Last year, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship at IIM-A incubated ‘Creative Riot’, a company by four 23-year olds, all graduates from the University of Mumbai. The firm initially built a power management software product for enterprises, but has now started talking about something you and I can use. It has come up with Time Trove, a productivity software that can track everything done on a personal computer (PC)—tell how much time is spent everyday on Facebook, on mails, in chat, or on Office applications.
The same year, in India’s Silicon Valley, Vinod Gopinath and two of his colleagues working for a mobile TV chip company quit to start Althea Systems. A video discovery firm was born. Althea came up with ‘Shufflr’ which adopted a social approach to finding videos you would want to watch. Its smart website with an Apple-ish interface can filter and recommend videos on the homepage based on profile and usage. The company now has users in 30 countries.
The last 18 months have seen a riot of many other such consumer-focussed software product companies—a sea change from few years ago when the Indian technology product story was mainly the story of enterprise class products like the Finacle and the Flexcube. The rise of cloud computing, viral marketing, and new distribution points such as Facebook have now enabled applications that can be sold across the world with very less start-up costs.
Consulting firm Browne & Mohan estimates the number of Business to Consumer (B2C) software product companies in India at 176 currently. TR Madan Mohan, managing partner, Browne & Mohan, says, “B2C companies broadly fall into four categories. There are search and recommendation firms, companies that facilitate purchases, community building, personalisation and analytics.”
Start up GloMantra has an online personal assistant product myBantu, which helps one search the Web and get three to nine personalised recommendations. Kerela-based Ohile Technologies is selling mobile applications such as stock market and expense trackers to consumers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Mexico. Bangalore-based Webyog is developing Cloud Magic, a super fast search for a consumer’s online data.
Mumbai-based Hayagriva will release in January next year a product that can save Facebook posts and help create online digital diaries. eMudhra, the consumer technology brand of 3i Infotech Consumer Services, announced last week the launch of MyMoney, a personal finance management product that helps users track spending and achieve financial discipline. Cloud computing company Nivio had launched the world’s first online windows based desktop and is developing more products. Among them are CloudBook and CloudPC—devices that will be priced around $100-200 and provide access to a Windows based operating system and applications that reside in the cloud.
Source:http://financialexpress.com/news/software-products-make-a-trip-to-the-drawing-room/717356/1
