Venture capital firms invested into 92 companies and exited 14 investments in India during 2006, according to the US-IVCA/Venture Intelligence India Venture Capital Report-2006.

Some interesting facts from the report:

• Early-stage deals account for almost 60 percent of all investments.


• 28 percent of all investments fall in the US$5-10 million category, followed by 26 percent in the US$2-5 million category.


• IT & ITES companies corner over 70 percent of VC investments.


• The US$20 million raised by electric car maker Reva is the largest reported investment during the year.


• VC firms and SME-focused PE firms raised over US$1 billion for investments.


• Sequoia Capital India is the most active investor.

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The online gaming industry in India is worth Rs210 (US$4.92) million, according to a recently published IMRB-IAMAI report. But nearly 20 percent of this revenue (Rs40 million) goes directly to international players not based in India.

Subscription-based revenues are three times more than advertising income. In the US, advertising accounts for close to 40 percent of revenues.

• Organized cyber cafes = Rs121.7 million


• Subscription-based revenues = Rs66 million


• Advertising = Rs22.4 million

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Google is looking beyond the urban market in India. It is launching multiple initiatives aimed at increasing its reach to the rural users.

The company is developing customized content for rural customers, including weather updates, crop patterns and other local data.

Google News launched in Hindi last week. Google Samachar gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the Web and presents a ranked one-page summary with links to news sources.
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India has surpassed Russia to become the third-largest telecom network in the world after China and the US.

India added 6.3 million new telephone users in February 2007, taking the total number of telephone subscribers to 202.74 million. The total wireless subscriber (GSM, CDMA & WLL-F) base is 162.53 million, while total wireline subscribers are 40.39 million now.

Compared to China and the US, India still has a low tele-density of 18.26. India is now also the third-largest CDMA market in the world after the US and South Korea.
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Thats a catchy title, good enough to generate hype. So first the good news.

According to comScore Networks India, China and Russia experienced the highest year-on-year growth rates in terms of Internet users. The Indian Internet population grew at 33 percent, making it the fastest-growing country of Internet users. India had over 21 million users aged over 15 years at the end of January 2007, as against 16 million a year ago.

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The number of people using the Internet worldwide grew by 10 percent to reach 747 million people at the end of January 2007. The US leads with an online population 153.4 million. China comes second place with 86.8 million users, followed by Japan with 53.6 million, Germany (32 million), the UK (30 million) and eighth-ranked India. Internet users outside the US now account for 80 percent of the world's online population.
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