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Archive for May, 2009
Why making good friends in college is important
Thursday, May 28th, 2009Finally, started on the path to familiarize myself with blogging with this first reflection.
…It is interesting to see the number of college friends who get together to startup. I am not sure if there has been any study from where I can quote a statistic, but I bet that amongst all the startups, those started by college batchmates would be a significant percent. Microsoft, please don’t sue me. I mean no offense to the dropouts.
Am just penning down an observation from the 23 startups – 14 incubatees we have at CIIE and 9 startups which have joined us for iAccelerator in 2009 summers…
Social Gaming startup, HashCube, breaks new ground at iAccelerator
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Leveraging its success with fun educational puzzle games on Facebook, HashCube has become one of the most successful companies to launch games for the recently opened up social networks of MySpace, Orkut and Friendster. HashCube’s Sudoku application is now the most popular Sudoku app of MySpace’s 110 million monthly users.
With more than 300,000 monthly active users on Facebook, 3 million monthly page views, a stable of 8 games deployed on 4 different social networking and mobile platforms and significant revenue, HashCube has a proven track record of developing, deploying and monetizing educational casual games for the social and mobile platforms. They are one of the few startups which are doing more than copy pasting US stuff for India. Rather, more than 99% of their active users currently are non-Indians. With 5 more games planned, their success looks likely to continue well into the future.
HashCube, a start-up being supported under iAccelerator program at IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), aims to leverage the current craze amongst youth to use applications built on these platforms. Notably, iShoot application on iPhone by a developer in the US made around Rs 3 crore in one month. Scrabulous by India’s Agarwala brothers has been one of the most popular applications on Facebook.
“Having already raised their initial investment from the iAccelerator, the team would soon be looking at raising more innovative financing. Since economics of games are more like movies, revenue sharing deals align with financing games naturally. This takes a lot of the risk out of funding startups” says Freeman Murray (Founder of Upstart.in, a co-investor and part of Management Team at iAccelerator).
HashCube’s innovation extends beyond programming as they look to alternative industries for ideas on how to finance their expansion. Borrowing a trick from the movie industry they plan to sell ‘points’ in their upcoming games entitling investors to act like producers and to directly share in the revenue of the games Hashcube develops. This provides a much clearer path for investors to get a return on their money and allows HashCube to retain more control of their company, creating a ‘win-win’ for both parties.
“We got interested in supporting Hashcube as they were doing more than just ‘games’. They are able to quickly come up with simple, logical and mentally stimulating games like Sudoku, LooptheLoop and Dot Game which a regular internet user can play the same way he has been playing other games” Pranay Gupta, Joint CEO, CIIE (IIM Ahmedabad).
Design Innovation at CIIE
Friday, May 1st, 2009Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, the incubator at IIM Ahmedabad, in conjunction with its aim to help innovative people grow, is planning to provide space on its premises at IIM Ahmedabad for art. The idea behind this is to encourage and provide a platform to regional artists/art-form(s) and recognise their talent.
The theme for the above mentioned activity is Innovation and Entrepreneurship, where following materials could be used by the participants while designing:
Wood/Bamboo
Tile(s)
Acrylic
Clay
Glass
Metal
Jute
POP
Wire
Scrap
Tentative surface area for design: 5’ x 10’
Interested individuals could send in photographs of their work/ portfolios at design@ciieindia.org by 15th of May, 2009.