1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Kobster

The Indian ecommerce market has attracted many a retailer. In particular, niche sectors like office supplies that has an annual growth rate of 15 to 20% is attracting quite a few ecommerce ventures. One such ecommerce startup is Kobster.com, a one-stop e-destination for office supplies.

In the highly unorganized office supplies market, Kobster provides an online platform that makes it easy for companies and educational institutes to procure a wide range of office supplies, furniture, customizable stationery and gifts. With doorstep delivery, flexible payment options such as cash on delivery, and the convenience and efficiency of online shopping, Kobster aims to eliminate the need to engage with multiple vendors and end the office supplies procurement nightmare.

Kobster was founded in July 2012 by three college friends, Karthik Ramaiah, Mohan Gayam and Vineet Neeraj. Vineet, a former software developer with Cognizant, manages the marketing and sales aspect of the business. He had earlier launched an event services startup, Yippie, followed by a product startup, ArrayShield.  Karthik, a former Java developer at Cognizant handles all the technical aspects as well as customer support, while Mohan, a former HCL Technologies employee, is responsible for the product catalog and ensuring best deals from suppliers.
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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Mad Marketeer

Online marketing has become hugely popular and effective in recent years with the rise in social media activity and mobile access. However, for small non-profit organizations that have few resources, navigating the labyrinth of marketing activities and following an effective marketing strategy is tough and often expensive. In 2007, Katharine Coles, a veteran marketing professional, founded a company that strives to provide professional but affordable marketing solutions to the non-profit segment.

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Insane Logic, United Kingdom

The educational technology sector, or “edutech,” is seeing both advances in and greater attention to niche markets. The growing integration of technology into people’s daily lives has provided a great opportunity for better learning and developmental apps. One such product comes from Zoe Peden, a co-founder of Insane Logic, a 1M/1M premium member company. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Car Rental Bookers, Greece

Using the Internet to book services such as car rentals is now routine for many drivers and travelers. Internet booking capabilities, however, exist almost solely for global operators and franchises. Barriers to entry for SMBs include the high cost of development and the need to cover a minimum territory before entering into a global distribution system (GDS). In 2004, travel industry veteran Stathis Katinas teamed up with software architect Tristan Mcevan to support these small and mid-sized car rental operators, creating a tool to give them a greater online presence. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: SociaLasso, Tel Aviv, Israel

The meteoric rise of social media has in turn created a need for social media marketing for every business, large or small. A key issue for all these marketeers is to identify the players to market to: potential customers and influencers, in particular, and the ecosystem in general. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: InSync, Kolkata, India

In 2006, 1M/1M premium member InSync was established as an IT company to provide software solutions to Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) from their location in Kolkata. Over the next three years, InSync would acquire more than 500 domestic customers, and make an important discovery. They noted that at a certain volume, it was impossible for customers to manage their e-commerce businesses without an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Leveraging this knowledge, InSync shifted focus from services to product and released their flagship integration solution, SBOeConnect. Today, the company specializes in solutions that complement enterprise solution products, as well as business intelligence services, including reporting and data warehousing. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: PartingOut.com, Graham, Texas

After years of frustration trying to efficiently sell used car parts online, Kevin Fullerton realized there was a significant opportunity to build an online community designed around the deal flow of buying and selling used parts. The result was PartingOut.com, an online salvage marketplace for used auto parts that operates on a visual platform of parts exchange, combining a yard management system with an open web-based platform. Its intention is to work evenly through both buyers and sellers.

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Hooduku, Houston, Texas

In late 2011, 1M/1M premium member Hooduku, a cloud and mobile application services company, saw an unduly large bill from one of its cloud providers but couldn’t see how to track the spending. Citing lack of controls on cloud spending as a cause, Hooduku decided to develop an internal solution to the problem. Earlier this year the company released Xervmon, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based cloud cost management and analytics product that primarily focuses on cloud spending analytics.

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Sensible Softwares, Pune, India

Sensible Softwares is a 1M/1M premium company that launched in August 2009 with its flagship product BootStrapToday. BootStrapToday is an application life cycle management platform for software development teams. In just 60 seconds, software development teams can get started managing the life cycles of their projects.

In any software development undertaking, 30% to 40% of a developer’s effort goes into fixing bugs. That percentage is even larger for maintenance projects. The cost of fixing a bug increases exponentially with the time it takes to detect it, and writing bug-free code is impossible. But the cost of fixing a bug can be reduced by detecting bugs earlier. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: GloMantra, Sunnyvale, California and Bangalore, India

I made a prediction about 2012 being the year when personalization technologies start to find their stride.

GloMantra, Inc. is a company that specializes in personalization technology and social commerce solutions for e-commerce and online media companies. GloMantra understands the intent of consumers and the context of their need, and uses them to provide personalized and relevant recommendations. Based on its patent-pending personalization technology, the company provides three distinct offerings: personalization solutions for social commerce, which enable a personalized recommendations service for retailers and online media enterprises; a mobile personal assistant, which is a fully integrated solution for mobile device OEMs and carriers to make their smart devices smarter; and myBantu.com, a free consumer application, that acts as a smart personal assistant, giving users relevant recommendations for their daily needs. The company currently has a team of 15 serving a user base of over 10,000.

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: QuadMo Solutions, Bangalore, India

Rewards programs have been around for a long time. Gartner reports that systems that leverage social and mobile concepts have seen rapid growth recently, and increasing global adoption of employee recognition systems is expected over the next three to five years. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: ifood.tv, Menlo Park, California

For some, like Tyler Florence and Rachael Ray, cooking is their livelihood. For others, it’s a hobby. But for most, cooking is a necessity, a means to an end. Still, they want to cook food that looks and tastes good.

Based in Menlo Park, California, with offshore offices in India, ifood.tv was launched in 2007. This 1M/1M premium company is a popular destination for food- and recipe-related video content. On ifood.tv, foodies are coming together to discover new and interesting content, while professional chefs are using the platform to gain exposure and build their brand. Over the past few years, the company has aggregated a large library of cooking videos (more than 40,000) and text recipes (about 200,000) online; all the videos are hosted, managed, and streamed through the content management platform. Content is created by an in-house team of editors and sourced from professional chefs, video producers, authors, and media companies. The technology platform can deliver a blend of multimedia, interactive, and social features, and it can be reused to launch new Web 3.0 sites in other verticals. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: Happy Grasshopper, Safety Harbor, Florida

Staying in touch with past and present customers is important. In today’s business environment, this means that having an effective email marketing campaign is equally important. Enter Happy Grasshopper, today’s Incubation Radar company. Happy Grasshopper is the easiest way to keep in touch with your sphere, according to founder, Dan Stewart. Its team of writers create timely, interesting email messages that actually get read and responded to. The team loads a new message into a customer’s account every three weeks for him to edit and approve before it is sent. Full reporting on deliverability and open rates is also provided in real time. For the first quarter of 2011, the company’s open rate was 198.2% higher than that of Constant Contact for the real estate market segment. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: FreshDesk, Chennai, India

A finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge, Freshdesk is a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak. Small- and medium-business owners can set up online customer support platforms that combine the backend help desk system used by agents (ticketing, knowledge management) with an online customer portal (self service, forums, idea management, voting, etc.) on the front end. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: Bizosys, Bangalore, India

Bizosys Technologies, a Bangalore, India based software engineering company was founded in 2009. The founders, Sunil Guttula and Abinasha Karana are experienced IT professional with 15 years’ experience between them solving various enterprise IT problems. Guttula, Bizosys’ CEO, and Karana founded the company with the goal to “simplify software development.”

Toward that end, they have created two products. The first is HSearch, a NoSQL technology based search engine for big data that aims to break the barrier of scale of growing information and accessing it across information silos. The second product is 10Screens, a tool to visualize business requirements critical to software development, which tend to be hampered by poor communication among various stakeholders. 10Screens is currently a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge. >>>