StartupCentral

Barely ten days after Amazon scripted a soft entry into the Indian ecommerce market with comparison shopping site Junglee, homegrown players have started to feel the pressure of major league competition. Bangalore-based Flipkart, which headlines the second coming of ecommerce in India, has been the first to react. This afternoon, the Accel Partners and Tiger [...]

Lok Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation-backed social venture capital firm, has emerged from a tough 2011 with a realigned investment game plan. From being focused only on the microfinance sector, the Gurgaon-based firm now has a broader mandate to invest in healthcare, education, employment services and other financial services businesses. The recast follows its declining fortunes [...]

MobStac, the mobile publishing platform developed by Bangalore-based MobileMotion Technologies, is growing up. A couple of weeks ago, the Accel Partners-backed startup announced the launch of its 360-degree mobile publishing platform, which allows online publishers to seamlessly adapt content to any kind of mobile device, including tablets. The new platform also brings along some key [...]

When Pepperfry, the country’s newest ecommerce startup, opened for business on January 3, founders Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah never anticipated that the day would end the next morning at 6.00 am. “We were giving away 200 Pepper Points to customers who signed up that day and by 7.30 pm we had 700 transactions,” says [...]

Unreasonable Institute, a non-profit based in Boulder, Colorado, has thrown open the Unreasonable Marketplace for 2012. Every year, the institute invites 25 social entrepreneurs from across the world to spend six weeks at its headquarters. The entrepreneurs receive training and build long-term relationships with mentors and investors and get legal advice and design consulting. The [...]