Startups with a Kewl quotient

In the past few months I had the chance to talk to some of the start-up owners/VC investors, which had some really cool concepts. I'll give the concepts of those startups only which are in production i.e. out of stealth mode for obvious reasons.

1) When you call someone and the guy is not able to take the call, then it goes to the voicemail. He can get the message only when he is free. Suppose you are the guy; you need to go to the voicemail number, retrieve the voice and play them to get the message. This is pretty old usual and slow stuff.
Now, what these startup guys have done is that, they record the voicemail, convert it into text using 'Voice recognition' and 'speech-to-text' technology and send the message as sms text to the user. I feel this is a pretty handy stuff esp. when you are in middle of a meeting and you cannot hear the voicemail. Cool, no problems; just subscribe to this service and bingo: you get an non-intrusive sms in the middle of the meeting - conveying what the other person has to say.

2) Then there is one startup, which has a web portal. You can go to their website, select a design and get it printed on your T-shirt, coffee mug or whatever. The beauty of the system is that these guys have created an ecosystem which is analogous to Open-Source Software. i.e. artists and designers can contribute their designs, and the users can select the designs they want. The design contributor gets a royalty based on the usage of the design. So, it's a win-win situtaion for all, the users have a plethora of designs to select from and the artists get paid on actuals for how well their designs are sold, so it also fosters the creativity.

3) I really like the startup called rupeex.com which can be used to track your portfolio. I like the ease with which their portfolio tracler integrates with most of the trading/demat accounts. You just need to upload the html copy of your Demat Account statement or your Trading book, it'll add each transaction automatically and will calculate your net loss/profit or the positions. Most importantly, you don't need to calculate your income tax liabilities manually by feeding into an excel sheet. Just upload the file, let it analyze the Order book and bingo you have all your profit/losses, short term /long term capital gains taxes calculated for you. It also brings relevant data like company news for your portfolio companies. If that was not enough they have brick and mortar model to suppllement it, as they'll collect the info you have fed into the website, take your signatures and submit to the IT department for a nominal fee of 100 bucks. Really handy, and a huge time saver.

Keep watching this space for some more cool ideas and startups :-)