Rupee Manager gets into Private Beta

Where is my Money ? Where is the every hard-earned Rupee of mine ? If those questions ring regularly in your mind, we know exactly what you want. To be able to manage your personal finances is becoming extremely critical during these troubled times. Everybody is looking at ways to make for the best utilization of monetary resources. Here is introducing India's first desktop-based money management software. Yes, you read that right. This software does installs on your desktop. No more keeping all your financial data with online service providers. No more worrying about theft of such personal and financial details.

Lets have a first look at "Rupee Manager". This is a personal finance software being developed by TechnoLabs. Since the software is all Java based, all it needs is an installation of the JRE on your computer. And what it does is -

1) Helps you manage your income and expenses.

2) Tells you if your investments are working for the future

3) Helps you with critical financial alerts

4) Suggests a balanced portfolio as per the risk profile adopted by the user

5) Pictorial representations of your budget, investments and expenses

And a lot more. If you are a salary earning individual in India, then this software is meant for you.

RupeeManager is a easy-to-use personal finance software to manage your money. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes and comes. Measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. And that’s what RupeeManager helps you to get started with.

Other than tracking your earnings and your expenses, it is important to see if your money is working for your future. We have a feature where you can allocate your income among fixed expenses, discretionary expenses, short term savings and long term investments. It’s like assigning goals for your money. Also, you will get an idea how to balance your portfolio according to your risk profile. You will match the portfolio with your risk appetite and see if you can take more risk or go more conservative. In other words, you get to decide your asset allocation strategy.


If you want to be a part of the private beta, here is the link to the post. Just add a reply to this post, and we will get back to you for the Beta.

Hope you find this software worthy of a look. And may we be able to bring a lot of control as far as your money is concerned. TechnoLabs is proudly associated with Ranjan Varma for the functionality that he brought to the table, and we turned it into Technology.

SSD Next edition - 11th July - Agenda

It has been a long time since this blog carried information about the SSD Agenda. This time we had the entire information and the complete program is all set. Here is what we will have on the 11th of July at the American Center, KG Marg.

1) 2:15 pm to 3:00 pm - "My Rules of getting Funded" - Rohit Agarwal of TechTribe fame. Rohit is an experienced entrepreneur who has co-founded many a startups. He has seen both ups and downs, one constant being - his ability to get funded. He will share some of his ways with money

2) 3:00 pm to 3:45 pm - "How we got here? From here to where?" - Harpreet Singh from CoCubes. He is going to give us the CoCubes story. How they started, Where they are now. Also a quick roundup of their business model, revenue streams. Why getting funded is not the end but the beginning.

3) 4:00 pm to 4:45 pm - "Entrepreneurs and VCs to focus on Offline Businesses" - Sameer Guglani from Morpheus Venture Partners (MVP). There is a much larger and untapped market opportunity in businesses that do not operate out of the "internet". Sameer will get talking about the space and such businesses.

Am seriously looking forward to this one. Especially the talk from Sameer. Have been always fascinated with businesses that don't function in the online world. He is going to talk about their proliferation, funding etc. This is really an exciting talk as far as I can see it coming from him. And then there is Rohit - just see the links Google reports on his funding for TechTribe and the aftermath. Its a good story to read and learn from. Harpreet on the other hand has a creative streak to himself. I was impressed with the way he communicated while we finalized the topic and content of his talk.

Overall, a very worthy spend of a half day. So come over and join us for some worthy thoughts. These are men who have been there and done it all. Register here for the SSD July edition.

Start of a relationship with Pluggd.In

Today marked the beginning of a relationship with Pluggd.In . It started when Ashish Sinha put out a post saying he wanted some Rock-Stars to join the blogging team at Pluggd.In . I thought of letting the knowledge gained from verticals like Health-Care and Sports be shared through this medium. Just a phone call later, I had signed up to do a few starting posts on the Health-Care industry / knowledge / research.

And it so happened, that the first post went online today. It talks about Swine-Flu - the lack of information propagation through various public and private entities - responsible for giving out this information. Read the entire post here on Pluggd.In

Wish me some luck. Hoping this will help TechnoLabs in some way or the other.

Agenda for Startup Saturday Delhi (June Editiion)

Here is the schedule for Startup Saturday Dehi (June edition)

1) Vivek starts the proceedings with his talk.
  "Understanding the power of effective PR for Startups"
  We will start off at 2:00 pm

2) Prabind from Nivio will take us through a Demo of the
  Airtel Net PC. Nivio are technology partners to this offering.
  Lets look what they have to present here. - 3:00 pm

3) Harish goes on to explain
  "Early Stage Venture Funding: Options and Expectations".
  His talk will derive from his experiences at
  Canaan Partners. - 4:00 pm

4) Networking Session over Tea/Snacks  5:00 pm - 6:00 pm


See you all at the American Center.

Agenda for the 9th of May, 2009 (SSD Edition 5)

This is what you will find , when you arrive at the American Center for the 5th edition of Startup Saturday Delhi.

Date : 9th May 2009

Time : 2:00 pm

1) Ankit Maheshwari from InstaBlogs - He is going to talk about the idea, team and execution behind InstaBlogs. The challenges he faces operating out of Shimla. And finally some of his thoughts on the "recession".

2) A sort of "Entrepreneurial SoapBox". This will be on a first-come-first-serve basis. We will invite 5 entrepreneurs among the audience to come up and give a short 2-minute pitch about their ventures. Then the floor will be open for discussion about what problems are they facing and what are they actually doing to make business sense out of their ventures. Invitations will be available on the spot.

3) Sarabdeep Singh from Fachak - Fachak is a platform to collect content from across internet and your desktop and build mash boxes (collections) out of it. It is something like a play list of YouTube but not confined to videos, but also contains Presentations, documents and images. You can aggregate content from third party services like YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr etc as well as pick up content from your desktop.

Expecting to see a lot of fantastic people - eager to hear some excellent folks - who have been able to find monetization in the world of digital social media. Catch you at the American Center for 5th edition of Startup Saturday Delhi.

Agenda for the Startup Saturday Delhi (4th edition)

In the midst of continuously broken patterns of weather and governments, it feels good to see something that has a marked continuity to it. On the 11th of April, Startup Saturday Delhi will mark its 4th occurrence. Nevertheless, change has also been a constant companion to the Startup Saturday Delhi (SSD). Started under the aegis of HeadStart Foundation, SSD has so far been a mix of product/technology demos from software startups based out of Delhi/NCR. There have been a few "Gyan" sessions from people like Narendra Nag and Deepak Shenoy. Coming to think of it, it has been an interesting revelation about technology, business, HR mix that goes into being a startup.

This Saturday will again see the convergence of startup enthusiasts at the permanent venue of American Center. For anybody who is coming in for the first time, here is the complete address of the place you will be spending a good second half of the day - 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi - 110001. Here is the link to google map, for those needing exact driving directions.

Now a look at the way proceedings are scheduled for the day

2:00 pm	Sony Joy from MobMe shares his startup story. He is talking about the way his venture MobMe was brought about as a startup, their growth fundamentals and learnings on the way. A good few minutes on how did they go about getting funded. Also demoing their product offering.
3:00 pm	Vineesh goes on to take us through a demo of his new venture Weboword. He is also associated with Pictualize. Weboword is a visual vocabulary product. It portrays words through the eyes of somebody who can only understand pictures. Vineesh will talk about the things that make such niche products successful.
4:00 pm	Arun from SlideShare. He is talking about the "Essence of Design - for Startups" - why the presentation would really matter when you are a startup or developing a product. Arun has been with SlideShare for more than a year, and knows what it takes to build "presentations that matter".
5:00 pm	Networking over Snacks and Tea/Coffee

The registration mechanism from this SSD onwards has been modified. Now the registrations are hosted by the HeadStart Network. Take a look at the SSD Wiki for the agenda as well as the registration mechanism. If you have any questions/comments, please feel free to email me.

If you do not make it to the registrations on the blog posted here, it should not be such a worry. Just make sure that you are added to the SSD Project on the HeadStart Network. We will figure out the rest. Thats all for the time being. Hoping to catch up with lots of startup folks tomorrow.

Proceedings from the Startup Saturday Delhi - Edition 3 ( Part I )

14th March 2009 saw the American Center in Delhi host the 3rd Startup Saturday Delhi event. Carefully screened and chosen were the presenters for this edition, after a not so enthusiastic response to the 2nd edition.

Michael Macy, the Cultural Attache at the American Center took to the stage before the invited speakers got there. He challenged the young people in the audience to use the recessionary period we're in to find innovative solutions to problems that we face daily. He cited a few examples of companies that were started during recessions to being very large powerhouses today - including Microsoft. This was a small involvement from the hosts of SSD, and it proves that they are always willing to support such initiatives.

Next onto the podium was Mrigank Tripathi along with a demo of whats being done at his 2 month old venture - VoiceTap. The idea behind VoiceTap was conceived sometime in January and they have already reached Alpha. Mrigank expects to hit Beta in the next 4 weeks. Now for the concept, VoiceTap is a service that is trying to create a connect between Knowledge Experts and Knowledge Seekers. It is a platform where you get to speak and interact directly with experts: people who have ‘made it’ in the field that is relevant to you. The service will be delivered over the phone – and the calls will be scheduled based on the interest levels shown in that particular call - the level being judged by way of numbers registering as knowledge seekers as well as the curiosity in terms of questions being put up for the expert. They have partnered with one of the largest conference call providers for the backend technology, since getting a larger set of people onto a single conference call is quite expensive.

Link to Mrigank's presentation about VoiceTap

Mrigank faced a lot of questions from the attentive audience. He identified revenue models under these heads - premium service where subscribers can take a 1-1 call for any subject, pay per minute, in-call advertising and sponsored calls. Authenticity of the experts and live calls were the basic USP upon which Mrigank hinges the success of VoiceTap. This link has the answers to a lot of questions about VoiceTap.

Next up was Wirkle co-founder Tarun Mittal. Wirkle is a products and services company in the mobile phone domain. He started off with a demo of few products in the Mobile VAS domain. They have an excellent product in the Mobileum platform. Its a patent pending platform, and is extensively provided to others who can build their products and services over it. This was first developed for the GSMA Mobile Congress, held annually in Barcelona, Spain. This is a platform thats based on the client-server architecture. The server collates information from a number of sources, and distributes it to the clients existing in the form of hand-held devices. Tarun went on to demo a few other applications in the social media space that work over the mobile phone device. Next in his kitty were applications for the iPhone. There is this special touch sensitive application available from Wirkle, that makes a "Kiss" sound when the iPhone is placed near human skin. Or at least thats where everybody could test it.

Link to Tarun's presentation about Wirkle

Once the product demo was over, Tarun delved into the formation of Wirkle. The history has it that 3 friends working in US decided to come back to India and venture out on their own. Their exposure to an advanced mobile phone market in the western half of globe inspired them to start a products and services company in the hand-held device market. And thus was born "Wirkle".

This happens when you come out of an interesting event. This blog post has already gone past a readable length. I am going to terminate it here. And modify the title to say that this is part I of the entire coverage from 3rd edition of Startup Saturday Delhi. Will be posting the second half in a day or two.