Startup Q&A from 19th November


Mohan K
Mohan K, Editor @ MyDigitalStartup.net

Check out the recent responses to questions on Startups:


Question: Why do servers of online portals like “Amazon.in” go down?
Good question. First the basics. eCommerce servers are complex and integrate several tools technologies and information system applications

link: Microsoft

I am not going to try to explain the architecture. Companies like Amazon not only host the eCommerce applications that you and I use but also offer the “service” of hosting to other large companies “Build your Business with Amazon Services” AWS is a leading public cloud hosting platform used by small and large companies.

Back to your question, Why do servers of online portals like “Amazon .in” go down?

Check out Amazon India Diwali Dhamaka Sale Flops as Website Crashes and Poor Discounts on Offer

“The outage was short, but it’s extremely rare for Amazon .com to crash. Amazon depends on heavy e-commerce traffic, especially around the holidays, so it has famously massive server capacity to handle traffic spikes. Even a few minutes of downtime can cost the company millions.”

Bottomline: eCommerce giants spend millions of $$s and resources on developing fault-tolerant, redundant systems, but occasionally encounter down-time. There isn’t a single reason since there are multiple points of failure, and every crash is unique: failing over-and-over for the same reason will bring down the company.



Question: Which startup idea which was born in India was copied by other countries?

Firstly, what is a startup? A startup company (startup or start-up) is an entrepreneurial venture which is typically a newly emerged, fast-growing business that aims to meet a marketplace need by developing or offering an innovative product, process or service.

Therefore in the context of this question, the term “startup” is too open ended, and one could also take a historic perspective to include innovations, technologies and techniques. There is an excellent compilation of Indian inventions and discoveries on Wikipedia.

Interesting Indian innovations include Mysorean rockets, Prefabricated homes . More recently in history: Bhabha scattering, Indian nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabhapublished a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, in which he performed the first calculation to determine the cross section of electron-positron scattering. Raman effect: The Encyclopædia Britannica (2008) reports: “change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules. Interestingly, the “startups” to scale-up some of the innovations were not focused on commercialization.

In the field of Information Technologies, scores of Indians have innovated and even commercialized their “startups,” many of them in the Silicon Valley. Early InfoTech innovators include Sabeer Bhatia – hotmail, Vinod Khosla – Sun microsystems etc.

Indian startups continue to innovate in Bangalore, Hyderabad and elsewhere, and periodically get bought by tech giants. Just a few examples

  • Indian Startup Little Eye Labs Confirms Its Acquisition By Facebook, Deal Worth $10-$15M
  • Google in talks to buy Indian startup InMobi
  • etc

Those in the industry only loosely use terms like “Israeli startup” or “Irish startup” or “Indian startup.”

Bottomline: We will continue to see startups in “born” in India going global. Given the global nature of technology innovation, it gets harder to point to where a startup was conceived, or born.

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