I came across an interesting article on Disruptive Web 2.0 startups from India. Its an interesting list that has been put together by The India Street.

The list comprises the following:

• Nautanki.TV: Original Video Content. See it in action on FilmyFundas.
• MusicNMovies: Download Bollywood Movies. Not sure how legal this is as I found a lot of pirated movie content which surely won’t be available for free download by the makers of those movies.
• MusicIndiaOnline: Indian Music
• Brijj: Yet another social networking site. There are so many out there already. I am not sure where the disruption in their technology is. There are many me-too sites now!
• Chikka: Mobile content provider. I used them for sending free SMS’s once upon a time!
• OnMobile: Very large subscriber base. Has a huge potential to be a big player.
• OLPC: Provides cheap laptops.
• AutoIndia: The name says it all.
• Burrp!: Read about Burrp on Travelogue.
• HolidayIQ: I’ve been using this site for planning holidays since its original India Resorts Survey Days. Very impressive community driven site.
• BharatStudent: Yet another social networking site. They are trying to target the niche ‘Indian Students’! You might see some of their advertisements coming up on my YPOPs! website

Nice list but could have been more thorough because I don’t think a few of them deserve to be on this list. Let me make an attempt at coming up with my list in a few days from now.

If you are a blogger, you must be loving the experience of blogging. How about taking it to the next level? What is that you ask? What if you were told that you can get paid to blog? Yes! You heard right. To get paid for something you already like doing, that’s a dream come true. Smorty will enable you to do just that.

Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. This form of blog advertising is catching on fast, and can help your blog make some good money. It could be a great alternative to stuffing your site with other forms of advertisements.

You just accept what products and services you like, and then write about it. It cannot get any simpler than this.

Try out Smorty now, if you’re not already subscribed to their service.

Cellit Mobile Marketing is a Chicago-based mobile marketing company that has services to help small businesses and large companies leverage the power of mobile marketing to reach customers in a unique way: using mobile phones. Cellit uses text messaging, WAP or Voice as the three technology mediums. Its technology is proven and used by Industry bigwigs like Dell, Philips, RE/MAX Associates, Marie Claire, Prudential, Hearst Corporation, Sotheby’s, GPS Insight, the city of Las Vegas, and others. Two of the most popular services by Cellit Mobile Marketing are House4Cell and CouponZap.

House4Cell is a tool designed to help you serve home buyers better while capturing valuable leads. You can provide instant information to Buyers in text messages, along with faxes and emails for more information. You can also send photographs of the listings directly to the phones. Not to forget, it enables you to capture leads for follow-up. There are a host of other great features as well. House4Cell is believed to be the undisputed leader in the world of real estate text messaging. The December 2006 issue of Real Estate Trends + Technology featured House4Cell.

CouponZap is a mobile coupon and promotion service that gives you the power to promote your product or service to interested customers via text messaging (SMS). CouponZap allows you to run voting, polls, message blasts and other forms of mobile campaigns. With a large mobile penetration in the US market, imagine what you can achieve with CouponZap!! CouponZap provides a great reporting engine as well. User can view bar charts and pie graphs that clearly shows how many people have redeemed special offers. A good example of CouponZap can be found in the The March 2007 issue of Marie Claire which used Cellit to power Crest Send-A-Smile.

Both House4Cell and CouponZap provide easy to use web-based front-ends. You can visit their sites to see some demo’s about the technology which clearly shows their ease of use.

Skype announced its return back to normalcy today! This must be a relief to millions of its users who rely on their services not only for personal use but only for business use.

Many startups use Skype as their internal communication tool if they have geographically dispersed offices. Did their 2-3 days of downtime impact your business? If yes, how? If not, how come!

Do share your experiences in a world without Skype (for 2 days!)…

If you are on the lookout for shopping cart software then Ashop Commerce could be your answer. Ashop Commerce is one of the leading provides of hosted shopping cart software.

Their solution is affordable and easy to setup with great technical support. You get complete freedom in your web designing without any restrictions at all. All this keeping complete fool-proof data security in mind.

The pricing starts at US$39.95/month for the Lite Package and goes up to US$189.95/month for the Ashop Plus package. You have another two packages to choose from — Ashop 500 (US$69.95/month) and Ashop 2000 (US$99.95/month).

If you’re still not convinced, you can get a 10 day trial for free without having to give your credit card details!  It couldn’t get any better than this…

Microsoft is going to be giving away Works for free in an attempt to take on OpenOffice and Google Docs.

MS Works will be become an advertisement based free product. This has not yet been confirmed by Microsoft but the rumor mill is strong that this might happen quite soon.

I’m not really sure that even if this happens, will Microsoft be able to curb the growth of OpenOffice or Google Docs.

I just stumbled upon an interesting site called BOXSTr and thought of sharing it with all of you.

The slick looking site provides free and paid plans for online file storage. The free plan itself provides 5GB of data storage! Now, that’s a lot of free space.