Over two-and-a-half million people worldwide, half of them in the US, are using word processors,creating slide-show presentations and doing their sums with the help of an online suite of software products built by technology start-up Zoho, located in Chennai.
In Bangalore, InMobi,a company that builds technology for mobile internet advertising,is helping global advertisers and publishers reach 175 million customers every month across Asia,Africa,the UK and the US.
... while it took Infosys Technologies 18 years to record its first $100 million in revenue,product start-ups such as InMobi expect to do so within five years.
In Kolkata, FusionCharts,a graphic data visualisation tool created by startup Infosoft Global is used by 1,500 organisations across the globe, including the US government.
..Webaroo’s SMSGupShup a Twitter-like closed group messaging product for cellphone subscribers, has 27 million users in India. In three months GupShup will be available to mobile users in nearly two dozen countries.
Apalya now has one million customers for its product MiMobiTV that streams live television onto mobiles starting at a subscription price of Rs150 a month.
Earlier this year, Mango Technologies, that was incubated at the NSRCEL centre in IIM-Bangalore, sold two of its proprietary telecom solutions to handset maker, Qualcomm.
The free version of FusionCharts works with PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, RoR, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations. I was not aware of it when I was evaluating free ASP.NET charting controls for a project requirement.
Webaroos SMSGupShup was probably the inspiration for Google India's free SMS service called Google SMS Channels.
Similarly, JustDial may have been the inspiration for another Google India Labs service called Google Phone Search. This free service which is in the pilot stage provides voice search for region-specific info like local business listings, movie showtimes etc., in Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. While Google Phone Search (toll free # 1-800-41-999-999) uses speech recognition technology to process a query and read out the results or send the information via SMS, a real person picks up the phone at JustDial (phone # in India - 6999-9999; in 240 cities in India) to address a query.
JustDial makes money from small businesses paying up to be sponsored listings. In this fiscal year, it made about $32 million in revenues having answered 72 million calls. JustDial (1-800-JUSTDIAL) has recently been launched in the US. The operations will be handled out of India but it will soon be creating call center jobs in the US.