Bangalore Attracts Tech Giants, Home-Grown Start-Ups

December 4th, 2007

Bangalore, India (AHN) - Tech giants Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco dominate the IT landscape in Bangalore, attracting home-grown start-ups to set up their own firms here as well.

Every week, Bangalore sees new firms like Mapunity or Mobisy or Motvik as a buoyant economy gives many Indians the financial cushion to experiment with start-ups, the International Herald Tribune reported.

Many coffee clubs have sprouted, and tips on new technologies and strategies for attracting investors are traded.

BarCamp, Open Coffee Club and TiE and local chapters of well-established Silicon Valley clubs are popular. BarCamp has signed up more than 600 members since it started in December 2006, including those from Amazon, Accenture, General Electric and Yahoo.

Elsewhere in India, Babajob.com is a local version of Facebook/MySpace designed for the poor, reflecting how entrepreneurs and large multinationals are making India a hub of computer innovation targeting the poor.

Nokia develops many of its ultra cheap cell phones in India where Citibank also first experimented with a special ATM that recognizes thumbprints to help slum-dwellers who struggle with personal identification numbers.

Microsoft has made India one of the major centers studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users.