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Office Library

• Name: Kwench
• Type: Community-based
• Whats it About: Online corporate library
• Start-up Year: 2007
• Founder/CEO: Sunder Nookala
• URL: www.kwench.in

Created to fulfill the need of a library in a corporate setup, constraints of resource, funds and space, barring companies from doing thatthe four founders, all IIM-A alumni, claim the idea to be a paradigm shift to the concept of corporate libraries by enabling companies to provide its employees access to hundred of titles through online membership. Web based booking, no late charges, and unlimited borrowal time make the service very popular among the subscribed corporate users. WNS, YesBank, Wipro, Tata AIG Life, Nexus India Capital, etc, are some of its clients.

Preserving Status Quo

• Name: Kwippy
• Type: UGC/Niche Social Networking
• Whats it About: Sharing status messages and having discussions over them
• Start-up Year: 2008
• Founder/CEO: Mayank Dhingra, co-founder
• URL: www.kwippy.com

Simply put, Kwippy stores your status messages, that you see across your messengers like Yahoo, Gtalk, Facebook, etc. It also enables you to have discussions on your status messages and in that way becomes a platform for user conversations. The ideology behind Kwippy is that at any point in time, status messages reflect individual thought process and are capable of starting stimulating discussions with like minded people. Kwippy was started by three enthusiasts who after quitting Slideshare came up with the innovative idea of storing status messages and quipping on them.

Life as It Is

• Name: Lifeblob
• Type: User Generated
• Whats it About: Virtual diary/timeline
• Start-up Year: June 2008
• Founder/CEO: Pranav Bhasin, Rakesh Rajan & Vishnu GS
• URL: http://www.lifeblob.com/

Lifeblob is a digital diary based on your timeline. Add events and landmarks in your life, share it with friends who can then tag the part of the timeline where they feature, adjust the scale of your timeline and fragment your online life, etc. Each entry on your timeline is like a blob which viewers click to expand. Integrated with other social networking and photo-sharing sites, the digital diary site received $1 mn from Google backed SeedFund in August 2008.

Betting against Odds

• Name: LordofOdds
• Type: Ratings/Feedback
• Whats it About: Prediction and money-less betting
• Start-up Year: March 2008
• Founder/CEO: Hariharan K
• URL: http://www.lordsofodds.com

The desi jua takes a clean, fun, money-less and sophisticated name and shape in the form of LordofOdds. Predict the IPL team that would win the match, or which celebrity contestant would be thrown out of the reality show, or is the star couple headed for a breakup? Once a user floats an event, others make a prediction, offer their wager for the outcome (virtual money called Loots), and like the way traditional betting is done, the bars are raised when support for an outcome increases. The ongoing IPL matches steel the show on this virtual betting arena right now.

Check out the Mermaid

• Name: Metaaso Mermaid
• Type: Tools
• Whats it About: Providing large scale videoconferencing, exchange live wire information, etc, with basic infrastructure
• Start-up Year: 2007
• Founder/CEO: Aditya Yadav (CTO)
• URL: www.metaaso.com

Mermaid is a line of products based on peer-to-peer technology, which allows users to do large scale videoconferencing, exchange live-wire information, create online radio stations and broadcast movies and live audio-video feeds to millions of people around the world, with nothing more than a home computer and an home network.

It provides a host of innovative features like Mermaid Movie, Mermaid News, Mermaid Multisource, etc. It can also boast of a vibrant website, but there is a problem with some links and leads, making it apparent that the company is still in its nascent stages.

Mingle all the Way

• Name: Minglebox
• Type: Social Networking
• Whats it About: An attempt to divulge all there is about education and careers
• Start-up Year: 2007
• Founder/CEO: Kavita Iyer, CEO
• URL: www.minglebox.com

Minglebox is a niche social networking site with its focus on careers and education. It brings news and events in the education field under one umbrella and initiates discussions on various topics. Its aim is to capture the imagination of the youth and become a household name across educational institutes and hiring firms. It offers advice on career, aptitude tests, best colleges and the hottest courses, etc. It also profiles institutes and creates campus networks. It was started by an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus.

The Perfect Parent

• Name: Parentree
• Type: Social Networking, Niche
• Whats it About: Community about parenting konw-how
• Start-up Year: August, 2008
• Founder/CEO: Shobha Durairajan, Sathya Narayanaswamy
• URL: www.parentree.in

Parentree is an Indian parenting community. It was founded in 2008 with the aim of providing the perfect guidance on the practical aspects of Indian parenting. The site includes school reviews, details of pre-schools,good books for children and to-be mothers to read, and local happenings in the various cities. It also has information on fostering intelligence, confidence and creativity in children, reliable classes for arts and sports, safe products children, good nutrition, parenting tips, pregnancy, child development, emotional development and behavior etc. Parentree also boasts of a medical advisory board for answering specific issues. Whats more, joining is free!

For and of Friends

• Name: Mobshare
• Type: Mobile
• Whats it About: Sharing your mobile phone photos and videos with friends
• Start-up Year: 2007
• Founder/CEO: Sony Hoy, COO and co-founder
• URL: www.mobshare.in

Mobshare helps users to share their mobile photos and videos with their friends and social groups. They have tie-ups with various operators and can carry your pictures, videos, etc, across all networks. The best part of it is that the user has to pay for just one MMS and send multiple. The viewers can also comment on the photos and the sender gets SMS alerts when a comment is posted.

Mobshare happens to be an early starter in the mobile arena of web 2.0.

You are Tagged

• Name: Tagz.in
• Type: Rating/UGC
• Whats it About: Tries to combine social news and bookmarking
• Start-up Year: NA
• Founder/CEO: Jeethu Rao/Thilak Raj Rao
• URL: tagz.in

As it unequivocally says, Tagz.in is inspired by delicious and reddit, and as the name shows, is a lot about India. It allows users to tag and save links, browse links posted by them and by others, vote and discuss on links posted by everyone, and allows to save some links privately. It has, as the company admits, some rudimentary, smarts built into its offering. It is one of the many social bookmarking sites but is pretty professional considering it is so new.

The Perfect Twist

1. Name: Tell-a-Friend/SocialTwist
2. Type: Collaboration Tool
3. Whats it About: Email, IM, blog, social media, and bookmark sharing
4. Start-up Year: September 2008
5. Founder/CEO: Jay Pullur, CEO, Pramati Technologies
6. URL: http://tellafriend.socialtwist.com/index.jsp

The USP of Tell-a-Friend, a social technology by Hyderabad based Pramati Technologies, is one-to-one and not one-to-many when compared to others like Share It or Add It, some known bookmarking and sharing tools on the Net. In a short span of time the tool, along with the catchy Te!! logo has indeed left a mark on users. It has grown from a sharing tool to a full-blown marketing tool with options of customizing widgets according to your community of users.

For Budding Singers

• Name: Uhooroo
• Type: Community (music)
• Whats it About: A musical platform for music enthusiasts in India
• Start-up Year: 2007
• Founder/CEO: Bharath Madhusudan, Vinay Mahadik
• URL: www.uhooroo.com

This one is for the music lovers. It doesnt boast of catering to anyone else and is happy with its niche set of audience. Uhooroo is designed to encourage musicians to completely free themselves and lose themselves into their artshowcase their talent, promote their music, network with other musicians, offer their services for hire and take up music as a serious career and business. Uhooroo is designed to allow musicians to reach out to and get noticed by a growing music community. On Uhooroo, musicians can upload their tracks, review music and also create a portfolio page for themselves.

Its not Psycho Babbling

• Name: Zahdoo
• Type: Social Networking/niche
• Whats it About: A socio-cognitive utility, with the aim of making social networking useful
• Start-up Year: 2007
• Founder/CEO: Srinath Nagabhirava, CEO and founder
• URL: www.zahdoo.com

What Zahdoo is trying to achieve sounds complicated, but at a simpler level its a social networking site. According to their site, Zahdoo.com is a socio-cognitive utility that helps individuals and families manage the daily juggle of activities, information and relationships. Dont fret if you dont completely understand that. Even we dont. However, the main aim of Zahdoo seems to be making social networking productive and meaningful. Zahdoo was started by nLeague, a Hyderabad-based IT products and services company.

Mehak Chawla & Shikha Das
mehakc@cybermedia.co.in
shikhad@cybermedia.co.in

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