Deal Radar 2008: TutorVista

Located in Bangalore, India, TutorVista provides scheduled and on-demand tutoring to students all over the world. In an attempt to penetrate the $2.5 billion-a-year private tutoring market in the US, Krishnan Ganesh founded TutorVista in 2005, which has grown to include over 100,000 registered users, although the actual number of students tutored by the company

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The Convergence Device Movement

Apple will be announcing earnings this week. Nokia announced last week, and their guidance was cautious. Rim already announced an excellent quarter. My sense is that all three companies will continue to do very well given the at large convergence device movement that is sweeping over our electronics-driven lives. Laptops will be abandoned in favor of

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Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 1)

There are plenty of job search engines out there. So what makes this one an interesting story? It’s their innovation (the first to use the new LinkedIn API), their ability to reach localized job markets (over 30,000 cities), and all while delivering a customized user experience. This is the direction that successful vertical search engines

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Travel Ad Network Raises Series A

Travel Ad Network (TAN), the largest vertical ad network in travel, just closed a $15 million Series A round of financing led by Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individual investors. And what a Series A it is! $50-$75 Million valuation, estimated in my deal radar post and commensurate with the trends in the industry set

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Deal Radar 2008: SKS Microfinance

Microfinance is slowly becoming a mainstream financial service category, and with the recent IPO of Mexican MFI, Compartamos, interest in the segment has been growing. SKS Microfinance was launched in 1998 by Vikram Akula, who is now recognized by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In the last

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Your Virtual Travel Concierge Has Arrived : Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka (Part 6)

SM: Could you describe how you go about putting together a team? BT: In my two prior ventures I built strong management teams, sometimes through trial and error. This time I knew what I was looking for in terms of not only experience and background, but in character and personality. You can have the best

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The State of Taboo, 2008

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author I just spent two years studying trends in the near future for “2011: Trendspotting,” my new book from McGraw-Hill (www.Laermer.com). Taboos are changing. There are not as many of them—and the ones existing will surprise you, make you think twice before going down certain roads.

Marvell: Connectivity Solutions

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author As we continue to analyze the company’s wireless products, it is illustrative to look at its connectivity solutions strategy. In the last segment of this series, we discussed Marvell’s WLAN business. In this piece, I will analyze its Bluetooth and GPS strategies, which I consider as vital elements of tomorrow’s

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