Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Quikr, India’s leading horizontal classifieds player, has raised $6 million in series C funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), and returning investors, Omidyar Network, Matrix Partners India and eBay Inc. With this round of financing, Quikr has raised in excess of Rs 50 crore since inception. Norwest Venture Partners, which led the round, has invested about $4 million.

Quikr offers a web-based classifieds platform that addresses the needs of local communities in 40 cities across India. More than 8 million consumers visit Quikr every month to buy, sell, rent or find things.

Above figure compares the traction at Quickr, Sulekha and ClickIndia.

Interestingly NVP is an existing investor in Sulekha, another classified portal. Local classifieds portals are becoming hot favorites for investors. Earlier Helion invested in GETIT, Sequoia capital raised their equity in Justdial and NVP invested in OLX.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

If you get fun by kissing and sharing your tale ijustmadelove.com will take your fun at new level altogether. I am amazed to find the thought process which goes behind developing portal like this.

ijustmadelove.com allows users to upload details of the place where they did it (outdoors or indoor), the time, the positions (six graphic positions are listed) in which they did it, and much more. The site powered by Google maps shows countries around the world.

Once my ex CEO told me data is priceless and i am sure portal like this going to garner millions of users, in other words sites with such whacky ideas are developed to attract users and later business model is developed on top of it.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Virtual farmers exceeding the total number of real farmers, yes welcome to the world of social games, truly a paradigm shift they way we played games on PC. There are 82 million users who play Farmville once in a month and there are 32 million virtual farmers who play everyday.

Prominent players in social games are – Zynga, Playdom, Bigpoint and PLayfish and popular social games are Farmville, Mafia Wars, Mobsters.  Zynga is juggernaut in developing social games, 5 out of top 10 games are from Zynga’s factory.

Even Myspace is feeling left out in this social games and has announced MySpace Games experience at this month’s conference aiming to encourage game makers to cater to its online audience, can attract over 10 million players.

Why social games are growing in such a pace -

• First and foremost its free of cost, user doen’t need to spend on consoles like PSP, Xbox ect. Just need decent internet connection and account in social network like facebook.
• Games like Farmville are designed brilliantly, its highly engaging and user can keep on ploughing their virtual farm thought out the day. This is real stickiness. Hats off to Farmville team!!
• Being social it allows user like me to take my love of achievements one step further and share my accomplishments with a much wider group of friends.

WealthERP is a bangalore based startup which provides SaaS based wealth management cum financial services platform for wealth advisors and financial planners and distributors. Their platform covers multiple asset classes and allows advisors to plan, manage and analyze investments across assets and have a 360 view of their client’s investment portfolio. WealthERP is not a personal finance management portal and is not for end users.

WealthERP will help financial intermediaries increase the penetration of wealth management and financial products to rural and non-metro areas by providing them with an economical platform that is rich in features and functionality, without the hassles of owning the infrastructure.

Let’s analyze the pain points and gaps WealthERP is addressing -

• a) inadequate advisor and customer education
• b) emphasis on legacy investment products
• c) prohibitive economics of processing transactions and servicing customers
• d) legacy delivery systems
• e) high dependence upon commission based sales model.  Majority of the advisors do not have any software.  Usage of process driven tools for scientific financial planning and wealth management is lacking.   Advisors reach in non-metro and rural areas is very low.  Scalable and affordable technology solutions are very few.

WealthERP is founded by Monish Jamwal, he worked with Bank of New York and Credit Suisse before starting this venture.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Onward Mobility, a mobile apps development company raises money from Mumbai Angels. After a long hiatus mobile space is attracting VCs now. Onward Mobility develops smart and cutting edge apps that transforms simple phones phones into something altogether different, giving them abilities they never had before. Their products basically addresses the every step of phone usage right from managing calls to tracking the lost phone. Onward Mobility products are branded as MOBI and they have mainly 4 kinds of products -

Product Name – Functionality

• MobiCop – Mobile security, Data Protection, Remote Monitoring, Lost Phone tracker

This hoarding caught my attention and the next moment i captured it on my camera, someone seems to be cashing on the popularity of Chetan Bhagat. I am not sure Advertisers got the consent from CB. But looking at the Ad Its a smart marketing spoof.

You decide who’s the idiot

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Can you believe sites like 123Greetings can go public, its just simple flash based e-cards service provider with an inventory of 20k cards. I have used their service during my college days and you would have send cards to your friends via 123Greetings.  I was in  a impression that 123Greetings is US based portal and was excited and surprised to find its a product of Kolkotta based Intrasoft technologies. Its been in operation since 13 years

Let’s dig into the reasons which propelled 123Greetings IPO-  Its revenue depends only on online advertising. Currently, 65% revenue and 60% online traffic come from the US while the rest is from India, Its US #2 greeting site as well. Have a look at their monthly traction -

This is some mind blowing  statistics!!

According to its prospectus filed with the market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India, Intrasoft posted revenue of Rs21.38 crore and profit of Rs5.3 crore in the last fiscal. At the lower end of its price band of Rs137-145 per share, Intrasoft hopes to raise roughly Rs50 crore from the issue.

The firm’s market capitalization will thus hover around Rs200 crore—eight times its revenue for the past year, and nearly five times more than the net worth of the firm, which stood at Rs37.6 crore on 30 September 2009.

So moral of the story – company can go public if you are making money solely coming from advertisers

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Freemium is a business model that works by offering basic Web services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. In simple words Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc. then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

Things to consider before implementing Freemium business model-

• Freemium may work for u if u have: great long term retention rate, product value increases over time, low variable costs.
• Create a business service with business processes which is highly robust, so it is scalable and doesn’t need large numbers of people to grow.
• Analyse how user use your system and assess the data, you will come across gaps in the system which you can address through premium service and it means more sales.
• Make sure you show them the value of features and how they can leverage features coming with premium subscription.
• Have reasonable pricing for premium subscription, if its too high competitors can cause dent to your business. High free user base tends to keep away the competition.
• Tease users with data on premium stuff and thus continue to entice them.
• Dont try to target 40-50% user base to convert into premium users, 10% conversion is too good rate.

topCATcoaching is an online CAT  preparation portal which provides courseware, practise test, mock CATs. topCATcoaching is launched by Prism Education, Its a venture started by Manish Gulati an ex VP engineering at Infoedge. User needs to pay up for the courses they have subscribed for but there are some free courses as well like vocabulary builder which helps in improving vocabulary. Apart from courses they have forum where CAT aspirants can discuss anything related to CAT, personally i like service portals which have integrated forum for users to interact instilling sense of community.

Salient Features -:

• Original in-house developed copyrighted content suitable for web-learning
• In-house faculty to answer doubts 24×7
• Students can choose over 20 courses and
• The courses are available on internet, on CD (no internet required), mobile application developed in conjunction with Spice, printed postal correspondence course catering to students in remote areas.
• Students can access various reports based on difficulty level and time taken to answer each question, percentile for each question, sectional percentile and overall percentile.

Reliance Venture Asset Management India’s first and largest corporate venture capital firm and an arm of the Reliance ADA Group, today announced that it has successfully completed the first round of venture funding in Reverse Logistics Co, a technology enabled end-to-end reverse supply chain solutions company.  Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo are co-investors in this round of funding in Reverse Logistics Co. along with Reliance Venture Asset Management.

Reverse Logistics provides a one stop, technology enabled, comprehensive reverse logistics solutions for the Indian market. Reverse Logistics Co. understands that the power of reverse logistics is in data and so its solution’s backbone is its proprietary technology platform that provides end-to-end data visibility of the returned products from point of origin to its final disposition.  The company’s single goal is to help companies make their reverse logistics process a competitive advantage allowing them to focus on their core competency of delighting customers through world class products.

Reverse logistics refers to the backward supply chain network where a product moves from the end consumer to the manufacturer for reuse, disposal or surplus sale purposes with the rationale to increase overall efficiencies, the release added.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com