Archive for the ‘Startup Ecosystem’ Category

Global Entrepreneurship Summit-2011 at IIT Kharagapur

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
Ecell is a Student organization with the aim of fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship among college students in India and nurturing young people with bright ideas. Ecell boasts to be one of the most active student bodies in India – with more than 15 start-ups from IIT Kharagpur itself within its five years of inception.
With rise of interest in students to pursue entrepreneurial and non conventional careers Ecell is organising a start up camp at the campus during Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Startups can participate to hire interns from students of IIT Kharagpur and 50 other engineering and management institutions as well as will get a chance to network with several Venture Capitalists and other startups.
Global Entrepreneurship Summit  is the annual flagship event of Ecell. It is one of the biggest entrepreneurial platforms for academicians, new-age entrepreneurs, eminent business, personalities, venture capitalists, startups and the students to gather at one place and share their entrepreneurial endeavours and experiences, and to pledge to take entrepreneurship to greater scales.


The Global Entrepreneurship Summit-2011 is going to be held from 14-16 January 2011.

Startup Camp Details:
1. The start up camp start ups shall give a small (2-3 slides) presentation of their start up and the work profile they have to offer.
2. The registered student will then proceed to the start up camp arena where they can interact with different start ups over a coffee table.
3. Near to the networking space, a short presentation upon the opportunities in various attending startups will be flashed continously compiled in the form of videos.
4. Various VCs and angel investors will also be invited to take part in the networking with various startups and the students. There will be a separate conference session between VCs and startups where startups can pitch their idea for funding by the VCs.
5. There will be a panel discussion of VCs and startups on how a college startup can get funded by a VC.
6. Participating Start Ups will also be given space on our website where they can post about opportunities with their own company and draw attention.
7. Start Up shall have to pay a nominal fee of 1500 INR per representative to E-Cell for participating in Start Up camp on campus. However posting on the web shall be at free of cost.


Benefits to startups attending the Startup Camp:
1. The camp will serve as a pre-placement talk for the startups looking for talented and passionate student willing to learn by working in a startup.
2. The camp will serve as a great platform for the networking between startups, VCs and students.
3. The event will create a creditable profile of participating startups amongst the student community helping them in branding and their future hirings.

For more information about Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2011 visit www.ges.ecell-iitkgp.org
For any more Information regarding Entrepreneurship Cell, you can visit www.ecell-iitkgp.org

Lifeblob accuses Facebook of copying its ‘Related Photo’ feature

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

lifeblob_logo

Lifeblob is accusing Facebook for blatantly copying its ‘Related Photos’ feature.

Pranav (Founder/CEO) of Lifeblob says – Just to set the record straight, we have had this feature ( and a lot more ) at http://www.lifeblob.com for over a year now and facebook has blatantly copied it. Every time you upload a photo on lifeblob, a recommendation engine not only looks at the face tags, but also the other information associated wtih your photo to show you photos that are closely related around it.So when you upload your graduation day photos, we discover other photos of your graduation day and show it next to your photo. What facebook has done is picked up this idea and launched a simple version of it that only uses face tags.

The question is that how many Indian Startups would suffer from these unethical activities from Biggies like Facebook, Google & Microsft.

The Entrepreneurship Development Cell – IIT Delhi

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

EDC-IITDAbout EDC:
The Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC, IITD) was initiated in January, 2007 with a vision to promote Entrepreneurship amongst IIT Delhi students and to build an exhaustive resource pool to aid potential student entrepreneurs.

Since its inception, EDC have organized various events ranged over social entrepreneurship events on campus to PAN IIT business plan contests.

Team:

Faculty Advisor: Prof. Shashi Mathur
Chief Industry Advisor: Mr. Sanjiv Sethi
President: Ankur Khetan
Vice-Presidents: Karan Gupta, Mehak Gupta, & Neha Jindal
CORPORATE AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: Abhishek Jain, & Rachit Gupta
EVENTS AND PROGRAMS: Nikhil Tiwari, Poem Kabra, & Ramandeep Babrah
MARKETING AND FINANCE: Aakash Tulsani, & Gagandeep Singh
MEDIA AND PUBLIC RELATIONS: Lalit Bihani, Sachin Verma, & Vishwesh Singh
STUDENT ENTREPRENEUR HELPDESK: Kunal Goel, Kush Goel, & Shreyans Singh
EDITORIAL BOARD: Siddharth Bhattacharya
DESIGN: Akshina Gupta, Rohit Chaudhary, & Vishal Jain
WEB AND TECHNOLOGY: Sachin Agrawal, & Sangeet Aggarwal

EDC Website

iWeekend Bangalore 12-14th March 2010

Monday, March 15th, 2010

iWeekend event was successfully organized at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore. Two ideas were shortlisted namely: Wikipaisa.org, led by Deven Shah and Kickoffers.com, led by Vinayak.

50 selected entrepreneurs were asked to choose from 2 selected projects to work on during the weekend. It was a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, especially the techies, to expand their horizons in two intensive days, working with talented people of diverse profiles.

Qualcomm buys Mango Tech Products: Ojas Exits

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Qualcomm, has bought Mango’s handset user interface software with a PC-based customization kit that allows developers to create mobile applications.

Mango has announced the sale of few of its products to Qualcomm Inc.
Ojas Ventures, the $35-million early stage venture fund floated by N S Raghavan, the co-founder and former joint managing director of Infosys, has made its first exit from its investment in Bangalore-based Mango Technologies Pvt Ltd.

The exit for Ojas follows Mango Technologies’ move to sell few of its products to Qualcomm Incorporated, the world’s largest wireless semiconductor company. As part of this transaction, Qualcomm received mobile handset user interface (UI) software and a PC-based UI customization toolkit from Mango. The value of the deal was not disclosed. The deal with Qualcomm has offered an exit window for both Ojas, which is the first institutional investor, and other angel investors in Mango.

Reference Links:
http://www.vccircle.com/500/news/ojas-makes-its-first-exit-with-mango-technologies
http://www.livemint.com/2010/02/03231305/Ojas-exits-Mango-Tech-after-Qu.html
http://contentsutra.com/article/419-ojas-ventures-invests-in-software-solution-provider-mango-technologies/

Blogomania Cognizance 2010 IIT Roorkee

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Coginzance is annual technical festival of IIT Roorkee.

Blogomania, a long term event that spans for the three months of January, February and March 2010, aims to pit the top bloggers of the nation against one another. Primarily a contest to test the blogging skills of the contestant, this is a platform to showcase one’s eloquence, wit and humour to impress the masses.

All registered users of Cognizance 2010 can participate. Prizes worth Rs. 25,000 are at stake.

The Entrepreneurship Summit 2010 by Ecell, IIT Bombay

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

E-Summit is the annual event of Ecell at IIT Bombay.

E-Summit 2010 focuses on the three E’s:
* Explore
* Evolve
* Enterprise

E-Summit will bring in some of the most enriching and enlightening panel discussions, workshops and interactive sessions with successful and distinguished entrepreneurs and corporates. For startups and entrepreneurs there will be parallel events like mentoring sessions and startup showcasing. The summit will also host the finals for EUREKA! 2009- Asia’s largest Business Plan competition.

Web: http://www.esummit.ecell.in
Date: 7th Feb, 2010
Venue: IIT Bombay

Organized by:
The Entrepreneurship Cell
SAC, IIT Bombay
Mumbai-400076
Phone No: (022) 25764044
Fax No: (022) 25768490
E-Mail: ecell@iitb.ac.in

13 Tips for creating a successful web business

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Thanks Vineesh for this insightful post.

Tips for creating a successful new online product

What to build
1. Build for someone specific: The worst possible market for a product is “small businesses on the web”.
2. Don’t be afraid of targeting a narrow niche: The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success.
3. Solve a real problem that costs money: The easiest way to get someone to loosen their purse strings is to convince them that using your product will pay for itself.

How to build it
4. Test the market with a working prototype as soon as possible: Listen to your users — and, to do this, give them a chance to tell you.
5. Develop iteratively: Aim for the result of each iteration to be useful in and of itself, but keep each iteration as tiny as possible.
6. Get things right, and be decisive in correcting the wrongs: Don’t delay necessary change just because you’re already committed into a different direction.
7. Don’t spend the time correcting until you know what you’re aiming for: If you realise that you need to change the direction of the product significantly, figure out your new goals for before implementing the change.
8. Don’t let your programmers design the user interface: Make sure you have a gifted UI designer on your team.

Who to build it with
9. Make sure every member of the development team is passionate about the product: Build your product in-house, and make sure the team is fully bought into the concept and committed to make it a success.
10. Be sickeningly elitist about your development team and sickeningly inclusive about your users: It’s never the user’s fault, it’s always your product’s fault for not being clear and intuitive enough.
11. The best hiring strategy is to hire no one: You need to recruit a development team to work with you, not for you.
12. Include at least one target user on the development team: Survival is worth giving up equity to get a target user on your development team.
13. Ensure everyone on your development team understands the problem they’re solving: Embed your development team into the end-users’ environment — at least for a time.

Read complete post here.

Startup Saturday at Bangalore ­- October Edition

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Theme – Online Retail

Startup Saturday is an initiative by Headstart to provide entrepreneurs in each city with a monthly community driven forum that is structured in agenda but open in discussions. A Startup Saturday provides a forum for entrepreneurs to discuss, present, network and learn from peers, prospective customers, adopters, partners and investors.

The fundamental idea is to have all parts of the innovation ecosystem interact with each other with high frequency and through rich conversation. We strongly believe that this would lead to faster evolution of the entire ecosystem.

Time and Venue:­
Saturday – 10th October, 2009 10:00 hrs – 13:00 hrs
Venue: NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore

Agenda:
Demo 1:  FlipKart.com
Demo 2:  Picsquare.com
Lightning Pitches:
Panel Discussion “Opportunities & Challenges in Online Retail”
o  Vitheeswaran from Indiaplaza.in
o  Vijay from WisdomTap
o Vijay from Infibeam.com
Snacks and Networking.

Visit http://network.headstart.in/projects/startup-saturday-bangalore/project-home or http://headstart.in/ for further details.

Broadband Connectivity: India just manages to beat Egypt & Nigeria

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Even though we are close to touching 400mn mobile subscribers, India’s broadband speed is not at all a story to talk about. In a study conducted on Broadband Quality Speed (BQS), India stood 62nd and has managed to beat Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Overall average broadband quality increased across the globe:

  • Global average download throughput increased by 49% to 4.75 Megabits per second (Mbps)
  • Global average upload throughput increased by 69% to 1.3 Mbps
  • Global average latency decreased by 21% to 170 milliseconds
  • South Korea, Japan and HK top the list, followed by Sweden, Switzerland and Netherlands (source).

Complete post here.