Vote for it : Belgaum IT company in top 30 of hottest start ups in India !!

Right now it is in 9'th position ...do vote for it by dec 22 in TATA NEN Hottest Startup

Vayavya Labs of Belgaum in top 30 for TATA NEN Hottest Startup Awards

The TATA NEN Hottest Startup Awards are a result of the combined efforts of TATA, a rapidly growing business group in India with significant international operations, and the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), a non-profit organization, and India's leader in entrepreneurship education.

Vayavya Labs, (Tata NEN hottest startup details) a Belgaum based IT/ Internet/ Software developer has been nominated in the top 30 hottest startups. Voting lines will open from 25 Nov and will be open until December 22. 5 winners will selected after December 22.

Vayavya Labs offers tools, which target the semiconductor, & design services firms. The flagship product DDGen (US patent pending) attempts to de-mystify the device driver development for embedded platforms.

why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India

Gaurav makes a very good case why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India after Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).

Social media practitioners often talk about it in cryptic “conversation is an art form” terms, but you can break down the social media delivery process in six discrete steps that correspond to the oft-quoted Listen -> Understand -> Engage model:-

1. Data collection
2. Data mining
3. Data analysis
4. Insight delivery
5. Consulting
6. Solution delivery

If you look hard at these six steps, you’ll find that many of them are driven by dynamics that make them very susceptible to outsourcing –

Sudhakar Ram writes below in his column about the first two waves after that i have posted column on third wave of outsourcing !! interesting read go on

As a participant in and observer of the Indian IT industry for over two decades, I can clearly see that software and services exports from India have gone through two waves and that a Third Wave is now unfolding.

Wave 1, which we can trace to the 80s and 90s, clearly established that Indian IT professionals were competent and could be trusted to deliver world-class work. This was the staff augmentation era of the industry, largely serviced through onsite services.

Wave 2, starting off in the mid-90s and currently at its peak, established India as an offshore programming destination. With labor arbitrage as the basic value proposition, Indian companies established large offshore development centers that had competent technical staff, mature CMM processes and world-class infrastructure. While the trigger for Wave 2 was the offshore initiatives by companies like GE, Motorola, Nortel etc., the Y2K bug gave it the necessary momentum. Although things slowed a bit after the dotcom bust, the shrinking IT budgets actually gave an impetus to large Fortune 500 companies to use offshore centers as a mainstream sourcing option.

India Making Millions Servicing U.S. Social Media Ecosystem

By Daya Baran at October 19, 2008 8 Comments

While U.S. companies struggle to figure out how to monetize social media, India’s tech industry has quietly figured out a way to make hundreds of millions (maybe billions) by servicing it. Everything from simple comments on blog posts, to breaking sophisticated Google CAPTCHAs, Craigslist listings, Gmail invites, Yahoo personals, MySpace profiles, YouTube uploads, Facebook friends, and now I hear Twitter tweets are all being performed in India on behalf of social networking sites, blogs, photo sharing, video, and other social media and Web 2.0 sites that depend heavily on online advertising as a revenue source are using these services to boost traffic and users.

For a mere $2 a thousand CAPTCHAs can be solved and a thousand blog comments or MySpace friend requests can be sent generating lots of traffic and links for that property and hence, increasing its online ad revenue. Workers in India process the data using CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

In fact, entire social media and online advertising campaigns featuring cool graphics, widgets, RSS feeds, and other sitewide interactive features are being created and executed from India. “Anything that can be outsourced is being outsourced today in India,” said Rajdeep Sahrawat, vice president of Nasscom, or the National Association of Software Service Companies, an Indian software industry trade organization that closely monitors trends in outsourcing.

India is no longer a call center outsourcing destination. It has rapidly become a global hub servicing the U.S. social media ecosystem and as well as the higher knowledge industries. Services such as tax filing and preparation, medical diagnoses, legal work, and financial portfolio analysis are turning to India for sophisticated knowledge processing and analysis work. A start-up that provides such services is PreMedia Global and in two years, it has grown from a brother-and-sister operation to a company with 900 employees. Initially, they considered launching a call-center operation, said co-founder Kapil Viswanathan, who studied engineering at Stanford University. However, they quickly saw that the nature of outsourcing was changing. “High-end, knowledge-based services — that’s where the growth is coming from,” he said. “We think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The California Fair Trade Coalition said virtually any job that uses a computer could be outsourced, and it argues that U.S. trade laws should be changed to make it more difficult for companies to send work overseas. “Those countries have large and rapidly growing pools of talented people with much lower incomes than people with similar skills in the United States”, Imelda Abarca, director of the coalition. But other experts say the threat to high-end American jobs is overstated. India remains “an undergraduate factory,” said Raffiq Dossani, a Stanford University researcher who studies higher education in the South Asian country. “This limits the kind of work that can be outsourced to India.”

Pervez Sikora, a former U.S. newspaper executive who is now chief operating officer for 2AdPro Media Solutions said he’s been approached by Silicon Valley companies that want to outsource their marketing work. It is not just U.S. companies that are flocking to India. European, Japanese as well as Arab companies are tapping into India’s legions of highly trained graduates that India’s vast college system produces every year. But the number of U.S. companies using these services is expected to increase due to the financial crisis which is forcing them to cut costs.

And, it is no longer simply tech companies that are looking to cut costs using these services - Disney, DreamWorks, and drugs manufacturing companies are also tapping the India pool. “We are getting multiple inquiries a day”, said Todd Brownrout, chief marketing officer at 2AdPro, which expects to expand from 350 employees to 1,000 next year. Two years ago, it was a tough sell to convince newspaper executives that someone sitting halfway across the globe could produce ads that are accurate and on-time. Sanjiv Gupta, chief executive of Hyderabad-based Pressmart, which provides Internet technology services to publications, argues this outsourcing model can be applied to editorial content. “It’s outsourcing of creativity,” he said.

While the debate continues over just which American jobs may be vulnerable to outsourcing, executives like Sikora acknowledge that the new global economic order is forcing Americans to reposition their careers. “People have to understand how jobs are changing and start reinventing themselves,” he said. “No one will be able to stop this now.”

Where Are The JOBS In India

An interesting read in TOI today !! Purely shows how outsourcing/growth of india is still Intact

Where Are The JOBS In India

Citigroup on Tuesday cut 53,000 more jobs, triggering fears of more layoffs by other companies across industries. TOI, however, has decided to be contrarian. Instead of only writing about pink slips, it hunted out companies that are actually hiring. Here’s the lowdown on

FINANCE & CONSULTANCY
SBI to hire 25,000 new hands, according to bank chairman O P Bhat. The fresh recruitment will be done this fiscal – 20,000 in the clerical cadre and 5,000 supervisory staff
Bank of India to hire 10,000 over the next few months. This, on top of over 30,000 fresh recruitments in 2008-09. In the next 2 yrs, the bank plans to take in 75,000 Accenture will hire 10,000 people in India by 2010, says COO Stephen J Rohleder
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, top global mgmt consultants, looking to hire 3,500 in India in 3 yrs
MetLife, a new private insurance co., will recruit 30,000 agents and 2,000 managers by March 2009, says CEO Rajesh Relan
BPO
Aegis BPO Services will add 1,000 people per month this fiscal
CAMPUS HIRING
IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta say all their students have got placements for next year
INFOTECH
Tata Consultancy Services to hire 30,000-35,000 people this year, says a spokesperson. TCS made 24,789 technical campus offers for 2009-10, a 13% jump over this year
Infosys is sticking to plans of hiring 25,000 people this fiscal, says CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan. Infosys has made around 20,000 offers for next year
Satyam plans to hire 8,000-10,000 people this fiscal, according to its HR head, S V Krishnan
MANUFACTURING
L&T will hire 10,000 people over the next 3 yrs, according to CMD A M Naik
Maruti has decided to hire 1,000 fresh hands despite the sluggishness in the auto sector, says a company spokesman

Is 3G and WIMAX disruptive for India?

As India is preparing for the rollout end of this year to mid next year of 3G and WiMax services it represents a significant move forward for the Indian mobile telecoms Industry. I could find some very positive news that India to have 230 m 3G subscribers by 2013

3G and variations of it first got rolled out in Japan back in 2001. 3G essentially allows you to shift data faster over the mobile phone network thereby opening up many new services and possibilities (such as video telephony and high speed data services for downloading information and surfing the web). WiMax is similar to home wireless technology. Where-as home wifi only reaches out a few hundred feet, WiMax has a much wider range many across kilimeter. It also offers speeds that are far greather than 3G. To WiMax in to reality, just image that you can be anywhere in the city of Mumbai, lets say, and flip open your laptop and get on to the web instantly regardless of where you stand. Work from the park, the local Cafe Coffe Day, from home or at the airport terminal. WiMax allows this and that too at high speed.

The advantage of 3G to mobile phone operators is that there are a lot of phone models in the market aleady which already support 3G out-of-the-box. With further investment in installing 3G transmission towers the basic infrastructure for 3G in India can be rapidly rolled out. WiMax, on the other hand, could take a little longer to become widespread. The equipment necessary to receive WiMax signals isn’t readily available in India yet and transmissions in the WiMax spectrum is some-what limited to date. In India, Tata Communications has been experiementing with a WiMax trial and Bangalore and hopes to expand this across Mumbai and Delhi once spectrum has been allocated.

What really interests me is that WiMax has the potential to reach remote rural populations in India where existing mobile coverage is patchy or non-existant. This would open up the possibility of bridging the digital divide and binging the advantages of access to the Internet to whole new communities. History has shown that Internet access in rural areas of India has been mostly a good thing with a great examples being the e-Choupal project, which enables farmers to get price of grain and seed direct from market instead of going through the middle man via internet terminal in their villages and farms.

Access to the internet in rural areas also spreads the influence of better and wider education to all of India’s population, helping to unlock the latant tallent of a youthful and eager work force. Ultimately, however, as technologies like WiMax and 3G reach the masses, it will enable India to innovate and invent in ways it hasn’t done so before. Entepreneurs up and down the country as well as would-be entrepreneurs will suddenly have a new medium to release their ideas through. When I look at the divide between the uptake of broadband internet and mobile telephony in India, the choice today is clear. More Indian’s today own and use a mobile phone and the number of mobile subscribers dwarfs the number of broadband intenet subscribers. Everyone from your ricksha-wala to duba-wala, city slicker to gardener, cleaner to call centre worker now owns a mobile phone and the uptake is unstopable.

Although market saturation of mobile phone ownership is some years off in India, like its global counterparts, Indian telco’s will eventually start to feel the pinch and one way to sustain and increase revenue is to expand sevice offerings.

3G and WiMax will enable Indian telco’s to offer their subscriber base a multitude of new services including premium video content, video to video chat between hand-sets (and cross network), selling software to mobile phone business users and innovating in the burgeoning mobile phone games industry. Like it’s console games counterpart, mobile gaming is booming in International makets and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case in India once the networks enable people to download large files to their phones. Culturally, Indian’s differ in many ways to the world at large and one of those differences is the high value placed on education. Nintendo already realises this and its DS games console, coupled with the plethora of recent educational titles that you play on the Nintendo DS is taking off like hot-cakes. This is a natural appeal and fit with the Indian psychi and mind-set.

Finally, 3G will allow Indian users to upload photos and videos from their phones to the web and partipicate in the mobile social networking space beyond the confines of SMS and becomes what is coined as citizen journalists. Indian teleco’s will probably offer a selection of data packages to subscibers, although like the west, most teleco’s will no-doubt standardise data tarrifs on flat rate “eat as much as you like” structures to reduce confusion and streamline billing.

There are countless ways the Indian telco’s and consumers will benefit from 3G and WiMax and I cannot wait for this market to blossom in India. With over 71 countries now offering 3G to its consumers, it’s time for India to join the 3G club and perhaps suplant it altogether with WiMax.

Go India go !

Nandan Nilekani: The 6 things that changed India

Source : http://churumuri.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/nandan-nilekani-the-6-things-that-changed-india/

Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of Infosys Technologies and Thomas L. Friedman’s muse for The World is Flat, is working on his own book titled Imagining India; his attempt, as he puts it, to address a gap in understanding India.

Delivering the global leader lecture at Johns Hopkins University’s school of advanced international studies last week, Nilekani spoke of the six things that changed in the mindset of india, “which is really responsible for the dynamism, the vitality, the energy you see today in India,” reports Aziz Haniffa in India Abroad.

1) Earlier, population was looked at as a burden and a lot of things that happened in the 1960s and ’70s—like family planning and sterilisation and the Emergency and so forth—were related to the belief that population was getting out of control and that it was actually a problem to have a large population. Today, we think of it as human capital. And, this has become even more critical because India is going to be the only young country in an ageing world and that really makes a huge difference.

2) Entrepreneurs are no longer viewed with suspicion but as icons of economic growth. Since 1991, there has been a huge expansion of enterprise, there is a far bigger role for the private sector and for industry. India today has the largest pool of entrepreneurial talent outside the United States. Indian entrepreneurs are not afraid of liberalisation any more. They are very confident and globally competitive and they are not only investing abroad, they are buying companies abroad.

3) English is no longer viewed as an imperial language that has to be jettisoned but as a language of aspiration that has to be really cultivated. All the political angst about English has disappeared largely because of the growth in the economy, the growth of outsourcing, the growth of jobs. More and more people, whether they are in villages or small towns, are realising that if they want to participate in the global economy and bring more income to their lives, they have to learn English. And the political system has accepted this because more and more states which had stopped teaching English are now going back to teaching English from class one.

4) The notion of democracy has undergone a major transformation from the time of india’s Independence. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was really a top-down idea. It was an idea of the leaders who had a certain vision of the kind of country they had to create, and it was given or gifted to all the people who may not have necessarily understood the value and import of what was happening. Today, it has gone on to become a bottom-up democracy where everybody understands their democratic rights. You see people taking charge and doing things without waiting for the state to do the job.

5) Technology has helped India leap-frog several decades from a very antiquated system to a very modern system. What people don’t realise is it has played as much a role in India’s internal development as it has in terms of the $50 billion in IT exports. The entire national elections of 2004 across were done digitally using electronic voting machines—there was no paper. Today, thanks to technology, India has the most modern stock markets in the world. The mobile phone has become accessible to everybody. It is touching every individual and we are seeing more and more applications, causing a quantum leap in productivity, fuelling economic growth.

6) India has adopted a progressive view of globalisation. Fundamentally the confidence that India has gained has made our worldview on globalisation far more positive. Our companies have become globally competitive and are willing to go out. More and more people are beginning to become far more comfortable with globalisation and they are realising the benefits of an open economy, of having their workers and their people all over the world, and of Indian companies exporting capital abroad.

Would a US Recession Hammer the Indians?

Would a US Recession Hammer the Indians?
Posted by: Steve Hamm on February 11
The threat of a US recession looms large globally. There’s no question that as America’s huge and hungry consumption machine starts to sputter, other economies around the world will suffer. My colleague, Nandina Lakshman, writes in a BusinessWeek Online story published today that some of the Indian outsourcing companies are preparing for a recession by cutting salary incentives and otherwise tightening up on expenses. I actually don’t expect a US recession to do much harm to the top Indian software services outfits. It’s true that they got hit hard by the US recession of 2001/2002. But I think that was a very different situation. For starters, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and the others were not that well known or credible five years ago. But that has changed now. They’re trusted by US and Northern European clients—depended on, in fact. Another factor: There was a lot of uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Business spending stalled. This time, it’s consumer spending that is faltering. Businesses will want to cut costs to deal with the effects of the consumer slowdown. I believe they’re likely to increase their use of low-cost Indian services, rather than cutting back on them.

US IT Jobs: Which Way is the Wind Blowing?
Posted by: Steve Hamm on February 13
US software programming jobs took a real wacking at the end of the last recession, but bounced back since—in spite of the offshoring trend and the rise of the Indian tech services industry. Now we’re heading into another recession, it seems. Will US software programmers lose out again? I’m betting no. The reason: The impending retirement of the babyboomers. Already, a lot of federal government programmers are retiring, since they’re reached the retirement age of 55. This factor—combined with low graduating rates for computer science majors—is already causing a shortfall in US programming talent. I believe that whatever cost cutting that’s done by companies during a recession will be more than offset by the software talent shortfall. Five years from now, US programmers will be in even greater demand.
New data supporting these conclusions came in this week from the IT Governance Institute. In its IT governance Global Status Report-2008, the ITGI reported the results of its survey of global IT leaders. Fifty-eight percent of the respondents said "insufficient number of staff" was a big problem--putting it at the top of problems they listed. That's a substantial increase from 2005, when 35% said they face staffing shortages. Remember, this is a global survey, so the shortage isn't just in the U.S. John Lainhart, the principle advisor on IT governance to the ITGI, told me that the baby boomers retiring is the big culprit. With newly trained programmers in short supply, he said, "We'll have to retrain people coming out of professions that aren't doing so well."
I noticed that President Bush's budget proposal slashes the labor department budget, so there isn't much hope for federal retraining programs stepping into the breach.
Lainhart mentioned an innovative program at Penn State that seems like it's on the right track. They're teaching computer science students to be consultants rather than coding grunts. People in the program have to study a foreign language in addition to the major programming languages. In their course work they operate as teams and work on creating technology solutions for customers. Their exams are team-based, too.
This type of program seems sure to appeal to students, and also will give people the skills they need for sustainable, high-pay careers. But, to fill the staffing gap, we'll need a lot more of this kind of thing.

A new angle on distance learning

[Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/bangaloretigers/archives/2007/04/a_new_angle_on.html#more ]

Anything that can be done over the Web can be done in India--so why not tutoring? I recently came across a company in Bangalore that's doing just that. The company, Tutorvista, started operations in a beta sort of way in late 2005, but only started marketing aggressively late last year.
This is a really interesting company. It offers families in North America and Europe a pretty compelling financial deal: unlimited tutoring in math and English for $100 a month. This is the first Indian off-shoring service aimed at consumers.
The tutors, 500 of them so far, work from their homes in 23 Indian cities. They all have masters degrees or dual bachelors degrees in education and a specialty. The tutors conduct online sessions with their students that include the ability to speak to one another via VOIP and to share an electronic whiteboard. So far, Tutorvista has about 2000 students. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but Ganesh Krishnan, the company’s CEO, says it’s ahead of the business plan. “We’ve made something that was unaffordable to the common man affordable—thanks to low-priced Indian labor and the Internet,” he says.
The deal certainly seems good for customers. Rather than pay local tutors $40 to $50 per one-hour session, they get all they can consume in a month for $100.
The business model is pretty sweet for Tutorvista, too. It recruits and trains tutors online and pays them $300 to $400 a month. It doesn’t spend much on marketing; most of its customers come to it via word of mouth.
The company faces some stiff challenges. How does a small, little-known Indian company convince people in the US and UK to shell out $100 for tutoring over the Internet? It’s all so new and unproven.
Still, Krishnan is confident enough in a gradual buildup in business that he’s already experimenting with new services. He’s piloting an English-as-a-second-language program in Korea, and plans on eventually selling it worldwide. Plus he plans on offering Spanish tutoring worldwide as well—with the tutors in Argentina, Costa Rica and elsewhere.