INSPIRING ENTREPRENEURS.......
JUST DIAL (V.S.MANAN)
Just Dial is India’s premier local search destination and telephonic information services provider. Founded in Mumbai in 1994 by V.S.S. Mani, the company caters to over 25 million users spread across 240 cities in India with a single national number.
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Mani, who serves as Just Dial Managing Director, is a first generation entrepreneur and an experienced management professional. He has revolutionised the way people conduct local searches and has made Just Dial a household name. Starting with a modest sum of Rs 50,000, Mani has built a business with an annual turnover of Rs 100 crore and a valuation in excess of Rs 500 crore. In March 2009, Just Dial posted revenues of about Rs 134 crore.
Just Dial is available in India through various channels - phone, Web, WAP and SMS. The company also launched its local search service in North America on a toll-free number, 1-800-justdial. Just Dial bridges the gap between buyers and sellers by helping buyers find the right providers of products and services, while helping sellers improve the efficiency of their marketing channels. Since its inception, the company has experienced exponential growth and has raised three rounds of strategic investments from California-based venture fund Sequoia Capital, New York-based hedge fund Tiger Global and Hong Kong-based SAIF Partners. The company has a 4,000-strong workforce and has more than 135,000 paid advertisers.
SULEKHA.com (Satya Prabhakar)
Sulekha.com is one the largest global, interactive, mobile and Internet platforms that connects Indians worldwide. The site has a portfolio of industry-leading services including classifieds, yellow pages business searches, events and social media reviews and participation.
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Sulekha.com was created in 1998 by Satya Prabhakar, CEO, as a simple website to publish articles written by Indians from around the world. Prabhakar has over 20 years of experience in the US and India in management, business development and strategy roles at TCS, Philips, Honeywell and AT&T. He has won awards for technical/business leadership at AT&T and Honeywell. In 2008, Confederation of Indian Industry conferred him with an award for entrepreneurship.
With Prabhakar at the helm, Sulekha has grown into a global Internet franchise serving Indians through a portfolio of services. With an annual turnover of over `20 crore, 20 million hits a month and several online groups debating motley issues, Sulekha has come a long way.
The company is headquartered in Chennai and Austin, US, and has offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and New York. It serves an exponentially growing online and mobile member base of 6.2 million in over 50 cities in India, US and other parts of the world. The company also owns and manages Sulekhab2b.com, an e-commerce portal that showcases and sells thousands of products.
Since its inception in 1998, Sulekha has married world-class technology with effective business and monetisation processes to achieve accelerating growth of both revenue and usage. The company has developed a large listing of general classifieds and highly comprehensive and accurate yellow pages business listings in India. The company also has a sophisticated and scalable mobile/online platform and a large number of small to medium business advertisers in the online/mobile space. It has alliances with major mobile and online partners such as Reliance, Vodafone, Airtel that have made the use of classifieds and local search easy and effective for customers.
Alok Kejriwal, Games2win
Incorporated in 2007 by Alok Kejriwal, Games2win is one of the top 20 online gaming businesses in the world that hosts proprietary games in several languages. With a hi-tech studio and a highly proficient set of creatives, production and programming teams, the company aims to create and host high standard games.
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Kejriwal, who serves as the CEO of Games2win, is a serial entrepreneur who founded Contests2win (c2w) in 1998. C2w was the world’s first customised brands promotions websites and has retained its leadership position since then. Under Kejriwal’s leadership, Games2Win has constantly been innovating and expanding its operations.
The company publishes approximately 12 games a month on its website. The games offered are in various categories, such as action, adventure, arcade, car, cricket, dress-up, funny, puzzle, romance, sports and trivia games. Realising the need to reach out to younger audiences, Games2win started www.chimpoo.com, where young children can play games, shop for their Chimpoos and interact with other Chimpoos in a safe environment.
The company is also a strong player in the social gaming arena and produces original gaming applications for social networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut. With games in 23 languages and visited by gamers from more than 200 countries, Games2win is one of the largest flash game producers in the world. It has a global fan following of over six million visitors a month.
Beyond its own games, Games2Win has also developed an advertising technology called inviziads.Games2win is the promoter of Inviziads (www.inviziads.com), the world’s fastest growing in-game ad network. Inviziads reaches out to more than 13 million viewers a month and has a footprint across 200 countries and 6,500+ websites. Recently, the site also launched a search engine (Game Curry) across all gaming sites to help users find a particular game
Sidharth Rao, Webchutney
Founded in 1999 by Sidharth Rao, Webchutney is a full service digital media agency. Prior to setting up Webchutney, Rao had short stints as a copywriter at leading advertising agencies. A self-educated entrepreneur, he started the company as a creative shop which now offers a range of Internet marketing solutions to a large portfolio of globally recognised brands
and companies.
and companies.
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With Rao as CEO, Webchutney has steadily grown over these years. In 2006, the company was rated as one of India’s coolest companies by Business Today. With a team of over 150 people in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, the agency works with leading companies in India by developing award-winning and memorable experiences for brands to connect, engage with and build sustained relationships with their consumers online. Along with creative intelligence, the company’s portfolio of services include online advertising, Web design and development, mobile marketing and social media services.
The company is highly innovative in online marketing. At the 2006 Abby Awards, it bagged both the gold and silver for a viral marketing campaign it had developed for makemytrip.com. At the 2010 Big Idea Chair Award, the company bagged two silver awards for media campaigns for Airtel and Tata Tea.
Some of Webchutney’s clients include Microsoft, HP, Google, Infosys, ICICI, HSBC, Citibank, Pepsi and Intel. With presence in India, Singapore and Malaysia, the company has plans to expand to other parts of Asia and beyond.
Raman Roy, Quattro BPO Solutions
Quattro is a global services company offering business and knowledge processing services to organisations seeking higher operational effectiveness, greater flexibility and lower operating costs. Quattro offers several complementary business lines, each one intensely focused on serving the needs of its target clients with technology-based knowledge services while leveraging the overall resources of Quattro – operational excellence, global infrastructure and capital.
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Raman Roy, Chairman and Managing Director of Quattro BPO Solutions, is widely regarded as the pioneer and guru of the Indian BPO industry. Having successfully led the captive BPO initiatives of American Express, GE Capital and Spectramind (now Wipro BPO), Raman has played a pivotal role in establishing the country’s stature as a destination for remote processing.
In recognition to his contribution to the BPO industry, Roy has received numerous awards from the industry. In 2002, he received the Dataquest Pathbreaker Award for directly creating 35,000+ jobs in India and indirectly enabling the employment of 350,000 people by creating the BPO industry. He was also bestowed with the Role Model and Exemplary Leader Award under the BPO Excellence Awards 2009 - 2010 by Stars of the Industry Awards.
As a true business transformation partner, Quattro leverages its BPO experience to offer innovative outsourcing solutions which go well beyond labour arbitrage and deliver tangible process improvements to its clients. With nine operation centres in five countries, Quattro is a top-ranked BPO/KPO supplier providing global scale with 24/7 service delivery capability and built-in redundancies for data privacy and security.
Quattro’s biggest differentiator is its commitment to provide ‘Value through Innovation’ utilising a combination of proprietary tools, platforms and unique business processes
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