The logo came in a little after midnight our time, confirming it. Red Herring has updated its site to reflect the final 100 winners.

It’s still sinking in. They looked at over 600 companies all over Asia – and Japan and Australia and Russia, and picked us in their top 100. Wowie!

We’re one among a dozen companies they picked with a base in India and, at 15 months of age, we’re by far the youngest of the lot. We’re also the only one in the world this year – across Red Herring’s Asia, Europe and North America lists that’s in the $12 billion business of search engine marketing.

Your wishes – when we last counted, over 60 on the blog itself and a lot many more on email – must have counted. Oh, yes, Sam – and those t-shirts you made for us.

What next? Off to Shanghai on Sep 5 to receive said award, meet the other 99 (and hopefully win some clients among them too!).

Ask us Ni Hao Ma in a couple of weeks!

Mahesh Murthy

…so says Red Herring.

Red Herring is pretty much the bible of technology-driven businesses – and they have an annual listing called the “Red Herring 100” where they pick firms they believe have the potential to make a big impact globally. In the past, they’ve picked Google and eBay when they were barely blips on the radar.

Well, Red Herring now has grown its list from just the Americas to Europe and Asia. And they’ve just told us that we’ve been short-listed for selection among the top 100 firms in Asia. We’re in their top 200 – and we’ll know in a week or two whether we’re in their top 100.

What makes this special for us is a couple of things: one, that we’re barely a year old – and this is a proof of the maturity of our technology and its effectiveness. Two – from what we can see of the Red Herring North American 100 and the Red Herring European 100 lists this year, we’re the only search engine marketing firm they picked from around the world. That’s a pretty nice honour.

We’re also quite thrilled to see some of Red Herring’s other picks this year – they include Skype, Vonage and Symbian – and we’re almost embarrassed to be in such exalted company.

Wish us all the best – as we wait to see if we get picked to be among the final 100…

Well, it’s technically been more than a year. 14 months, since we started, to be precise. And it was time for us to go let our hair down (Especially Peter. And HIS hair.).

So we plonked off to Kamshet. A beautiful property called Native Place, surrounded by hills, a lake and stupendous weather. We had a couple of awesome guest speakers, Ingrid Srinath, the Mother Theresa of the marketing world and Shashanka Ghosh, the grand old man of music television in India. (Oh, how they’re both going to hate these descriptions!). And then our own presentations – where some of us even stayed awake.

The was followed by some interesting outdoor stuff – where we grappled with rain and each other. Till, of course the song and dance started, resulting in some slightly embarrassing stuff – and some deeply embarrassing stuff.

…all the way up till the walk and the bus ride back home.

We’re thrilled to bits to have Carolina James Bajaj join us as our Head of Corporate Communications.

CJ, as she’s been called since her days as a radio jockey, has over 8 years of corporate communications experience and was last in a senior position at a leading PR firm, where she handled Sify.com, the Internet and Online Association of India and other tech-driven clients.

There’s more about her here.

We can’t divulge numbers here – but we have a pretty happy client in this leading sharebroking firm, for whom we’ve tripled the leads generated in just the last month alone.

What did it? A few things – BroadWords really worked here – going wider than ever before; and also using graphic and banner ads in addition to the usual text links.

And, yes – the stock market has been booming in India too!