iBlog: Nishit Shah

RED HERRING 100 ASIA

Red Herring Magazine have announced their list of 200 finalists for the “Red Herring 100 Asia” Awards 2007. The Red Herring’s editorial team comes up with Red Herring 100 lists which recognize promising startups that will lead the next wave of innovation. I was surprised to see around 40 odd Indian companies in the list of finalist. Which I believe is quite impressive, only next to China which had around 80. Thanks to the broadband connectivity at home and some spare time, I had the liberty to browse through all of the Indian companies websites. I couldn’t do the same for companies based in China, as most of them were in Chinese and heck I can’t read it !
I found one very interesting thing while browsing through the About Us section of these sites. Most of the Indian companies were founded by IIT / IIM alumni. It was a pretty common trend that atleast one of the Board Member / Founder / Director had something to do with the elite clan of India. I am pretty impressed with many web 2.0 Indian companies.

I am excited by the fact that a business unit of the place where I work is among the 200 finalists. The Top 100 award winners will be announced at the Red Herring 100 Asia Award Ceremony on August 29th.