Customer Service Suppor...

Freshdesk , an Indian startup that offers a cloud-based customer support platform, has raised $5 million in financing led by Tiger Global Management with previous investor Accel Partners participating. Freshdesk, which competes with Zendesk , offers a simple, online help desk and support ticketing application that supports customers through email, phone, Facebook and Twitter. Customer service agents can support, update and assign projects directly from an email client, without needing to log in or use a mobile app. Agents simply email or forward a request to a Freshdesk unique email address and the request will be added to Freshdesk’s interface. Freshdesk automatically processes the command, makes the update, and sends the rest of the email to the appropriate customer. Agents can also directly send an email to a specific address, automatically converting the ticket to a knowledge base article that can be accessed by any agent. The startup, which launched last year, currently has over 700 customers. The new funding will be used to ramp up engineering talent as well as expand globally.

Meet The XOLO X900, Int...

With Lava’s XOLO X900 Intel is entering uncharted territory. It’s the chip maker’s first major push into mobile phones. Intel revealed its new mobile strategy and upcoming hardware a few months back at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress. Since then Lava’s XOLO X900 has not changed. It’s still destined for just India. It’s still a mid-tier Android 2.3 phone (ICS is coming) with a 4.03-inch, HSPA+ 3G phone. But Intel’s inside and that’s a big deal. Inside the average looking X900 is Intel’s Atom Z2460 processor. This is the first of several upcoming phones that forgo the tradition ARM-based CPU for Intel’s Atom X2460. Intel designed this Atom SoC with Android specifically in mind. The chip runs at a competitive 1.6GHz and features Intel’s hyper-threading, 400MHz graphics core with support for OpenGL, ES2.0 and OpenVG. The silcon also had a dedicated imaging core that supports throughput of up to 240 megapixels per second and a 10-picture burst mode — a key selling point of the XOLO X900. This is just a test for Intel, though. The company is launching this device in only India. A similar but slightly more powerful handset will hit China later this year. Intel is using these fast-moving markets as a test bed of sorts. If found to be successful, Intel will no doubt look to other OEMs for the slower moving, but more lucrative markets of Europe and the US. Until then, Indian buyers will have Intel smartphones all to themselves. Lava’s XOLO X900 will hit Indian retailers on April 23 for approximately 22,000 rupees, or about $420. Seeing how the iPhone 4S goes for twice as much in India, the XOLO X900′s price should be enticing enough to convince at least some buyers to test Intel’s first generation device.

Mor.sl Offers Recipe Re...

An entrepreneur we met in DC, Mili Mittal, told us about her site, mor.sl . Unfortunately, she didn’t describe it fully, leading me to believe it was far less cool than it really is. That failure has been averted thanks to a quick browse and subsequent salivation. Mor.sl is, in short, a recipe recommendation engine. You like you some cheese? They got you some cheese. You like you some pasta? Bang. Pasta. The site is arguably beautifully designed – it looks a bit like Pinterest – and it looks nothing like the ad- and text-heavy recipe sites like Epicurous.com. Mili describes it as “Pandora + Amazon for cooking.” “We just launched the site in mid February and I’m estimating 25% growth in unique visitors for month two,” she said. She founded mor.sl because she noticed she wasn’t eating enough healthy food. “My mom worked night shifts when I was growing up. She left the house at 4pm, came home at 8pm on her break, whipped up a fresh-from-scratch, healthy Indian meal, fed the family, and left to go back to work at 8:30. I was privileged to eat healthy fresh food every single day growing up, but somehow, as an adult, I never managed to provide such meals for myself,” she said. “Nearly all my friends – busy professionals – faced the same problem. They wanted to cook at home, but they lacked the mental model required to plan and cook gourmet meals efficiently throughout the week. So, we decided to automate the mental model with mor.sl.” To help you cook like Mili’s mom, mor.sl recommends recipes based on a few simple criteria. The system works via tags and hand curation and all of the recipes – at least the ones I’ve seen – look delicioso . The key to the recommendation engine is a simple quiz that assesses your skill level, allergies, and food preferences. mor.sl learns your tastes and preferences, your allergies and skill level and recommends recipes that will work for your everyday life. All of our recipes are hand-curated by top food bloggers and publishers, so you’re always getting the best of the web. Mor.sl wasn’t always supposed to be a recommendation engine. In fact, Mili originally wanted to download users’ purchase history and offer recipes based on data stored by Safeway. They built it, but found some problems with the system. “After testing that product with users, we realized it required far too much user input to stay accurate after the first set of suggestions. We learned that the user inputs had to be optional and minimal, so we flipped the model to more of a Pandora-style recommendations engine. This, in turn, forced a business model pivot which we’re testing now,” she said. Future improvements will allow you to plan meals and shopping trips as you grab recipe recommendations. Mili told us that she loved all of the recipes on the site but said she really loved one recipe in particular. “It’s difficult to choose amongst recipes from roughly 35 amazing food bloggers and publishers. I’ll have to be honest though – my favorite is one that comes from our earliest set of recipes – before we had any content partnerships: my mother’s recipe for Yellow Dahl (basically, Indian lentil soup). Comfort food is where it’s at,” she said.

Indian Government To La...

BlackBerry fans in India had best stay on the up-and-up lest they want to draw unwanted attention from the country’s security agencies. India Today reported over the weekend that the country’s government is on the verge of being able to capture messages sent though RIM’s formerly iron-clad BBM service. Unnamed Indian officials were quick to point out to India Today that their forthcoming ability to capture and crack BBM messages will be used strictly on snoop on devices whose users are suspected of engaging in criminal or terrorist activity. Thankfully, there seems to a be a fairly rigorous approval process that needs to take place before the snooping can commence — the Union Home Ministry must essentially issue a warrant to the agency in question (eight of them authorized to tap communications), who then must request access to the data from the trackee’s service provider. Given their focus on facilitating communication between employees, the government is less concerned with snooping on messages that pass through BlackBerry enterprise servers. That isn’t to say that they can’t do it — they would have to intercept the messages before the were encrypted by the BES, which they view as more an unnecessary hassle than a technical impossibility. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because RIM and India have had a long, and at times contentious relationship. The whole convoluted story first began to unfold in March 2008 , when the Indian government began seeking a way to “lawfully intercept” emails and messages sent by BlackBerry users. India was (and remains) so wedded to the idea that they eventually threatened to shut down RIM’s network within the country entirely if they didn’t fork over that access. RIM fought the good fight for nearly two months, but eventually backed down rather than let themselves be shut out of the Indian market entirely. The Indian government was unhappy with RIM’s initial offer but finally got their wish back in October, when RIM (perhaps reluctantly) installed a facility in Mumbai that would effectively allow the government to poke around in user data as needed. And, well, here we are. BlackBerrys (and perhaps BBM in particular) have proven to be a useful method for people to communicate in the midst of chaos and confusion, but whether or not the Indian government’s newfound powers will help as much as they think remains to be seen.

Google TV Adds New Inte...

Google today announced another step in the build-out of its Google TV service: it is adding several new international channels in the form of apps to the Google TV platform, aimed at those who live in the U.S. but are missing content from home. Among them are a mix of entertainment and news services, including al-Jazeera, the Chinese-language PPTV, the IslamBox collection of channels, Yupp TV (another aggregator, this time of Indian content) and Japan’s Crunchyroll. But while it is going international on one level, it is not on another: still no definite dates on when Google plans to launch its service outside of the U.S. “We’re looking to roll out internationally through the course of 2012,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. But no specific timings beyond that, or the specific reasons for why is has not done so yet. “We don’t break out the reasons why, but we do want to make sure that users everywhere get the full experience, so we want to make sure we work towards that,” he said. He also did not specify which markets might be the first to see roll-outs of the service outside of the U.S. To get Google TV, Google currently lists two options : either buy a special Sony Internet TV, or a set-top box from Sony or Logitech that you use with your own Internet-enabled TV. Sony in January said that it didn’t expect to offer its Google-TV-enabled devices in the UK, at least, until September. That was already a delay on earlier estimates which had put it at an autumn 2011 arrival. There could be a number of reasons for the delay, from supplies to getting international rights sorted out for the video and other content. That has been one of the key issues with the international expansion of other IP video services, such as Hulu. At the moment, Google TV says it has thousands of apps for the service — basically, everything in Google Play (nee Android Market) that doesn’t require touchscreens, location or other mobile-only features — but in terms of apps that have been optimized for Google TV itself, there are 150. Today’s list in full: PPTV: HD cinema blockbusters and TV dramas from Asia, as well as anime series, variety shows such as Taiwanese Idol and China Super Girl, and live sports and financial news. IslamBox: more than 40 live TV channels and over two thousand hours of video on demand in four different languages from around the world, including the Islam Channel from UK, Express News from Pakistan, Peace TV from India, Bridges Television from USA, Huda TV from Egypt. Yupp TV: more than 80 channels available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Punjabi languages. Raaga: South Asian music from more than 200 music labels from the region in almost 20 languages including Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and more. Crunchyroll: Japanese anime and Asian drama. Euronews: web app that publishes news every 30 minutes covering the day’s top world, sport, business, lifestyle and breaking news in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. Al Jazeera: the English version, not the Arabic edition.