Flipkart Makes Seed Investment In Mobile-Technology Startup Cube26

BENGALURU: Flipkart has made a seed investment in mobile-technology startup Cube26, the latest in nearly a dozen such deals as the ecommerce giant chases innovations to stay nimble and gain an edge over rivals. Flipkart contributed a minority share in a Rs50-crore investment led by Tiger Global in Cube26.

"Our overall investment philosophy is around backing a phenomenal team trying to solve a hard problem in a large market through technology," Nishant Verman, head of corporate development at Flipkart, told ET, adding that the firm especially backs startups focused on mobile technology.

Delhi-based Cube26, which has built multiple mobile-based technologies since its inception in 2012, fits right in. The startup already assists Flipkart and other ecommerce companies in customer acquisition.

Verman said that while a few of Flipkart's investments were in companies associated with its business, others had zero overlap, such as home rental listings startup Nestaway."While we have a lot of great, prominent people in Flipkart, all innovation is not going to happen behind our doors. There are amazing entrepreneurs outside," Verman said.

"(Cube26) is a very disruptive company. We feel this can really impact the lives of users, both today and in the future."

Cube26 has worked with mobile phone manufacturers including Micromax, Panasonic and Karbonn to create customised operating systems for users and gesturelinked features.

The startup, which has acquired 10 patents, recently ventured into building technology related to Internet of Things, which are networks of connected devices.

Cube26 announced that it will make affordable connected devices, the first of which, a smart bulb, will be released in the market in November.


"We are elated at the trust showcased by our investors so early in our journey and glad to be associated with global leaders," Cube26 cofounder Saurav Kumar said.

The now-profitable company, founded three years ago by Kumar, Abhilekh Aggarwal and Aakash Jain, earns a monthly revenue of over Rs1 crore.

Disclaimer :- Following article come from ET

The Startup's Guide to Doing Keyword Research Like The Pros

As the owner of a new online business, one of your biggest challenges is likely cash flow. Unfortunately, the only solution to this problem (besides a generous influx of investor cash) is to start driving search engine traffic and generating revenue – fast.

And herein lies the classic catch 22: you can’t get your site ranking without hiring a professional SEO, yet you can’t afford to pay an SEO until your site begins ranking and making money.

So, what’s a startup to do?

In this post, I’ll provide you with a framework for doing your own keyword research, just like the pros. I’ll take you step by step through the process of finding relevant keywords and then analyzing the sites that rank highly for these terms. I’ll also show you exactly which tools the pros use, and explain how you can use them to find high value keywords to incorporate into your own site.

But first, let’s take a look at some important principles that will impact how you select the ideal keywords for your site.

The term sometimes brings to mind old-school SEO techniques like keyword stuffing or including hidden text on a page as a way of ranking. But when it comes down to it, keyword research – and the ensuing incorporation of those keywords into a site – is more about understanding and using the language and terminology your target market uses in search.

When you understand what words people are looking for, you can provide content that does a great job of covering these topics and themes.

Another important aspect of keyword research is competitive analysis. Analyzing the top-ranking sites for your keywords allows you to determine which keywords are actually realistic for your business. Without this critical step, you could find yourself wasting time and money targeting keywords that you never had a chance of ranking for.

Citation from Forbes : http://goo.gl/3Tmt8H

20 biggest reasons why startup companies fail

Startup companies seem to have all the fun. They create new markets, disrupt old ones, get ridiculous amounts of money from venture capital firms, throw wild launch parties, have the best-looking offices — the list goes on. But is it really that easy to reach startup stardom, or do these idyllic stereotypes hide a harsher truth?

As it appears, the reality is harsh indeed, because 90% of all startups fail. That sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, let that sink in. Oh, and the VC money I mentioned earlier? It counts for just 1% of total startup funding, as 82% of startups are self-funded and 24% of entrepreneurs rely on friends and family to keep their business dreams afloat. As for wild parties and lavish offices, the more extravagant they are, the more money is being thrown away, reducing the chance of success and abusing the trust of investors.

Another common reason for failure, Furr argues, is that startups “are doing good things but doing them out of order. In other words, they are doing things that seem to make sense, like investing to build the product, hiring good people to help them sell it, developing marketing materials, and essentially doing all the kinds of things that big companies with lots of resources do when they are executing on a known opportunity.”

The issue here, however, is that these investments make sense only when there is extensive pre-existing market research supporting them, or years of sales data that justify the risk. In the majority of documented cases, instead of assessing the risks and opportunities objectively and scaling those investments accordingly, startups rely on guesswork, giving more credit to their vision of what the future may hold, rather than examining real facts. This is understandable, as many startups bring new and never-before-seen products to the market, but this is also why they need to manage the process of coming to the market differently.

Here’s the list of top 20 most common reasons by CB Insights:

The reasons for failure are varied indeed. Reading charts and books is all well and good, but sometimes you want to go granular and really dig into why some startups crashed and burned. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a website sharing failure stories of various startups, so you could learn from their mistakes, and hopefully avoid them? 

It’s obvious that the data support the aforementioned statistics — no market, running out of cash, lack of focus and many more reasons are given, creating short and intimate stories that are a part of this depressing, but educational, database of broken dreams and business ideas.

Citation from Market Watch : http://goo.gl/5Fz2SU

With CEO shakeup, Twitter under pressure to please advertisers

Twitter Inc's (TWTR.N) next chief executive officer faces a crucial challenge as the company seeks to appease Wall Street after this week's management shakeup - helping disaffected advertisers connect with users.

And many advertisers, analysts and investors say Twitter already has the right person for the job: not interim CEO Jack Dorsey but Adam Bain, the company's president and head of revenue, who has emerged as an early favorite.

Twitter's outgoing chief executive, Dick Costolo, resigned abruptly Thursday amid pressure from investors to increase the user base and improve what's known as direct response advertising, the most lucrative type on the microblogging site.

Those ads prompt users to take an action, such as signing up for a website or buying a product. Improving them is central to Twitter's ability to make more money.

Before joining Twitter in 2010, Bain served as president of the Fox Audience Network where he was responsible for monetizing advertising platforms across News Corp's (NWSA.O) web properties. At Twitter, he has helped aggressively grow the advertising platform. He holds many of the company's most valuable relationship with advertisers and understands the media business, advertisers said, and could help redirect Twitter so it meets advertisers' demands and makes more money. 

For now, advertisers hope the management change will "light a fire" under Twitter, said Adam Epstein, chief executive of adMarketplace, which works with search advertisers. Even though they have discussed ways to improve advertising with Twitter executives, the company has been slow to change.

"When you talk to Twitter, you can throw some great ideas on a whiteboard, but there seems to be a lack of urgency," Epstein said.

They also hope Twitter makes the site easier to use so that more people become regular users and click on ads. Advertisers also want Twitter to provide data that allows them to gather more information on consumers.

Twitter would not make an executive available to comment on Friday.

Among the challenges of advertising on Twitter are the site's fast-moving news scroll, which makes it less likely users will stop to click on an ad. Facebook and Instagram, by comparison, showcase photos and videos in ads and display them more effectively to users, making it more likely users will click on them.

In April, Costolo said Twitter was forced to cut rates for direct response ads after they failed to deliver as promised. That led the company to cut its revenue forecast for the year as it anticipated making $4 million to $5 million less each quarter.

Half a dozen ad executives interviewed by Reuters said they spend more money on rival platforms, such as Facebook and Google, because they have more users, better capture attention and provide more data on how advertisers can target consumers.

Dorsey, who served as CEO from 2007 to 2008 before management ousted him, said the CEO search has not yet begun but has not ruled out his interest in the job permanently. He said he would not change the company's strategy.

UNTAPPED POTENTIAL

Twitter's user base has been eclipsed by its competitors. It has 302 million users, compared with Facebook Inc's (FB.O) 1.4 billion and WhatsApp's 800 million.

Advertisers said the main problem lies in what they called Twitter's "untapped potential" in reaching its millions of users.

About 80 to 90 percent of users scan Twitter content but don't tweet, according to Affinio, which measures community engagement on digital platforms. Even though about 1 billion people have tried the service, most do not become regular users.

"Twitter needs to be able to build a product that consumers know and love and stay in," said Maura Tuohy, social director at Eleven Inc, an agency that helps brands advertise.

Twitter has taken steps to meet some ad buyers' demands. In April, it announced a partnership with Google's (GOOGL.O) online advertising service DoubleClick and marketing technology company TellApart, which helps advertisers measure ad views, clicks and calculate investment returns, to provide more data to advertisers. But it has not announced when those partnerships will go into effect.

But illustrating the complexity of the site's relationship with ads, a study conducted by Twitter found that some of its key attributes, such as including a hashtag or mentioning another account in a tweet, were actually harmful to advertisers.

Barry Lowenthal, president of Media Kitchen, a media planning and buying agency, said he uses Twitter for product announcements, such as a new fragrance, but does not regularly turn to Twitter for advertising.

"It has a very particular role," Lowenthal said. "We don't use it regularly like we do Facebook and Instagram."

Citation : taken from REUTERS EDITION US : http://goo.gl/TCXVVJ

Blogging Idea of Future

How four avid bloggers from Chennai made fortune by blogging

For most people, blogging serves as a good pastime, a forum to air or read views and opinions. However, for four yuppies from Chennai, harnessing the power of blogs has proved to be a money-minting venture million dollar business, to be precise.

Launched in August 2007, IndiBlogger.in started as a free blogging platform for Indians. However, the founders—Renie Ravin, Karthik DR, Vineet Rajan and Anoop Johnson—had a bigger game plan: to mobilize the blogosphere, a nascent field at the time, so that companies and brands could engage with their customers. The idea was conceptualized by the founders (barring Rajan), all in their 20s, at a party in early August 2007. Convinced that they were on to a good thing, the trio quit their respective jobs shortly afterwards and focused on their start-up. Rajan left his account manager's job with Hewlett Packard, Hyderabad, to join IndiBlogger after a bloggers' meet in Pune, in March 2008.

Luckily for the founders, they found an angel investor who chipped in with the seed capital. The money was spent on building infrastructure and marketing.

Here's how IndiBlogger works: Registering one's blog is free of charge, but members must publish at least five blog posts to continue to be a part of the community. The company's eight-strong team handles support and moderation from Chennai and Bangalore. The revenue comes from connecting brands and bloggers via unique blogging contests and meets, which are organized periodically across the country. The idea stems from the fact that brands see value in connecting with bloggers, who can influence the purchase decisions of their peer groups. In fact, a Neilsen report, Global Trust in Advertising Survey 2011, shows that less than a third of Netizens trust advertisements, while 92% have faith in peer and word-of-mouth recommendations.