No of cities covered will increase to 15 from the current 11 in the same span of time. Currently, users can send queries directly to vendors and get price quotes. We have generated 123,723 business leads for our vendor partners since going live.

BIW : Is it a content or online services portal?

Ashish Abrol: BIW is also an online magazine for brides and grooms to be. They can come to BIW and read about the latest trends for brides and grooms. We have interviews with leading designers, jewellers, makeup artists, hairstylists, etc. Basically all the information you may need to plan that perfect wedding. We also provide articles on honeymoon destinations, bridal beauty, fitness, budget weddings, destination weddings, etc. 

Future plans?

Ashish Abrol: Our third offering is e-commerce which we are launching on 10th Jan, 2012. This will allow users to shop the latest wedding collections be it saris, salwar suits, honeymoon resort wear, gifting items or home furnishings for the couple’s new home. More services are in the offing over the next 6 months. 

The company has already secured partnership with over 25 suppliers so far and are adding more suppliers every week.  

Also see: ShadiMagic wants to be the marketplace for Wedding Related Services

Founded in 2008, Shareaholic began as a nights-and-weekends project for founder and CEO, JayMeattle (of Compete.com success) – has grown Shareaholic from a “nights and weekends” project to a fast-growing 8-person company with more than 250 million users.

About two million people have downloaded Shareaholic’s browser plug-in, which enables content sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, or plain old e-mail. Through over 200,000 websites that use Shareaholic’s tools, the company says it reaches over 250 million unique users each month making it one of the largest networks of long-tail site owners.

Mu Sigma is already profitable and can finance its own operations, but will use the investment funds to accelerate its growth in the burgeoning analytics services market. A portion of the proceeds are being used to purchase shares held by existing shareholders, all of whom will continue to have stakes in the company.

The company has grown rapidly since its founding in 2004; in fact, its 2008-2010 revenue growth of 886 percent earned Mu Sigma a spot in the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.

On the one hand you could think of us as consulting plus applied math minus the high cost. On the other hand, you could think of us as IT plus business plus applied math, [Dhiraj Rajaram, Founder/source]

Is BIG Data the next BIG theme? From Pluggd.in forum [topic: What do you think of Mu Sigma's 150 Million$ Funding?]

Analytics, data mining and other such “big data” efforts are likely to be big in the coming years. The volume of “data” being produced has rapidly outstripped the tools that can make sense of it, and information (and noise) overload is a very real problem. The exact nature of the solutions is still an open question – whether open frameworks, point solutions or service delivery models will be the ones that gain prominence. I would also take a wild shot at creating tools that could be built into apps and other software to enable various aspects of this, rather than an isolated analytics solution.

Recommended Read: What is the Big Fuss about Big Data?

Tool: Hadoop: From Toy Elephant to Jumbo Data Sets [A 101]

In addition, ScaleArc announced the appointment of Justin Barney, who previously ran sales divisions at companies like Citrix and Juniper Networks, as president and COO.

ScaleArc’s iDB software, which is available for MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and Postgres database environments, offers real-time query analytics and control, instant horizontal scaling, caching, dynamic load balancing and more, all without any changes to existing applications or databases.

With exponentially growing data and increasing transaction rates, organizations face substantial cost and complexity in scaling their database architecture in a cost-effective manner while increasing performance, visibility and uptime. The ScaleArc iDB software provides a wide spectrum of capabilities: real-time query-analytics and control, instant horizontal scaling for capacity growth or high availability, one-click query caching, automated sharding, dynamic load balancing, enforcement of security policies, and much more, allwithout any changes to existing applications or databases.It is the only solution that reduces overall CapEx and OpExcosts by up to 50% and delivers instant performance improvements of 6x-24x with no disruptions to existing environments.

Started by Varun Singh (ex-CTO of Web18), ScaleArc’s customers cover a wide range of industries including eCommerce, web 2.0 / SaaS, online gaming, digital media companies, service providers, and enterprises.

–

Our approach is simple – you ask any question about your trip, and one of us will do all the research & bookings for your trip! We then turbocharge this by:

1. Having tens of thousands of travel enthusiasts sign up and train to become travel researchers.

2. Building an amazing technology platform that aggregates the entire travel web and auto-categorizes it – deals, events, hotels, sublets, even tips from locals on foursquare and your friends who’ve recently been there.

We call this the 90% tech + 10% human insight approach. [mygola].

The company has raised $1mn from Blumberg Capital, Dave McClure / 500 Startups, Lewis Cheng, Mac Harman, Sandeep Bapna, Priyavrat Bhartia, Aldo Monteforte and Alvaro Gutierrez.

Essentially, mygola starts where SEO focused travel planner ends.  From our earlier rant, Customer Focus : Why Indian online travel space is not with it, mostly:

The trouble is, the users are looking to travel for a purpose, and the journey/hotel is one piece of the whole experience. They want to be assured of a certain quality and wants a no-hassle experience. And all that’s on offer is inventory, with some lip gloss on top by way of an interface, and possibly sorted by this or that.

What about the guy who wants to fly to Delhi from Madurai and may be open to combination of either a bus+flight or a train+flight ? From either Chennai or Bangalore. What about the NRI-in-India-for-a-month traveling to 3-4 destinations who’d hire a car, a cell, take a couple of domestic flights, perhaps a holiday to some destination while here, maybe even love to have a data card ?
Your users are looking for very different things. Playing “agent” for a ticket transaction, or a hotel reservation, is hardly what I’d call sticky, or a customer delight strategy.

What is the value that you’re creating ? For OTAs – and there are almost as many as airlines – its even fuzzier these days without a deal or discount. Not long term at all, I’d imagine.
And please do not talk to me about the reduction in your cut as a benefit – I really could not care less about that!

Though mygola competes with local tourist guides, focus on technology is what differentiates them (as opposed to consulting services provided by tourist guides). Surely an interesting startup to watch out for.

Important to note that mygola is started by Anshuman Bapna, who earlier started and sold his startup RightHalf when he was studying in IIT Mumbai.

Trivone is promoted by veteran journalist L. ‘Subu’ Subramanyan and it manages three IT Media Properties –www.techtree.com, www.channeltimes.com and www.cxotoday.com. The company plans to build several Digital media properties in specific verticals and increase its presence in the Digital Media landscape inIndia.

Earlier in the year Trivone had acquired the management rights for the three IT portals, viz., Techtree.com, ChannelTimes.com and CXOToday.com from UTV.

 Yesware is an Email for sales people. The application is available for Gmail and smart phones and provides email analytics, customizable templates and CRM integration. They secured $1M in funding in September 2011.

Attachments.me overcomes Gmail’s shortcomings in attachment search. Attachments.me allows you to search by file type, email address, or tag. In March 2011 they received a seed funding of $500K.

 Spanning is not strictly an email related app, but it’s a business-class, cloud-to-cloud backup for Google Apps. In April 2011 they reported securing Series A funding of $2M.

Perkville is a loyalty card solution without any plastic card or any phone app. Your email address is your loyalty card. Neat, eh? The company’s profile on CrunchBase mentions a seed funding of $500K in Jan 2011.

Instead of constantly checking your inbox for important messages, AwayFind lets you configure when and how to alert you of urgent emails, SMS, phone calls or smartphone apps running on the iPhone or Android devices. Awayfind reported getting $800K funding in October 2011.

 ShortMail – It’s like Twitter for email. It forces you to cut down your email to 500 characters. They secured $750K Series A funding in July 2011.

FanBridge is a Fan relationship management service. They had secured about $2M in funding in Jan 2011. FanBridge, helps bands, artists, sports teams, and even small businesses and brands manage their fan base through opt-in emails and sophisticated analytics. It manages more than 120 million fans via email alone.

ActivePath has developed a “patent pending” technology that allows Banks to send out emails such that readers can instantly take action on the email – transact immediately via email itself. ActivePath secured Series B funding of $10M in September 2011.

 Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your Gmail inbox and includes information from sources like LinkedIn, Skype etc. I find this quite a useful add on to Gmail. Last year they received $1M in seed funding. Gmail has introduced its own People widget in May 2011.

CloudMagic has built a browser extension that results in an extra search box in your Gmail interface that allows you to rapidly search for anything in your inbox, with results updating as you type and the ability to preview messages from a thread in a tab or open entire conversations with a single click.

 LiveIntent helps sell and buy email ad inventory. They secured $8M in series B funding in September 2011.

There are a lot more interesting apps around email marketing, Email and CRM integrations, and browser extensions and so on.

Email has still got its mojo.

[Guest article by Geetanjali Dighe, part of Juvlon team.]

- Recommended Read: Coverage of Email Marketing industry.

Data Source: TechCrunch/Crunchbase.

“Our decision to invest in Pepperfry was an easy one. Pepperfry has a strong team, extensive e-commerce and retail expertise and great execution abilities reflected in the imminent launch of www.pepperfry.com in less than five months since commencing operations. We are excited by the e-commerce opportunity in India and believe that Pepperfry is a great addition to our robust global internet portfolio. I wish the team the very best.” [Niren Shah, Managing Director, Norwest Venture Partners India]

Headquartered in Mumbai, Pepperfry also has on ground sourcing and fulfillment operations in Delhi and Jodhpur. The product is scheduled for launch during Christmas season and has grown to more than 70 employees over the last few months.

Writes Karishma Kapoor

As a first-time mother, I often longed for a really trusted support system, that I could turn to whenever I needed something, for myself or my baby. A service I could rely on for the best, in products as well as advice.

So I was delighted to discover babyoye.com when my son was just a few months old. I have found everything I needed on babyoye.com – from bibs to beds! What’s more, I can shop online, from the comfort of home, and have everything delivered to my doorstep, in 2 days flat. (I believe in some cities outside Mumbai, it takes a couple of days longer but imagine, you get super products and super service at your doorstep and you can pay cash on delivery.)

I appreciate it so much, that I met with the Babyoye team and we shared many ideas on how Babyoye can help parents give their children the right start in life. When I was asked if I would like to invest in Babyoye, I instinctively said yes. I am an actor, not a businesswoman but it is not really a business decision. I am investing as a parent who has discovered a wonderful service and wishes to share it with fellow parents. So yes, I have put in my time and my money but most importantly, I’m putting my heart into it.

I now have a very close relationship with babyoye.com. A bond that I invite you to share. Discover how wonderful it is to have a friend who’s always there for you, and your child. [page]

What about Adwords?

Earlier, Babyoye raised $2.5mn funding from Accel Partners and Tiger Global (April 2011) and as a customer of the service, I can bet that the majority of the investment went into adwords (and NOT technology development). Case in point – I recently ordered products from Babyoye (which surely has marginally better inventory than others, especially FirstCry) and here are my observations (I did talk about this on Twitter and was surprised that there wasn’t any response from BabyOye’s customer support team):

1. Needs better login/registration infrastructure.
In my case, the site didn’t show any product/order history even though I bought a product. Not sure what am I missing.

2. Respect the promotional campaign.
Nov 18th – price of a product was Rs. 1,900/ and 3 days later, the price went up to Rs. 2,500/. On being asked why this price change (hey! this ain’t a deal site?), I got a response that ‘must be a mistake. Please try again’. We tried and nothing happened. The price was still showing Rs. 2,500/ and on being asked again, customer care simply replied that the product must be out of order. In short, they were clueless and so were we.

3. Gift wrap?

When you are checking-out an order, you have an option to gift wrap the same. I opted for this option (by the way, the order was for my 1 year old niece who is in Delhi) and I am now told that the product was delivered without gift wrap.
Is this dependability?

4. Tracking system.
Once you have placed an order, you get a tracking number. And this is what the tracking page looks like (“Coming soon”).

If calling up customer care for order tracking is the only way forward, then it must be the most under-optimized way of spending money (technology investment in areas like these can be a BIG differentiator).

Ecommerce is not just about pumping up site traffic, but it’s a LOT about integrating backend and frontend – and given my limited experience of using Babyoye, I am not convinced whether the team has done a good job of integration (especially given the $2.5mn funding they have raised).

The reason why I am sharing my one-time-experience of BabyOye is because I am not sure where is the money going. Did Karishma Kapoor really invest in the site or she has invested in Google Adwords program, after all most of these sites are ultimately investing in adwords and NOT on technology! And that to me is the most scary part about this crazy investments in ecommerce.

What has been your experience with Babyoye?

PS: Of course, I’d expect the Babyoye team to take this candid feedback in the right spirit. They have a lot of things going right for them (including inventory/branding etc), but focused approach on technology will surely help them scale.

Freshdesk was founded in 2010 by former Zoho executives, Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy. As part of the investment, Shekhar Kirani from Accel Partners will now be joining Freshdesk’s board of directors. The Series A Funding comes just as Freshdesk released a host of new features, including Facebook and Twitter integration, enabling businesses to take complete control of their customer service over social media.

Freshdesk aims to bridge a gap in the customer support software market where there were no quality options that were affordable for SMBs. Already integrated with Google Apps, the company plans to add more integrations with other cloud services in the coming months. Freshdesk now has customers in over 30 countries and is available in 6 languages.

Last year, Freshdesk demoed their product at UnPluggd event. Watch their demo video

By supporting on-premise installations, as well as ‘in the cloud’ hosting, Sapience (Innovizetech’s flagship product) is designed and priced right for organizations ranging from tens to several thousand employees. The funds raised will be used to expand customer base, add advanced features and investments in R&D.

Seed Enterprises is a new venture fund by Mitesh Bohra, Avinash Sethi and Siddharth Sethi, who previously co-founded InfoBeans Systems. Post this investment, Mitesh Bohra joins company’s Board of Directors and Avinash Sethi as CMO of the company.

Deltecs’ flagship product DRONA which was started as a mobile learning & communication platform, aims to expand to newer domains like Mobile Marketing Automation, Sales & Channel enablement. The funding will be used by Deltecs for ramping up the team, expanding the product offering and building marketing, sales & customer support infrastructure.

The company is founded by former Wipro engineers Divyesh Kharade, Jinen Dedhia and Akash Shah. Started as tech-garage-startup, boot strapped with initial services projects to fund the development of the product DRONA. “This funding not only validates our unique methodology and positions us to expand into new verticals, it also allows us to continue helping business to effectively engage their audience on mobile platform.” said Divyesh Kharade, co-founder and CEO at Deltecs InfoTech.

DRONA provides mobile learning to executives on smartphones. These can also be used as corporate video channels for training purpose or internal communications. Some of Deltecs clients include Airtel, UltraTech Cement, State Bank of India, Wipro, Fullerton and Indian Railways, among others.

The company has recently launched BizPunditz that provides digital library of best practices from India’s finest leaders through a video clip spanning 3-6 minutes.

The Kutchi Angel Network (KAN) is promoted by business houses like Anchor Group, Navneet Group and Gala Group,  will support entrepreneurs from Kutch district of Gujarat state. KAN has made its debut deal by investing in Deltecs Infotech, a mobile learning solutions company. Other promoters of KAN include the Anchor Group, which sold its electrical accessories business to Japanese electrical giant Matsushita Electric Works for Rs 2,000 crore and has interests in FMCG, real estate, writing products and IPL (as an investor in Kochi Tuskers); Navneet Group, whose flagship is the BSE-listed education content provider Navneet Publications (India); promoters of chemical manufacturing firm Aarti Industries and the jewellery firm Antara.

The company founded in 2007, entered into a tie-up with YouTube three years back and offers live content from TimesNow, ET Now, Aaj Tak etc. As of writing this, iStream offers only News related content and plans to offer Movies and Live TV content soon.

Post funding, Ravi Adusumalli and Mukul Singhal of SAIF Partners will join A2 Media’s board following the $5 Mn investment.

Monetizing Online Video Content In India

Monetization is typically from subscriptions, pay-per-view, sponsorships and ads. If you have compelling premium content that is copyrighted or licensed by you then subscription and or pay-per-view models could be an option. But getting scale on the back of subscriptions is not easy; however, if executed correctly, you could make a tidy margin. Monetization through advertising is popular amongst existing websites that have video capability.[read: A 101 On Understanding Your Online Video Competency]

Given that most of the content producers are embracing the app/tablet space, iStream’s real meat lies in streaming to devices – and essentially competing with content creators as well.

The key for iStream is to really redefine content distribution (think Hulu) – distribution which offers much bigger reach than content producers can ever imagine.

Recommended Read on Online Video Industry in India:

• State of Online Video Industry in India [Video Ad Inventory Is Sold As Display Ad Inventory]
• Online Video in India – What’s the future?

Mentions Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of One97:

Narayan and his team put their Artificial Intelligence skills to create this personal search engine for your world. And then one day Siri (on iPhone 4S)happened. The Dexetra team had done AI , done web bot and now challenged them to launch their own version for Android just in 8 hours. They created it overnight, calling by reverse spelling of Siri i.e. Iris..Since then things have not been the same. With nearly a million downloads and 10s of millions of queries iris crates first global product out from Bangalore.

Our investment made months before is announced today and is a great reinforcement of opportunity to create world-class offerings out of India.

Investments like these strengthens the ecosystem – they are made primarily for the love of ‘this is super awesome product!’ than mulled over questions like ‘what’s your business model? How will you make money?”.

A big plus to One97 Fund and Dexetra for the funding.

Grexit’s core concept revolves making a sense of information (knowledge) that is stored in email discussion threads. Grexit enables you to create ‘smart folders’ (for Google Apps email account) and start sharing information to Grexit’s online repository (simple forward the email to add@grexit.com), which can be accessed by team members.

The key question for Grexit to answer is whether it’s competing with KM (Knowledge Management) tools or Enterprise Collaboration/Task Management services – that is, which IT department will pay for their service. In its current form, project managers are the ones who needs these services and Grexit’s competition comes from free software like Wikis etc.

» Useful Read: 5 Basic Email Etiquettes for Entrepreneurs

» Guest post by Grexit Team: CC is Evil, So Is Its First Cousin [Inbox Clutter]

- Happiest Minds is a provider of cloud services, software product engineering, infrastructure management, security, testing and consulting services.

- TELiBrahma is a developer of mobile solutions using augmented reality, Bluetooth and WiFi technologies for advertising and retail segments. The company offers location-based and visual recognition-based applications that give consumers an enhanced digital experience in their interactions with major brands.

In total, Intel Capital announced 10 new and planned investments in Asian companies, totaling US$40 million, at the 12^th annual Global Summit. These investments span five Asian markets – China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – and reflect Asia’s position at the forefront of global technology innovation.

Intel Capital earlier announced its plan to invest $20mn in 6 Indian startups – in Saankhya Labs, Testing Czars, FINO, What’s on India, enStage and DURON Energy Pvt. Ltd.

The Salorix Social Marketing Platform enables multi-channel listening, social media campaign planning and engagement in a unified framework. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA and with offices in New York and Bangalore, India, Salorix’s customers include Blue Shield of California, AARP, United Online, HP/Palm and agencies such as Mediacom, OMD and Universal McCann.

The Salorix platform helps in tuning listening parameters to one’s market, industry, company and brand. Relevant conversations are categorized, scored and metrics reported to provide brand and audience insights.

The platform coupled with Solarix’s expert in-house Social Listening and Engagement team provides the combination to sift through terabytes of data to locate your most vocal, connected and influential prospects and customers. We then engage these influencers to drive awareness, clicks, leads and orders.

Last year, Buzzgain which offered similar services (analytics) was acquired by MeltWater.

Related startup: Benchmark Your Social Media Efforts With UnMetric