Food and entertainment are two strong consumer markets in India and Matrix Partners India appears to have honed in on this burgeoning market. Chinese food is the second most popular cuisine in India and recently Yo!China, a Chinese restaurant chain, received $10 million in funding from Matrix Partners ...

SAN FRANCISCO, December 12, 2006 (PodTech News) — In the news today, Nintendo’s Wii surprises the world with its first lawsuit — it’s not an injury! In Vienna, Mozart’s works have been brought into the digital age, and they’re now living online, absolutely free. Also, a glimpse at memory after ...

Given the Marketing Voices community requests, metrics for consumer-generated media and listening centered marketing are the core of my conversation with CMO of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Peter Blackshaw. Metrics is the key challenge for all PodTech client companies, and especially for podcasting. Pete and I also talk about how the ...

SAN FRANCISCO, December 9, 2006 (PodTech News) — Recent headlines suggest that it’s getting harder and harder for citizens in Iran to visit Web sites like the open-source online encyclopedia Wikipedia and even the online home of The New York Times. An academic partnership between several universities is working to ...

Watch the three winning pitches of the first ever CRV Entrepreneur Idol (coming to a grad school near you soon). Judges George, Bill Tai and Susan Wu of CRV, as well as Silicon Valley famed blogger and journalist, Matt Marshall chose their top 5 contestants ...

Hack Days seems to be the in-thing amongst developers. The 24-hour coding challenge has caught the fancy of the tech community which is looking for various ways to make work more interesting.

Barely a few weeks after Yahoo conducted its much publicized public Hack Day, Sabre Labs is holding ...

Apple is once again in Greenpeace’s cross-hairs — the environmental watchdog’s Green Electronics Guide put Apple at the bottom of the heap, while Nokia sits on top. Along those lines, a quick look at a conversation that’s bound to gain momentum: How much energy does the online world use? ...

Netflix meets Fedex is how Raghav Kher describes his online movie rental company Seventymm, which he founded in Bangalore in 2005. This is Raghav’s fourth company, and it has recently received a second round of investment of $10 million from Matrix Partners India.

In this interview Raghav discusses why ...

SAN FRANCISCO, December 5, 2006 (PodTech News) — Search competition may be heating up with Ask.com’s revamped services. Other search firms have pumped some ad revenue into the newspaper industry. How are newspapers reacting? They may be starting to look a lot more local — and a lot more virtual ...

The venture investment scene in India appears to show no signs of slowing down. In the past few days, a number of investment deals were inked and signed.

Leading the pack is Travel Guru, a travel portal, received $15 million from Sequoia Capital and Battery Ventures. Next in the ...

A professional-turned-entrepreneur, Deep Kalra promoted India’s most successful online travel company, MakeMyTrip in April 2000. [tag]MMT[tag] is a comprehensive travel services provider for leisure travel to, from and within India.

Over the past 5 years, MMT has grown rapidly to become the market leader for U.S.-India travel. MMT’s domestic launch ...

Wikis are going to change the world, or at least the way the world does business. That’s the thinking behind so much of what Barry Libert, CEO of Shared Insights, has been up to lately. He discusses a future for business that could involve a lot more sharing among ...

IBM developerWorks Community Programs manager, Rawn Shah, talks about a pioneering university course on Web 2.0 and online communities and a ground-breaking course he helped to launch and is co-teaching at the University of Arizona.

As Community Programs manager, Shah focuses on how to develop greater interaction between our members through ...

Dushyant Mehta and his company, IndiaPicture, has been in the news recently for signing up a deal with Corbis to be their exclusive distributor in India.

Corbis is a company owned by Bill Gates and it is the world’s second largest stock photo website.

Dushyant’s passion for rich media and ...

Jan Kabili, who does Photoshop Online TV, comes over to my house to teach Thomas Hawk a bunch of Adobe Photoshop tips and tricks. In Part I he gets schooled on Adobe Bridge, which is a great program to bring RAW images into your computer and do some ...

Rishi Navani is the founding managing director of Matrix Partners, India. Rishi has been involved in the Indian investment space for about 10 years and has seen the investment landscape in India undergo a dramatic change in the last few quarters.

Matrix Partners has a $150 million fund and it ...

Hundreds of people are lined up outside the Sony Metreon in San Francisco, hoping to buy a Sony PS3 gaming console, which will go on sale across the country at midnight. With so many people already in line, even before they’ve used the new machine and before they know how ...

George Wright, marketing director at Blendtec, invited us back stage for the filming of Blendtec’s next Will it Blend? video. Currently YouTube’s #3 most watched video producer, Blendtec has found an amazing ROI for their $50 marketing spend. With over 6 million visitors to their WillitBlend.com ...

SAN JOSE, November 9th, 2006 (PodTech News)–Modern consumers are not only tech savvy, they’re also thirsty to be tuned in, unplugged, and turned on at all times and instantly with innovative digital products. This past week Dow Jones brought together the most promising consumer-oriented startups along with industry-leading executives and ...

Megan Cunningham, founder of Magnet Media — and one of the official Vloggies judges — talks with PodTech’s John Furrier at the after-party. Magnet Media is an educational media company serving the entertainment industry. It produces two series of interactive educational products: Zoom In Online and The Digital Media ...

Why do Indian companies pay such scant respect for usability? We ask Amit Ranjan, who heads the Delhi office of Uzanto, a Silicon Valley startup. He heads the product development team that has built two of Uzanto’s products, SlideShare & MindCanvas. SlideShare is a Web 2.0 application for ...

The Web 2.0 mantra is that old media — NBC, Hearst, Disney, etc. — are too incompetent to be successful on the Web. The reality is that old media has invested a lot of time, effort and money in positioning their valuable offline properties to make money online. Some of ...

Jerry Zucker, producer of Airplane, Ghost and The Naked Gun, spoke at the Vloggies, saying that he had no interest in videoblogging but adding that the Hollywood studios are a mess…. He was kidding, but he did say that online media is in its infancy, predicting that we’ll look back ...

A Symantec Security Response podcast focused on information-stealing programs designed to gather account information for online games. The goal of this podcast is to help you better understand the threats these programs pose to more than just your online game account and how to protect yourself from these types of ...

The markets are back up, with several big corporate buyouts bolstering confidence on the day before Election Day. Google made the papers today, as it prepared to roll out auctioned-off ad space in some of the most prestigious newspapers in the country. Meanwhile, CBS is positioning itself for a stronger ...