Indian Startups Blog

Watch Shantanu Bhagwat of Amadeus Capital Partners talk about the VC environment in India and Indian startups.

IBS Software, a global provider of new-generation IT solutions to the Travel, Transportation and Logistics (TTL) industry will be setting up a new office in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Through the new facility, IBS seeks to establish an Ocean Transportation Line of Business, the latest addition to its six other lines of business. This is IBS’ second office in Europe, the first one being in London.

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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.

I am sure you have heard of Muziboo by now, if not hop on, to see the profile of the latest independent music portal with variety of features. And yes, it is very much an India-centric music collection. A related post to online music platforms was done here.

Muziboo’s tag line says “Get an audience” and accordingly serves as a platform of exposure for all kinds of independent music, home-made creations, home-grown / studio recordings, all at one place and accumulate an audience. Of course, the music is to be submitted or uploaded at the site. There is a great opportunity to gather feedback and amass a sizable fan following. It also serves as a discussion corner for like-minded or opposite viewed music fans with the provision for forming groups and communities.

Stepping closer – The site presents four sections music, groups, bands and radio.

The music page / section shows the latest independent music that has been uploaded, which can be played individually clicking the play icon. To browser of more music, you click on the More Music option on the right hand side, a secondary list of songs is presented and a player to play all the songs listed on that web page. Simultaneously one can keep track of the latest comments, again this is song wise and have to browser with More Comments. A tag cloud is listed at the bottom of the page to highlight latest viewpoints.

The groups page / section is an important element of the whole setup. User can form new groups to discuss and share opinions, based on the music taste, likes, dislikes, ratings, new / old and so on.

Figure 1. Muziboo groups page with latest groups, latest discussions, latest replies

Each of them, the groups, replies, discussions can be browsed for more content with the latest being listed on the front page. Relevant tag cloud is present in each of the sections for quick access. There is also an option to create new groups here.

The bands section / page is for the band profiles. A new music band can create a profile on this page. This section is still small, and should see more growth as the site registers positive growth by word-of-mouth as well as the quality of the uploads.

And the last part is the Radio page / section. One can listen to non-stop music on the radio channels. Also the radio widget can be hosted on blogs, websites, social-networking sites for virality. Currently, the radio hosts three channels – English, Hindi, and Instrumental. The widget and be shared, and there’ an icon for that.

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Figure 2 (a) Playlist for browsing songs page wise (b) Widget for muziboo radio, can be hosted on blogs and sites

Apart from these, we have the Browser Charts option that lets users to view, most played songs, top rated content, most favorites for songs, most commented listings, browser random selections and the latest entrants. The songs carry favorites feedback from the listeners and also comments. There is a good chance to host discussions and critique on the available content. The latest content can also be accessed via RSS feeds. Additionally, there is a playlist creation feature to, however I was unable to do this one in the possible time that I browsed the site. Maybe, it needs to be specified more intuitively.

The site has a nice look and feel, with good layout and balanced mix of features for a recently begun startup. The content and songs are also high quality, and I was really surprised with both the quality of recordings, playback and also the quality of the uploaded content. The playlist and widgets are very good features for preserving user stickiness and spreading the Web 2.0 fever. The community aspect is picking up going by the participation. The network effects in terms of more content and user participation is what would drive such an undertaking. And the traffic to Muziboo is also soaring in recent weeks as per Alexa ratings [ I checked this one out ].

Do give it a try and let’ know what you feel?