Chicken or Egg?

Google India had its first ever Google Developer Day, held in Bangalore on October 18th. I spoke about our Indic Transliteration API, which makes it possible to add Indic language tying to any website in a very simple manner. (more about this API and other Indic tools a later post).

What struck me as I spoke to the developers at the conference is a sense of uncertainty about the market opportunity for Indic language products and services, so I thought I'd set down some thoughts on how I look at this market.

The opportunity.

• In an earlier post, I outlined some of the demographic and socioeconomic statistics that set the context for this opportunity. Bottom-line: India is getting richer and more literate at a much faster pace than its learning English.
  
• In every country around the world, as the internet provided compelling content and applications in local languages, people found value in them. This is true across Europe, Asia and the Americas. There is no reason to think India is different.
  

The ecosystem

• The bottleneck is this: people won't go online until hey find value, and the value creators (content producers, application developers) won't make the investment until they find people online. How to break this logjam?
• If we look at how the internet developed in the US, it may provide a useful analogy. For the purposes of our discussion, we can break down this evolution into three phases.
• First came content. This was mostly produced by communities people who had a passion for putting up content they cared about. Traffic and monetization was mot the motivation.
• Second came growing readership as people started discovering this content. This set off a virtuous cycle in which content eventually because a viable, monetizatable business.
• Third (and final) were the application developers who could now focus on moving the online experience beyond passive consumption of information to interactivity, community building, service delivery and a host of other innovations.

The Indic market was stuck in phase one for a long time, and (I believe) has just recently entered phase two. There are some signs to back this up - the growing number of newspapers launching online editions in local languages, the growth in the number of tools available for entering local language text using an english keyboard (Google, Quillpad among others).

Are you ready?

Shift Happens

Neat slideshow on technological and political shifts. It just won the "World's Best Presentation Contest" at SlideShare.

Long Bets

The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900 contained an article listing predictions for the year 2000. The author writes:

These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.

Some of the more remarkable themes:

• Telecommunications: "Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span."
  

• Spy satellites: "Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer in charge of troops below."

• Genetically modified food: "peas as large as beets" and "strawberries as large as apples."

There were some exercises in wishful thinking, such as the view that we would all be athletic and fit in a hundred years:

Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling."

We'll try to get there in 2100. And my favorite, the somewhat mystifying prediction:

There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.

The full article is available here.

Fight Poverty with Connectivity

The notion that large-scale handouts of aid hasn't worked to alleviate poverty is well documented. In the worst case, it enriches corrupt, autocratic kleptocracies (e.g. as it did with Mobutu in Zaire). More commonly it's simply wasted because the institutions necessary to use it are not effective, and a sort of low-grade ineffeciency and corruption takes hold. Even the biggest provider of such development aid, the World Bank, has now recognized that aid must be linked to governance to be successful (championed by Paul Wolfowitz, whose current woes do not invalidate this notion).

The basic underlying lesson, according to Iqbal Qadir, founder of GrameenPhone, is that poverty can be reduced only by empowering individuals, not governments. His own involvement in setting up a cell phone company in rural Bangladesh is testament to the individual-centered, connectivity-based model of economic development. Qadir is currently a director at the MIT Center for Developmental Entrepreneurship, which has already brought to market several innovative products for developing economies.

See below for a talk that Mr. Qadir gave at the TED conference in 2005, explaining his ideas about ending poverty through connectivity. (If you don't see the embedded video, click here).

Long Lived by Design

Picking up where my last post left off, the issue of data longevity is specially important to developing economies where the process of digitizing government records and making government services available online is just beginning. The lessons to be learned from data loss from the early adopters in more developed economies should be taken to heart.

There's no question that this is a well-understood problem and many projects are tackling different aspects of it. For example, open standards such as ODF reduce the risk of unreadable data. Digitization and hosting of content by service providers offloads the problem from individual consumers to service providers who are, presumably, better suited to deal with it. At the cutting edge, there's even talk of using bacteria for long-term data storage!

My point is not that adequate steps are not being taken. My point is that product design should incorporate principles with longevity in mind. What might these principles look like? A great place to start is by looking at the Clock of the Long Now, conceived by Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines fame). As he explains the genesis of the project:

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.

This seemingly quirky endeavor is actually a deeply insightful way to examine our notion of time and its impact on technological progress. Hillis lays out a list of design principles for his 10,000 year clock.

• Longevity: The clock should be accurate even after 10,000 years, and must not contain valuable parts (such as jewels, expensive metals, or special alloys) that might be looted.

• Maintainability: Future generations should be able to keep the clock working, if necessary, with nothing more advanced than Bronze Age tools and materials.

• Transparency: The clock should be understandable without stopping or disassembling it; no functionality should be opaque.

• Evolvability: It should be possible to improve the clock over time.

• Scalability: To ensure that the final, large, clock will work properly, smaller prototypes must be built and tested.

These principles seem to me to be broadly applicable. If your product, software or hardware, may be used for any duration longer than five years, you would do well to consider each of these issues (adapted for your specific situation) and how you plan to address them in your product.

Microsoft Office v. 2100?

Those of us who have an interest in technology and want to build widely adopted products will do well to consider the issue of longevity. Building products with a long-term view is a good practice in itself; but also thinking long-term yields design requirements that tend to be beneficial for the overall product.

As an example, consider the Domesday Book, a comprehensive survey of England, commissioned by William I of England, and completed in the year 1086. The book still survives and can be viewed in Britain's National Archives. Today, more than 900 years later, the book is readable, understandable, and provides valuable historical, social and economic insights to historians and scholars. Inspired by the Domesday Book, the BBC undertook to create a similar survey of England in 1986. The contents were stored as 12-inch video discs (remember those?) which are now obsolete. The digital version of the Domesday book lasted all of 20 years!

Think about how much of the information generated in the last 40 years or so is already lost to us. Data created in some proprietary format for which the program is no longer available, or stored in obsolete media which can no longer be read. Clearly we generate a lot more content that we did before, and perhaps not all of it needs to be preserved. However, since there is no way to distinguish what should be preserved from what should not (and who gets to decide this anyway?), they are treated identically. There are groups, such as the Digital Preservation Coalition, based in the UK (started as an attempt to save the 1986 version of the Domesday book as their top priority!) that are tackling the issue. But a lot more remains to be done.

Even more important than preservation efforts are design principles that allow for the creation of long-lived content. Products designed with longevity principles in mind are the only proactive and scalable way to solve the problem. Preservation will always be a reactive and expensive fall-back option and will never offer a complete solution to the problem.

All Together Now....

Will Price (who is fast becoming one of my favorite bloggers) has another great post on the virtues of alignment. The key point he makes is that entrepreneurs can context-switch effortlessly, but that same capability cannot (and should not) be expected of the organization as a whole. In fact, this is the key test of the maturity of an early-stage company founder.

When your company starts out, you are hunting for validation, for a niche. You conduct small-scale experiments, involving marketing campaigns and product prototypes/demos. You then gather feedback and hopefully find a segment or two where the value proposition is easy to demonstrate, the need is urgent, and there is money available to solve the problem. You then double down on those segments. First, work your tail off to get anchor, referenceable customers, and then use those to streamline and accelerate the sales process. All the while, the product team is conducting small-scale experiments to identify the next couple of segments to target.

At least, that's how things should go. In practice, this discipline is very hard to achieve, and organizational alignment falls directly as a consequence of not following this disciplined approach. I've seen a couple of key areas that lead to a lack of alignment in the organization:

• Failure to set up clear, time-bound success (and failure) criteria. Early-stage companies do need to experiment; its unclear up front in most cases where you should be selling your product, who the ideal customer is etc. However, too often these experiments are not controlled. Without an up-front definition of when to consider the experiment a success, and when to walk away, its too easy to be led into one rat-hole after another, where success is just over the horizon, just one demo away. A common case is when you're able to get a toe-hold into a large enterprise and keep trying to accommodate their every request for information, for endless meetings, for product enhancements etc, without a clear idea of the end game. While the sale may eventually happen, the opportunity cost for the organization is immense.

• Trying to do too much. You've conducted a couple of experiments, and found a couple of areas in which your product might add value. However, these areas don't have a lot to do with each other. You might rationalize this away and find connections where none really exist, but really you know that you've come to a key decision-point. Do I invest in solving problem X or problem Y? The thing is: you have to pick and quickly align the organization behind your choice. If you don't, the default trajectory is that there will be people in the organization who try to solve each problem, and the organization eventually splinters.
  

Alignment is relatively easy to test for: ask your marketing and sales people what they think the company does. Then ask your engineers. Ask the back office folks: finance, adminsitration, HR. Ask your customers. Ask analysts and the press. Ask them once every quarter. If the responses are roughly the same, then congratulations! You've kept the organization aligned. If not, don't fool yourself - you've got a serious problem and you need to address it as quickly as possible. Alignment is relatively easy to test for, but I don't see it happening too often. Could it be because we don't particularly want to know the answer?

Resources for Entrepreneurs at Stanford

The fact that there are so many resources for entrepreneurs available online is both a blessing and a curse. It's hard to know which sites to focus on, and how to make sense of sometimes contradictory advice. I will not attempt to provide a comprehensive list here - it'll be obsolete as soon as it's published. Instead, I would like to point you to some entrepreneurship resources provided by my alma mater, Stanford University. There is a lot of great information, videos, podcasts among other resources, all available freely and online. Take a look at these sites - there's great information available for you here:

• Stanford Entrepreneurship Network. The umbrella organization for all entrepreneurship-related groups within Stanford.
  

• Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES). Lots of great information. Particularly recommended are the weekly newsletter that highlights entrepreneurial activity in the Bay Area, and the Thought Leaders seminar series (of which, more below).
  

• Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Stanford University. Deals with all things entrepreneurial at Graduate School of Business. Lots of research papers, videos of speeches given by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and an "Entrepreneur Resource Database" that connects entrepreneurs with potential partners or investors.

• Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. The lectures are free and open to the public; they occur every Wednesday from 4:30 to 5:30PM at the Skilling Auditorium at Stanford. If you can't go, the lectures are all available online, along with handouts and other supplemental material.
  

• Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Stanford University. Deals with all things entrepreneurial at the Engineering School. So far not a lot of useful material for entrepreneurs - most of the presentations have to do with teaching entrepreneurship - but stay tuned.

Can entrepreneurship be learned? Probably not, but you can certainly benefit from understanding what others have done, and forming your own pattern recognition rules.

This Just In: Indian VC Investment Doubles in 2006

From a new report produced by the US-India Venture Capital Association, Venture Capital firms in India invested $508 million in 92 deals in 2006. That's an average deal size of $5.5 million, which shows the bias towards growth capital rather than risk capital. These numbers are just about double the 2005 numbers of $268 million in 44 deals.

Peter Bamkole's MISFIT Framework

The mission statement of this blog is to examine the effects of innovation in developing economies. It's ended up becoming very focused on India, mostly because of my own background and experience. I will attempt to remedy this as much as I can and provide a broader perspective. I plan to bring in guest bloggers from Brazil, South Africa and China in the coming months. But let's start with Nigeria.

The Nigerian government has recognized the importance of entrepreneurship in their economic development, and has made its study required for all university students. Leaving aside the irony of government mandated entrepreneurship, it is a worthy cause. To promote entrepreneurship in Nigeria, the government set up an organization called Enterprise Development Services, funded by, among others, the World Bank and HP Nigeria.

Peter Bamkole, General Manager, Enterprise Development Services, was in the US recently, and spoke about the challenges of setting up the conditions to support entrepreneurship and innovation in Nigeria. It's very interesting reading, particularly his method of analyzing the conditions that negatively affect entrepreneurship. He calls it the "MISFIT" framework. It's an acronym that expands to:

• M – Market. How do you provide people access to markets and an understanding of the requirements of that market? For example, how is a small business owner in Nigeria to tackle the US market? Where does she get information about regulations, for example?

• I – Infrastructure. Lack of predictable and stable power supply; high transportation costs.

• S – Support Services. Support organizations that provide mentorship and guidance to entrepreneurs are too few and far between to provide the level of service needed.
  

• F – Finance. Lack of risk capital available to entrepreneurs. Some of this is also due to entrenched mindset of debt vs equity, since that was the only option for a long time.
  

• I – Information. As Mr. Bamkole puts it: "lack of access to information significantly reduces the motivation to venture. In the USA and other developed countries, information abounds. This in no small way helps entrepreneurs make “informed” decisions when venturing. They can research the sector/industry they are about to venture into and the best strategy to adopt, etc. Where there is no access to information, it's like venturing in the dark."

• T – Technology. The entrepreneur lacks access to the tools to drive efficiency and productivity gains.
  

The interview is worth reading and/or listening to, and the MISFIT framework applies to all developing economies to one degree or another. Good luck to you Mr. Bamkole!

50 Most Important People on the Web?

PC World has a list of the "50 Most Important People on The Web." Yes, we all know that these lists are marketing gimmicks and not serious attempts at analysis and measurement of influence. Still, it's a lot of fun to go through them. This list is interesting because it contained names I had never heard of before and because it has informative blurbs against each entry. While there will be endless quibbling about the choices in this list, there was one stark reality that leapt out at me: the lack of non-US spots on the list. I could count only five:

• #13 Henry Chon, CEO of Cyworld. The Korean site that inspired MySpace.
• #15 Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the creators of Kazaa, Skype and now Joost.
• #20 Jack Ma, COO of Alibaba.com. Business to business portal and control of Yahoo! China.
• #43 Mikko H. Hypponen, F-Secure. Finnish security maven.
• #48 Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, Iraqi bloggers. Writing about the situation in Iraq from the ground in Baghdad.

There's no question that the vast majority of content, as well as underlying infrastructure and tools, come from the United States. Even so, just 10% of the total list representing the world outside of the US seems like a very low number to me. Keep in mind that the US accounts for about 20% of all internet users and is growing slower than every other region in the world.

I'm sure the compilers of the list had no plan to consciously exclude, but I really hope to see this number increase over time.

SMS is the Platform

A good friend of mine, Rishi Bhargava, recently returned from a trip to India. He shares my interest in technology, innovation, and the emerging Indian market. We had a long chat after he returned and he had some very interesting observations, which I'm going to summarize here:

• SMS is the Platform. We already know about the importance of mobile devices to technology adoption in India, but my friend made an even more pointed observation: your product or service has to be accessible via SMS to have any chance of gaining a large user base. Even when people buy data-enabled smartphones, they often have no interest in mastering a new interface when SMS is familiar and easy-to-use. For example, jewelers are paying for SMS-based alerts for price changes in precious metals. These same people are not familiar with the internet and are unlikely to be early adopters of an internet-based marketplace for precious metals.
  

• Lack of Trust Hinders Adoption. The medium for social networking is the clearest indication of the generation gap. In India, for people in their 30's or older, social networks are largely physical. Business is done in this way and social relations are conducted in this way. It's a perfectly rational response to the lack of effective remediation and redress. If you got cheated out of some money, how would you get it back? The police are often inept and/or corrupt and the court system is notoriously slow moving. The only rational thing to do is to minimize your risk by dealing only with people in your social network. Today's teenagers are comfortable moving their social networks online, but this generally tends to reflect their physical networks. The same issue of trust, just in a different medium.

• Internet Connectivity is Cumbersome. Beyond a small number of tech-savvy users in large cities, the internet has largely not touched people's lives in a meaningful manner. Even when people sign up for email accounts, they don't check them on a regular basis (and certainly not at the frequency that has become the norm in the US). Setting up and managing a broadband connection can still be cumbersome. Customer service at providers like BSNL and VSNL are universally acknowledged to be terrible. Even providers such as Airtel are getting poor reviews in this department. This has resulted in a cottage industry of "computer service" technicians who often do nothing more than apply the latest Windows patch. Still, they are needed to provide peace of mind to the non tech-savvy. Pricing plans are still archaic in terms of pricing by bandwidth usage (as if people actually know their expected bandwidth usage!) This entire process has to become a lot more streamlined before we can expect wider adoption.
  

This Time It's Different...

I keep hearing about how this time is different. There will be no repeat of the 2001 bust. The reasoning, as I understand it, goes something like this: we learned our lesson the last time, clear evidence of a business model is a prerequisite this time around, its cheaper to start a company now, so risk is more widely spread, and so on. However, all that VC money still has to go somewhere, and I see more examples of "irrational exuberance" than before. There are two classes of companies that I think are leading indicators of an overly lax investment climate:

• Great products with no business model.
• A feature trying to pass off as a product.

(The third class - "really bad companies" - is, unfortunately, a lagging indicator; whether a company belongs in this class or not is only clear after the fact)

Just in the last 24 hours, I came across two companies that fall into these categories. There are many more where this came from:

• Virtual Ubiquity. They bill themselves as the "first real word processor for the web" and you have to love that chutzpah. Based on Flash rather than HTML, it's been getting rave reviews and it does look very cool. Check out the screenshots in the GigaOM post about them. Very cool product, but what's the business model? Paid subscriptions seem unlikely, given the number of free alternatives. An ad-based model is possible, but a tough slog given the difficulty of driving enough traffic to make it worthwhile. Interoperability with other online productivity apps will be an issue. Online suites will have an edge here, even with a smaller feature set.

• Seriosity. Allows the creation of an email "economy." Everyone is allocated a certain amount of a virtual currency, and you can attach different amounts of your "money" to emails you send to indicate its importance. It's an interesting, though overly complex, approach to the real problem of information overload. But this is not a product - it's a feature. $6MM in VC funding to date.

Will it really be different this time around?

Partying Like It's 2001

Startups seem to be sprouting everywhere these days, like mushrooms. Silicon Valley is back! If you feel like you're hearing about more interesting new startups these days than before, you're right. There's money sloshing around as VC investment in 2006 hit $25 billion, its highest level in five years. Silicon Valley got more VC money in 2006 than at any time since 2001. Then there's the more tangible effects for people who work in the valley.

There's jobs for the taking. The number of jobs in Silicon Valley increased for the first time since 2001, with a net 33,000 increase in 2006.



Incomes are on the rise. Median household income rose 6.5% in 2006, after falling about a percent in the period 2001 - 2004.



If you're interested in exploring statistics about Silicon Valley, take a look at the 2007 Index of Silicon Valley, an excellent statistical summary of the area.

Diagnosing Startup Problems

One of the classic issues that every startup is faced with is identifying causality in the face of uncertainty and noise. This is true for both positive and negative outcomes. For example:

• A large bank just bought your software - great news! But can you isolate the specific reasons why they bought and make it repeatable? Or is it a special situation or relationship driven sale?

• If sales are stalling, what's the issue? Is it the product, the market or sales execution? If the organization is heading towards dysfunction, this often leads to finger pointing and a revolving door among the executive team.

I recently came across one of the best posts I've ever read on the subject. Will Price of Hummer Winblad, has a post called "Isolating Causality: Bad Market or Bad Company." This should be required reading for entrepreneurs and employees in any early-stage startup.

The case of the missing address book

Tim O'Reilly blogs about the missing Web 2.0 address book. He says:

What really needs to be done is not just to connect the various social networks that do exist in internet network-of-networks style, but also to social-network enable our real social network apps: our IM, our email, our phone. Where, I keep asking vendors, is the Web 2.0 address book?

Spot-on Tim! Why is it that, in spite of all this emphasis on community and collaboration, managing my address book is still painful? The various elements of our communications tools need to be linked together effectively, and the best place for that link is in an address book. My address book is still largely an offline entity, despite some rudimentary efforts at linking it to my online world (e.g. the Outlook Toolbar from LinkedIn). I can import my Outlook contacts into Gmail, but I can't keep them in sync. Plaxo was a promising start to solving this problem, but they became yet another social network, not the linking mechanism between networks.

What should a web 2.0 address book look like? Here are some characteristics I think are key:

• Always available. It goes without saying - I should have my address book available online and offline, on all my computers and mobile devices, and they should always be in sync. This has been an area of active investment, and solutions are getting better, but its still cumbersome to keep things in sync.

• Easily portable. I own my address book, and no vendor should use their functionality, no matter how cool, for lock-in. Ideally the address book should store data in a human-readable format to begin with. If not, I should always be able to export into a variety of standard formats.
  

• Proactive. Today's model requires my active participation for every contact that gets stored in my address book. A good address book should anticipate some of my needs and act for me. For example, if I've exchanged a couple of emails with someone who is not in my address book, it should try and find that person's contact info (e.g. from LinkedIn, or some other source) and add it to my address book (perhaps asking me for confirmation first). If someone updates an email address on orkut and that person is connected to me, my address book should know about it and act appropriately. Plaxo tried to do some of this, but their fatal flaw was that they were not neutral. Which brings me to my next point.

• Neutral. The provider of this functionality must be neutral in the areas of social networking and collaboration. If LinkedIn provided this functionality they would attempt to lock my address book to their network. If Yahoo IM provided this functionality, they would likely restrict access to Gmail, and so on. The address book provider must not have a stake in the network, but only in the links between them.
  
  
• Mediate trust relationships. I already have multiple places in which I've placed indications of trust. Anyone linked to me on LinkedIn list is a trusted relationship. Anyone on my Yahoo IM list is probably also a trusted relationship. Ditto for people I've had multiple email exchanges with. How can I aggregate this information in one place and manage trust centrally. One way in which this could be useful, for example, is that recommendation sites could use my trust information to appropriately weight the recommendations I got. Amazon.com would recommend stuff not only based on their collaboration filtering techniques (essentially statistical analysis) but also factor in my trusted relationships. If I was looking for an Italian restaurant in Palo Alto, I'd much rather hear what a few trusted people have to say about it than a mass of strangers.

• Geo-aware. The contacts in my address book usually have location information stored in the record. Why is this information not used for a visual representation of my address book? For example, if I'm going to Chicago for a weekend trip, wouldn't it be great to map my friends in Chicago, so that I might get in touch with them while I'm there? And wouldn't it be even better if I could find restaurants in the vicinity so that we could meet for dinner at a mutually convenient location.

• Presence-aware. My address book should have a notion of where I am, and take appropriate action based on my preferences. E.g. point out a good used-book store in the neighborhood (I'm always up for browsing in a good used-book store). Or alert me that a friend is nearby and I might want to get in touch.

How would this ideal address book provider make money? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. :-)

Daily Product Fix: Zink

The only reason for this post is that I recently came across a fantastic product.




Inkless, portable printing in a beautifully designed device - how cool is that! The company responsible for it - Zink - was started by ex-Polaroid folks. Endgadget has a nice writeup here.

India Startup Tracker: The Wisdom of Crowds

As someone who follows the goings-on in the Indian start-up world, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the activity in this area. This is great! That's a good problem to have. In an attempt to keep track of it all, I've decided to start tracking companies, investments and exits in a spreadsheet. No big deal, you say. True, but wait - there's a twist. The spreadsheet is online and I'd like to make it available for everyone to update. Like a good software design, let's parallelize to scale up. You can view the spreadsheet here. The spreadsheet has two worksheets:

• Silicon Valley 2.0: List of Indian start-ups, and funding details, if applicable.
• Wall Street 2.0: List of M&A activity and IPO's in the start-up world.
  

I'm open to changing the names - please send me suggestions! I will continue to work on it; I hope that if we all keep this updated collaboratively, we'll have the best, most up-to-date source of information available in any one place.

Some ground rules, and a mini FAQ below.

Ground rules

• Restrict the list to start-ups: This is meant as a listing of start-up companies, not larger companies getting funded by late-stage private equity. What's the exact definition of a start-up? There isn't one - use your judgment.
• When listing funding details, please provide a source. And it goes without saying that the spreadsheet should only contain publicly available information.

Other than that, let's build this together and see what develops.

FAQ

Q: How do I edit the spreadsheet?
A: Send me an email at: rahul [dot] roychowdhury [at] gmail [dot] com and I will give you permission to edit the spreadsheet.

Q: Why use Google Spreadsheets rather than a wiki?
A: Good question, and its something I thought about. Wikis generally provide better collaboration than Google Spreadsheets currently does. On the other hand, having the information in tabular form will allow some interesting trend analysis and summary displays once the data set gets large enough. And even if Google Spreadsheets doesn't currently provide charting and analysis tools (#1 on my Google wish list!) you can always download the data to Excel and do the analysis. In general, I think this capability outweighs other considerations.

Q: The format looks pretty awful. Can I change it?
A: By all means.

Proto.in: Showcasing startups in India

Proto.in, the Indian equivalent to the DEMO conference in the US, took place last weekend in Chennai, India. Blogger tggokul provides a good summary and Swaroop gives his thoughts on the companies presenting. The complete list of participating companies is available from the proto.in website.

Flips and leapfrogs: Evaluating new technologies

Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee has a thought-provoking post, A Technology Flip Test, in which he discusses a useful new framework for evaluating technology. Imagine a world in which the new emerging technology trend (e.g. software as a service) is actually the incumbent technology. Would the current incumbent technology (e.g. traditional enterprise software) make inroads against it? Seems to me that is a useful construct for evaluating technology trends in general, and for leapfrogging trends in particular.