Getting started with Investing

I recently decided to start exploring on how to go about investing in Indian stock market and so far have found the following two choices straightforward.
1) Sharekhan.com: This was suggested by my friend Sudarshan and is turning out be a real good company. Their web site is comprehensive enough and their service is excellent. The particular gentlemen I deal with is very responsive and never takes more than few hours to resolve any issue. Sharekhan is conveninently integrated with several online banks (ICICI, HDFCBank, CitiBank etc) to move your funds back and forth at the click of a few buttons. Applying for IPO as well is just an online process and ususally takes less than a minute to complete.
2) ICICIDirect.com: ICICI provides a 3 in 1 account (savings, demat and trading) just like most US brokers and is pretty easy to operate and move funds around. For those of you who do not know what "demat" means, it is holding shares in electronic form at your broker instead of physical share certificates under your mattress. For folks from US, it has always been in demat form and so no biggy except that you get confused when you hear this term for the first time.


TCS (Tata Consultancy Service) put up thier IPO and that is going to be my first investment here in the Indian markets. BTW, one of the interesting facts for those following Google IPO is that all IPO's now in India are being run on the dutch auction format (the same kind Google is planning) and so was surprised to find out, the general awareness on how this works.