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Entrepreneurs, Anantapur (2026)

13/06/2016

Microsoft is buying the professional networking website LinkedIn for just over $26bn (175880.47 crores rupies) in cash.
The software giant will pay $196 a share - a premium of almost 50% to Friday's closing share price.
The deal will help Microsoft boost sales of its business and email software.
Microsoft said that LinkedIn would retain its "distinct brand, culture and independence".
Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight, said the deal would give Microsoft access to the world's biggest professional social network with more than 430 million members worldwide.

18/05/2016

'After creating Google Alerts, this Indian techie has become a farmer"

Naga Kataru grew up in Gampalagudem, a farming village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He was a gifted student in a high school where only half the students would show up for class, “because education wasn’t a priority for them,” Naga told Bizztor. His father, the school’s principal, was determined to send his son to college. So, Naga graduated with a college degree in Computer Science and Engineering and then enrolled at the Indian Institute of Technology, in one of the country’s best computer science programs.
Thereafter, as an employee of Google, USA, when Naga first pitched the idea of Google Alerts, it was immediately rejected. “My manager didn’t like it,” said Naga. “He said Google makes money when people come to us. If we set alerts, then we’re losing money because we’re sending people away from Google,” Naga added.
Naga trusted his instincts anyway. “I went to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I said I had a cool prototype with a simple user interface to show them,” he said. The Google founders tested it right away, said Naga. In fact, the first keywords ever used to test Google Alerts were “Google” and “Larry Page,” he said. “They both loved it,” said Naga, who is listed on three patents for Google Alerts.
After eight years, Naga eventually quit Google and jumped into completely new territories — documentary short films and improv theater. Naga’s latest career reincarnation is as a farmer. In 2008, he bought a 320-acre farm in Modesto, California. It was only meant to be a diversified investment. “I thought I would sell it after five years,” said Naga.
But the farm reminded him of his life in India. “I missed the way the fruits and flowers smelled differently in India,” he said. Instead of selling the money-losing farm, he converted it into an almond farm, which required one-third the labor. “I didn’t know anything about farming. But I love education and I taught myself,” he said.
Today the farm, which also grows apricots, is profitable and has eight employees. It generates $2.5 million in annual revenue. Naga isn’t resting on his laurels. He’s working on two degrees at Stanford — an MBA and an MS in Environment & Resources — to prepare him for his next challenge: making farming more tech-savvy.

18/05/2016

How a street-vendor set up a 1.5 crore business, selling samosas....

J Haja Funyamin, Proprietor of Hafa Foods and Frozen Foods is a 6th standard school drop-out. He began earning his livelihood by selling samosas on the streets of Chennai. Today he is a successful businessman, producing frozen, ready-to-cook, snacks for upmarket clients. Success comes after hardships. Sitting inside his factory office at Red Hills to the north of Chennai, Haja recounts his growth in business. He first acknowledges the continuous support of the Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (BYST), a not-for-profit organisation that helps entrepreneurs secure finance to start ventures.

“Just about a decade ago I was a street vendor in Pudupet selling samosas and other fried snacks to support my family. I have studied only up to sixth standard,” Haja told The Hindu. It was while selling samosas in the narrow lanes lined with automobile repair and spare parts shops, that he got an opportunity to handle a job work for a food exporter. But the initial money to get the business going was hard to come by.
A chance link to BYST which arranged a bank loan of about Rs 1 lakh without collateral helped him get going. After he completed the contract, Haja approached BYST for financial support to start out on his own. “With about a Rs 7.5 lakh loan I rented a place in Red Hills and bought a freezer in 2008 and kicked off the business,” he recalls. Over the next three years, business grew to about Rs 75 lakh and he was employing over 25 persons. Today, he runs a Rs 1.5-crore business and employs 40-45 workers. He makes vegetarian and non-vegetarian, raw, frozen snacks such as samosas and rolls. These have a shelf life of about six months. The factory makes about 40,000 pieces of frozen snacks daily.
The business mostly caters to institutional sales to flight kitchens, theme parks, malls, restaurant chains, educational institutions and industrial and wedding caterers. However, it has not been without challenges. “While I knew the production technique, marketing and arranging funds were tough. BYST’s mentoring helped. Also, I suffered initially when I sold on credit. But I learnt my lesson and now it is only cash-and-carry. Yes, I lost some customers in the process but my business has improved,” says Haja.
It is important to plough back the money into the business for growth. “I retain a portion of the profits for my bare necessities and family needs. Everything else goes back into the business,” says Haja. Business is thriving and Haja hopes to start exports and retail sales soon.

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16/12/2015

The best startups are powered by products with quality design. There is a growing appetite in the Indian startup scene to implement great design, yet there are few platforms that teach how.

Design is critical:
“Design is a critical element to early and continuous customer adoption and engagement,” says Pankaj Jain, Partner at 500 Startups. “Products that are easy to use and aesthetically pleasing will stand out against products that aren’t,” says Pankaj, a graduate of NYU Stern School of Business. He shares that startups in the US and even some in India have won because of a conscious attention to design.

Today in India, this is even more critical as Indian consumer startups need to create good experiences to differentiate against their peers. And those building enterprise companies for global markets are inherently competing against global players who have an understanding of design. “At 500, we think startups need to leverage design to succeed,” Jain says, and rightly so, having spent dozen of years on Wall Street before moving to New Delhi in 2007 to start a company to provide a marketplace for domestic and unskilled labor, called Semblr.

While most startups may consider design as something to do with art and aesthetics, Jain dispels that myth. Design, he says, is more of a science with known processes and techniques. It takes patience and study just like science to understand how to make design work for your startups. “We believe good design isn’t hard, but does require hard work to get right.”

Design as science:
There are many things one must keep in mind when it comes to designing for a startup. First, design is never executed in isolation. It’s a collaborative process that involves constant interaction with the end users. “You should never be designing for yourself,” Jain cautions. Secondly, it’s an iterative process. You never arrive at the ‘right design’ the first time around. “What is most important to remember is that more than visual design, it’s how a product works — form always follows function.” What would also help to know is that design needs to be shipped fast and tested on a constant basis.

Common design mistakes:
One common design mistake is not to understand the difference between UI and UX. To put it very simply, UI is what people use to interact with your product, and UX is how they feel while they do so. Most people think it is the same thing and this leads to them concentrating only on UI and forgetting about UX.
A quick solution to this is getting engineers involved in UX and encouraging them to learn UX techniques and basics. “The other common mistake is thinking of design as the ‘last step’,” Jain observes, adding, “often startups begin building a solution without much interaction with users, and this is a huge risk.” Hence, using design techniques to get early user feedback is critical to a startup. “Design is not about making a scrappy MVP pretty before shipping it, design is about how you conceptualize, execute, and test the MVP,” says Jain, who names SocialCops, InstaMojo, HeadOut, and PicCollage as some of the best designed products.

500 Startups has launched the 500 Design Program in India with its first design workshop to be held in New Delhi on December 17.

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12/09/2015

Ola founders youngest on list of super-rich Indians

The new-age entrepreneurship boom in India is being reflected in the ranks of the wealthiest Indians, with several first-timers entering the super rich list. The debutants include Ola founders Ankit Bhati, 28, and Bhavish Aggarwal, 29, who are also the youngest on the list. With their personal fortunes estimated at Rs 2,385 crore each, the duo are jointly ranked 238th.

While the top spots are occupied by familiar faces, with Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani ranked numero uno with a net worth of Rs 1.6 lakh crore, the list also throws up some surprises.

For example, the Indian who posted the biggest gain in wealth over the past year is reported to be Dhiraj Rajaram, the 40-year-old founder of Bengaluru-based analytics firm Mu Sigma. Rajaram saw his personal fortune rise six-fold, to Rs 17,800 crore. His ranking has risen 127 positions to No. 38, according to the Hurun India Rich List for 2015.

There are 76 new faces among the 296 who made it to the list this year, with the cut-off level being personal wealth of Rs 1,600 crore. Apart from Ola's Bhati and Aggarwal, other prominent tech entrepreneurs on the list include Flipkart's Sachin Bansal, 34, and Binny Bansal, 34, whose estimated wealth of Rs 9,010 crore each puts them at the 85th spot, a rise of 58 positions. Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl, 32, is a new entrant, jumping straight to the 243rd spot with a wealth of Rs 2,314 crore.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, 38, of mobile wallet and e-commerce firm Paytm, and Naveen Tewari, 39, of the mobile ad network InMobi are also new entrants.

Most of these technology and internet companies have raised significant amounts of private equity capital at substantial valuations over the past year. Flipkart's latest fund raise valued the firm at $15 billion, and Snapdeal's valued it close to $5 billion. Most of the new-age startup founders are also exceptional in that they are self-made; 85% of those in the list are part of family businesses.

Copy from TOI

11/07/2015

Men e-shop more than women: Study

Men spend 1.3x more time than women shopping on e-commerce sites every month on an average in India. The trend is reversed in developed countries like the UK and the US, where women spend twice the amount of time by men shopping on smartphones.

On other smartphone usage habits like chat and social networking (like Facebook), women are more active than men, while they are just a tad behind men as far as gaming goes. Real time smartphone usage data from Nielsen Informate suggests that women are just as tech-savvy and active on their smartphones as men, but do slightly different things.

Women represent a small portion of the smartphone universe in the country, with only 20% across all ages being active on data-enabled smartphones. Prashant Singh, MD, Nielsen India, said, "With the rise in smartphone pe*******on, especially among women, the smartphone will become her best friend, providing her with apps to manage her life, connect with the world and express herself."

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11/07/2015

Paytm will invest Rs 640 crore to bring sellers online>>>>......

Paytm has set aside $100 million (about Rs 640 crore) to help sellers go online. The Noida-based mobile commerce platform, backed by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, is planning to subsidise sellers as it is planning to get nearly one lakh of them on its marketplace by the end of this year.
"We are creating the whole ecosystem for merchants on our Gobig merchant platform," said Renu Satti, vice president, SME business and operations at Paytm. Using the Gobig platform (gobig.paytm.com), merchants can avail services including content writing, cataloguing, online marketing and imaging.

Paytm wants to get nearly 10,000 service providers on board by the end of the year, said Satti.

The company is not charging merchants a commission on sales, it had said in April.

E-commerce firms including Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon have also been seeking to woo sellers as they try to chase ambitious growth targets and carve a bigger slice of the country's growing e-tailing market.

"There is a big gap in specific areas such as cataloging. Offline sellers don't have capabilities around images, content and so on," said Venkat Potluri, co-founder and CEO of Sellworx, which has helped nearly 300 merchants go online in the past six months.

While Flipkart is looking to add one lakh sellers by year end, Snapdeal has said that it wants to get to 10 lakh merchants in three years from 1.5 lakh sellers currently and Shopclues wants to increase its merchant base from 1.25 lakh to 5 lakh by the end of 2015. Amazon has not disclosed seller numbers.

"While the targets are huge, only about 30,000-40,000 sellers are likely to be active online by year end," said Potluri, who was earlier a director at Flipkart.

"The market is growing every day , so that number could go up," said Potluri. "Many sellers get orders in the first two-three weeks and then it tapers off. They lose interest after that," he said.

Paytm's platform to help sellers currently has 600 partners listed on the site. "Smaller merchants, for instance a handicrafts seller in a village, will need these services to sell online," said Satti. The company won't seek exclusivity from the seller. "We believe that people should be able to go everywhere they want to," he said.

The company , which is in advanced talks to raise $600 million (about Rs 3,840 crore) from Alibaba Group Holdings, recently said that nearly one lakh Chinese sellers will sell through its platform as part of a partnership it has with AliExpress.

India's internet market, which was valued at $11 billion (about Rs 70,000 crore) in 2013, could rise to $137 billion (Rs 8.77 lakh crore) by 2020, according a Morgan Stanley Research report.

India's retail market is expected to grow to $1 trillion (Rs 64 lakh crore) by 2020 from $600 billion Rs 38 lakh crore) in 2015, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group and Retailers Association of India.

copy from TOI.....

04/05/2015

Snapdeal buys Freecharge in biggest startup M&A

Snapdeal has acquired online mobile recharge platform FreeCharge in the largest buyout so far in the Indian consumer Internet sector as it arms itself with fresh ammunition to battle rivals for leadership in the online retail sector. The Delhi-based company did not disclose the financial terms of the transaction, but sources privy to the details said it paid over Rs 2,800 crore ($450 million) in cash and stock.

We want to target the new tsunami of users who are going to come on to the Internet. This (acquisition) improves our ability to acquire users at a significant velocity at a very low cost," said Kunal Bahl, 32, the cofounder and CEO of Snapdeal.

Together we represent the largest mobile commerce company in the country now," said Bahl, a Wharton Business School graduate who co-founded Snapdeal with schoolmate Rohit Bansal in 2007. The company, which began by selling printed coupon booklets, has pivoted —or changed its business model — seven times until it hit the right note as an online marketplace. It has since received funding from some of the world's biggest corporations, including eBay and Japan's SoftBank, from which it raised $627 million in October.The deal also marks the entry of Sequoia Capital — a significant shareholder in FreeCharge and the most prolific investor in India last year — into the online retail sector where rival venture capital firm Accel Partners enjoys a head start because of its early bet on market leader Flipkart.

"We have recently invested in multiple marketplaces, where we are shareholders. Tokopedia in Indonesia, Carousell in Southeast Asia, and now we have become a shareholder in Snapdeal. We like marketplaces more than inventory-led ecommerce," said Shailendra Singh, a managing director at Sequoia India.

24/03/2015

2014 best products

03/03/2015

Do you know that certain people can access Facebook accounts without the need for passwords? Some Facebook employees have direct access to your account.

But Facebook has explained that this is part of a tiered and strictly-managed customer support set-up, with employees abusing this trust getting fired, VentureBeat reported.

"Access is tiered and limited by job function, and designated employees may only access the amount of information that's necessary to carry out their job responsibilities, such as responding to bug reports or account support inquiries."

"Two separate systems are in place to detect suspicious patterns of behaviour, and these systems produce reports once per week, which are reviewed by two independent security teams," VentureBeat quoted a Facebook spokesperson as saying.

"We have a zero tolerance approach to abuse, and improper behaviour results in termination," the spokesperson added. The VentureBeat report said Facebook's explanation stemmed from the experience of Paavo Siljamaki, director at the record label Anjunabeats.

Siljamaki narrated about a visit to Facebook offices in LA, with nice people there giving advice on how to use Facebook better. He said he was asked if it was okay for them to look at his profile, and he agreed. He then said a Facebook engineer logged in directly without entering the password.

"Just made me wonder how many of Facebook's staff have this kind of 'master' access to anyone's account? What are the rules on who and when they can access our private content and how would we know if someone did," he wondered.
-------------- copy from TOI

11/11/2014

It takes courage, strength and discipline to break from the herd and become a successful entrepreneur or business leader.

06/11/2014

15 Free Online Learning Sites Every Entrepreneur Should Visit

Being a successful entrepreneur means you have to wear a lot of hats, especially when your company is just starting out and you don’t have enough employees to cover all the areas you need.

Learning the new skills necessary to start a new business can be expensive, but fortunately the initiative for free, high-quality, educational resources online has only continued to grow in the past few years. Below are some of the resources available to learn more about marketing, entrepreneurship, business management and more.

1. CodeAcademy

2. HubSpot Academy

3. Moz

4. LearnVest

5. Niche consultant courses

6. edX

7. Khan Academy

8. MIT Open Courseware

9. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

10. Coursera

11. OpenCulture

12. YouTube

13. Alison

14. Saylor

15. Podcasts

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com

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