The Foodlinks Story
Sarathbabu was born and brought up in a slum in Madipakkam in Chennai and was one of 5 siblings. His mother being the sole bread winner for the family worked very hard – sellind idlis in the morning, working for the mid-day meal during the day (scheme of TN govt. which gave her Rs. 30 a day) and teaching at the adult education programme in the evenings.
Sarath worked alongside his mother selling idlis in the morning. He also did book-binding to make extra money and at one time had 20 other children working for him binding books. He was a good student and made it to BITS Pilani, the first semester fees arranged by pawning his sister’s jewellery. Only through scholarship he was able to pay for his tution fees.
During his studies at Pilani, Sarathbabu got a first time exposure to many things. He improved upon his English and was able to relate and communicate with other student from more affluent backgrounds.
He found a job with Polaris working with them for 30 months which helped him clear his debts. He prepared for CAT which he cleared on his third attempt. His stint at IIM helped him immensely.
Refusing a Rs. 8 L salary in 2006, Sarathbabu decided to turn entrepreneur by entering the food business forming “Foodlink Catering Services”. He took a loan of Rs. 1 lakh, hired office space and hired 3 employees. His first order was from a software company based in Ahmedabad. With orders from IIMA itself coming to him, he took an additional loan of Rs. 11 lakhs and started a kitchen of his own.
Sarath is dreaming big about his venture. During a ceremony hosted by IIMA, where Mr. Narayan Murthy lit a lamp to inaugrate his company, Sarathbabu stressed that with “quality, cleanliness and delivery” as his business motto, he expects to emerge a market leader in 10 years and turn his company into a food chain that will be a “national brand” employing 50,000 people.
Turing award (for computing) goes to a lady
One of the most prestigious prizes in computing, the $100,000 Turing Award, for the first time in 40 years, was awarded to a woman on Wednesday. Frances E. Allen, 74, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another.
Allen joined IBM in 1957 after completing a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan. At the time, IBM recruited women by circulating a brochure on campuses that was titled “My Fair Ladies.”
The Turing Award was first given in 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Previous winners have included luminaries in encryption, artificial intelligence, hypertext, networking and other vital elements of modern computing.
Netscape founders new venture
Mark Andreessen, who had successfully built and sold the first user-friendly web browser – Netscape, is now the CTO of Ning, a software that allows one to make their own social networking site without having to write any code.
The current social networking sites are one-size-fits-all giants. people would want to network with people around their interests – a sports team, knitting, database technology, MS Dhoni, etc. Just as there are websites (millions and millions) created by people around their interest group, a large number of social networks would come up around interest groups.
Ning has templates for hosting discussions, sharing music, photo, videos. It is an asp hosted servcie with back end built on Java where the user gets access to all the APIs. Launched in 2005, the product has been redone and reintroduced.
The rise of Graphene
Graphene is a rapidly rising star on the horizon of materials science and condensed-matter physics. This strictly two-dimensional material exhibits exceptionally high crystal and electronic quality, and, despite its short history, has already revealed a cornucopia of new physics and potential applications. Whereas one can be certain of the realness of applications only when commercial products appear, graphene no longer requires any further proof of its importance in terms of fundamental physics.
Owing to its unusual electronic spectrum, graphene has led to the emergence of a new paradigm of ‘relativistic’ condensed-matter physics, where quantum relativistic phenomena, some of which are unobservable in high-energy physics, can now be mimicked and tested in table-top experiments. More generally, graphene represents a conceptually new class of materials that are only one atom thick, and, on this basis, offers new inroads into low-dimensional physics that has never ceased to surprise and continues to provide a fertile ground for applications. This abstract is from Nature.
Read more about Graphene on Wikipedia.
2007 Budget Implication on VC
Prior to the budget, the entire income of registered VC Funds (VCF) and Venture Capital Companies (VCC), whether foreign or domestic, was exempt from Indian income tax, subject to certain conditions. Instead, the income was taxed in the hands of its investors at the time of distribution. However as per the The Finance Bill, 2007 the pass through status for VCF/ VCC would be restricted to only income from investment in domestic unlisted company (VCC) engaged in certain specified businesses such as IT, bio-tech etc . This provision would apply to even the existing non-VCU investments already made by VCFs.
The Finance Bill is therefore seen as a roadblock for other sectors such as Infrastructure/ real estate development from attracting venture funds.
Also from the taxation perspective, VCFs being in the the nature of a Trust vehicle, the taxation would now be guided by the complex principles relating to trust taxation. Whilst this taxation regime for Trusts also aims at one-level taxation, there are several issues which would need to be addressed – characterization as business income or capital gains, taxation on accrual basis rather than on distribution to investors, tax treaty benefits.
Guruji – Indias own search engine
Two IIT Delhi graduates, Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, have launched Guruji.com, an internet search engine that aims to provide a comprehensive search for Indian content.
Guruji.com has received a seed fund of $7 million from Sequoia Capital India (formerly WestBridge Capital), a venture capital firm. Suvir Sujan, founding partner, Nexus India Capital, has also invested in the internet search company.
Adopting the pay-per-click model to generate revenues, the company expects to break-even in 1.5 years. Guruji.com at present offers search data in three Indian languages – Hindi, Kannada and Telgu and would soon also provide search data in Tamil and Bengali.
With nearly 90 per cent of internet search queries being local in nature an engine like Guruji.com is expected to provide more relevant content to its users. With a growing internet population which is expected to grow to 100 to 200 million in the next couple of years, offer Guruji a huge potential.
The crawl technology used by Guruji.com is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms. The engine then indexes the data that it gathers and provides the user with a simple keyword based interface to get to the data quickly and efficiently, they said.
Guruji would have a growing database and it would first focus on top 20 cities where there is a reasonable amount of internet penetration.
About its founders:
Anurag Dod holds a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi and an MS is Comp. Sci. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In his over 10 years of experience he was also involved in developing the core search technology at Wisenut Search Engine which was later acquired by Looksmart in 2002.
Gaurav Mishra holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi in Computer Science and a MS from State University of New York, Buffalo. He worked for over 10 years in software engineering positions in various organisations in the US including Microsoft, Nokia.
One 97 – A mobile software company
One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd., operates in the Telecom Value Added Service space, creating applications for domestic and international market.
Founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in 2000, One97 currently comprises a staff of 125 people with offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore. It recently (end-2006) acquired another SMS and Mobile data service company Positive Comsol.
Vijay finished school when he was just 14 and was the youngest engineer to graduate out of the Delhi College of Engineering. He set up a business at 19 which was sold to a New Jersey-based telecom software company. Vijay comes form a family of educators from Bihar and his dream was that he wanted to own a billion dollar company by the time he was 30 years old.
He then went about to set up One97, a company into the mobile VAS market. Starting as just a astrology content and rightone content provider, One97 has moved up to provide entire technology services. They started with a revenue share business model (first of its kind arrangement) whereby they offered telcos the option of paying One97 only if the VAS makes money.
One97 offers the entire range of services from SMS and WAP transaction to USSD, which could be used for services such as alerts and reminders, transaction execution, data surfing, etc. With the introduction of 3G in the future, VAS companies are expected to increase revenues by leveraging bandwidth leading to better business applications and improved user experience .
His future could be moving towards video and are soon to launch video SMSs, video portals and videogames. One97 would also be focussing on more network-based value added services like spam-call block. They are also looking at next generation applications like fax applications and next-gen USSD applications.
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