Fast, Cool and Fantastic – and Made in India Meet the M-Zero India is known…
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“Educate a Child – and Change a Life’ A mobile ‘Chalta Phirta’ school, computer learning…
The world knows of Dropbox, which is estimated to be a $ 5 billion company but few know that its genesis happened at Y Combinator, an incubator of start-ups which also nurtured the $1. 3 billion Airbnb.
“Y Combinator has become the central place to see where the next huge companies will be born and this makes it tremendously exciting to be a part of,” says Harj Taggar, 29, who is part of the core team at Y Combinator.
Since 2005 Y combinator has funded over 380 startups, including Reddit, Scribd, Disqus, Dropbox, ZumoDrive, Justin.tv, Posterous, Airbnb, Heyzap, Cloudkick, DailyBooth, WePay, Bump, Stripe, AeroFS, and Hipmunk.It has been called the most prestigious program for budding entrepreneurs and has created an entirely new method of funding early stage startups.
In the tech world, patents don’t foster innovation; they inhibit it. They are like nuclear weapons in an arms race, in that companies use them to hold competitors back or to extort license fees from companies that can’t afford the time and cost of litigation.
These battles play out every week in Silicon Valley: among the behemoths—Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP—and between behemoths, startups, patent trolls, and large corporations. Startup entrepreneurs live in constant fear that behemoths or patent trolls will bankrupt them with frivolous lawsuits.
BlackBerries and Apples are much more than fruit nowadays – they are our very lifeline to the larger world outside. So today on Jan 25, it’s hard to believe that on yet another Jan 25 – in 1915 to be precise – Alexander Graham Bell, first inaugurated US transcontinental telephone service. Can you imagine a world devoid of our little buzzing devices, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no text messages on the run?
“The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.”
Software patents are just nuclear weapons in an arms race. They don’t foster innovation, they inhibit it. That’s because things change rapidly in this industry. Speed and technological obsolescence are the only protections that matter. Fledgling startups have to worry more about some big player or patent troll pulling out a big gun and bankrupting them with a frivolous lawsuit than they do about someone stealing their ideas.
How can young girls get a sense of self and confidence in tackling the larger world? On the recent Take Our Daughters to Work Day, two South Asian organizations came together to make this a reality. South Asian Women’s Leadership Forum (SAWLF) partnered with South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!). Over 45 high school students got a chance to visit corporate offices such as JP Morgan Private Bank, Harper Collins, MTV, Infosys and Colgate, thanks to SAWLF women who are already working in these companies.
Want to know where you can get WiFi connection in Manhattan? Confused by the labyrinth of subway connections? Or just hungry for a great meal? Now, thanks to a team of Indian IT professionals, you can have all that information at your finger tips on your iPhone – and it’s free.
NYC Way is the name of this neat application and it’s got Mayor Bloomberg’s seal of approval. It got an honorable mention for the App of the Year but also won the Public Choice Grand Prize and the Investors’ Choice Award in the NYC Big Apps competition