According to statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), China’s 426 million mobile phone users sent more than 200 billion short messages in the first half of the year. Last month, Worlds biggest mobile market started an initiative to cleanup the wireless value-added services industry. Under the policy directives of China’s Ministry of Information […]

I got quite a few requests with regards to possible VC/PE jobs at Battery Ventures and elsewhere in India. First of all thanks for reaching out to me. A quick suggestion to people interested in the space. The typical VC/PE jobs are few and far in between, but there are definitely a lot of opportunities […]

A very well balanced article in businessweek on what value VCs add, how they constraint the team, and what can go wrong. I think its useful to link this back to the objectives of the core team in terms of building scale versus lifestyle businesses, timing issues to scaleup and associated competitive threats, and so […]

As an advisor to FINO I have to collect service tax on my advisory fee and pay it to the Service Tax department which is part of the Central Excise Department. I need to get registered and get a service tax number. By now I know I should just ask my tax advisor to do […]

I came across this article on why You Tube is getting such high usage. A quote from the article…… ” Then comes YouTube. The first thing you notice about YouTube is the lack of barriers to entry. You can sign up quickly and upload anything in any format right away. YouTube’s computers then transcode (convert) […]

The oligopolistic power that telecom operators have in India is probably slowing innovation in the mobile space. Discount broking made trading volumes grow exponentially so if SMS were very cheap or near free we would see much more use and much more spam as well. Similarly if the rev share on VAS were to be […]

I just came back from the inaugral MMS ( Mobile Monday on a Saturday) get together sponsored by Adobe and Value First. Kudos to the organizers. I know very little about this space so I just went to listen and learn. I have a “smart” phone and an old mobile phone and strangely ( or […]

Erik Sundelof who is mentioned in this article is a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University. I am an alum (2002-03) so I got mail from the program. I do not know the cell/SMS domain well but this leads me to believe that with ring tones and premium SMS we may only scratched the […]

Dear all, We are introducing a new feature on venturewoods — this is an experiment with a job and resume board for startup opportunities, especially finding the core team members who share the passion for creating something out of nothing. We have received a lot of feedback that such people are not easily accessible through […]

I recently read about IPv6 and what China’s plans are in the domain. http://www.cio.com/archive/071506/china.html Interested to hear other thoughts and what this means for India & Indian entrepreneurs.

This article from Business 2.0 is interesting. Conventional wisdom is that a single location is very important for a startup and I think getting a multinational operation going for a startup is not easy. The advantages are numerous and it is nice to read about people who have made it work. I recently read about […]

A company that my brother cofounded just got acquired for around $50 million in cash. It had 40 employees and found a use for some cool technology that they developed in providing a Zero Touch Fraud detection solution. This year revenues were around $3-$4 million and next year may touch $10 million. I think they […]