Three Indian startups - Amagi Media Labs, EyesAndFeet.com, and Infimatra Technologies - are attracting attention for their innovative products. Amagi Media Labs has developed a technology to allow local advertisers to target ads on national TV channels to specific cities. EyesAndFeet.com has created a web application that provides data on local businesses' social media activities and helps those businesses improve their social media efforts. Infimatra Technologies has developed a mobile app called PlanEasy2D that allows users to design floor plans for homes and place furniture virtually. The founders of these three startups are working on promising solutions in the areas of media, social networking, and mobility.

1. c m y k c m y k
Facebook
CEO Mark
Zuckerberg
to feature in
a cartoon. Technomics
Apps in works
for RIM tablet,
says Oliver
Bussman, CIO
of SAP.
iPhone
beats RIM,
others in
satisfaction
survey.
11New Delhi ●● Monday ●● 22 November 2010
Indian product start-ups begin
to attract serious attention
Notepads that keep you on the same pageANNE EISENBERG
NEW YORK
Nov. 21: Three-by-five
index cards, those hallmarks
of research, may be fading
away in these digital times,
but the need to take notes
endures.
Human memory is as weak
as ever, and people are still
shoring it up by recording
their observations, research
and grocery lists, though
many now use computers
instead of pens and paper.
But the electronic
notepads on smartphones,
tablets, laptops and desktops
don’t synchronize with one
another automatically. Say
you’re sitting on a plane
with your laptop, jotting
down some brilliant words
for that speech you’re giving
next week. Back at the
office, those notes will never
find their way to the copy of
the speech you’ve stored on
your desktop, unless, for
example, you e-mail them to
yourself.
Now companies including
Simperium and Evernote
offer applications you can
install on your various
mobile and stationary
devices. The companies’
servers gather and coordi-
nate those notepads, keeping
all the entries up to date
The source of the notes
may be typed text, Simperi-
um’s specialty. Evernote’s
expanding services, mean-
while, can handle notes sent
by keyboard, digital pen,
scanner or camera phone.
Simplenote, a free applica-
tion from Simperium, runs
on desktops and laptops via
the Web. It can also be
installed on iPhones, iPads
and the iPod Touch, says
Michael Johnston, a co-
founder of Simperium, a
start-up begun this year in
San Francisco. Other com-
panies, he says, also use
Simperium’s synchroniza-
tion platform as part of apps
that run, for instance, on
Android phones.
The company is already
profitable, he said, in part
from premium subscriptions
($12 a year) and in part from
advertising displayed on the
site.
Jonathan Beilin, a game
developer and writer in Sun-
nyvale, Calif., uses Sim-
plenote with his desktop PC,
his Apple laptop, his iPad
and his iPhone. He may
write down ideas for his
blog in the morning on his
iPad; then, when he switch-
es to his laptop later in the
day, the rough draft is wait-
ing for him.
“It’s the only sane way to
share between my comput-
ers and my mobile devices,”
he said. (He still carries pen-
cils and a Moleskine note-
book, mainly for drawing.)
The Simplenote app is
intended for keeping text
notes. For those who want to
capture additional informa-
tion — like Web page clip-
pings, photos and voice
memos — Evernote offers
both a free and a premium
service ($45 a year) that
work across most devices
and platforms, says Phil
Libin, the CEO of the com-
pany, which is in Mountain
View, Calif. If users are
away from home without
laptops, they can still use a
smartphone or a hotel com-
puter, for instance, to access
an account and retrieve
notes.
Mr. Libin says Evernote
has been adding and refining
its offerings, buoyed in part
by $20 million in recent
funding led by Sequoia Cap-
ital. One of its new services,
available to those who
install Google’s Chrome
browser, is a dual search —
one of public sources found
by Google, and another of
the private data on a user’s
Evernote account. It also
added one-button service on
scanners from Canon and
other companies that auto-
matically send scanned doc-
uments to the Evernote
account.
David Pierce, 22, a junior
analyst at PC Magazine in
Manhattan, uses Evernote
on his BlackBerry, iPad,
iPod Touch, Mac and PC. “I
take notes on whatever
device I have in hand at the
moment,” he says, “but then
all the information in my
notes is in one, single,
accessible place.”
He also uses his phone to
take photos of business
cards and white boards at
meetings. — NYT
Nokia’s N8
phone has
power issues
N
okia, the world's top
cellphone maker,
said on Friday some
of its flagship N8 smart-
phones were sold with a
power fault that meant they
switched themselves off.
The success of the N8 —
Nokia's first real challenge
to Apple's iPhone, more
than three years after its
launch — is seen as crucial
to Nokia's profit margins in
the current quarter, analysts
say.
Nokia sales chief Niklas
Savander said “a limited
number of N8 users” were
facing the problem of their
phones switching off, and
they are not able to turn
them on again.
A spokesman said the
fault was due to a problem
in production, which has
since been fixed.
He said the issue was lim-
ited to the N8 model, but
declined to comment on
how many phones were
impacted. “Probably not all
consumers have informed
Nokia about the problems,
so the final number of
faulty products is likely to
increase,” Nordea analyst
Sami Sarkamies said.
“Hardware problems can
be tricky to find and solve,”
he said.
The fault in the power
management stems from
the way in which the engine
component — which
includes most of the tech-
nology in the phone,
excluding covers and bat-
teries — in the Nokia N8
was being installed.
“If you look at the total
number it is a small num-
ber,” Savander said in a
video on company website.
The N8, first to use
Nokia's new Symbian soft-
ware, was originally sched-
uled to reach consumers in
June. In April, Nokia
warned the software renew-
al would take longer than
expected due to quality
problems, and said that the
model would reach con-
sumers by the end of Sep-
tember.
The model was finally in
the shops last month.
A weak offering of smart-
phones and problems with
software were seen as the
main reasons for Nokia
replacing Chief Executive
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with
Stephen Elop. — Reuters
SANGEETHA CHENGAPPA
BENGALURU
Nov. 21: Although India has
shed the “land of call cen-
tres” stereotype over the last
decade to emerge as an
indomitable player in the
IT/BPO industry, it is yet to
make a mark with IP cre-
ation globally. The good
news is that Indian product
story has arrived at an
inflection point, with a
handful of potential billion-
dollar companies that are
already creating waves in
the US and UK. The better
news is that there are many
more product start-ups with
great value propositions
emerging. Here’s a look at
three promising start-ups in
the media, social network-
ing and mobility space.
AMAGI MEDIA LABS
TV is the most compelling
media option in India,
reaching close to 500 mil-
lion people across the
nation, and benefits adver-
tisers who require national
reach to sell their products
across the country. Howev-
er, it is a very expensive and
wasteful proposition for
local advertisers to promote
their products on national
networks. To address this
problem, Bengaluru-based
technology start-up Amagi
Media Labs has built a DSP
technology infrastructure on
analog cable, digital cable
and DTH platforms to help
local advertisers such as
jewellers, consumer
durables companies, real
estate developers, etc., to
target their offerings only to
people in their cities on a
national TV channel.
National TV channels put a
special marker on the con-
tent which they stream to
MSOs or national cable TV
operators. This marker is
identified by the ‘Insertion
Box’ provided by Amagi to
the MSOs, which allows the
national ad-spot to be
replaced by a local ad-spot
in the exact place which is
marked. This modified con-
tent is then streamed to the
local cable TV operators.
“No onion, no garlic
Maggi noodles is sold only
in Gujarat, Bio-yoghurt is
retailed in a few metros, and
SUVs sell a lot in Bengaluru
and Delhi – our solution
allows advertisers to target
their advertising to a specif-
ic consumer base through
city-specific ad-spots which
they can buy from Amagi, at
a fraction of the nation-wide
price. At present we connect
8 million cable TV sub-
scribers across the country
in Bengaluru, Hyderabad,
Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata,
Patna, Nagpur and Indore
and have completed over
100 advertising campaigns,”
said Amagi's co-founder,
Bhaskar S.
EYESANDFEET.COM
Some of the questions that
might cross your mind if
you are a local business
owner of a bar, restaurant,
café or spa could be: Which
restaurant’s got the most
Facebook fans in your local-
ity, what they do so well to
deserve this fan club and so
on. Chennai-based start-up,
EyesAndFeet.com has
developed a web application
that helps local business
owners in the US figure out
what their immediate neigh-
bours and competitors are
doing on Facebook, Twitter
and other social networks
and the kind of business that
they rake in from actively
engaging with people on
these networks.
“We are creating what we
believe to be the most com-
prehensive and usable data-
base of local business social
media activity – all deliv-
ered at EyesAndFeet.com
through our ‘See Module.’
Our web application also
has a ‘Do Module’ which
helps local businesses
embark on their own social
media efforts and we help
them customise it for Face-
book, Twitter etc,” said Lak-
shmanan Narayan, founder-
CEO, EyesAndFeet.com.
Interestingly, the business
also gets a ‘score’ based on
how well they’re using
social media for their busi-
ness. They can compare
their score with other small
and local businesses to see
how good or badly they are
doing. “We expect this gam-
ing element to further cat-
alyze a local business’s
adoption of social media,"
said Narayan, who has
rolled out a beta version of
the solution across 10 cities
in the US with over 500 reg-
istered users.
INFIMATRA TECH-
NOLOGIES
PlanEasy2D, a mobile
application developed by a
technology start-up InfiMa-
tra Technologies, addresses
the numerous painpoints of
people who are in the
process of buying or design-
ing their homes. The 2-
dimensional application
allows users to start drawing
rooms and walls of their
dream home in the dimen-
sions of their choice in
square feet or metres, on a
basic blank screen on their
mobile phone or desktop.
The furniture library for
each room – living room,
bedroom, bathroom,
kitchen, study, etc – allows
users to drag and place a
sofa, chair, table or cot and
rotate it in any direction to
fit snugly into the selected
rooms. Floor tiles in differ-
ent colours can be placed
along with landscaping ele-
ments, such as green grass
in the balcony and terrace,
potted plants in the drawing
room and kitchen window-
sill, etc. The basic floor plan
can be saved to be worked
upon the next day.
“With more and more
youngsters going in for
homes at the beginning of
their careers, we decided to
develop a mobile floor-plan-
ner solution that would help
them plan their dream home
down to the last detail. We
are currently working on
developing a 3D version of
the application for the desk-
top where the wall colouring
or tiling and the effect of
sunlight on a patch of floor-
ing can be viewed and a vir-
tual walk-through the home
will be possible,” said
Srikanth Krishnamohan,
founder-CEO, InfiMatra.
(Left) Bhaskar S. of Amagi Media Labs. (Centre) Lakshmanan Narayan of EyesAnd-
Feet.com. (Right) Srikanth Krishnamohan of Infimatra. Bhaskar, Lakshmanan and
Srikanth head promising Indian start-ups. —ASIAN AGE
Lawsuit indicates Dell hid computer faults
ASHLEE VANCE
SAN FRANCISCO
Nov. 21: Documents
unsealed Thursday in a
three-year-old lawsuit
against Dell have raised
more questions about how
the company handled an
unprecedented number of
faulty computers sold to
governments, schools and
corporations from 2003 to
2005.
A judge in the Federal Dis-
trict Court in North Carolina
unsealed hundreds of docu-
ments linked to a lawsuit
filed by Advanced Internet
Technologies that had
accused Dell of trying to
hide defects in its desktop
computers from customers.
For instance, the court
documents show that the
City of New York filed inci-
dent reports with Dell on
20.2 percent of a batch of
5,000 computers purchased
during this period. A pur-
chase of 2,800 computers by
Microsoft resulted in issues
with 11 percent of the
machines; General Electric,
William W. Backus Hospi-
tal, Denison University and
the Montana Justice Depart-
ment were among dozens of
other organizations that
experienced similar results.
The documents also show
how Dell had resisted
informing many of its cus-
tomers about the extent of
the problem. Despite wide-
spread reports from the
field, Dell salespeople and
technicians were encour-
aged to keep customers in
the dark about the known
defects that left computers
inoperable.
As it tried to deal with the
mounting issues, Dell began
ranking customers by
importance, putting first
those who might move their
accounts to another PC
maker, followed by those
who might curtail sales and
giving the lowest priority to
those who were bothered but
still willing to stick with
Dell.
The company declined to
recall the systems and did
what it called “proactive
field replacements” for cus-
tomers that met certain sales
and failure rate thresholds.
In September, Dell settled
the lawsuit with Advanced
Internet Technologies with-
out disclosing the terms of
the agreement. The New
York Times sought access to
the documents that had
remained under seal.
The issues with the com-
puters revolved around the
capacitors that dot computer
motherboards. A typical
Dell computer could have
up to 20 of these capacitors,
which cost a fraction of a
penny each and help regu-
late electrical operations of
the machines.
Earlier this decade, capaci-
tors made in Asia with a bad
chemical recipe were sold to
numerous makers of televi-
sions, PCs and other elec-
tronic devices. The capaci-
tors would bulge when they
became too hot and cause
devices to malfunction or
stop working altogether.
Dell, Hewlett-Packard and
Apple and others were
aware of these issues and
tried to pull faulty comput-
ers from the market and to
fix the computers. But even
while keeping an eye on the
problem, Dell continued to
receive faulty capacitors
from suppliers.
It waged a three-year battle
to identify the troublesome
components. Studies con-
ducted by Dell and a third
party showed that the com-
pany shipped 11.8 million
computers from May of
2003 to July 2005 that were
at risk of breaking.
What shocked customers
and Dell was the rate at
which the computers failed.
For example, the unsealed
court documents included a
Dell study from 2004 in
which the component issues
charged past the company’s
initial forecasts. In June of
that year, Dell expected that
a minimum of 12 percent of
its SX270 Optiplex comput-
ers would result in incident
reports from customers over
a period of three years. By
September, Dell raised the
minimum incident report
forecast to 45 percent and
noted it could run as high as
97 percent.
The same Dell study cov-
ered issues with the GX270
computer and noted that the
company planned to help
customers who had bought
more than 50 computers and
who had at least 5 percent of
those systems fail. — NYT
Groupon Inc
considering
selling itself out
E
-commerce coupon
site Groupon Inc is
considering selling
itself to Google Inc,
according to media reports
on Friday.
The two are in discussions
about an acquisition for
more than $3 billion,
reported the technology
blog AllThingsD, citing
anonymous sources, on Fri-
day. Groupon is a privately
held, Chicago-based com-
pany which was launched
about two years ago. The
company, which sends its
members daily emails with
about 200 deals, is present
in 250 markets in North
America. The deals are
activated only when a mini-
mum number of people
agree to make a purchase,
giving Groupon clout to
negotiate steep group dis-
counts.” There is nothing
for us to comment on.
These are just rumors,” said
Groupon spokeswoman
Julie Mossler. A Google
spokesman said the compa-
ny does not comment on
rumors or speculation.
— Reuters
“Dell salespeople
and technicians
were encouraged
to keep
customers in the
dark.”
Keep looking for
your ‘Grameen’
KAPIL KHANDELWAL
S
ince the success of
SKS Microfinance
and its IPO, a new
breed of wannabe
healthcare social entre-
preneurs have emerged
that would like to incu-
bate the “Grameen” like
social business models
in healthcare and ICT
(Information, communi-
cation and technology)
in rural and urban slum
of India. These initial
attempts by wannabe
social entrepreneurs in
mobile health are quite
laudable and encourag-
ing. A couple of years
ago, I had urged to the
Health and ICT Minis-
ters of African continent
to bring the stakeholders
from government, civil
society, academia, ICT
and health industries to
create an opportunity for
aligning on key priori-
ties in the development
of the mHealth ecosys-
tem.
The same applies to
India as well. For 16%
of world's population,
we have around 20% of
the world's disease bur-
den, less than 8% of
world's hospital beds
and doctors (around 0.8
million each) and we
have around 625 million
mobile phones users
which are the second
largest base in the world
and the health and ICT
needs to catch up to the
opportunity of leverag-
ing the half billion
mobile handsets. The
social entrepreneurs in
the healthcare still don't
know the right business
models for empowering
the ‘aam admi’ to con-
trol have over their
health and, as such, help
transform the manner in
which new solutions are
created. Our wannabe
Nobel Laureates, the
Grameen look alike
social entrepreneurs in
healthcare think though
the business models that
they should work out to
be another successful
disruptive SKS-like
social venture.
After having reviewed
hundreds of business
plans for different
healthcare ICT ventures
as advisory board mem-
ber, here are three key
points that most
wannabes forget to vali-
date and become too
passionate with their
panacea to the world's
healthcare problems.
There are three key
components to building
your successful venture
— value proposition,
delivery proposition and
lastly the financial
proposition. Firstly,
what is the value propo-
sition that you are
addressing and what are
the key service lines that
you propose to incubate.
In the short to medium
term, mHealth is a per-
sonal, additional, discre-
tionary spend. Value
proposition would need
to address consumer
spending on healthcare
and what they are will-
ing to pay for. Once you
have zeroed into the
value proposition then
you need to define the
compelling services that
would be payed for by
the consumers.
A word of caution here
is to engage with those
consumers that do care
for their health and use
their experience to build
compelling feedback to
other potential con-
sumers. Most of the
good ventures have been
killed due to over indul-
gence with the medical
profession and regula-
tion rather than thinking
like aam admi.
Having defined the
value proposition and
the services, the second
component is to define
the delivery proposition
and competencies that
would be required to
deliver your “Grameen”
mhealth venture. Many
techies often start by
building the technology
castles rather having an
understanding of the
value proposition they
would like to deliver to
the consumers. The idea
here is to stop thinking
like doctors and techies
and start thinking like
patients and consumers.
Lastly, the business
plan or the financial
proposition of running a
social healthcare ven-
ture.
Obviously with good
intent, there is a health
indicator that the ven-
ture would strive toim-
prove upon.
The revenues and costs
need to be balanced to
ensure that there is prof-
it for the venture.
The acid test is to
define all these proposi-
tions to build another
Grameen or SKS in
healthcare and ICT.
Keep on looking…
there's a business model
somewhere taking
shape…
Kapil Khandelwal is a leading healthcare and
ICT expert. Kapil@KapilKhandelwal.com
A dose
of IT
A dose
of IT
Evernote coordinates the notes you collect daily,
whether on your phone, laptop or desktop.
AGE
THE