2010 mantra for global firms: Catch the Indian-founded startups

By Eureka Bharali, SiliconIndia
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Bangalore:"Indians tends to think of the workability of the idea and not basically on the idea. Once there is a cash flow, it naturally turns on anyone who's following the trend," says Siddharth S. Kumar, Founder-Director of PixelKraft. No wonder, every other day we have witnessed the acquisition of Indian startups. The Year 2010 turned an eye-popping year for all who followed the acquisition trends among global firms, and firms founded by Indians ruled the roost. The acquisition of Ashok Singhal founded 3Par heralded a Tom and Jerry race between the two giants Dell and HP. Infact 3Par was the trend setter and experts pointed to companies like Compellent, CommVault and Isilon Systems, who they thought could benefit from the storage acquisition wave. And as it was seen Sujal Patel led Isilon made the storage bellwether EMC to shed as much as $2.25 billion. If storage was not enough, there were the acquisitions as a result of the tug-of-war to rule in each other's forte. Co-founded by Vikas Gupta, Jambool, the social gold dealer in virtual games got the attention of Google, for the latter wanted to strengthen its social network foray with 'Google Me'. On the other hand, there was Facebook which extended $10 million to acquire Chailabs and step into Adsense domain, as the Chailabs founder Gokul Rajaram was an adsense exec. The next trend in acquisition was to regig the deteriorating business and the best example was Balckberry's acquisition of Ranjan Nag led Cellmania. It was mainly to upgrade its App World platform which offer just 9,500 apps as compared to Apple's 225,000 and Android store's 65,000.