• VentureWoods
• Pluggd.in ‘coffee’ forum
• Pluggd.in ecosystem section
• Hello Intern
• Sutra Jobs
• Indian Jobs board at ‘Joel On Software’
• Barcamp Mumbai Startup Jobs section
• NEN Startup Jobs section
• Startup Lunches, part of proto.in
• Startup Dunia     [added to this list on Mar 17, 2009]
• Talentty     [added to this list on Mar 28, 2009]
• Work For A Startup     [added to this list on May 15, 2009]
• My Special Job     [added to this list on May 15, 2009]
• Workasaur     [added to this list on Nov 18, 2009]
• The Morpheus portfolio companies’ open positions     [added to this list on May 12, 2011]
• Yourstory.in     [added to this list on Dec 17, 2011]

Are there other resources that should be on this list? Please let me know in the comments.

There are other questions I’m wondering as well:

• Which are the popular places followed by the startuppers who are looking to hire interns, freshers and experienced people?
• For passionate students/freshers who want to work in startups, where do they start? Should they just apply via these sites or should they first do in-person networking at OpenCoffeeClub, Startup Saturday and similar meeting grounds first?

Update: Another tip is finding which startups got funding recently.

“Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready just in time.”

As opposed to only thinking of right now, taking a year to build it and realize it is no longer needed, or more likely, it is no longer the way things are done.

This statement immediately came to my mind when I was reading the announcement of ‘Triple Play’ by Airtel:

Rs. 999 per month which gives 135 channels including 256 kbps broadband speed with unlimited download and a landline connection.

First, you can imagine internet access completely on the television in homes, say in a year or so.

Second, if you combine this with their Online Desktop feature(¹), and you can imagine how people will be accessing computing on their TV just a year down the lane without ever buying a traditional desktop computer. And best of all, users can easily install/uninstall applications (on rental basis) without hassles/worries/dangers of “ruining your computer” since Airtel will be hosting the computing facility.

The question is: If you are a company (whether big or small) in the tech space, do your products and services take this into account?

Similarly, we all know that netbooks are the rage now. Atul predicted that these are stop-gap measures until people realize that they can do the same things with slightly higher-end phones.

Again, ask the same question above.

Technology indeed changes so fast and changes our lifestyle along with it.

Other useful points from the talk:

• It is not the tools you use. It’s how you use them.
• Those who forget history (i.e. learn from others’ mistakes) are doomed to repeat it.
• If product is good, price is right, people will buy it.
• A product is more than just code. A customer wants a solution and a long term relationship with the service provider.
• Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready in time.
• Markets can be created.
• Hint: Assume connectivity. Local storage no longer matters.
• Biggest products are mobile products now. Simple products, not big things.
• Advertising doesn’t pay. Unless you’re Yahoo or Google.
• VC funding is not a viable business model. Unless you’re a VC.

⁽¹⁾ Has this service actually taken off? Who uses it, I wonder.

Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.

The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.

The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.

The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”

The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”

Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:

1. Gather the right players
2. Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.

He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:

1. Teach the Game
   • When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game – the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
2. Share the macrovision
   • What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
3. Near-term targets.
   • A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
4. Keep score
   • Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
   • In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
   • Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
   • Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
   • Keep changing critical numbers.
   • Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
   • Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
   • Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk – 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
5. Line of sight
   • Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
   • This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
6. Celebrate your victories
   • Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
   • Have a Victory Party
   • The act of recognizing > how you recognize

7. Align everyone’s interests

   • To the victor(s), belong the spoils
   • In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
   • Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
   • How direct is the co-relation?
   • Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
   • American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.

8. When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.

Bhavin briefly mentioned about Ricardo Semler and his book Maverick):

Semler went to work for his father’s company, originally called Semler & Company, then a shipbuilding supplier in São Paulo. Semler clashed with his father, Antonio Semler, who supported a traditional autocratic style of management while the younger Semler favoured a decentralised, participatory style. Further, Ricardo favored diversification away from the struggling shipbuilding industry, which his father opposed.

After heated clashes, the son threatened to leave the company. Rather than see this happen, Antonio Semler resigned as CEO and vested majority ownership in his son in 1980 when Ricardo was 21 years old. On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers. He began work on a diversification program and to rescue the company.

…

Among many ‘radical’ policies, Semler let his employees set their own hours, design their workplace, choose their own IT, share all information and have no secrets. Every six months bosses are evaluated by their subordinates and the results are posted. Semco has a policy of complete internal financial openness, even teaching factory workers how to read accounts so they can understand the company’s books. Salaries are public information unless the employee requests they not be published. In addition, all employees can set their own salary. In doing so they must consider what they think they can make elsewhere; what others with similar skills and responsibilities make in the company; what friends with similar backgrounds make and how much they need to live on. Semco doesn’t have receptionists, secretaries or personal assistants, regarding them as unnecessary.

Each business unit is small enough so that those involved understand everything that is going on and can influence the outcomes. Starting out as a manufacturing company, Semco allowed it’s workers to set their own production quotas and found that employees would voluntarily work overtime to meet them. Profit sharing is practiced right down to factory floor level, instead of large bonuses only for senior management. Semler eventually retired from all executive positions at age 33.

The next interesting session was Mahesh Murthy on the art of marketing your startup.

• His list of exploits is impressive – an advertising and marketing maverick, O’Gilvy & Mather, revived Channel V from closing down, helped launches of Amazon (Earth’s Biggest Bookstore campaign) and Yahoo! (first commercial version of Yahoo), Co-Founder of Geodesic, CEO/Founder of Pinstorm pay-for-performance SEO/SEM, Managing Partner of Seedfund (Google as investor)
• Make the product insanely great so that first customer recommends it to others.
• If you have a product, and you need to advertise to sell it, you’re doing something wrong.
• Satisfied customer more important than advertising.
• The usual suspects (G, Y, M, A) don’t advertise, do they?
• Pricing – Charge super-premium at the start. Competition worry if it is more expensive, not cheaper. Make it a positioning weapon.
• Price NOT calculated as cost + profit, but it is a differentiation strategy. Make it a premium product. Price is not the way to win, you’ll NEVER win by being cheaper.
• Market at conferences by being a speaker. Be outrageous. You can even trash the competition if you know what you’re talking about.
• Be a thought leader in your market / niche area, even if it is left-handed hockey sticks. Be a global expert. Journalists and audience will talk to you then because you have credibility. ⇒ Be a trend setter.
• Good PR is very important, talk to journalists. Tell them what they want to know, what they want to hear, give them trends, not “I’m great” funda.
• If something is already a trend, it’s the “end”. You have to set the trend. Be 1st, 2nd or 3rd, not the 10th guy.
• If you need money for marketing ⇒ worry sign i.e. More budget ⇒ Smaller brains ⇒ Poorer product
• Market research is crap. It can give what 5 people think, not how to change what those 5 people think. Nobody can predict the future.
• More notes at MediaNama.

The next session was by Kiruba on the topic of business blogging and why startups should blog. People had the same traditional apprehensions that I have heard before. For example, people said they don’t know how to get an audience. Although it is difficult to convince people, my personal view is that it is exactly like marketing your startup – who is going to buy your product? Just like you have to put in effort to gain customers for your product, you have to put in effort to gain an audience for your blog. And the same goes for the product i.e. the content – if the articles are not good, don’t complain that nobody is reading/talking about it. However, I don’t think most people grokked this.

Amit Ranjan (SlideShare) talked about virality. And amazingly, I again missed catching him in a conference, damn. His formula of putting a virality ratio made it more realistic to think about it. Simplistically, if people who are subscribing are referring more people, then the growth is high, otherwise it will reach a plateau.

Sanjay Anandaram’s talk about reconciling entrepreneurs and investors was a big hit with the audience, especially with his wit and dry humor. The most laughs were at the “Open your kimono, let the investor look into your financial details. If the investor likes what he sees, then you are in business.” There were many important points like learning the basics of how term sheets work, etc. Namitha Jagadeesh has a detailed writeup in her livemint blog.

Shashank Ghosh, a film maker, talked about how creative people are like startups – they have to focus on convincing the producer (VC) about the story (product) and that it will be a hit (profit). He was very humorous and showcased a trailer of the upcoming “Quick Gun Murugan” movie, which seems like a promising movie. Shah Rukh Khan’s role-playing in ‘Om Shanti Om’ of a South Indian cowboy hero saying “Rascal, Mind It” was a teaser about this movie.

Day 2 was the demo sessions.

The blogosphere has covered this topic in detail, especially this post at the VC Circle. My favorite demos/startup products were Lipikaar – an impressive easy way to write native language, Soliton doing error detection in factory products, Storrz social shopping portal, one-stop shop recruitment portals created by tiriyo and thehiringtool, the intelligent OOH displays by NextBiT Computing and the mobile banking by Eko. More details at the WATBlog. Very impressive ideas and execution! People should stop the talk that India is just a IT services country, there are some serious kick-ass products being done here.

The most important part of any conference is not what happens inside the halls, but what happens out in the corridors. And proto.in proved itself to be a remarkable gathering because of the amount of non-stop networking that happened. At the end of the two days, I was totally deprived of energy and had a big stack of business cards in my hand. Surprisingly, people were more open to talk to each other here than at unconferences like BarCamp, etc.

It was a fantastic couple of days, and it was totally worth the flight tickets to Delhi.

Kudos and thanks to all the organizers for hosting such a fantastic event, right from Vijay Anand and Kiruba and the rest of The Knowledge Foundation who are the pillars behind proto.in, to Sudhir and Divya who compéred the show, and all the volunteers behind the scenes.

Inspired by Vijay Anand’s “Ideas To Toss” series, I thought why not start my own occasional series as well? I’m calling it the “Ideas are Cheap” series. The name is a take on the common proverb “Ideas are Cheap. Execution is Everything.”

So here’s the idea for today:

Can we have a business where the users can customize the hardware that goes into their phone?

This is not a new idea. We are just applying Dell’s business model to mobile phones. If Dell can do it for desktops and laptops, why can’t it be done for mobile phones?

The customization can range from how much memory you want, whether you need a camera or not, etc. to choosing the color and the type of body (candybar or flip or other form factors) and so on.

The range of customization possible depends on the capabilities and costs involved in the assembly process. For example, users may be able to customize the phone by having a name for a special button called ‘Mom’ (or ‘Dad’ or ‘Son’ and so on) that is hotwired to call you. You can gift this to your corresponding loved ones. The advantage is it becomes a wonderful ‘personal’ phone and becomes easy-to-use for technophobic people.

The implementation will be challenging. For one, desktops and laptops can be assembled because of the plug-and-play IBM PC architecture as well as because the operating system easily adjusts to changes in the hardware. AFAIK, mobile phones are not built that way as of today and requires some configuration in the software based on which hardware features are present and which are not (please correct me if I am wrong). Making the software easily adaptable will be a major feature.

The other interesting part is to build a factory that facilitates this. It is very hard to build a supply-chain system for such a factory.

The good part is that the technology could be built on top of OpenMoko – after all, this is the kind of ideas that FIC (the sponsors of the OpenMoko project) had in mind in creating a mostly-open-hardware and open-source-software mobile computing project.

Personalization is one of the buzzwords that is supposed to make the big moolah for companies these days, and allowing people to customize a device that they carry around all day definitely has potential.

End credits: This idea was part of a random discussion between Ramjee and myself.

On a different tangent, there are lots of ideas waiting to happen in the software. For example, it’s not only Apple that can do an App Store for their phone, this can be done for this platform too. Of course, we’ll have to start off a holy war of choosing that one linux distro…

Perhaps similar ideas can be done on top of the Asus EEE PC as well?

One year ago, on this day, we launched ion, the ipod charger. The launch was just one blog post. That’s it. Within two hours, Atul Chitnis bought the first ion in our online store. We celebrated.

But hold on, let’s rewind the story a bit.

As people might have heard in our recent running talk, it all started when Vikram, Niara and myself started training together for the 2006 Bangalore Marathon.

During one of our runs, Vikram told us that he had created his own charger circuit and came up with this wacky idea of manufacturing and selling them. I never took it seriously but Niara did. She convinced Vikram to take the idea forward. Nearly six months later, the idea had taken wings.

The prototype looked nothing like something we could sell.

Later, I was planning to attend the first proto.in. Vikram and Niara joined in and we went together. I was totally floored by the energy of the people there and the fire in the eyes of these startup guys. I told those two that they should talk to this guy called Arif Vakil of “Vakil Housing” fame and how he was looking to fund interesting ideas. Immediately, Vikram swung into action, approached Vakil and started explaining the idea. Surprisingly, he showed interest!

Luckily, Vikram had brought his prototype and went to fetch it from his bag. Then Vikram started searching for his iPod when Arif said “Let’s try with my iPod”. Wow. That moment. Imagine if your VC is a would-be customer and the product solves a problem that he himself faces. Nothing like it.

We connected Arif’s iPod to the charger and the charger to a power socket. The blue LED came on. The iPod was showing the charging symbol. We all had smiles on our faces. Arif was impressed and went on to even ask us where we live and so on. That means he really was interested.

After that incident, it was time to head back. Vikram was on an all-time high. That was when we were all convinced that we were on to something. And throughout the bus journey from Chennai to Bangalore, those two convinced me to join ion. I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, it was a Saturdays-only part-time thing. Yeah, Vikram and me had discussed about such things endlessly. But still, I wasn’t sure.

I thought about it the next day and thought “Why not?” I don’t lose much if it bombs and it was a good excuse for us three to keep meeting up.

For various reasons, we didn’t approach Vakil for funding and put in the initial investment ourselves. And we went from shopping for running shoes to shopping for resistors and capacitors and modifying Drupal code.

Then there was the countless decision-making sessions like coming up with poster ideas and then the stories about how we decided the logo for ion, how we landed in trouble with the cops, and finally the launch of ion.

We sent an email to friends asking them to forward to their company internal groups and anybody who would be interested. We also gave posters to put up on their company notice boards. That was pretty much our ‘marketing strategy’. The idea was that we marketed it as an iPod charger and our target audience was the techie crowd.

We marketed it as an iPod charger even though it will work with anything that can be charged with USB right from mobile phones to battery chargers. We use the term iPod charger because that’s what people have most demand for. The second part about targeting techies was because they will be the ones who will look to finding a solution that is cheaper than the official charger which costs 2000 rupees but still is reliable. Ours was one-fifth that price.

The most humbling experience for me was trying to sell ion outside the Aerosmith concert. That was such a good example of a wrong person (me) in the right place doing the job not suited for him. But yet Niara and me did it for ion.

Then came the amazing customer feedback and our highest point – getting featured in a half-page article in Economic Times:

And yes, Arif congratulated us.

But you want to know what’s the craziest part? We made just 200 pieces of ion. Yes, that’s it. 200 ions. Crazy. And see how far it went.

After that ET article happened, we ran out of stock. That was six months ago. Many people have asked me why we’re not selling more ions. So I thought I’ll tell the hidden part of the story today – We never intended ion to live longer than those 200 pieces. It was just a business experiment for us, nothing more. Why? To learn what it takes to convert an idea to a reliable quality product and take it to market.

We never called ourselves a startup back then. That has happened only in hindsight. In fact, I was in it because I thought I could help since I had some experience in maintaining my own websites and maybe I can learn a thing or two in running an ecommerce store.

After we managed to the finish selling the batch of 200 pieces and made decent profit, Vikram moved to USA, Niara moved on to other things in life and so did I.

But the response hasn’t stopped. Even last Thursday (Apr 17), we got emails from four different people in a single day asking when we’ll be back in stock. Crazy, I tell you.

I have had so many personal failures and failed projects in the past few years that it seemed stupid to kill a successful project of ours. So Vikram and myself have been working on reviving ion. We hope to be back with a batch of second generation ions in the next month.

The experiment continues.

27 companies were showcased and they each had 8 minutes to present their product. Working prototypes and demos were encouraged, ppts discouraged. Companies were asked to focus on questions like ‘who are you’, ‘what are you doing’, ‘what makes you different’ and ‘what are you looking for’.

I had written down some notes during the entire day:

• opening talk by CTO of rediff (the main sponsor)
  • announcing platform
  • not sure what this was exactly about, but I think it was web services to help other websites use Rediff similar to web services by Yahoo/Google
  • why rediff is interested in proto? because they want to encourage indian entrepreneurship and partner with them
  • an example is how they worked with tachyon to enable indian languages on rediff
  • venki -at- rediffmail.com

Telecom

• (1) unleash networks
  • network analysis for telecom
  • visualization, reconstruction
  • go as deep or as high level as you can imagine
• (2) valuefirst
  • virtual mobile network operator
  • allow your company product to be sms-enabled (irrespective of service provider)
• (3) sloka telecom
  • make installation of wimax networks easy
  • easy installation, upgradation
  • small box
  • one-third the price of current market products
  • with more funding and time, they can reduce to one-tenth
• (4) drishti
  • combine communication with enterprise applications (crm, erp)
  • something like mac os automator to create extensions and plugins

Infrastructure and Development Platforms

• (5) vembu platforms
  • storgrid
  • data backup
  • web ui! looks very simple and easy to use
    • surely beats the software my company laptop uses for backup
  • marketing -at- vembu.com
• (6) i-create software
  • vyasa : open source business intelligence
  • data warehousing on web 2.0 platform
  • uses natural language processing for querying
    • makes finding easy
  • focus on banking industry
  • can type questions like ‘which fund offers are going to close this week’
• (7) stringbeans portal platform
  • web 2.0 platform software
  • bring your enterprise software to web2.0
  • open source
  • aim to create portals as easy as creating ppts

Internet and Web 2.0

• (8) saffronconnect.com
  • social networking around audio and video
  • bands can upload their songs to sell
  • 70% of money goes to artist as opposed to traditional 15%
  • distribution extends to yahoo music, itunes, real, etc.
  • bally sagoo has his latest album here
• (9) seraja.com
  • content in context
  • the eventweb
  • create a community around an event
  • does everything from event photos to event blog to event wiki
  • seems similar to upcoming.org?
• (10) spoteazy.com
  • product search
  • aim: fastest way to decide which product to buy
  • currently works only for mobile phones, but will extend to other products
  • gives full amount with all the asterisks removed
  • powerful search – “phone camera bluetooth”
  • uses other recommendation sites to determine ranking of product
  • “k700i vs n70″ gives table for feature comparison
  • ranking order can change depending on the features you stress on (in your search query)
• (11) picsquare.com
  • print photos
  • delivered anywhere in india in 4 days
  • send printed photos to family
  • photo calendar
  • wish they had an option to directly pick the photos from flickr
• (12) ixigo.com
  • travel search
  • acts as a meta search engine for air tickets from different providers
  • shows full amount
  • good simple ui
  • click to directly buy ticket
  • wonder how ixigo makes money – do they have tie-ups with the providers?
  • travel planning not showcased yet, but looks promising
  • confusing logo, wish they choose a more clearer one
• (13) taazza
  • news can be more fun to read, more useful, more individualized
  • auto-tagged news items
  • browse news by people or places or quotes
  • interesting, wonder how they recognize a phrase is a person or a place
  • presenters were not clear about usp

Consumer Electronics

• (14) novatium
  • three issues hinder pc adoption in emerging markets : affordability, desirability, manageability
  • “computing for the next billion”
  • utility computing
  • you get monitor, keyboard mouse – it’s a dumb terminal
  • all computing and software is in the server run by the local cable-wallah
  • instant on/off, no booting
  • test run in a apartment complex shows promising results, actual paying customers
  • rs.4500 for nova netpc, rs.450 per month for computing, connectivity and applications
  • ~100 million installations by 2010, including home + smb market
  • “computing 2.0″
  • community news and views
  • allows “provisioned” software as a service
  • users can try new software without worrying about installation or any such hassles
  • targeted 1:1 ads on desktop, claim that ads will be more relevant
  • value added services
  • yuvaraj -at- novatium.com
• (15) smart pundits
  • car drivers will love this
  • automatic changing of headlight from high <-> low beam depending on oncoming vehicles
  • camera in windshield
  • demo of algorithm looked very convincing

Business and Productivity

• (16) kallos serveit crm
  • for any sales force > 10 employees
  • metadata based app
  • no need to customize code for every new client
  • just simply change the data models
  • more manageable, simpler than changing code as in existing crm/erp products
• (17) helpdeskpilot.com
  • handle support / talk to customers
  • tenmiles.com
  • 18 countries, 9 languages
• (18) tracbac.com
  • “collaborate visually”
  • easier and effective collaboration of design
  • put arrows and circle text and jot notes on design (say, a poster) just like you would on paper
  • integrated with amazon s3
  • ‘tracbac mini’ : desktop version
  • market
    • indian ad/design : $80-100 million
    • artwork outsourcing : $10 billion
  • narain -at- 360in.com
  • 10 people company
  • looking for alliances and funding
• (19) aumega networks
  • indus live
  • p2p enable your app
  • enterprise computing space
  • provide software-as-a-service by publishing on a network
  • includes sdk (including compiler), network, middleware, runtime
  • all kinds of networks (lan, wifi, etc.)
  • all kinds of devices (pda, tv, pc, mobile)
  • example of p2p-enabling microsoft word by adding a toolbar to share documents, similar to google docs or zoho
  • you can use network services (such as web services) even when you are not connected
  • fast direct point-to-point connectivity without server : games, sharing, etc.
  • looking for
    • open source services
    • partner with social networks, photo sites, etc.
    • seed money to do new services : local/topical search engine for mobile phones
• (20) support magic
  • online products : 60% of customers abort the buying process, want to ask some questions
  • if they don’t get timely answers/replies, they don’t come back at all, even for future products
  • knowledge base, troubleshooter, live chat, ticketing
• (21) desicrew solutions
  • data entry in rural areas for urban people
  • seems similar to amazon’s mechanical turk
  • rural bpos
  • data conversion, audio transcriptions, localization services
  • click management information system to manage the entire process
  • initiative by tenet/iit madras
  • saloni -at- tenet.res.in
  • 60 people as of now, 90 more this quarter
• (22) deep root linux
  • start.deeproot.in
  • make open source easy
  • easy to deploy
  • deepofix mail server

Mobile

• (23) wizdom.in
  • adaptive learning programs on your mobile
  • improve skills, get instant feedback
  • seems strange to expect students to afford gprs on their phone and expect them to learn on the mobile
• (24) wirkle.com
  • mobile solutions for the enterprise
  • crm on mobile
  • requires gprs
  • as a friend joked, “join once, work everywhere”
• (25) thinkways
  • mobisync
  • backup, retrieval, configuration, sharing of data on your mobile phone
  • contacts, calendar, todo lists
  • requires java
  • requires gprs/3g
  • deployed by mobileone in singapore
  • aim to capture 30% of indian market by 2008
  • 12-15 million users by 2010
  • revenue per subscriber at $0.3 per month
  • mobisync -at- thinkways.com
  • they want to global
  • vijay anand says no such business models anywhere, this is real experimentation
• (26) spinaxys
  • mpathy
  • ads on your mobile
  • follows your likes and dislikes
  • can it do for mobile what google did for search?
  • not clear on how a customer actually uses mpathy
• (27) ciindia.com
  • company has won 9 national awards, including president’s award
  • “sell quick” product for usage by exhibitors at booths at a product fair
  • 3 month old product, already 500 customers
  • capture customer data using pda/pocketpc
  • send orders immediately to back office
  • keep track of availability of products
  • quickly process each customer
  • avoid losing potential buyers due to crowding

Discussion

• partha (vc, ilabs, chennai)
  • multiple perspectives are most important, talk to people, understand how they perceive the product
  • would your parents buy it
  • many ideas were avantgarde, can find no where else
  • start focusing on commercial aspect since day one
  • your business model simply will not change later
  • sify had such problems, ilabs had funded sify
  • earning from day one helps you in bootstrapping and boosts morale
  • feedback is most important, especially non-geek perspective
• arif vakil (angel investor)
  • famous real estate company wanting to diversify by investing in tech startups
  • two reactions
    • wowed by the presentations of the day
    • how long will this uniqueness stay?
  • business models were not explained during the presentations, only ideas
• mukul (canaan ventures)
  • funded bharatmatrimony.com
  • day was impressive
  • interested in funding some of the companies showcased today
• vijay anand (organizer, entrepreneur himself)
  • 45 companies were shortlisted, but only 27 showcased today
  • these other companies also were good ideas
  • profile handbooks will be printed, and sent to people on request
• atul chitnis (does he even need an intro any more?)
  • when explaining, how are the two modules/features connected? that is unclear to the non-tech people who were the actual audience today.
  • the ingenius part of the product is actually that link between the features
  • understand that the audience is not familiar with the product, only you are
  • understand what kind of audience you will be speaking to
  • proto.in should be more popular, blames vijay anand
  • people got to know only through the business world article
  • sad part was many people felt their idea was not good enough to present at proto.in
  • if it fills a need, it is not a stupid idea
  • most successful things are simplest ones
  • clarity of what you think the idea is worth
    • have you done a market study?
    • what is your market?
    • shows your seriousness
  • anecdote of a person complaining about “developing nations” and other person retorts saying “at least they are developing”
  • proto.in means our time has come
  • india is growing, take example of airlines not going out of business but actually increasing, and railways, and so on
  • this event signifies our time has come and more things are on the horizon
  • proposes that this should be a quarterly event, assuming vijay anand (the organizer) doesn’t run away from such a suggestion

My general observation is that most of these startup ideas were to better existing products and processes in 2 ways : 1. Price 2. Ease of use. The first point forces the entrepreneur to think a lot about business models. The second point points in the direction of making technologies simpler, easier and usable. The good thing was most of the presenters had a clear answer to “What problem are you trying to solve?”

Overall, I think it was a fantastic event, there were very few hiccups and everything the organizers did demonstrated their single-minded focus to do as much as possible to showcase these startup companies. However, there were many things that could have been done better, especially regarding the publicity and the target audience. Srikanth and Jyothirmayee talk about this better than I can.

At the end of the day, I could see many ideas jumping out of peoples heads in conversations between wannabe-entrepreneurs and interested VCs, there were heated conversations between fellow entrepreneurs, especially on how they can collaborate and build on each other. The plain energy and excitement around was great to see.

Indeed, has our time come?

Update : Few videos of the presentations have been uploaded by Gokul who has blogged the whole event live!