Harish Palaniappan's

The information on starting or registering a business in india, is not one of those things that are very well available. The government staff who do it, don't want any layman to be informed, because their bread and butter is in the bribe money they get on each and each thing they do to accept your registration to helping you understand what and how to do it.

(But things are better with egovernance now.. read on. or skip to update on this post on july 21)

Only Chartered accountants or accountants know the process and the government offices well, and because of these, these accountants, most of them, try to make a killing out of our pocket for the little services they provide, and you would have no where to go or do it yourself since there's not enough information outside the heads of the accountants.

Some of us tried to 'google' our way, thinking google should have it, but unfortunately google will clarify it here, that indian government organizations or their processes are never put up on the internet though every ministry and district organization seems to have a .nic.in, or a gov.in domain name.

This post and how we could share stuff
I am setting up this blog post, and will be updating it regularly as I go through my process of information collection and company registration and filing taxes and returns. May be if what you need isn't here, sometime it will be when I also go through the process.

If you have already come through some processes the hard way and would like to share any such information, please post to comment in this post, or if its a lot of information you have, please mail me harish.palaniappan @ gmail.com and i will add it to this long post.

Information On Companies, Acts, and processes in India

May be these links help to kick-off your information collection drive:
Starting your own business in India
Forming a company in India
Starting a business - by doingbusiness.org
The Indian Ministry of company affairs website
Starting a business in singapore

MCA21 : Online company registrations and other e-form processes
The Indian ministry of company affairs has setup an online governance website since september 2006 (delayed by almost 6 months) with the help of Tata consultancy services.

I have not used the website yet to do any processes, because some processes seem to have a manual process attached which first has to be completed at the Registrar of Companies (RoC) office and then the process taken online. But i am not sure. Check for yourself as to what MCA21 is and how to use the website to complete your processes, all online.
Here's the pdf document that explains MCA21 and how to use mca.gov.in website

Update: 24th July 2007 :

In the different types of companies that can be registered (or that can be created in India at all legally), there's no possibility of starting a single person company.. At a minimum, you can only start a private firm with 2 directors.

But, the government has been recommended by an expert committee, to add a new class of companies which is proposed as 'One person company' and probably may have OPC Pvt. or OPC Pvt. Ltd. as the ending name of the company.

If this recommendation is approved (which probably will be by amendments in the companies Act), then there will be a possibility of registering One Person companies in India. As of now, you atleast make a friendly legal entity as a director apart from yourself, like your mother or wife, or some friend, and register your company as a Private company with minimum 2 directors.

Though it is technically bad that India hasn't still recognized 'one person companies', practically it is better to register as a private company since that will avoid further paper work when your 'one person company' grows to have employees which then requires a conversion in your registration or possibly re-registration.

-- continuted --

Continue reading "start-up registering business in india ?" »

Posted by Harish at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There is a product in the market called 'Reading Pen' by quick-pen.com... i think there might be more brands, and might be its more advanced now than what i read about in quick-pen's website today.

As indicated below, you move the pen over the word and it recognizes the word with its scanning abilities (which in itself is great technology), and further speaks the word in different accents. Yes, they have reading pens for American accent, British accent, etc.,

[Click on the above image once to enable the flash object, then every time you move your mouse over the image, it will pronounce the word in British accent']

[src: www.quick-pen.com, this one costs 299$ and you can buy it here.]

What if?
Imagine if this technology was evloved into something where blind students can read any book (without exactly pointing a device on a word, which blind children cant do), or going further having a device, like a blind person points and clicks, and it says 'tree at 10 metres ahead', or, with help of GPS say 'you are 3 miles aways from the destination, you need to take a right-turn after 1.3 miles'.. something like that.

Posted by Harish at 12:23 PM | Permalink

Innovation on the internet is growing by the numbers. This one I am trying to post here is quite a few years old and you might be already using it.. if you are not... why not, read about it.

Pookmail.com is an innovative idea/technique, in a website, where you, me, and every body, even machines, nuts, bolts, plants, and bears have always had an email id and some of us only don't use it.

type_whatever_you_want@pookmail.com and that's a valid email id that you can use and check your emails.. and this is one place where you get no crap like email_id already in use, select another.

How pookmail works:
Firstly, your mailbox is not yours.. its everybody's. There could be a 1000 users using the email id neo@pookmail.com, and any of them could read mails actually targeted to you, or you could read mails targeted to them.

How is this useful? Its useful only to avoid spam.. not to email your friends or receive mails from them.. Please don't have it on your business card, or neither try using pookmail id for any useful purpose.

An example usage:
An example would be in subscribing to a demo service by some company, and you use anony@pookmail.com. If the company sends any verification mails, you could go to pookmail, read that mail, and get your verification done. if you liked that company's service, and you trust them, you probably could use their internal system to change your email contact to a valid different email id.. or else ignore them and be safe that they dont know your email id and all their spam (if they send) will go get dumped in the pookmail servers. pookmail servers delete all mail which are 24 hrs old. and nobody gets to delete a mail through their interface.

The service is free...no strings.. no registrations.
What use it would be if pookmail.com asked you to register for their service and you need to give them your email id and hope they dont spam you??.. so at pookmail they don't ask you email id or anything at all.. you type some_id, unique or not, and you see the mail's inbox without owning the box, logging in or remembering any password stuff.

Recently, pookmail launched features to reply to mails from their interface, which could be an important upgrade since some strangers on the web ask you to reply from your email Id to verify your authentication.. and you don't want to trust them with your email id as yet.

Repeating again... DON'T interestingly use pookmail to communicate anything to anybody, or give a pookmail id for a paid service, because people could be looking into your mail and hijacking your paid service into theirs.

Bottomline:
The answer to SPAM email is multi-fold.. and never exhaustive enough techniques are available to protect anybody from SPAM in totality. But, when we know of systems that can help avoid spam, (at least when we know some websites could send us spam but still we want to give them our email address) we can use these techniques to safegaurd our interests.

Posted by Harish at 2:34 PM | Permalink

Everytime christmas comes, innovative toys and robots companies make to hit the christmas gift market keeps you amazed and gaping.

This video in the link below discusses two such interesting robots.. these are not the high-cost dog robots or anything that you can only see, but these are interesting, funny robots, and quite attractive gifts that you will love to buy for someone. check the link below. and hey, the link plays a customary ad video for a minute and then loads the actual video. but its worth the waiting. happy holiday season.

2 interesting Holiday robot gifts reviewed

Posted by Harish at 5:54 PM | Permalink

Read "Turning pomegranates into gold" at 37signals.com.. to know more

Posted by Harish at 1:50 PM | Permalink

You might have digged there at http://www.digg.com (If not you should check.. its becoming as popular as google)
This is an interesting and inspiring real-life story of how a simple, humble guy made a even more humble startup into a 60 million $ company thats now growing wildly closer to Google.

$1000 - $60 million company in 18 months flat.. story of Digg.com's founder & owner Kevin Rose

Innovation matters! more than anything else on an internet business... is the moral of the story.

Source : 37 signals - Signal Vs Noise Blogs for inspiring Entrepreneurships

Posted by Harish at 1:40 PM | Permalink