Indian Startups Blog

Social networking site Indyarocks.com has partnered with FXLabs Studios, a leading end-to-end game company, to create a gaming platform that will have more than 5,000 online casual games. According to Indyarocks, the online gaming platform will also allow independent game developers to upload and get feedback from more than a million active gamers on Indyarocks.

Internet search engine Guruji.com has launched Music Ka Guru – Guruji.com Music Search. The new service also provides a list of top songs, top singers and top albums.

According to the company, Guruji.com Music Search allows users to search Indian songs, released from 1932 onwards, by song name, actor, singer, movie or music director and listen to them online. The service currently covers songs in eight Indian languages.

“Many wannabe entrepreneurs and their backers failed to understand that there is one set of competencies needed to build a website and another quite different set to run a web-based business. It was assumed that if you could build a good site you would have a successful web business,” Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder and CEO of Naukri.com, wrote in an article titled ‘The Story of the Year – The Dotcom Bust’ which was published on 24th December 2000 in The Pioneer newspaper. Bikhchandani recently reproduced the article in his blog. An excerpt:

Amity Innovation Incubator, a not-for-profit society launched by Amity to promote the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India, has invited entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, researchers and students to convert their technology ideas into successful businesses of tomorrow.

Ishir Infotech, which owns internet marketing company Ishir Digital, is planning to launch Tonic Tag, an online ad network comprising of large and niche online publishers in India and abroad, by the end of this month (May 2008).

Tonic Tag is co-founded by Siddharth Swarup, founder and managing director, Ishir Infotech; Rishi Khanna, CEO, Ishir Infotech and Mohit Maheshwari, manager, web solutions, Ishir Infotech.

Ram Shriram, a founding board member and director of Google, has sold 27,475 shares of the company for $600 and $602 apiece, reports Forbes.

The stock sale was conducted under a prearranged trading plan which allows a company insider to set up a program in advance for such transactions and proceed with them even if he or she comes into possession of material non-public information.

Video sharing site YouTube, which is owned by Google, has launched YouTube.co.in, a local site specific to Indian viewers. YouTube has also signed up “dozens of local partners” to distribute their content through the YouTube India site. To coincide with the YouTube India launch, the company has also unveiled the official YouTube India blog at in.YouTube.com/blog.

Lucknow-based WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Advertising is running an online service at AdvertisementIndia.com where users can book their ads in Indian national and regional dailies from anywhere in the world.

Yahoo has partnered with security technology company McAfee to deliver a ‘safer’ Web search experience to Yahoo Search users. According to Yahoo, websites that may harm the user’s computer just by visiting them will be eliminated from appearing in Yahoo Search results.

Time magazine has included Jay Adelson, CEO, Digg.com; Michael Arrington, founder and editor, TechCrunch; Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple; Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Facebook among 100 most influential people in the world, The 2008 TIME 100.