Kiruba's podcast

Kallol Borah is the founder and CEO of Aumega Networks, a software infrastructure company with a presence in India, UK and Japan. Aumega Networks licenses software development kits for software-as-a-service computing (SaaS) — especially peer-to-peer software services.

The company's technology enables implementation of application services that are network and device neutral and are more commonly used in the domains of industrial and personal area networking, mobility and supply chain management.

Kallol has 8 years of industry experience and has played roles from selling services to managing products for Aumega Networks and managing its transition from a software services provider to a technology and enterprise product licensing business. Prior to that, he worked at Reliance Industries Limited in business development and project finance functions.

Kallol did his post-graduation in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Helen Shukla is the founder-director of The Writers Block, a Bangalore-based company that focuses on technical documentation outsourcing and consulting.

In this interview, Helen talks about the state of technical documentation in India, what skills are required for the job and how her company aims in filling the demand for quality writers in India.

Harish founded Smile Interactive, the company that incubated Quasar, one of India's top digital advertising agencies. It's also behind Tyroo, an advertising network that Yahoo recently bought a substantial part of. It also built the technology behind MakeMyTrip, India's biggest travel portal.

In this podcast, Harish talks about what it takes to incubate small companies internally.

Harish, an engineering graduate in Computer Sciences, is a serial entrepreneur. prior to getting into Internet business, he built bullet proof cars.

Harish is considered a thought leader on the subjects of digital technology, interactive advertising, online travel, and entrepreneurship and is a regular speaker at various forums for the same.

He is an active member of NASSCOM and IAMAI and proactively represents the Indian internet community for addressing issues related to the growth and smooth functioning of the industry with various regulatory bodies.

Will mobile phones be the future for cash payment? Will mobile payment usher in a cashless society? Are services like Western Union threatened by mobile payment? These are all the questions that Aditya answers in this podcast. Aditya Menon is Chief Information and Technology Officer of Obopay India. He started the US company's India operations.

Obopay is a comprehensive mobile payment service that lets you instantly get, send and spend money anywhere, anytime using a mobile phone.

He was previously CIO of YES Bank. Prior to this, Aditya was Group CIO at MphasiS.

Aditya has 20 years of experience working in the field of banking software product development. , specially in the payments and cash management domain. He was a pioneer in the field of electronic payments and banking, launching the first PC based high value payments systems in 1986 for global banks like ABN and Standard Chartered Bank.

Let's listen to Aditya talk about Obopay.

A while ago, Monster India was the first job site to launch a Video Resume service. In this episode, you'll hear an interview with Vikas Agarwal, vice president of product & technology at Monster India, the key guy behind the new video service.

Vikas manages the team that launched the new site, which won the Best Indian Job Site Award from PC World.

MCA by education, Vikas started his career with Wipro before working with Hughes Software to develop GSM protocols for Mobile satellite communication.

SJ Klein is director of content at the One Laptop Per Child project. The vision of the project is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. And one such way is through a very inexpensive yet rugged laptop. OLPC is the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, from the MIT Media Lab.

Samuel Klein has spent many years developing collaborative communities. He is an advocate for free universal access to knowledge and tools, and a veteran Wikipedian. He organizined the international Wikimedia conference in Cambridge. Previously he has worked to develop software and supporting communities for machine-assisted human translation, and to set up free education centers.

Klein is interested in local and sustainable knowledge development. He establishes ties with teachers, game developers, and publishers, helping them to understand the need and uses for free and open materials. He is passionate about working with the global community around open education.

In this podcast, SJ talks about the OLPC program and about the laptop itself.

Photo courtesy: DCMetBlogger

Dr. Ronaldo Lemos is the director of the Creative Commons Brazil and a member of the Board of iCommons, which makes him the right candidate to explain the differenes between the two organizations.

He is the director of the Center for Technology and Society at the FGV School of Law in Rio, Brazil. He is also the head professor of Intellectual Property law at the same school.

He is one of the founders of Overmundo, the largest Web 2.0 iniative in Brazil. He has earned his LL.B. and LL.D. from the University of Sao Paulo, and his LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

Ravi Swaminathan is president of Hewlett Packard's Personal Systems Group for India. He has countrywide responsibility for the entire range of consumer and commercial PCs, laptops, workstations and the emerging range of personal access devices including handhelds.

Ravi joined Compaq in 1995 and started the consumer PC business in India. He was subsequently promoted in 1997 as the director for the consumer products for South Asia. In 2001, he was appointed to head the newly formed Access Division in Compaq India. Prior to joining Compaq, Ravi held various key positions at ICI.

Ravi holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and is a chemical technologist from the University of Mumbai.

Will an Indian clone of an international hit take off in India? That's what we ask MeraVideo.com's founder, Kanwaldeep Kalsi whose site is a direct clone of YouTube.com.

MeraVideo was recently in the news for being close to signing up venture funding of $1.5 million. We ask Kanwaldeep about his company's revenue model and its chances of success.

Kalsi is an IIT Delhi graduate and has eight years of experience in managing projects of approximately $30M in the United States and India, in a broad range industries including entrepreneurial capacity. Kanwaldeep has sufficient experience in the IT sector and has been involved with a lot of projects on web-site development and hosting.

Kanwaldeep successfully founded a television production company and has already produced two shows on STAR TV and SONY. Kanwaldeep's principal role is to provide overall supervision and strategic direction to the group.

John Buckman is a serial entrepreneur, a musician, a marketeer and an open media evengelist, but he's better known as the CEO of Magnatune, an indpendent, profitable online record label whose tagline closely matches that of Google's: "We are not evil."

Ask any musician and he'll tell you about the unfair treatment and high-handedness of big record labels. They always call the shots and take most of the revenues. John Buckman saw an opportunity here. He created an artist-friendly label that not only shares profits equally with musicians but also allows them to retain the rights to their work.

John sits on the board of Creative Commons and it's no wonder that he has successfully used the open source principles to establish a unique kind of business model for the music industry.

Prior to founding Magnatune, Buckman founded Lyris Technologies in 1994. Lyris sells software for email newsletters and spam prevention. The company was generating $12 million in annual revenues when Buckman sold it in 2005.

Burrp! is a lifestyle social site that allows users to submit and review lifestyle-related listings like restaurants, bars and nightlife.

Deap Ubhi co-founded this site along with his friend Anand Jain. Deap is a mergers & acquisitons man with private equity experience. He most recently was a senior associate at Alpine Investors in San Francisco before the entreprenurial bug bit him and brought him over to Mumbai.

In this interview, he talks about the idea behind the site's existence, how it is transforming from a restaurant guide to a lifestyle social listing site, their revenue models and the justification for a funding request of $6 million.

Jamison Young is a full-time artist who has refused to sign up with big record labels. Instead, he believes in giving away his music for free using Creative Commons, and that has surprisingly helped him sell more records. Now, this may sound contradictory but Jamison says that by giving away your music for free downloads, it vastly increases the number of people who listen to your music and they in turn refer to their friends. This spreads word about the album and quite a few of them buy the album off the store shelves. This is actually a good technique to give a fighting chance against the most established artists.

Jamison has written, sung, produced and marketed his own album, called Shifting Sands of the Blue Car, the music for which is freely available for download on his website and at MySpace.

Jamison is an Australian now living Europe. Over the past year, he has performed in Australia, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Thailand, Switzerland and the U.S.

Jamison launched a new project called Hungry Artists Feed Hungry People, with portion of the sales proceeds going to help poor people in third world countries.

Dushyant Mehta and his company, IndiaPicture, has been in the news recently for signing up a deal with Corbis to be their exclusive distributor in India.

Corbis is a company owned by Bill Gates and it is the world's second largest stock photo website.

Dushyant's passion for rich media and content management started in the early days of his career, when he was executive producer for U.R. Productions, a production house specializing in TV shows.

After U.R., he was a freelance consultant, advising media companies on digital video technologies. Dushyant co-founded his own online media company, IndiaPicture.com, now the largest online repository of images in South East Asia.

Cory Doctorow is a popular science fiction author and co-editor of the high-profile blog, BoingBoing. His novels are given away for free on the Internet as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. They can be freely shared, and in some cases, remixed or translated and sold in developing countries. Perhaps surprisingly, this has led to good sales in the real world.

He is former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology advocacy nonprofit that works to upload liberty in technology law, policy and standards.

He describes himself as "an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person".

K Vaitheeswaran is currently the chief operating officer of Indiaplaza, the world's largest India-centric e-commerce company with operations in Bangalore, Chennai and Austin, Texas.

K Vaitheeswaran is a co-founder of www.fabmall.com, the company that pioneered the Indian E-commerce Industry. Since September 1999, he spent all his time and efforts in not only building Fabmall.com into a position of industry leadership but has also been engaged in evangelizing the cause of E-commerce in India.

In November 2006, The Pitch magazine listed him among the Top 20 people in the Indian Internet industry.

He also co-founded the Fabmall chain of grocery stores, which has become one of the leading brands in the Indian organized retail industry.

This book is a collaborative project — one of the first on the subject of unconferences. Written entirely on a wiki, the book includes key insights from individuals all around the world who have helped organize unconferences or attended them. So far, close to 100 people from 10 different coutries have volunteered for the project, though only a few have actively started on the project.

One of the team members is Sudhir Syal, who currently works in a leading Indian Internet portal. He is a well-known journalist who writes for Economic Times, one of India's biggest financial dailies and The Hindu, South India's number one newspaper.

In this podcast, I have a freewheeling conversation with Sudhir about the book and the challenges that go with authoring a collaborative book.

Tags: unconference, Sudhir Syal

Listen to the man who heads Sify.com, one of India's biggest portals and also heads marketing for Sify Iways, one of Asia's biggest cybercafe chains with over 3300 cafes in more than 150 cities in India. Sivaramakrishnan talks about his experience and challenges in both these businesses.

Sify is a leader in Consumer Internet and Enterprise Services in India with global delivery capabilities.

Siva, as he is popularly called, has over 18 years of experience in marketing consumer brands and building their businesses.

In his role as Vice President of the iWay cyber cafe business at Sify, he was instrumental in leading their transformation from Internet browsing centers to e-stores by introducing break-through alliances and initiatives.

Earlier, He was part of the Ford India marketing leadership team and led the successful launch of Ford's Ikon, Fusion, Fiesta and Endeavour in India.

For the launch of the Ford Ikon, Siva initiated a path-breaking online promotion considered one of the leading web initiatives of that time.

In August 2006, Siva took over as President, Portals.

He is a management graduate from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), New Delhi, with a successful track record of managing brands, sales, and customer service for global market leaders such as Procter & Gamble and Ford, both in India and abroad.

During his career with them, he has led brand, sales and customer service teams, championing successful marketing and sales initiatives for brands such as Vicks, Pampers, Old Spice, Ford Fiesta, Ford Ikon and the Ford Endeavour.

Sameer Sisodia is a cofounder of Ziva Software, the makers of Zook, a mobile search service. Its an interesting company that is incubated at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Ziva Software has built the world's first Mobile Social Answer Engine. The mobile answer engine delivers precise answers to users' questions and helps users find the desired information with the least number of interactions. It's inbuilt mobile-specific social networking system helps users to tap into the information and knowledge possessed by
their friends. Ability to find both on-web and off-web content in an intuitive and interactive manner provides a rich and satisfying experience to end-users.

Ziva's platform powers some of the biggest local directory search names in India - JustDial, InfoMedia being are some of the customers. Ziva also partners with some of the leading mobile content companies, and other service providers.

Ziva is a VC-backed, professionally-managed, product development company with exclusive focus on mobile-based access, search, and navigation. Ziva Software operates out of the NSR-GIV Center within the prestigious Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Bangalore.

Ravi Kumar is a veteran entrepreneur and currently a consultant with The Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. NSRCEL was set up in March 2002 at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB) to synergise with the institute's focus on entrepreneurial studies. The Centre defines the opportunities perceived by aspiring entrepreneurs, evaluates their strengths/weaknesses and helps them with resources to translate their concepts into profitable business ventures. NSRCEL's vision is "To be a world class center of excellence for seeding, nurturing and promoting entrepreneurship with emphasis on startups and existing organizations with growth protential." In this podcast, Ravi talks about NSRCEL's activities and about campus incubation.

Raj Datta is general manager, Knowledge Management (KM), in MindTree Consulting. As head of the KM function in MindTree, Raj has global responsibilities for all aspects of innovation, knowledge sharing and software reuse. He has established KM as a key global strength for MindTree as noted in MindTree's successful assessment at Level 5 in CMMi and P-CMM. He has evangelized and incorporated many learnings from the Open Source Movement into the KM approach at MindTree.

Prior to assuming this responsibility, Raj was heading the offshore delivery of all U.S. engagements for MindTree's IT Services business.He has about 15 years of industry experience, including delivery of large-scale enterprise solutions in the U.S.

In this interivew, Raj Talks about the importance of Knowledge Management and how MindTree has shaped it.

Organisational and Stress Consulting (OSC) assists organisations and their employees as they seek to increase organisational effectiveness and productivity. How does it do this? By helping them manage their stress and psychosocial hazards like bullying, harassment and violence in the workplace. (It's no surprise — these things have an adverse impact on individual and organisational health and performance.)

Organisational and Stress Consulting is an evolving company based in Dublin, with an office in Bangalore, India. They offer help in risk management of work-related stress and psychometric testing and assessment.

Payal Shah has a BA in psychology & media studies and a MSc from University of Nottingam, UK.

Lawrence Liang is the legal lead for Creative Commons India, and has helped set up the India chapter. The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that encourages people to share their creativity and make it available for others to legally build upon and share. By joining the Creative Commons, India has become part of a significant international effort in helping to make knowledge more accessible.

Lawrence Liang is one of the co-founders of Alternative Law Forum. ALF is a non profit collective of lawyers, academics and media practitioners who work on various aspects of law, legality and power.

His key areas of interest are law, technology and the politics of copyright.

He is the author of two books, A Guide to Open Content Licenses, and The Public is Watching: Sex, laws and Videotape. Liang is a guest lecturer at the National Law School, Bangalore and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Drew Clark is director of strategy at IBM's Venture Capital Group.

Drew is responsible for driving external innovation into IBM business units and identifying and developing new business opportunities. A 20-year IBM veteran, he has held a variety of key positions in software development and technology, product marketing and emerging-business development and strategy. He has led several entrepreneurial initiatives, including the formation of IBM's Internet Division.

IBM works with 120 of the world's top VC firms to gain insights into emerging technologies, nurture small businesses and potential startup partners and drive open computing principles in the marketplace.

Professor Bala Balachandran is considered one of the top 10 management gurus of Indian origin in the United States. He represents the first wave of Indian scholars who moved to top U.S.-based business schools and have since contributed to the growing recognition of India as a resource for ideas and academic talent.

Twenty-six years ago, Bala V Balachandran was the only Indian professor at the prestigious Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago, where he has specialized in accounting information systems and decision sciences. He has been with Kellogg for the past 34 years and has contributed richly.

He played an important part in the formation of the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and in the internationalization of MDI Gurgaon. Three years back he decided to set up his own B-school — the Great Lakes Institute of Management, in Chennai.

He has worked with previous governments in various capacities and is an advisor on the present planning commission. He is on the board of directors of the Credit Rating Information Services of India and is working with people like Sam Pitroda to integrate information technology in states like Gujarat, Maharashta, Punjab and Rajasthan.

He is also a consultant to the governments of Israel, Malaysia and Peru.

Amit Pande manages Oracle's user experience practice in Bangalore. This practice defines the user experience of Oracle's Applications Unlimited and Fusion product lines and provides comprehensive interaction design, usability engineering, and user interface and HCI research for Oracle's enterprise applications.

Amit talks about how usability is picking up among Indian companies, what it takes to set up a usability design lab and payscales among other things.

Prior to working with Oracle, Amit started PeopleSoft's user experience operations in India in 2004.

Amit graduated from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and also holds an undergrad degree in engineering from the National Institute of Technology (formerly MNREC), Allahabad, India.

Ajay Adiseshann is the founder and managing director of PayMate. He helped set up the company in May 2006. As managing director of PayMate, he is responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing, business development and overall strategy.

PayMate is the first-of-its-kind mobile payment service in India, which helps customers buy things online by sending an SMS from their mobile phone. The Mumbai-based wireless transactions platform provider has created a viable ecosystem to enable wireless transactions connecting banks, switches, merchants and customers using a simple, secure and seamless technology

A serial entrepreneur with a background in electrical engineering, Ajay founded founded Coruscant Tec, a mobile content developer and aggregator and Webresource, a Web applications and design company.

Syed Razik is an investor and entrepreneur. He is a director at Mecosoft, Fuente and Numeric Fuente.

Syed is part of a passionate group of people who founded The Knowledge Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that consists of technologists, entrepreneurs, professionals and artisans from across India who are driven by the need to organize world class conferences, seminars and workshops.

The Knowledge Foundation group has several big events to their credit including BarCampChennai, BlogCamp, Proto.in and WikiCamp.

In this interview, Syed talks about the mission and objectives of The Knowledge Foundation and the various events, unconferences conducted by the organization so far.

Jimmy Wales recently traveled to Chennai, in India, to take part in WikiCamp, India's first wiki unconference. Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and president of the Wikimedia Foundation. He stayed with Kiruba for two nights while he was there.

This conversation includes Wales's take on the difference between Wikipedia and Wikia, advertising or lack of advertising at Wikipedia and the future growth of the phenomenon.

Bhaskar Sayyaparaju joined Sify in August 2006 as chief technology officer. Sify Ltd. is one of the largest ISP's in India and they recently launched WiMAX here.

Bhaskar talks about the advantages offered by WiMAX, and reasons why WiMAX will become a successful technology. He also shares Sify's plan for the future and its competition with ISP's and telecom companies.

J.Murali contributes the popular weekly column "NetSpeak" for The Hindu newspaper, where he covers the latest trends and services in the online world. The column has appeared continuously for seven years and is an important information source read for many IT professionals.

Despite his column's popularity, many readers don't know about Murali as a person. In this conversation, Murali talks about how he came to write his column, what he writes about and a little bit about his personal interests.

J.Murali is currently the head of the computing department at The Centre for Development Studies at Trivandrum, Kerala.

Futurebazaar.com is India's latest big ticket shopping site that comes from the group which owns India's largest retail chain.

FutureBazaar.com recently got infused with a funding of $25 million and is bound to give established etailers in India many sleepless nights.

Led by Kishore Biyani, the group owns and operates huge retail chains including Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar, Central, E-Zone, Fashion Station, Depot and many others.

I caught up with Sankarson, CEO of FutureBazaar.com at the eTailing Conference in Chennai. Shanky, as he prefers to be called, has had impressive experience in the online retailing market having set up shopping sites for Rediff and Shoppers Stop.

In this podcast, Shanky gives his honest opinions about etailing in India and about FutureBazaar in particular.

Rajan helped cofound the Bangalore chapter of MobileMondays. He is passionate about mobile technologies, and that passion has led him to co-found a mobile media startup company called Motvik.

In this episode, Rajan talks about the history of Mobile Mondays and how this global concept was born. He also talks about what happens during MobileMonday meetings. And, finally, why Monday of all days?!

Sridhar Iyengar is former chairman and CEO of KPMG India. He has been with KPMG for 34 years as a partner in the UK, US and India.

In this interview, Sridhar talks about mentorship, his investments in various companies and what qualities he looks for in a person who approaches him for funding.

Currently, Sridhar is an independent mentor capitalist to early-stage companies. He sits on the boards of American India Foundation, Infosys, ICICI Bank, Rediff, OnMobile, among others.

He has also served as president of TIE and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales

Pravin Gandhi is currently the managing partner of SEED Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund based in Mumbai. Google and Sierra Ventures recently invested an undisclosed amount in Seedfund.

In 1972, Pravin co-founded the Hinditron group of companies (India's first IT Company) which subsequently merged with Digital Equipment Corporation in 1988 (now HP). Pravin serves on the board of several public and private corporates in India.

He is currently the president of TiE Mumbai and a past president of the Manufacturers Association of Information Technology, (an IT manufacturers association in India). He was also formerly a member of the NASSCOM executive council.

Pravin holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Cornell University.

Pradeep Kar founded Microland in 1989. Microland manages the IT infrastructure of companies worldwide.

Pradeep also founded Planetasia, Indya.com which was acquired by News Corporation, and Net Brahma, which was acquired by a U.S. telecom equipment company in 2001.

Pradeep is member of the Technology Advisory Panel to the Government of Karnataka and has received numerous accolades including Indian Express "India Young Business Achiever Award," the World Economic Forums award for the "Global Leader for Tomorrow."

Manish Vij is the co-founder of Quasar Media, an integrated online interactive agency. Prior to starting Quasar Media he worked with India's largest portal, Rediff.com, for over 5 years. He has been recognized as one of the prominent online media professionals in the country.

In the last two years he has also co-founded Tyroo.com, India's second-largest fully self serve ad network, Zoomtra.com - a Travel meta search and incubating entreprenuers with ideas on digital business under the group name of Smile Interactive Technology Group.

In this interview, Manish explains about Quasar's business models, the advantage online media agencies have over tradtional advertising agencies and the challenges in advertising via blogs

Asif Ali is the CTO of Mobile-Worx, a mobility solutions company. Mobile-Worx is trying to replicate the success of Google's Adsense program in the mobile space, where content is monetized via advertising.

Asif talks in detail about ZestAdz, an online platform that will allow companies to advertise their products and services on mobile phones through SMS and WAP sites.

Arun Natarajan is the founder and CEO of Venture Intelligence, a provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India.

Arun writes the Venture Intelligence India blog, covering entrepreneurship, business and venture capital industry trends.

In this conversation, he discusses the business model behind Venture Intelligence, the investment climate in India and the need for analysis of VC and private equity investments there.