Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Sequoia Capital India has invested $8M in Fashionandyou, a flash sale and invitation only shopping site. Fashionandyou is 1 year old startup founded by Pearl Uppal(ex Yahoo director sales) and Harish Bahl of Smile Interactive (Tyroo, Zoomtra, Quasar media). FashionandYou offers its registered users deals from designers at significant discounts, through limited time sales

FashionandYou will infuse the funds in their technology, supply chain and CRM. The runaway success for FashionandYou is providing its users premium brands in perfumes, clothing line, apparels, watches, accessories, jewelry category at 40-70% discount. The only demerit is their slow delivery process, they have not been able to fasten it and generally it takes 3-4 weeks to receive the shipment. With competition picking up in this space and investments coming in they should be able to focus on speedy delivery.

Lets take a look at FashionandYou monthly traction-:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	–	420K
Unique visitors (users)	–	420K
Page views	–	5.5M
Total visits	–	830K
Avg visits per visitor	–	2
Avg time on site	–	9:10

99labels.com, Exclusively.in(which recently raised $2.8M from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners) and Bagittoday.com are main competitors for FashionandYou.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Blue star Infotech a provider of software solutions for the global mid-market space has launched a new Web 2.0 based Enterprise Social Computing (ESC) platform that will act as a catalyst to empower enterprises to innovate and facilitate co-creation of products and services, achieve better collaboration, information sharing and knowledge management. BSI will target enterprises primarily from the manufacturing and consumer goods sector.

The ESC platform, targeted towards the Indian mid market segment, is built on BSI’s Visibility, Control and Optimize (VCO) vision for the mid-market space. The platform has elements such as ‘Open Minds’ that will facilitate ideation, innovation and employee recognition across the enterprise in a highly organized and structured manner helping them to adopt best practices of their larger enterprise counterparts. Better information sharing will reduce duplication and encourage creation of information assets and their reusability, which will help medium sized enterprises gear up to scale up faster to compete in the current marketplace.

The ESC platform inherently carries strengths of fast paced and structured communication by way of Wikis, Forums and Workflows. The platform can also be integrated with external ERP systems and Office applications. Shared Calendars, Online meetings and effective workflows can enable remote offices/factories, etc to also work in a virtual office environment.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Cisco recently launched social media monitoring tool called SocialMiner.  It is a social media customer care solution that can help you proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites.

By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow to organize customer posts on social media networks and deliver them to your social media customer care team, company can respond to customers in real time using the same social network they are using.

SocialMiner makes use of  algorithms to keep a watch on social network like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for keywords and phrases that are relevant to customers. The software then synthesizes and filters the most significant and relevant ones, forwards them onto a customer care executive who can take care.

Cisco SocialMiner provides:

• The ability to configure multiple campaigns to search for customer postings on the public social web about your company’s products, services, or area of expertise
• Filtering of social contacts based on preconfigured campaign filters to focus campaign searches
• Routing of social contacts to skilled customer care representatives in the contact center or to experts in the enterprise–multiple people can work together to handle responses to customer postings through shared work queues
• Detailed metrics for social media customer care activities, campaign reports, and team reports

With Cisco SocialMiner, company can listen and respond to customer conversations originating in the social web. Being proactive can help your company enhance its service, improve customer loyalty, garner new customers, and protect your brand.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

iWebNotes is a mumbai based startup which offers SaaS based ERP cum CRM solution targeted at small and medium enterprises.

iWebnotes facilitates SMEs in their ctivities such as accounting, invoicing, sales, stock keeping, projects, tasks and HR related activities. I like their pricing strategy kept it very simple and have adopted only one pricing which is 299/month/user, it won’t confuse the common user. One can see their demo and can as well signup for a 30 days free trial for the hands on experience.

The workflow and functionality are very basic and high level features which should suffice 70-75% of their work, which is good to get started  but i doubt whether this simplicity will draw users since most of the SMEs want rich features at low price.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com