Not sure the article said anything about they being good. Any evidence on VWO being the last innovative startup from India? Just because the startups are not featuring on HN does not mean there are no innovative startups from India.

Well, two of the three co founders in lal happen to be Indian Engineers too: http://lal.com/about/hiring (link gives founder profiles).

Although I have no doubts about the founders' programming chops, lal.com certainly can't be called "innovative".

Goodcrush.com had the exact same concept two years ago. Isawyou.com had the concept minus the college angle a couple years earlier.

Since when innovative startup is limited only to web?

Actually, there is a community there, checkout http://hackerstreet.in/

There are a lot of challenges to building a sfba-style startup in India though, more than it makes sense to go into in a comment. That said, there are plenty of very talented, veyr driven engineers there that understand the startup lifestyle - checkout http://resume.akash.im/ for one, I've really enjoyed all the work I've done with him (that's included training over emacs/skype, learning rails, cutting up psd's, to working on applications for me).