I was fortunate to attend proto.in in Chennai on Sunday. What was it all about? It’s about startups in India. It was the opportunity for an Indian entrepreneur to showcase his/her ideas and business plans, to look for funding, people to work with, partners or simply grab media attention.

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