Intel makes $77 million investment in 18 companies Date:   Wednesday , December 08, 2010 Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment arm has announced a bulk investment of $77 million in 18 new companies of which three are based in India — Shufflr.tv, BuzzInTown and Verismo Networks. Shufflr.tv is an Adobe Air based application developed by the cloud-based video discovery platform Althea Systems, headquartered in Bangalore. It provides a clean interface for discovering new content, and has content deals inked with NDTV, Reuters, CNBC-TV18, BigFlix in India, BBC and MSNBC in the UK, and also with Brightcove which aggregates a large number of content providers. Intel has further made undisclosed investments in Wortal which owns and operates the India based events listing site BuzzInTown which lists events taking place across 18 cities in India, including books and exhibitions, concerts, movies, theatre, sports, and so on and is now monetizing to push news letters on a weekly or daily basis. The third Indian firm, Verismo Networks, enables original equipment makers (OEMs) and multiple system operators (MSOs) to offer Internet content browsing on TV. In Bangalore, Verismo provides content service for IPTV service provider Atria Convergence Technologies, which is among the first MSOs in the country to launch IPTV services. “Innovation continues to thrive all over the world. Despite the economic environment, these 18 investments help advance next generation computing technologies aligning with Intel’s vision that more and more devices will compute and connect to the Internet, called the ‘compute continuum.’ The innovative technology developed by these companies supports the compute continuum from advancements in PCs and server trends, such as cloud computing, to building out the ecosystem around smart TVs and smartphones.” says Arvind Sodhani, President of Intel Capital and EVP of Intel. MyDala.com, a New Delhi-based group buying site that leverages the power of group buying to bring benefits to the shoppers has raised Rs 1.1-crore in angel funding from PE veterans Ajay Relan and Jayanta Basu, besides two unnamed U.S. investors. The site presently has about 200,000 subscribers and claims to have sold 100,000 vouchers. “Our gross business is at Rs 1 crore and in terms of savings for consumers, this is Rs 2 crore,” says Anisha Singh, CEO, MyDala.com. Popular categories of deals on the website include recreation, restaurant, health and beauty services. The CTO, Ashish Bhatnagar, believes that one of the trends is that the buying capacity of users has doubled. He said buyer capacity increased from Rs 200 to Rs 300-400 during 2009-10 periods and an increase in the number of credit card transactions on MyDala can also be seen. The website saw a doubling in the number of unique visitors in October from 75,000 to 1.5 lakh. Around 23 percent of MyDala’s customers return for a repeat purchase on a month on month basis. According to Anisha, Mydala is comfortable with its competition as it is ‘similar yet different’ in comparison with other Indian deal sites like SnapDeals.com and Dealsandyou.com.