From the world’s cheapest car to the world’s cheapest tablet, India has emerged as a hub of "Jugaad", a Hindi term which closely translates as "frugal innovation". Owing to its booming economy, growing middle class and a talent pool of highly skilled engineers, India has a thriving tech startup ecosystem. While there are thousands of startups across the country, we bring you a compilation of tech startups that have risen above the rest to be the talking points in the ...

Ever wondered what makes one startup succeed while another fails? Well a team of brains from Harvard Business School has put together a fascinating working paper called Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship which answers questions related to just this. We scoured the 35 page document and found the following pearls of wisdom. Question: Are serial entrepreneurs more likely to succeed than first time entrepreneurs? Answer: Yes. All things being equal, the paper states that a VC backed entrepreneur who succeeds in a venture (by ...

A New York-based early-stage VC fund called Founder Collective is taking an unusual bet on a niche online market: Fine Art. According to TechCrunch, the company is investing a cool US$4-million in Paddle8 -- an online marketplace that aims to provide people “With new access points to premier artworks”. Founder Collective is reportedly no stranger to investing in niche tech markets, having previously put capital into luxury vehicle hire app Uber and open-source hardware outfit MakerBot. Paddle8 says it hopes ...

In San Francisco cafes and bars, even on the street, I overhear people talking about their startup ideas, business plans, and goals. And there are tons of incubators, Angels, wannabe Angels, VC firms, making investments in startups. And there's lots of money being made, especially among the Super Angels, the incubators such as Y Combinator, the micro-VCs, and people such as Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure, who have made fortunes selling startups to larger companies. Sometimes startup teams can go from seed ...

After reading one too many ignorant articles and tweets about how personal financial management startup 22Seven must be safe because Yodlee is safe and so on -- I cracked. I banged out a bunch of tweets in quick succession with the hash tag combination #22Seven my #2c. The response was interesting, ranging from "love your work" to respected tech journalist Simon Dingle’s "How do you know I'm not a computer scientist? And why does that matter? Do you have to ...

As you sat watching the fireworks explode in the night air, bringing yet another year to an end, you may have quietly committed to a resolution that this was finally going to be the year that you take the plunge and start your own business. Naturally, you’re a bit of a geek, so it will most likely be in the tech sphere. The idea has been brewing in the back of your mind for years and, for some unknown reason, the ...

The high-profile launch of new financial management startup 22seven has faced some early criticism, from the very institutions it relies on: The banks. Prolific tweeter and CEO of First National Bank (FNB) Michael Jordaan tweeted yesterday that he thought 22seven was a "cool concept", but warned "against disclosing password(s) to any 3rd party". He ended his tweet with this ominous warning: "Risk all yours". Getting tweets re 22seven. Cool concept but have to advise against disclosing password to any 3rd party. Risk ...

The well-known founder of the pioneering online bank 20Twenty Christo Davel is hitting the market with a new startup, also in the financial management space. 20Twenty was an acclaimed South African online banking platform and an acknowledged leader for its time, but eventually went under when its bricks-and-mortar backing bank, Saambou, collapsed. 20Twenty was later sold to Standard Chartered for a cool US$10-million and closed. The new venture, the similarly-named 22Seven, is billed as an “intelligent money saving tool” that plugs ...

Online shopping was a pain before I got my first credit card. Painstakingly transferring money from my bank account to an online vendor is not ideal. With a credit card though, online shopping becomes easy. For the unlucky few who cannot get a credit card, online shopping dreams are dashed. Not so, says Triloq Payment Services. Its products, 1-2-Pay Online  and AcceptEmail have been in development from January 2011 and aim to “free” the user from online shopping payment grief, allowing ...

So did you get up at the crack of dawn to get your free Wimpy breakfast last week? I didn't, but driving into work I did hear it being discussed at large on various radio stations and they too shared my sentiment of not fully understanding the fascination and dedication of people to get up so early, use their petrol and rush to stand in a queue for breakfast that would have cost them less than R20. The human race ...