e-launches

Point and hic! Surfers can now buy UB's Kingfisher brand on-line. The brand is already available on-line in Bangalore and will, by the end-of the year, be available on-line in the other metros.

Another e-xtension gets under way. The D.S. Brar led Ranbaxy Laboratories will soon establish a portal that will serve as an exchange for bulk drugs.

There must be something about Hyderabad. Cellular service provider Tata Cellular, which is based in the city, has become the first company to launch WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) services.

The Net-trading arm of ICICI, ICICI Web trade, has started on-line trading in equity shares on its Website icicidirect.com.

WAP's Happening. The Bangalore-based Tenet India has recently launched a WAP-based portfolio-tracker and mobile-trading application, m-trade.

There's always room for one more personal investing site. Or is there? Valuenotes.com, a search engine dedicated to Indian equity, finance, and corporate research is the latest in a long line of sites that target the small investor.

e-ventures

They are at it again. The Raj Kondur and Ashish Dhawan-led Chrysalis Capital has made its seventh and latest investment of Rs 12.50 crore in TransWorks, an infotech-enabled start-up, which provides call centres and data processing solutions.

Credit the site with another successful placement. ICICI Venture Fund management has just picked up a 10 per cent stake in naukri.com.

View it as another imprint agreement. Tech-portal ZDNet.com has launched ZDNetindia.com in association with Jasubhai Interactive, a subsidiary of Chip magazine's Indian publisher, Jasubhai Media.

It's all about answers to FAQs. The Hyderabad-based Sriven Multi-tech Ltd. has tied up with the Mumbai-based BSEs Telecom Ltd (BTL) to float a joint venture company called Powersurfer Interactive Ltd, which will set up a city-specific (Mumbai being the city) Net-enabled network that will provide information on, among other things, entertainment, e-Commerce, tourism development, railway bookings, and banking.

The Ashok Soota promoted Mindtree Consulting will now facilitate the foray of the Global Trust Bank into e-Commerce.

-Vijayalakshmi Vardan

back to b-school

Everyone needs to go back to school. That is the logic behind www.bizkool.com, a Hyderabad-based start-up that claims to be a management portal addressing the needs of anyone who has anything to do with management: wannabe managers (read MBA-aspirants), MBAs seeking a peer-portal, and managers looking for that extra edge through an executive education programme. Incubated by consulting firm Cosmode, Bizkool's USP is information on Indian and international B-schools. The site has details on 250 Indian B-schools and 1,200 international ones today, and plans to increase these numbers to 700 and 2,100, respectively, by September and December this year. Says Kalpana Sinha, 35, CEO, Bizkool: ''Information on management education is unstructured, and comes from several disparate sources like directories, Websites, career counsellors, and newspaper advertisements. This is where Bizkool steps in.'' Although its activity right now is restricted to providing information on regular programmes and management development ones, Bizkool.com hopes to graduate to a business model that is built around advertising (from companies that are keen to target the country's management community, and from schools advertising their MBA and amp programmes), a subscription fee that users will eventually have to pay, and e-Commerce. That could be some aptitude test.

-E.K. Sharma

down(loading) to a T

He's got tea in his veins. Which probably explains why Ayush Bagla, the scion of the Bagla family that owns the Calcutta-based Hanuman Tea Ltd has gone on-line with a click and brick b2b infomediary, www.teauction.com. The site works like other b2b intermediaries: buyers and customers register; Teauction provides an evaluation of the products on auction, a guarantee of quality to customers, and payments to sellers. Customers can view the status of their bids on-line. And payments and deliveries are made either directly, or through it. The company has already forged alliances with HDFC Bank and Centurion Bank to facilitate electronic transactions. Says Bagla, 27: ''Our objective is to reduce the cost of transactions. This will ensure that people will not mind paying us a 1.5 per cent commission.'' To succeed, though, Teauction will have to work on enlarging its rather scarce product range (there were all of two items on auction on the site in end-April, 2000). On-line auctions of tea, it would appear, is an acquired taste.

-Rakhi Mazumdar

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