It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its five million registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200 million+ monthly active users, and some 600 billion in and outbound messages – but Hike’s growth is  impressive when you consider it’s only just over four months old. WhatsApp, of course, has been around for almost four years.

Mobile messaging is hot property right now, with tech giants like Facebook and most recently Google bent on owning the messaging space. The reason for all this interest in cross-platform chit-chat is that mobile messaging looks poised to steal social networking’s crown jewels: aka the cool factor, and thus the user engagement (Hike incorporates social status updates and emoji-based moods into its messaging app, to hang on the social chain). But the idea that there can be one ultimate mobile messaging winner — or one player as dominant as Facebook in the full-fat social networking space — seems unlikely. And that’s what Hike is banking on to disrupt WhatsApp and keep Facebook Messenger and its ilk from crashing its just-getting-started party.

There’s no doubt that local market realities intercede much more on mobile than on the traditional social networking playground of the desktop, especially in emerging markets where device, network and carrier variations influence how people communicate based on how they can afford to communicate. Those complexities provide an opportunity for local app makers to triumph over goliath outsiders if they build fixes for the local market, argues Hike.

“Given how competitive this market is we do feel that in about 3 or 5 years from now you will have somewhere between three to five players globally that own parts of the messaging space in the world. You’re already seeing it right now, you have Line in Japan, you have Kakao in Korea, you have WeChat in China, you have WhatsApp in South America and Europe, you have of course Facebook message or iMessage dominating in U.S. and WhatsApp growing there too. In India of course WhatsApp is the dominant player but we’ve come on to be a very strong number two in just four months,” says Hike creator Kavin Mittal.

“We can see that with communication if you solve local problems in the market there is room for a local player to win the market completely.”

Hike is one of the latest contenders to jump into the mobile messaging space, albeit with a few neat tricks up its sleeve that it’s confident will allow it to grab significant share in its chosen markets — namely India, and other similar emerging markets in place like Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa. Some 60% of Hike’s registered users are in India, 40% globally led by the Middle East and Germany (despite its emerging markets focus, Germany was actually the first market to spike an interest in Hike — which its creator puts down to it having 128bit encryption over Wi-Fi and Germans looking for a “much more secure solution to WhatsApp”).

On the neat tricks front, Hike has baked a patent-pending SMS conversion tool into its app to take advantage of fragmentation in the Indian market caused by low distribution of data-capable smartphones. So this is not just about incorporating SMS messages into a unified app — as Google plans to with its Hangouts app – but about making sure a data message can still reach someone who doesn’t have data, via the SMS channel.

Mittal explains that in India, even where people own smartphones they may not have data enabled, or  may sporadically turn data off to save money. SMS is therefore still a key comms channel that needed to be brought into the loop. This fragmentation was the problem the app’s creators were setting out to solve with Hike. They have also done this in as low cost a way as possible by building a system that ensures it does not send cross-network SMSes (which incur a termination fee in India) but routes same network to same network.

“The idea behind Hike… is it works free globally. Hike is available on iPhone, Windows, Android S40, S60, very soon BlackBerry now as well. But in case you don’t have a phone than can install Hike, or let’s say you have a phone but you don’t have data, I can still message you from Hike for free. We convert the IP message into an SMS and it’s free for me as a Hike user, to which you can reply back to – and the reply comes back straight to my inbox making messaging very  seamless. So I have one app for all my friends,”  Mittal tells TechCrunch.

Another future trick — due to launch on June 10 — is something that will allow users who have turned off their data to still be notified that they have a message waiting for them, presumably so they know to turn data back on. “At this point in the market there’s no way to notify you when you have a message waiting on one of these applications. So we’re launching something on June 10^th that’s going to solve this problem, so no matter where you are – no matter if you’re online or offline – you’ll be able to communicate via Hike with your friend all the time,” he adds.

Hike is funding the conversion cost of sending the SMSes itself —  in the Indian market, with a view to extending it to other emerging markets with similar dynamics — so that is one of its largest sunk costs at the moment, according to Mittal. But its monetisation strategy is based on building off that base in another way. The shift Hike’s creators are ultimately calculating on is the movement of consumer spending in its target emerging markets away from carrier ‘value add services’ — paid for infotainment SMSes and so on — to data-based content and entertainment.

That’s where Hike sees its future profits, by fleshing out its messaging offering to supplement the bread and butter of social comms with “content that’s very relevant to the local market” – much as the Line messaging app is already doing with entertainment content such as stickers and games.

“India is a country of 20 countries. There’s so much diversity, cultural differences, dialects, languages that one has to cater to and given that this is a big entertainment market there is no doubt we’re going to go down the route of enriching messaging around content,” he says. “If you look at why you message it’s around a piece of content, topic, video, something new you’ve found, something funny. And India it’s much more prevalent than other markets so we’re definitely going down that route, there’s no doubt about it.”

Hike is also looking to work with carriers to share some of the SMS conversion cost, with the benefit for carriers being that Hike is acting as an IP pusher, turning mobile owners into data drivers — and data is ultimately where carriers in these emerging will be making their future revenues from too.

“Given the traction we’ve had in the Indian market we’ve seen a lot of interest from the operators who want to work closely with Hike and figure out how to expand and grow the traction with Hike because what we’re doing for the operators is we’re introducing a lot of people to data,” says Mittal. “What one can also do over SMS is send photos, videos and so forth, so if I’m on Hike and do  SMS I can send you a picture and you get a link on SMS so you can open it on a browser, so we’re striking deals in the Indian market and the emerging markets like Middle East and Africa where the cost is not only bourn by us but by the operator too.”

Hike is starting out with more resources than most startups, being created by BSB, a 50:50 Bharti Softbank joint venture, that acts as a “quasi-strategic incubator”, as Mittal puts it. Bharti Softbank invested $7 million into Hike about a month ago — a measure of how much traction the app had managed to achieve in a few short months. BSB projects get their first round funded by the parent companies if they achieve enough traction.

Going forward, Hike will likely look outside for funding, says Mittal — assuming it can keep on growing, and reach its goal of at least 10 million registered users (“our internal critical number”), which it views as the baseline required before starting to think seriously about monetisation.

“By the end of the year we’ll be in a positon to raise money from the external market. The reason we’re doing that is the VC market in India has less of an appetite for taking massive risk.  Because one of the first questions to ask is ‘hey guys why are you building another messaging app?’ And we were pretty certain that if we did what we did we’d get the traction and so far we’ve proved it,” says Mittal. “We’re in a point where we have the $7 million but we will look outside, even possibly the West Coast for funding.”

Mittal won’t put a figure on Hike’s active user base but says it’s “amongst the highest we’ve seen in the industry and definitely way above 50%”. ”We feel there is a room for a local player to dominate markets like India, Africa and China and so forth,  and take care of the local needs, and that is something we’re working on. That’s the big philosophy we have at BSB,” he adds.

India’s technology-adoption stratification poses a huge challenge when you’re trying to build an app that lets people talk to whoever they want. A challenge that, ultimately, gives the local kid a toehold over global mobile messaging players, argues Hike.

“The market kind of splits India into three sort of broad demographics, the top part really mimics the U.S. population  — 30, 40 million people – they’re really switched on, they know about the Internet, they have smartphones and so on and so forth; there are about 150 million people that are experimenting with the Internet, but they have a lot of churn there because the Internet is still not a utility for these guys; and then you have a billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that have no clue whatsoever the Internet even is,” says Mittal.

“As you go further down in India, how do you tackle the one billion people? No one knows but we’re in India here, so we’re the guys to figure it out.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Early-stage investor sentiment in India is mirroring the newfound caution we’re seeing on the West Coast this year, according to a survey from an Indian startup accelerator that runs a program in four different cities in the country.

GSF, or Global Superangels Forum, runs a nine-week incubator program in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore with five startups in each city. They surveyed 40 angel investors and venture capital firms in the country to get a sense of how firms are feeling about the market there.

The study found that the pace of investments slowed. Most VC firms made fewer than 10 investments, while most angels in the survey closed fewer than five deals.

“I think we are certain to see a general slowdown in Series A investments in 2013,” said one angel who was unnamed in the study. “There will be a flight to higher quality, more complete and mature teams with a proven ability to build, scale and exit companies in 2013 as opposed to greenfield teams of very immature albeit talented founders.”

VCs are also doing more seed or angel-level deals — which also mirrors a trend we’re seeing the U.S. A few weeks ago, top Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West also put out a report saying that traditional venture investors are getting more active at the seed level. Not only that, they’re changing the character of funding deals, by moving them toward having a preferred stock structure instead of one that involves convertible debt.

Similarly, in this GSF study, 61 percent of the Indian angels the firm interviewed said there was greater collaboration with VC firms last year than in 2011. The benefits are two-fold: VCs get exposure to more early-stage companies and get options to step up investment in them later on in a Series A or B rounds. At the same time, these VC firms may be better resourced to help these companies either find exits or scale their businesses.

One area that both local Indian VC firms and angels find trouble with is the lack of exit opportunities for Indian startups. While the country has a hugely talented pool of technical talent, it hasn’t yet been able to translate that into a strong pipeline of IPO candidates. China in contrast has had a wealth of tech IPOs over the last several years, even though the market is in a bit of a lull after a frothy, overheated period. That’s partially because the Chinese government has chosen to create a “Great Firewall” and support domestic tech companies at the expense of foreign ones.

“They have their own Facebook. They have their own YouTube. They ring-fenced themselves,” said Rajesh Sawhney, who co-founded the accelerator. “That’s the not the situation with India. We’ve opened our doors. Our Google is your Google. Our Facebook is your Facebook.”

Indian consumer web and mobile startups have to compete on much more even footing with their U.S. and European counterparts, which can make it hard for domestic companies to break out.

At the same time, even though India has more than 1.2 billion people, its market is actually deceptively small given that there fewer than 150 million people with fixed-line Internet access. But Sawhney is betting this will change in the next five years.

“We’ll add 1 billion new people from India alone to the web,” he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fitiquette, a developer of virtual fitting room technology and a TC Disrupt finalist in September 2012, has been acquired by Myntra, one of the big fashion and lifestyle e-commerce companies in India.

Myntra plans to put San-Francisco-based Fitiquette, led by CEO/co-founder Andy Pandharikar, at the center of a new innovation lab in the city, as well as use Fitiquette’s core product on its retail site to drive more fashion purchases online. For now, that retail site is only in India, where Myntra reportedly made some $100 million in revenue last year.

This is Myntra’s second recent acquisition in the U.S. The first, in November 2012, was of New York-based Exclusively.in and its private label brand, Sher Singh. In both cases, the financial terms were not disclosed.

Fitiquette is in a crowded space — or fitting room, as it were. Others coming at the idea of virtual fitting including  TrueFit, MyShape, Clotheshorse, True & Co. for undergarments, Meality and Body Metrics. 

But with the $1.5 trillion fashion industry still in its early stages of moving to the web — even in the early-moving U.S. only about 10% of its $300 billion fashion market is online — there is a growing need for technology that helps consumers make accurate virtual estimates of how something will look in real life. One of the big gating factors to growth, Pandharikar says, is “lack of personalization.”

From my experience, Fitiquette’s approach is pretty engaging. You start with a mannequin that you customize to your measurements across specific areas like height, hips, breasts and and so on, allowing for minute adjustments for closest accuracy; this is then used to suggest clothing sizes and looks that would fit your shape. When you try the clothes on, you can view the results in an animated, 3D simulation. Future plans had included even more precise ways of getting a more lifelike appearance by way of photographs and video, and the ability to mix and match more clothing together.

The product had still been in pilot mode when it was purchased by Myntra, but it had already gained some traction: a limited beta of attracted some 20,000 users and somewhere between 2 million and 3 million try-ons, according to Pandharikar. And it had already been in discussions with a number of e-commerce players, some well-known, about rolling it out commercially. He says that Myntra approached Fitiquette almost immediately after TC Disrupt, and while Myntra had some customers nearly closed, “it was a deal we couldn’t resist.”

That’s a great exit story for a startup borne out of a fictional product used in a Cisco commercial for virtualization — Pandharikar and his co-founder Anant Kumar met while working at Cisco, and were inspired, when the commercial about the “future of shopping” went viral, to figure out a way of making a cool virtual fitting room into a reality. (There is more backstory here: Pandharikar also had some exposure to the fashion industry while still an undergraduate in India, when he imported and sold leather accessories to finance his way through college.)

Although Fitiquette had been envisioning its technology as a white-label service, it doesn’t look like it will be developing any third-party deals with other e-commerce sites for now. Myntra says it’s seeing 100% growth every six months, with some 30,000 products from 500 brands online, but the acquisition will give it one more way to help remain competitive against the likes of Snapdeal (which recently picked up a $50 million investment led by eBay) and Flipkart.

“Myntra aims to create the most compelling fashion shopping experience for Indian consumers at par or better than global standards,” Mukesh Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Myntra, said in a statement. “Fitiquette has developed pioneering technology for solving the Fit/Size problem online. This acquisition will not only help us improve the experience significantly but will also enhance our technology team with addition of top tech talent.” For its part, Myntra has raised about $70 million from VCs including Tiger Global, NEA-IndoUS Venture Partners, IDG and Accel Partners.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After some years of languishing, BillMonk’s service and user base will be taken over by a young Singapore startup, BillPin, which provides a similar bill-splitting service.

Just over six months old, BillPin pitches itself as a “Mint for groups” and offers a way for people to track how much money they owe each other. It has plenty of competitors in the bill-splitting space, including Splitwise, Billsup, Spotme, Divvyit, Splitmybill.ie; scooping up BillMonk’s user base might provide it a firm leg up in the fight for user acquisition.

BillMonk was founded in 2005 and was acquired by Indian mobile money provider Obopay in 2007. It’s one of the older players in the space, and seems to have suffered from neglect for a few years.

Some of its competitors have tried to capitalize on that. Splitwise launched a campaign to bring BillMonk users onboard last year. BillPin launched a similar service in October last year.

BillPin’s co-founder, Darius Cheung (whose previous startup, tenCube WaveSecure, was acquired by McAfee in 2010), acknowledged the older firm’s state of neglect. ”Not much improvement was added to BillMonk at all over the past seven years, and in fact BillMonk has suffered significant down time in the last six months or so,” he said.

Of the migration service BillPin created, he said: “It was launched to catch BillMonk users who were frustrated with its downtime, but we didn’t know then we were going to inherit its entire user base.”

Still, BillMonk continued to add users over its lifetime, and steadily at that, he said. As a result, bringing BillMonk’s user base onboard will give BillPin “easily 50 times” more users.

He wouldn’t say how many that is, but according to reports, BillPin has a small base of 5,000 or so users.

He made it clear that this move was an acquisition of the larger service’s user base, but none of BillMonk’s engineers will come over from Obopay.

BillPin has five employees in Singapore and one in India. It’s bootstrapped so far, but Cheung is currently hoping to raise an angel round.

Obopay started in 2005, and provides technology to corporate clients like Nokia and Societe Generale, and telcos like Warid Telecom in Uganda to allow them to offer their own branded mobile money-transfer services.

It was started in Bangalore, and now has its headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. It has Bangalore and Mumbai offices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Happy April First, errybody! Yes, that’s right, we’ve reached that special, inimitable time of year. April Fools Day 2013. At TechCrunch, we have a long history of taking April Fools seriously. Deadly, deadly seriously. So, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to create a master list (which will be updated throughout the day) with the best tomfoolery, pranks, WTFs and LOLs the Internet and the tech industry have to offer.

All night and all day, whatever it takes. If a company close to you happens to break out its clown shoes in what can only be an eye-rolling effort at being funny (really, the one time of year we indulge terrible nerd jokes publicly), please alert us in the comment section. And, again, thank you for your help in advance.

We’ve tried to separate the good from the bad and the ugly — and highlight the stuff that’s actually funny — sometimes with success, sometimes not.

So here they are.

(And, again, for our annual disclaimer: If you’re one of those folks who finds April Fools stressful because you’re constantly subject to punkings courtesy of your co-workers, rest assured that we at TechCrunch would never do that to you. Never. Never ever.)

The Great List Of April Foolings

Google Nose

You have to give Google props. They always take April Fools Day pretty seriously, and cats are usually involved. But this year Google is poking fun of its Glass Project with some olfactory goodness. Google Nose. Smells galore. You’ve probably been wondering what Google does with all that information that it tirelessly indexes for its search engine, combing the Web with Page Rank to serve you moderately usable results. Well, it’s also been collecting scents.

Now, as Greg reports, instead of paying hundreds or thousands for its newest piece of sexy hardware, Google is now letting you type your favorite scent into its search engine, tap the “smell button” and inhale to your hearts content. Just try not to sneeze on your monitor.

YouTube? More like NOTube, amirite?

That’s right. You heard it here first. Jordan brook the news Google has decided to shut down YouTube. After eight years, the company revealed that the whole thing has actually been an American Idol-like competition. Thank god, because for those of us that were taught that life is a competition — no enjoyment necessary — well, we’ve been a little suspicious of YouTube.

But the company has finally revealed that the competition that we know as YouTube is coming to a close, and that an expert panel of judges — YouTube celebrities themselves — will choose the winners. But don’t expect the winners to be announced any time soon. The judges will spend the next decade sifting through YouTube videos to choose said winners. Tomorrow, at midnight, the site will shut down and all content will be deleted. When it reopens in 2023, the only remaining video will be the winner. Frankly, it all makes perfect sense.

Gmail Blue

The hits just keep coming for The Googs. Next stop on the April Fools Google Train? “Gmail Blue.” That should explain itself, but just in case, it took Google “six years to develop the technology” to turn Gmail blue. Google turns nine tomorrow, and it might as well just go for it.

A poke at Facebook? Who’s to say?

You Got Vowels? Give Twitter Money.

Twitter has announced Twttr. Who needs vowels, am I right? Not you. Or Twitter. Twitter’s new “two-tiered” service includes a free portion called “Twttr” where each tweet (or “twt”) shall contain nary-a-vowel. But just in case that has you up in arms, you can have your stinkin’ vowels back, but it will cost you $5/month.

Pretty minimal price to pay for the fundamental building blocks of, you know, the English language and all. But because Twitter is ever-the-beneficent social network, it will offer the “sometimes Y” free of charge. Well, isn’t that precious? Oh, and thankfully URL vowels are free. Twitter’s not into the whole “hidden fees” thing, you understand. It’s almost like that April Fools joke where Facebook tried to make you pay $1 to message strangers. Oh wait, that actually happened.

Try it here. More from Drew here.

The Rest

Virgin’s Glass-Bottomed Plane

Glass-bottomed boats are so last year. That’s why Virgin is stepping it up a notch with the world’s first-ever glass-bottomed plane. Richard Branson proves himself to be a peerless innovator yet again:

We hope to trial the glass bottom technology with other Virgin airlines in time and have asked other Virgin companies to support this innovative trial and launch our new domestic Scottish route. This really is a team effort from all corners of Virgin.

Speechless.

Sony For Pets

Sony is releasing a new “Animalia” line of products for your tech product-starved pets. And they’re really “stoked” about it. As are your pets, no doubt. Because your hamsters need to test out those Beats headphones you bought them for Christmas.

According to Sony:

The introductory line-up includes Sony-branded products targeted at owners with dogs, cats and hamsters, with additional devices and networked services slated for release later this year. Check out this video to learn all about our new K9 4K TV, M3-OW KittyCans, and In-Cage Speakers.

ThinkGeek

ThinkGeek has a whole new line of April Fools products that are fun for the whole family. Like this “Eye Of Sauron Desk Lamp.” My apologies if your order doesn’t go through. I’ve already bought 50 of them.

Google Maps Treasure Mode

Google Maps wants to bring your Goonies dreams to life:

Archeological analysis has confirmed that our Google Maps Street View team has indeed found one of history’s long lost relics: a treasure map belonging to the infamous pirate, William “Captain” Kidd.

The map was found on a recent expedition in the Indian Ocean, as part of a deep-water dive to expand our underwater Street View collection. Captain Kidd was rumored to have buried his treasure around the world, and tales of a long-lost treasure map have lingered for generations.

Google+ Photos And +Emotion

Google+ now lets you add real emotions to your photos. This would be hilarious if 25 startups weren’t currently working on/pitching this idea — outside of Google+. Because the best Google+ April Fools joke is, really, well, Google+.

Google Analytics

Some users of Google Analytics may begin noticing that they have a few new international visitors checking out their sites. I’m just glad Google didn’t say that they were “totally out of this world.” Google is now including active visitors from the International Space Station, Control Room, who clearly have nothing better to do than to check out your WordPress blog. Here’s Carl to explain.

Google SCHMICK

More Google. Now Google wants to help you spruce up the look of your house. They explain:

Is your house looking a bit tired and shabby? Want to make your narky step-aunt jealous? Trying to keep up with the Joneses but don’t have the money to complete an expensive reno?

Now you can give your house a lick of fresh paint for free on Street View with Google SCHMICK (Simple Complete House Makeover Internet Conversion Kit). Forgot to mow the nature strip? Deck it out with some fresh buffalo grass. Front steps falling down? Swap them out for doric columns and a pergola. Graffiti on the front fence? Cover it with so many palm trees people will think they’re on the Vegas strip.

Google’s Levity Algorithm

For your Google Apps pleasures:

Toshiba Gets A Console

That’s right. Today, Toshiba is announcing its first-ever gaming console: The Shibasphere. Look out, every gaming console ever made, past, present or future. The Shibasphere is here.

The Shibasphere features unprecedented computing power, a completely controller-free interface, and Logical Aggression Monitoring that deploys positive therapeutics to prevent emotionally devastating rage-quits. Available accessories include the Shibadome, Shibasuit and Shibatote that enhance the sound, motion detection and portability of the console, and also features:

12 core 3.5 Ghz Processors
8192 MB GDDR5 RAM Graphics Card
809.3b Infrared Motion Detection
1080p Full HD
7.1 Channel Surround Sound
5 Stereo Mini Jacks
8 HDMI Ports
AC Power

SoundCloud’s Dropometer

Sometimes you just don’t know when “the drop” is going to hit in a song. Not sure what I’m talking about? If you’ve ever seen a Harlem Shake video, it’s that very short, euphoric moment where the music drops out for a second and suddenly everyone is dancing/humping something. (See a notable example from my alma mater here.) Well, now, using its patent-pending algorithm, SoundCloud will tell you when that “unpredictable and surprising moment” is going to happen, via The Dropometer:

… The Dropometer is designed to help you prepare yourself for the big moment, whether that means getting in the mental space where you can really break it down, or fixing yourself a fortifying snack.

While we first innovated the Dropometer around dubstep, we’ve identified broad utility for this new functionality across all genres. Look to the Dropometer to find out when to expect a key crescendo in a 17th-century symphony or the emotional climax in an episode of This American Life.

Love with Food Gon’ Get You High

Love With Food is announcing a new product line called Love With WEED — a monthly subscription that delivers a new high every month. For every box sent, we’ll plant a cannabis shrub along CA Route 1. It’s like Tom’s, but greener. Here it is.

Sphero PeaceKeeper

Robotics takes a step forward today with “Sphero — Peacekeeper Edition.” The robotics maker is now offering a super-sized version of Sphero that you can control from your smartphone or tablet. And cats love it. It measures 3-feet in diameter, weighs over 150 pounds but is totally fun and lightweight and agile. The future is now, people. GoSphero.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon has put together a big list of things you can to do prank your colleagues, family members and loved ones. See it here.

RunKeeper

The next revolution in running is here. Now. And it’s really big.

Obama Takes To Crowdtilt To Fund The Debt

President Obama has today taken to Crowdtilt to help raise money for the sky-rocketing national debt. When things get out of control, you can always turn to crowdfunding.

Here’s his note:

A PERSONAL APPEAL FROM PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

My fellow Americans,

Despite the best efforts of my administration, prolonged partisan debates in Congress are preventing us from a solution to our mounting national debt. Instead of bickering over taxes, we’re taking a new approach: asking everyday Americans to chip in so we can pay off our debt once and for all.

With your help, it’s time to act.
HELP PAY OFF our NATIONAL DEBT

Samsung’s Eco Trees

Really hilarious, Samsung: “Samsung Electronics announced Eco Trees, a smart, eco-friendly air purifier that runs on solar energy.” Get it? Chlorophyll? More like Bore-ophyll. Here are all of their fresh new Eco Tree products.

Nokia Gets Into Microwaves

With the success of its smartphones, it was really only a matter of time.

We are delighted to announce a significant new extension to Nokia’s product offering with the Nokia 5AM-TH1N6 Constellation, a touch-screen microwave oven. The Constellation sets itself apart with a superfast, water-cooled 8-core high-voltage transformer, which brings a combined performance of 5,000 watts to end-users, letting them heat up turnkey meal solutions within seconds.
‘Nokia has a proven track record and extensive IPR in working with microwave radios, so for us this was a logical next step. We can attack our competition in their core business,’ says Olavi Huhtikuu, Nokia’s director of household innovation.

‘That’s why we developed the highly innovative 5AM-TH1N6 Constellation, which will revolutionize everything from single households to canteen kitchens.’

The new Nokia 5AM-TH1N6 has even more innovative features. The device comes with the latest eye-tracking technology, which stops the food from rotating when you look at it, and it automatically adjusts the temperature depending on how hungry you look.

BMW Gets Into Strollers

With a royal baby due this summer, we are proud to announce the launch of our limited edition BMW P.R.A.M. (Postnatal Royal Auto Mobile). Available in Princess Pink or Royal Blue, this soft-top convertible has been designed using our EfficientDynamics technology. With two or four-wheel-drive, it rides as smoothly on a polo field as it does down The Mall and comes with air conditioning and built-in extendable flagpoles as standard. For those who are ‘too posh to push’ this masterpiece of motherhood even comes fitted with N.A.P.P.I.E. (Nanny-Assisting Petrol-Powered Injection Engine).

A Walk Down Memory Lane

April Fools Jokes Galore 2012

April Fools 2011: The Big List

April Fools 2010: The Definitive List

Exerpt image from Hark.com

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Sequoia Capital India landed in Singapore, the buzz around town was that a big-name US fund being in the country was going to really jolt the market and provide serious cred to the startups here.

The Indian team running operations here, however, appears to have spent the last year of its time in the island state helping its Indian funds expand into Singapore, rather than directly investing in startups here.

Singapore is a popular choice as a base for foreign companies looking to expand into Southeast Asia. Early last year, Sequoia Capital India MD, Shailendra Jit Singh, expressed interest in having the fund’s companies expand into the region. Sequoia Cap in the US also appeared to have been eyeing activity in Singapore for a while—it had its first offsite meeting in the country in 2011, and was in discussion with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong about its presence here.

The Prime Minister’s Office oversees its R&D arm, the National Research Foundation (NRF), which has been busy backing local venture capital firms here over the past few years. Its Technology Incubation Scheme is a program that matches funds picked by 11 appointed VCs here, in the proportion of 85 percent to 15 percent—the larger portion dished out by the government. This allows the VCs here to provide bigger sums of seed capital to startups, with much of the risk absorbed by the NRF.

Former NRF projects head, Yinglan Tan, was also pulled over to Sequoia Capital India’s team in July last year, where he is now a venture partner based in Singapore.

When I ran into Tan in Manila a couple of months ago, he was evasive about the funds they’re looking at in Singapore, but was happy to try to set up meetings with their existing funds in Singapore—all Indian-based startups, except for Airbnb and Evernote. Some of these companies that are being incubated in Singapore by Sequoia Cap include Via, Druva, Mu Sigma, Idea Device and Practo.

The meetings never happened, but word on the street is that Tan has been meeting with some Singapore-based startups that are approaching Series A or B in size, and are looking to expand beyond the island. One that I know of provides Wi-Fi infrastructure.

As for its current startups here, Via is pretty sizable. It operates a flight booking portal similar to Expedia and Zuji, and has about 1,200 employees, the bulk of which are in India, with some in Indonesia and another team in the Philippines. It also lists hotels, and has about 45,000 listings, with plans to add more.

Druva started in Pune, India and is now operationally HQed in Sunnyvale, according to Jaspreet Singh, its CEO and founder. The company provides a backup system for mobile devices in the enterprise.

Mu Sigma is a Bangalore-based data analytics company. Last month, it struck up a deal with MasterCard that valued the company at $1 billion, according to The Economic Times in India.

Idea Device is also a Bangalore startup, and makes a runbook automation system. Runbook automation is a set of technologies that helps take out some of the manual system administration tasks for IT departments.

As for the two US-based firms, Airbnb opened its Singapore office late in November last year, and Evernote has been in the country for a little over a year.

Sequoia Cap itself was operating out of a service office in High Street, but now is the anchor tenant at a fancy new co-working space called The Co, so it could be a sign that it’s trying to get closer to local startups.

Sequoia Cap US declined to comment further on its plans for Singapore.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we first heard about Daniel Epstein‘s plan to bring his Unreasonable Institute startup accelerator to the high seas with a 100 day, around-the-world sailing expedition called ‘Unreasonable At Sea,’ it frankly seemed like a pretty crazy idea. Let alone the risk of pirates (the real kind, not the entrepreneurial kind), there are so many possible things that could go wrong for the 11 startups aboard the ship — bad Internet connections, seasickness, homesickness, and the like.

So now that Unreasonable At Sea is more than halfway through its voyage (it started January 9th in San Diego and ends April 25th in Barcelona) we decided to check back in with Epstein for a TechCrunch TV talk yesterday morning to see how everything is coming along. For starters, the Internet connection is actually pretty solid, as we were able to see in the quality of our Skype chat as he was aboard the Unreasonable At Sea ship in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Mauritius. He told us that everything else is going just as swimmingly (sorry, I can never resist making some kind of water pun when writing about this endeavor.)

Watch the video embedded above to hear Epstein talk about the perks of the journey so far, how the startup folks are mingling with the Semester At Sea students aboard the ship (and getting some work out of them too), what the biggest lessons and surprises have been so far, and what’s in store for the rest of the journey ahead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wrapping your brain around technology trends here in the United States, or even just in Silicon Valley, is a chore. Figuring out the trends and who the major players are in an emerging market like India is 10 times as difficult. Bowei Gai, former LinkedIn employee by way of his company CardMuncher being acquired, has done just that under his World Startup Report umbrella.

Brad Feld and Dave McClure have been leading the mentor and seed-funding charge in India, as well as the Valley, as of late, and shared some interesting thoughts with us based on what they were able to pull from the report.

Feld told us that the online and offline business differences in India are what stood out to him:

I wasn’t tuned into the difference between online and offline businesses in India. The friction in offline society has a tremendous impact on any businesses, especially ones outside India, whereas the online world has enormous opportunities that seem unconstrained in the near term due to the extremely low penetration of smartphones when compared to the high penetration of mobile.

Here’s the extremely detailed report, complete with population information, market opportunity and current players in the country:

The idea for the World Startup Report is that one will be done in all major markets that are up-and-comers in the tech space. This is no small task, but if this India report is indicative of the types of information that Gai and his team are mining, then good things are bound to happen. Its mission is to share these documents for free, to empower local startup “activists” to become ambassadors for their region and ecosystem. Once those leaders emerge, then all of the pieces will start coming together for places like India.

Gai told me about the experience of gathering all of the information in the report above, which seemed like quite an adventure:

It’s been a life changing experience, having the ability to walk into startup’s office and ask any questions about their experience.

In the last 3 months, we spoke close to 2,000 young entrepreneurs, well-known successes, angels, VCs and policymakers to get everyone’s perspective on their startup ecosystem.

McClure talked to me about what it means to be more global as far as investing goes and why 500 Startups is starting to spend actual time, and money, in India:

The benefits and opportunities for getting in early (but not *too* early) in India are tremendous. For only small amounts of capital and resources (say, $1-2m/year?) we can get started now in India, and potentially see impact and returns within just a few years. Particularly seeing the rise of mobile / smartphone business in india, and the Indian middle class growth opportunity over the next 3-5 years is amazing.

Yes, mobile is something that you’ll hear about a lot when it comes to emerging markets. In India, mobile devices easily outnumber desktop ones, and all trends are pointing to smartphone adoption setting up booming potential in the country. Today it’s all about feature phones and SMS, but tomorrow, mobile apps will be bigger than desktop software ever was in the country for consumers.

It’s not easy to get involved in the startup scene in India without some learning and networking, as McClure explained to me. There’s a great bit of mentoring that will take place over the next few years to fuse all of the engineering talent that exists in India with consumer marketing expertise that hasn’t hit its stride in the country as of yet. This report is a great primer for anyone thinking about taking the long plane ride over to build some amazing things for consumers who are just getting ready for it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Free messaging apps are a dime a dozen these days. There’s everything from Viber, to Skype, to WhatsApp to GroupMe. But while these startups concentrated on smartphone apps, it has been in the emerging markets that messaging over data has made a huge impression, and that has required paying attention to feature phones which use Java apps. We saw Saya.im appear only last year in Africa for instance. So starting way back in 2006, this is exactly what Nimbuzz, a startup originally from the Netherlands, did. And that strategy is paying off. Today it announces that it has just passed 150 million users globally and is doubling its users year on year.

Indeed, the growth is such that AC Nielsen now thinks Nimbuzz is putting the heat on Facebook messenger in Asia and especially in India, according to the latest Nielsen India Rankings. These put Nimbuzz into the top 4 consumer brands in India, ahead of Facebook Messenger, YouTube and Gmail amongst others.

The trajectory has been quick. Nimbuzz says it reached 50 million users in August 2011 and 100 million in August 2012, thus doubling its user base every year. It’s strongest in Asia, mainly India and Saudi Arabia. In India it is used by twenty-five million users, or a quarter of the entire mobile Internet population of the country. That also translates into over 1 billion minutes of calls made per month and more than 102 billion messages sent and received on Nimbuzz per month.

For the stats heads amongst you here they are:

• More than 150 million users in 200 countries: Asia (78 million including middle east); Africa (16); Europe (10); USA (9)
• 100-percent year-over-year growth
• More than 5,000 devices supported
• More than 1 billion minutes of Nimbuzz P2P, NimbuzzOut and SIP calls made per month
• More than 102 billion messages sent and received per month
• Android devices account for more than 35% of all active and new users

But Nimbuzz is not just mobile messaging, but also includes calling and entertainment via its smartphone apps which pull in their party messaging services. This means you can add, say, a horoscope chat app which you can interrogate rather like a text-based Siri. Brands also interact with users in a chat format. So developers have started developing games like Hangman for instance or an app called “Stranger Buddy” which is like Chat Roulette in text form. These are hugely popular in regions where text messaging works where data is thin.

Nimbuzz is available on all major platforms such as BlackBerry 10, Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone, and J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac computers. It’s pre-loaded onto all local OEM handsets in India apart from Nokia, Samsung, LG.

Nimbuzz started in 2006 and came out of beta in 2008. It created an India office in 2008, but quickly became a full-blown Indian company.

Nimbuzz CEO Vikas Saxena says the appeal of Nimbuzz to users in thesemarkets is that it is as a “single platform capable of handling immense amounts of data for little or no cost at all.”

The company has produced an info graphic, but as TechCrunch is not fans of these, please just take it with a pinch of salt.

It’s investors include Mangrove and Naspers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Playcez, a startup out of Delhi, has closed a seed round of several hundred thousand USD for an events discovery app for Indian users.

It wouldn’t say how much funding it got exactly, but noted that the figure is under and closer to $1 million.

Its founder, Ashwani Gaur, acknowledged that other location-based, social type apps for consumers have tapered off in the hype cycle in the US, with investment in those coming down. But India’s growing smartphone user base is catching up to those trends, and is creating demand for his Playcez’s product at this time.

The company was one of six to come out of the Global Superangels Forum (GSF) mentorship program in November last year. The GSF is a TechStars-modeled startup accelerator program launched in India in September last year focusing on intensive incubation efforts for early startups.

Playcez’s app monitors social media and check-in activity in an area, and tries to judge locations based on where traffic is highest. Based on that, it recommends events and activities to users to do in the vicinity, and shows users what’s hot by distance.

Eventually, it plans to expand beyond India, he said.

The app is in private beta, to be released in two weeks. Register for the private beta here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch