14 Nov 2006
Will an Indian social networking site succeed against Orkut?
In this episode, we have Prerna Gupta, founder and CEO of Yaari.com – a new social networking site that claims to be “created by Indian youth, for Indian youth”. (Yaari means friendship)
At a time when the social networking space is getting increasingly crowded, we ask her why she decided to jump in now, and how she intends to go up against Orkut.
Prerna Gupta graduated from Stanford University and worked in a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley prior to founding Yaari.com. Prerna is of Indian origin but has lived all her life in the US. We ask her if that’s an impediment for her venture. Listen up.
Continue reading
08 Nov 2006
Why do Indian companies pay such scant respect for usability? We ask Amit Ranjan, who heads the Delhi office of Uzanto, a Silicon Valley startup. He heads the product development team that has built two of Uzanto’s products, SlideShare & MindCanvas. SlideShare is a Web 2.0 application for sharing PowerPoint Presentations on the web, while MindCanvas is an online research software that helps designers conduct user research while designing a web product/service.
Amit keenly follows emerging trends in the consumer Internet space in India and authors a blog called Webyantra, where he profiles innovative Indian web products. Webyantra is good place to go if you want to check out what’s happening in Indian Web 2.0. He is actively involved in organizing events like BarCamps and Mobile Mondays in Delhi.
In a previous professional avatar, Amit was into product marketing & sales. His last stint was with PepsiCo in their snacks food division. Prior to that, he worked with Asian Paints and Godrej & Boyce in their industrial division. He feels that the experience of those years has sharpened his end customer focus and his understanding of the behavior by which consumers interact with products & services.
Amit holds an MBA (with a major in Marketing) from the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), University of Delhi and a Mechanical Engineering degree from REC/NIT Jaipur.
Continue reading
01 Nov 2006
It’s not easy taking on the mighty Google. So, when you come across a man who has the guts to do that, you can’t help but admire the man’s spirit. Dr. Sridhar Vembu is the founder and CEO of AdventNet, the company behind the Zoho suite of services, a direct competition to Google’s hosted suite of office products.
He attended Indian Institute of Technology in Madras for his undergraduate degree and Princeton University for his PhD.
Continue reading
20 Oct 2006
Anurag Dod is the CEO and founder of Guruji.com, the latest India-based search engine.
Recently, Guruji secured an investment of $7 million from Sequoia Capital, the same investors who backed Google.com.
Anurag has more than years of extensive software engineering experience, including key contributions to two successful startups. As an engineering manager in Wisenut Search Engine, he was instrumental in developing its core search technology and has a patent pending for that. Wisenut was acquired by LookSmart in 2002. He also held senior engineering positions in eBay, Synopsis and Delsoft. Anurag holds BTech in eclectrical engineering from IIT Delhi and a Masters in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
In this interview, Anurag explains the need for a local search engine like Guruji and how it plans to take on the might of Google.
Continue reading
