Vision India 2020: Urja

For many years, I had traveled around India and wondered how to take advantage of the tremendous craftsmanship that exists in the depths of India. Whether it is in Nagaland or Gujarat, Kashmir or Bengal, India’s heritage has been rich with artisans.

Vertical Ad Networks: Evolution

Another big funding round in the vertical ad network world: FM raises between $40 and $50M from Oak Investment Partners. Valuation: $200 Million; 2007 Revenue: $25 Million; 2008 Revenue Forecast: $60 Million. Not bad!

Deal Radar 2008: Glam Media’s Fashion Forays

Glam Media is a women-focused distributed media network that represents and packages content from over 400 sources including fashion blogs, websites and magazines. Along with Glam.com, its flagship, it brings together content relevant to women while giving advertisers an efficient access to fragmented inventory. It is one of the companies we covered earlier in Women

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Stardoll for Little Girls: Mattias Miksche (Part 2)

SM: How did Paperdollheaven come about? MM: Some of the ideas were already there – the initial magic of paperdollheaven.com was all because of Liisa, our original founder and her vision of a fun, creative place for a forgotten demographic on the web: young girls. The new team then added the idea of personalized avators

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Deal Radar 2008: TheFind

We profiled Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind.com, a discovery shopping search engine last year. This is yet another vertical search engine optimized for visual merchandising oriented lifestyle products. In July 2007, TheFind raised $15 million in a third round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Ignition, Lightspeed and Redpoint. It had previously raised $11 million

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Deal Radar 2008: Girls Like Stardoll

Stardoll.com, formerly known as Paperdoll Heaven, is an online community for girls aged between 9 and17. It is a free online version of dress up dolls and is meant for those in love with fashion and style. The site features over 330 dolls and tens of thousands of virtual garments and accessories. It is now

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Women & Web 3.0 (Part 2)

Top Players and Rankings With more and more women going online for quality content on health, beauty, parenting, shopping, entertainment, dating, etc. there is a rising demand for women’s portals. Some of the top sites for women are iVillage, BellaOnline, Handbag and Janemag. Style, fashion, beauty, shopping sites are very popular among young college going

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Gap’s Turnaround Strategy

Visualize the Banana Republic store. It has a few floors of merchandise. When you walk into this store, very little of this applies to you. You are a size 4 woman, dark haired, brown-eyed, olive-skinned. Your style is rather more professional and clean-cut, than much of the frills and laces that you look around and

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