Cobaan is a Gurgaon Based startup with ReviewGist as its flagship product. The Company is co-founded by Nishant Soni (IIT Guwahati CS Alumni). Other principal members include Anubhav Dhawan (NSIT Alumni).

ReviewGist (in public beta phase) as the name suggests gives the Gist of reviews from various sources for a product that a consumer might be interested in. The end-user interface is fairly simple to use and search produces just the right amount of details for a product. Though, it might turn out to be a good & useful web-site but the down-side here is that it is targeted for the US market.

The work “encompasses” a portion of Web 2.0 & also involves “Semantic Search”. If you have any experience with NLP (Natural Language Processing) & Semantic Search – Cobaan might be very interested in you. They are also looking for Java/JSP/Java Script Engineers. Compensation/Benefits include – Food, Stay & Beer & the company seems to follow open work culture with flexible timings. Sound like a good place to work at – Doesn’t it?

For more Information – send email to info@cobaan.com or submit your query/suggestion/feedback to Cobaan at http://www.reviewgist.com/feedback.jsp

Further Reading

• To know more reasons for working here check out – http://www.slideshare.net/sonink/why-you-should-quit-your-job-and-join-a-startup/

• Cobaan’s CEO Nishant’s Linked-In Profile can be found here – http://www.linkedin.com/in/nishantsoni

• Check out this link at wikipedia to get started with “Semantic Search” Concepts.

Tyroo (http://www.tyroo.com) is an internet advertising network based out of New Delhi. Commercially launched in June 2006, it is incubated by the Smile Interactive Technology Group (SITG) – which also has some other successful companies (Quasar Media, Creons, Zoomtra, Zumtra & StudioSmile) also under its hood.

With 1000+ publishers (web-sites) already using their services Tyroo seems to be doing a great job. One reason for this could be innovative services that Tyroo is bringing in to the on-line advertising space. For example – they recently started an SMS initiative that would allow a consumer to send an SMS online to the ad publisher. This would be of immense benefit to Indian SMEs who do not have web-sites yet.

The core technology platform on which the product is based has been developed in-house which provides Tyroo an edge over competition in India. Both Java & .NET technologies are being used in building the platform.

Useful Links

– http://amitsempire.blogspot.com/ [Blog of Amit Chabra (Tyroo’s Public Relations Manager)]

– http://www.itvidya.com/blog/sitg & http://www.itvidya.com/user/sitg [Blog from user name SITG – provides useful information about SITG]

– Linked-in Profile of Aditya Khanna (Business Head Tyroo)

Wirkle is working in building a social networking tool for the mobile phone user community. The company has been around since more than two years & has Varun Khurana (IIT Delhi), Sunil Goyal (IIT Delhi) & Lomesh Dutta (Delhi College of Engineering) as the principal founding members. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, Wirkle has a small (around 20 at the time of writing this) but smart team of engineers right here in Gurgaon.

LinkNSurf (http://www.linknsurf.com) is Wirkle’s flagship product. Currently in beta, it allows the user to share & track blogs, photos & other useful content right on the mobile phone. The idea here is very simple – Wirkle’s server gets content (blogs, photos, emails etc) from sources on the web through a variety of protocols & then transform this information into a format that is suitable for viewing on the mobile phone. The application is ready to be tried on a variety of phones. You can find out more about this service on the FAQ page of the service.

Besides LinkNSurf, Wirkle also offers software development services to its clients. Having used J2EE as the platform for LinkNSurf, their areas of strength in technology include Client/Server core java development & J2ME. More elaborate list of Technologies that Wirkle’s team has experience on can be found here.

Further reading

Linked In Profiles [Varun, Lomesh]

Interested in joining Wirkle – send an email to jobs@wirkle.com

For more information send an email to info@wirkle.com

Tekriti Software is a Software Tech Startup based out of Gurgaon. Started in February 2005 by a group of IIT Delhi Engineers (with rich work experience in Microsoft & Infosys), it seems to have a good set of thinking people managing the organization. You can read more about their team here.

Tekriti has a product called TekMedia, which provides re-usable technology components that can be used to add rich media functionality to web-sites. Besides these products, Tekriti also offers Off-shore Development Services & helps its clients with product development. Read more about their Services Offerings here.

On the technology front, their strengths seem to be in Rich Internet Applications (AJAX, Laszlo etc), .NET/ASP.Net. More elaborate list for the technologies they are working on can be found on their web-site here.

Useful Links

– Blogs of their Principal Members (Ashish, Gaurav & Manish)

Uzanto Consulting is a New Delhi (Green Park) based product organization. They set up their office in Delhi (which was earlier in Sarvapriya Vihar) a little more than 3 years ago. Their American office is based at Mountain View, California. It consists of two founding principals: Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle. The team as such is a small, tightly-knit team of developers and designers in India & US working with cutting edge technologies like Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services.

Uzanto’s flagship product slideshare is a great on-line service that allows any body to share a presentation on the web. Launched in October 2006 this service is gaining popularity – One quick look at their service tells you why. Their other product – MindCanvas launched in November 2005, is a research service that improves on online surveys. It uses Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to let online users participate in answering the complex questions that are faced in designing a product or service. You can read more about this service at http://www.themindcanvas.com/

Uzanto also offers consulting in the area of web product strategy. This involves around User Experience Consulting (usability of an interface), Web Product Conceptualization (what features to build), Rich Interfaces Consulting (Using technologies like AJAX, Flash etc to improve the web interface), Customer Research (through MindCanvas).

Some useful links

• A Posting from Jonathan about why should you work at Uzanto – http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2006/03/did_i_mention_w.html

Sometime ago, I started making a note of every product startup company I heard about in the NCR region. I wanted to know more about what these companies are doing & how are they going about it. I enjoyed this so much that I added some notes about these organizations in a spread-sheet document. Later I realized, that this was very useful information for anyone & which is not readily available on the web. So I decided to put this on my blog for the benefits of all others. In fact this was also one of the reasons at the back of my mind – for starting this Blog.

If you are wondering why I was collecting this information; here’s the answer. Every couple of months I used to get into this mode of “I want to start my own venture”. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m ready yet to start on my own – but I’m very keen on learning from what other startups have been doing. The idea there (perhaps) is to learn from these companies and hopefully apply this knowledge in future to other startup that I get associated with. Another reason why I started looking into this data was that one a friend commented that startups don’t work well in Delhi/NCR. I disagreed as I didn’t see (and still don’t see) any logic behind this. To prove my point, I started collecting this information.

I will be posting information about some of these product based startups in NCR in my next set of posts. The information that I’ll post is gathered from various public channels (blogs, web-sites etc) but might be stale. I would encourage [ex-]employees from these companies (if they come across this blog) to point out mistakes & improve the content in any way they can think would be more beneficial to readers.