CXO

Priya Shah of WATBlog called me up to do an interview on the current state of podcasting in India. I figured it may be a good idea to record the interview and also release it as a podcast.

Traditionally, this is the show where I interview CEOs of Indian IT companies with a focus on entrepreneurship, Internet and Mobile. However, this episode is going to be a bit different. Instead of the interviewer, I become the interviewee.

In this episode, we discuss the huge gap between the adoption of blogging and podcasting, the reasons why podcasting hasn’t taken off in India and about PodWorks, India’s biggest podcasting event that is taking place on June 9 & 10.

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Asawari Desai is a director with TiE Global, overseeing the performance of all the 42 offices. At TiE she is responsible for defining organizational strategy and vision, branding, identifying and addressing issues concerning the organization and individual offices and evaluating opportunities to open new offices.

Prior to TiE she worked as a fund manager with JF Electra, a leading private equity fund in Mumbai. She has more than 10 years of experience in financial services of which more than six years in private equity investing, fund management and fund raising and more than four years in financial advisory services.

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Drew Clark is director of strategy at IBM’s Venture Capital Group.

Drew is responsible for driving external innovation into IBM business units and identifying and developing new business opportunities. A 20-year IBM veteran, he has held a variety of key positions in software development and technology, product marketing and emerging-business development and strategy. He has led several entrepreneurial initiatives, including the formation of IBM’s Internet Division.

IBM works with 120 of the world’s top VC firms to gain insights into emerging technologies, nurture small businesses and potential startup partners and drive open computing principles in the marketplace.

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Lawrence Liang is the legal lead for Creative Commons India, and has helped set up the India chapter. The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that encourages people to share their creativity and make it available for others to legally build upon and share. By joining the Creative Commons, India has become part of a significant international effort in helping to make knowledge more accessible.

Lawrence Liang is one of the co-founders of Alternative Law Forum. ALF is a non profit collective of lawyers, academics and media practitioners who work on various aspects of law, legality and power.

His key areas of interest are law, technology and the politics of copyright.

He is the author of two books, A Guide to Open Content Licenses, and The Public is Watching: Sex, laws and Videotape. Liang is a guest lecturer at the National Law School, Bangalore and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

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Burrp! is a lifestyle social site that allows users to submit and review lifestyle-related listings like restaurants, bars and nightlife.

Deap Ubhi co-founded this site along with his friend Anand Jain. Deap is a mergers & acquisitons man with private equity experience. He most recently was a senior associate at Alpine Investors in San Francisco before the entreprenurial bug bit him and brought him over to Mumbai.

In this interview, he talks about the idea behind the site’s existence, how it is transforming from a restaurant guide to a lifestyle social listing site, their revenue models and the justification for a funding request of $6 million.

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