Archive for December, 2008
Silverstripesoftware.com: Easing the pain in making software deliveries
“Always hire quality people” is the rule followed by Siddharta Govindaraj, the 29 years old founder of Silverstripesoftware.com, a Chennai based self funded startup which has just two employees including the founder himself.
Though many companies want to stick to this rule, they get desperate after looking around for a while and eventually lower their hiring standards. “We are comfortably waiting till we find the right people” tells Sid who started his company in March 2007.
One of the leading causes of project failure is the poor communication between stakeholders and teams. Silverstripesoftware.com specialises in software that eases this pain in making software deliveries.
During his 4 years stint as an employee with a startup in Singapore, Sid got the experience in a process called Agile Software Development. Since the process was new at that time, there was a lack of quality tools available for developing this software. Sid had the vision of filling this gap and started off his own company back in India.
Offering their basic version for free and advanced version for a premium, their target customers are SMEs and medium size development shops abroad. Now a toddler in its development, the lack of money is the real challenge for this baby to grow, but this company does selective projects to get the revenue for funding their product development. With a record 3000 downloads of their software and with positive feedback for a couple of added features, they are making a few changes in their current version.
Though they manage revenues from custom projects, marketing is done through the internet and by actively participating in the Agile Software Development community in India. Since there are a very few established companies in its niche and their competitors being in business for less than two years, Sid finds it a level playing field to be won at the right possible time and achieve profits by middle of 2009. Sid a visionary of Chennai Open Coffee Club is pepping up his engines for achieving a break even by end of 2009 by concentrating on marketing and sales.
From his own experience he finds that many people while plunging into entrepreneurship have many doubts hindering on pursuing their entrepreneurial idea. Though many people opine that the right way is to clear all the doubts beforehand, Sid makes it a strong point that entrepreneurs should go ahead and make a plunge on starting up on their own.
“There is no way to clear everything upfront before starting. First start and then tackle each challenge as it comes on your path” tells Sid.
That is Kaushik the first employee of Silverstripesoftware.com
. He blogs at chaosbudha.blogspot.com and his microblog is http://twitter.com/kausikram
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Sid’s personal blog: http://siddhi.blogspot.com/
HomePlanGuru.com: Ideas for your dream home
“The Fallen Tomato Cart” an article authored by Subroto Bagchi inspired this man to taste entrepreneurship. Having run his local tabloid at Nanganallur in Chennai and his college magazine at the Madras Institute of Technology, he had a head-start on using entrepreneurial skills to raise funds at an early age.
Though he has IT experience in Infosys for 8+ years and short career stints in USA and @ Cognizant & MindTree, the entrepreneur inside him gave him the guts to make the jump off the cliff, but with self imposed conditions like: my venture should add value to everyone in India; mine will not be just another services company; will not just be doing another job; it should be a legal and highly ethical business.
In the year 2004, he designed and built his own feature-rich house at a cost of Rs.700 per sq. ft., The Watcher buy but builders were charging upwards of Rs.1,200 per sq. ft. A back-of the envelope calculation showed that Rs.500 per sq. ft. is being sucked by the builder from your pocket in an invisible way. For a nominal 1000 sq. ft. basic house, the ‘extra’ benefit for the builder is a whopping Rs. 5 Lakhs.
“If proper planning is made at the micro level, you stand to get more for your money, if you find it difficult to do micro planning for your home, I am there to help you…”, tells Virupakshan, the founder of www.homeplanguru.com the self funded start-up from Chennai. Sam’s Lake move
In a scenario where most of us, while buying a house go by the blind reliability of a builder, here is a guy who is setting the mast to hoist the “AWARENESS” flag for buyers on quality aspects of a house to be looked into while buying the service of a builder.
Since the concepts of “quality aspects in buying a home” and “micro planning of construction activity” are hardly heard of, Virupa finds it a big challenge in convincing his customers. On the other hand, for the customers who are willing to implement the suggested changes, there is resistance from the builders on implementation of these quality concepts as it results in hitting their profit margin.
Running the company single handedly, Virupa claims it to be Number One with a niche offering that has no competitors. “Electrical switches come with 10 years warranty and plumbing items come with 7 years warranty…”, these are the facts being thrown out by Virupa, but most of us have never ever got to hear from a builder or plumber/electrician. He gives out services like “3D plan”, “Wall plan”, “Comfort plan”, “Safety plan”, “Futuristic plan”, etc., at charges ranging between 50 paisa and Rs.3 per sq. ft. Though this start-up is at an early stage, it already has 50 happy customers.
To complement his concepts, he is preparing a book titled:
“‘ABCD of getting your Dream Home…”
Though the economic slowdown is giving cold feet to many ventures, Virupa is in cloud nine since the market is bound to shift from being builder driven to a customer driven one.
His future plan is to reach customers throughout India apart from partnering with a good company to be a “Certifying Authority” for newly constructed houses. Having seen the quality of homes during during his career in USA, he is in a mission to make Indian Homes on par with developed countries in terms of comfort, safety and quality and at right cost.
Address:HomePlanGuru.com Virupakshan Krishnamoorthi
C-1, Raj Paris Apts, 82, Kamaraj Street,
Virugambakkam, Chennai - 600 092
Tel: +91 9840 847872
Contact: info@homeplanguru.com
Micro Blog: http://twitter.com/virupa
Network: www.Linkedin.com/in/virupakshan
OrangeScape.com makes web application development a breeze
During his teenage and having just completed his 12th Standard in his native, a three tier coastal town called Cuddalore, he indulges in entrepreneurship by starting a company in the year 1992. The company did IT training and also attempted to churn out projects for the factories setting up shop at the nearby SIPCOT area. Though it had its initial successful days, the experiment was not promising and he along with his partners disposed it off for Rs.1 Lakh during 1995.
Then he searches for a full time job with a vision to learn things and gets an important career break at Hewlett-Packard, in Bangalore. Gets involved in developing software that detects fraud on the cell phone network for Vodafone and from there moves on to work for a US Based, specialized, rule engine company called Selectica. Proves his mantle and gets two successive double promotions leading to Director of Engineering of eInsurance Division. Meanwhile the eInsurance division got sold off to Accenture.
But the steam inside this man with passion to work on products had enough energy to make an uphill drive. “Why not we start on our own?” this question laid the foundation stone of OrangeScape.com. He along with his former tech. lead makes the plunge to start the company @ Chennai in 2003, which has now grown to serving around 40 enterprise customers from around the world apart from establishing their own office in USA & Germany.
The entrepreneur we are talking about is Mr.Suresh Sambandam, the Founder & CEO of OrangeScape.com which churns out a unique, patent pending approach of using a spreadsheet like interface to develop sophisticated enterprise class web applications. Their product called DimensionN is a Do-It-Yourself platform which eliminates the gap between the business and technical knowledge. Without the knowledge of programming, one can make a powerful web-based business applications using their simple spreadsheet interface.
Suresh tells “OrangeScape platform would be the most easy and simple to use, yet it is comprehensive enough to build any type of business applications and neutral to vertical or domain! “
This Chennai based angel funded, public limited company employs around 50 people. Suresh feels a real challenge in finding the right employee and referral based employment works out fine for them.
Achievements of OrangeScape include, being recognized as the Top Innovator by NASSCOM for the last two consecutive years and being one of the 3 companies showcased as EMERGING companies in the NASSCOM Product Conclave. With 15 years of industry experience, Suresh has a passion towards entrepreneurship & technology startups and gets tied up with spending his time in the startup eco system. He mentors budding entrepreneurs at the E-Cell of IIT Bombay and he is one of the Advisors of NuVeda Learning.
Address:
OrangeScape Technologies Limited.,114, Velachery One way Road,
Chinnamalai, Saidapet,
Chennai - 600 015.
Tel : +91-44-3068-6500
email: contact@orangescape.com
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