The Venture Intelligence Blog

The New York Times has published an interesting article featuring several professionals of Indian origin who quit successful careers abroad and returned to India. As the article indicates, several of the returnees are venturing beyond their lives in "gated colonies" and making a positive change to their wider social environment. Here's one from the many examples in the article: A radiologist, Dr. Kalyanpur had resigned himself to a significant pay drop upon his return. Then he proved to Yale that he could accurately read CT scans and other images transmitted via broadband to India. He began working for them from afar before starting his own business, Teleradiology Solutions Inc., in 2002. He spends his days reading images for the emergency room nightshifts of about 40 American hospitals, compensating for the shortfall of nighttime radiologists in the United States, and being compensated at near-American salary levels. His partner, like him, is American-trained; a...

While doing development out of India has become a "no brainer" for all enterprise software product companies, the most "obvious" way to go about exploiting the India advantage has been to set up a captive development center. Like Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Adobe, etc have done. So, how does Symphony manage to convince software companies like Siebel Systems (the world's leading provider of CRM software), Autodesk (the leading CAD software vendor) and other clients to outsource development work to it? (As Economic Times reported recently , Symphony has been providing software testing and development services to Siebel for over a year now.) What is Symphony's secret formula? Businessworld attempts to provide the answer. "To address the issue of trust, Symphony works on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) model. The understanding is that at any time the client can acquire the operations - including the team working on the project - from the servi...

At a time when pretty much all VCs in Silicon Valley are pushing their portfolio companies to open R&D centers in India, Promod Haque, Managing Partner at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), is adopting a different tack. He is encouraging his portfolio companies to view India as not just a low-cost development base, but also as a key market for their wares. With the Indian telecom services market already the fifth largest in the world and Indian IT services and BPO vendors making a serious mark on the global outsourcing market, Haque wants his portfolio companies to get an early entry into on what promises to be a long-term growth market for technology products. Haque calculates that India's call-center industry alone would be spending $12 billion on telecom equipment over the next four years. Haque is leveraging the PR value of his recent anointment - by Forbes magazine - as the world's top VC to help his portfolio firm kick-start their sales to Indian companies. After...

Red Herring magazine has published an offbeat interview with Kailas Narendran, a 25-year-old researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Mechanical Engineering, who co-created a device that provides mobility for patients with spinal cord injuries. Narendran and his co-inventor recently won a $30,000 prize for their business plan to commercialize the technology at MIT's Entrepreneurship Competition. The RH article points out that former MIT contest finalists - including Akamai, Centrata, and Firefly - are now valued at over $4 billion. Click Here to read the full profile.