Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Wouldn’t be nice on sharing the experience of your favorite hangout place with your friends and get rewarded? also getting recommendation on new hangout places you may like all through SMS. Good news is Revu.in has arrived.

Revu.in is a customer engagement plus reward platform on mobile. Revu.in is an innovative way to publish reviews about anything you like in real time by just sending a SMS. The platform enables businesses to build and engage with their community.

Revu.in is a Bangalore based startup founded by Mayank Sharma, Ishwar Sundararaman, Jaishankar Jayaramakrishnan. Revu was started in June 2010 with an idea of using mobile phone as a platform where consumers can talk about places they have been to and immediately promote it within their social media.

Revu bridges the gap between businesses and consumers using an existing device that consumers anyway use today – Their Mobile phone. Businesses run their mobile loyalty, engagement and informational programs and consumers subscribe to them with just their mobile number.

For users Revu.in provides a platform for them to share their experience in a restaurant/pub/concert plays etc with their friends on twitter/facebook and also let them socialize with other people in platform with similar interests.

Revu.in monetizes from the business for deploying its customer reward platform. For businesses Revu provides platform to offer rewards and discounts to their customers.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

If you are fed up with poor mobile service of your current telecom service provider but have been continuing with them just to avoid changing your number, there is good news for you. Now Mobile number portability has come into effect which means you can now leave your old service provider for a new one without changing your number. This service is kicking off in Rohtak, Haryana and will be launched in other parts of country by end of Decemeber.

Process for changing the telecom operator -

• For porting, a subscriber has to send an SMS (PORT<space>Mobile Number) from the number he wishes to be ported, to number 1900.
• The subscriber will receive a Unique Porting Code (UPC) by SMS from his current service provider.
• Use that code while filling out a detailed form for the company you want to shift to. Within 48 hours, that company will take over all your cell services.
• User needs to incur Rs. 19 as transfer fees.

Guidelines -

• User can’t change the circles i.e. a user residing in Bangalore Karnakata can’t go for number of TamilNadu, roaming will be incurred.
• User can shift from GSM to CDMA and vice versa.
• User needs to be with new telecom operator for 50days before user can shift again.
• Post-paid subscribers, before making the porting request, have to make sure that their last bill has been paid failing which the request for change to new service provider shall be rejected.

Freecharge is recently launched web based service which lets users to recharge any prepaid mobile phones in India. Via Freecharge user can recharge currency upto Rs 1000 and minimum recharge value is Rs 10.  Freecharge is conceptualized and launched by a strategic marketing company called Accelyst which work with India’s top retail companies.

To promote the usage, Freecharge has tied up with retailers like McDonalds, Barista where upon recharging user gets a free coupon equaling the amount which can be redeemed in the respective retail outlets, truly an amazing strategic partnership. It gives notion to user that they getting recharge free of cost

Freecharge is seed funded by Tandon Group, members of the Mumbai Angels. Freecharge has already acquired a ‘patent pending’ status for their business model

The online prepaid recharge business currently contributes to less than 1% of the total prepaid recharge but given the volumes of the Indian telecom industry even this amount runs in over 100s of Crores. The working model of Freecharge seems to be a sure win-win for mobile operators, retailers and the users.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

PhoneCurry is a new website that aims to help Indian consumers decide which mobile phone to purchase in a simple, uncluttered way. In times, when consumers are flooded with a choice of phones, with new models launched every week,  many people are using the Internet to find out about phones before buying. It is for such consumers, that PhoneCurry can come in handy.

The site attempts to make the process easy for a consumer by having:

1. Search oriented interface to help people find phones according to their exact and specific requirements. For instance, a user can do a search such as “Nokia and Samsung phones, costing between Rs 8,000 and 10,000, launched during the last year, having touchscreen, 3G support, full keyboard and in-built social networking”
2. Phone features explained in simple layman terms.
3. Overall opinion around each phone (collated and summarized from various publicly available phone reviews), and an overall rating, to make it easy for the consumer to make his decision.
4. Video reviews for popular phones.

The entire website has been structured to help a consumer make his/her decisions, as easily and as quickly as possible, with minimum of clutter.

Do give it a spin and share your views.

-Hitesh,vcBytes.com

There is a strong buzz in the market that Venture capital fund Canaan Partners is all set to invests in Naaptol a product comparison and shopping portal. Canaan Partners plans to pick up about 25% stake in Naaptol Online Shopping Pvt Ltd for Rs 40 Cr valuing the company at Rs 160 Cr.

This means it will put the valuation of the Mumbai-based company at `160 crore, nearly 2.3 times of its sales last year. Naaptol is founded by Manu Agarwal in 2008, it now registers 3,000 transactions a day and sells 500 brands.

This space has witnessed quite a lot of investments and qcquisitions, CompareIndia.com was acquired by Web18 in 2006. Another player in this space is Pricesbolo.com, a bangalore based startup. Canaan Partners invests in technology and healthcare companies. It has invested in e-commerce website Bharat Matrimony, Ceel Cast Asia holdings a  and entertainment website Chakpak Media.

It seems e-commerce portals have been catching attention from VC fraternity.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com