Startup Saturday: India News Digest

If you are not aware what is Startup Saturday, please read this first. Today will be the first installment of daily subject wise news digest that we have introduced.

Here it goes:

Proto.in event to be held in Pune on 25th July

India’s premier Startup event Proto will be held in Pune on 25th July. This is by far the must-attend event for every entrepreneur, wanna-be entrepreneur, startups and even for SMB’s looking for investment.

The event is attended by all the notable VC’s in India and many startups have benefitted a lot from this event (including my own startup – hover.in).

Quick Facts:

• Event Date: July 25^th, 2009
• Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium
• Address: Persistant Systems, Senapati Bapat Road (Near ICC Towers), Pune
• Expected Audience: 400 – 500
• Ticket Cost: Rs. 750/-

If you have not registered yourself yet, please do it now.

Online Education seems to be the flavour of the season for Indian startups

Education seems to be the hot favorite right now, not only with entrepreneurs, but also with the VCs and they are betting big on it.

Accentium Web, which is behind SecondShaadi.com and Gaadi.com, has now launched StudyTimes.com, an online education portal that aims to help students know about admission related information such as application deadlines, exam format and exam results about various colleges and courses in India and abroad.

Close behind heels are Malyalam Manorama guys who have launched (and later retracted, I guess) an education portal – ManoramaHorizon – probably an extension to their popular local language portal.

But the biggest of all was the third round funding of Tutorvista. Even a first round funding is rare for an Indian startup, however, Tutorvista has managed to garner whooping $19 million in third round funding from Pearson, Lightspeed Ventures and Manipal Group.

The online education provider raised $12.5 million from the UK based publishing giant Pearson Group and another $6.5 million from the existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG).

And now time for some interesting articles written by other startup bloggers:

• StartupCentral has written a good article on Why Venture Capitalists turn Entrepreneurs.
• Ashish has written about Google launching offline Newspaper print campaign to promote search. Incidentally, it was picked up by Techcrunch..sweet!

That wraps up our first news digest of Startup Saturday . If you have come across any interesting article on startups and want to feature it, do get in touch with us.