Startup Saturday Delhi

Startup Saturday Delhi is gearing up for another great event on July 11th, 2009. We’ve got a great group of speakers coming in to talk about entrepreneurship in India, both online and offline.

Agenda

The agenda for the 11th of July is below. We look forward to seeing you there.

1. “My Rules of getting Funded” – Rohit Agarwal of TechTribe fame. Rohit is an experienced entrepreneur who has co-founded many a startups. He has seen both ups and downs, one constant being – his ability to get funded. He will share some of his ways with money.
2. “How we got here? From here to where?” – Harpreet Singh from CoCubes. He is going to give us the CoCubes story. How they started, Where they are now. Also a quick roundup of their business model, revenue streams. Why getting funded is not the end but the beginning.
3. “Entrepreneurs and VCs to focus on Offline Businesses” – Sameer Guglani from Morpheus Venture Partners (MVP). There is a much larger and untapped market opportunity in businesses that do not operate out of the “internet”. Sameer will get talking about the space and such businesses.

Registration

To register for Startup Saturday Delhi on July 11th, please sign up here.

Being involved in Startup Saturday Delhi, I have come across a lot of entrepreneurs building Internet applications. Most of them being India centric. The problem, which has been discussed and reported numerous times is that broadband penetration is a miniscule 3% of the whole population. There are roughly 3 million broadband subscribers in India.

Airtel 8Mbps with 4GB Cap

India being a highly price conscious country, I find it amazing that telcos like Airtel are busy hiking the price of metered “broadband” while degrading service levels. The latest move by Airtel has been to increase the price of their “unlimited” 512k connection to Rs. 1,599 (USD 34) per month. The real kicker is that the speed degraded to 256k after you’ve hit downloads totaling 100GB.

Airtel 512k with 100GB Cap

At the same time, they are introducing 16Mbps connections for Rs. 2,999 (USD 64) per month that have download caps of 20GB. A single Linux distro download is 4GB. A point upgrade to OS X is generally around 500MB. Buying and downloading a few shows from iTunes or watching a few videos on YouTube and I’ll blow right thru my 20GB limit in a week. If I download roughly 40GB of data in a given month, my Internet access will cost me upwards of Rs. 12,000 (USD 255) per month.

Airtel 16Mbps with 20GB cap

If indian telcos like Airtel were to offer unlimited 1Mbps connections at Rs. 999 (USD 21) and unlimited 2Mbps at Rs. 1,599 (USD 34), the willingness of Indians to spend on Internet access would be much more palatable. Other than those whose careers in some way, shape, or form are connected to the Internet, very few people are willing to spend more than Rs. 999 per month on Internet access. Those that spend Rs. 999 or less per month, get an experience that basically sucks. They are frustrated and completely turned off by the fact that it takes 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video on YouTube.

India will never be a country of mass Internet adoption while the government agencies like TRAI and DoT don’t adopt a definition of broadband that is more inline with shifts in Internet usage. Indian telcos continue to provide subpar speeds at exorbitant prices when compares to the rest of the world. India, touting itself, as the technology center of the 21st Century, must adopt an infrastructure and a coherent policy around broadband deployment and usage. Only with the government mandating the need for widespread Internet adoption, at feasible price points, will there be widespread broadband adoption by non-techies.

However, relying on the government to be so forward thinking is a pipe-dream. What the Indian telcos should do is adopt a model that was instrumental in driving mobile usage in India. Drop the price points so that even the average person (living on Rs. 100 per day), would find Internet usage compelling, useful, and not frustrating. If they were to adopt a mass usage policy and not price their broadband products based on margins, I believe that in 5 years, India could have at least 100 million broadband users (via DSL, cable modem, Mobile 3G, wiMax, etc.) Is it too much to ask the Indian telcos like Airtel, MTNL, BSNL, Tata Communications, Reliance, etc. to push the envelope of adoption? Unfortunately, I think it might be.

This is what you will find , when you arrive at the American Center for the 5th edition of Startup Saturday Delhi.

Date : 9th May 2009

Time : 2:00 pm

1) Ankit Maheshwari from InstaBlogs - He is going to talk about the idea, team and execution behind InstaBlogs. The challenges he faces operating out of Shimla. And finally some of his thoughts on the “recession”.

2) A sort of “Entrepreneurial SoapBox”. This will be on a first-come-first-serve basis. We will invite 5 entrepreneurs among the audience to come up and give a short 2-minute pitch about their ventures. Then the floor will be open for discussion about what problems are they facing and what are they actually doing to make business sense out of their ventures. Invitations will be available on the spot.

3) Sarabdeep Singh from Fachak - Fachak is a platform to collect content from across internet and your desktop and build mash boxes (collections) out of it. It is something like a play list of YouTube but not confined to videos, but also contains Presentations, documents and images. You can aggregate content from third party services like YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr etc as well as pick up content from your desktop.

Expecting to see a lot of fantastic people - eager to hear some excellent folks - who have been able to find monetization in the world of digital social media. Catch you at the American Center for 5th edition of Startup Saturday Delhi.

In the latest format of registering for an SSD, we are supposed to put our info like name, e-mail, phone etc on a publicly viewable and, more concerning, searchable webpage. This is not a good way to collect registration info as we know how important it is to preserve online privacy. Everyday a number of internet users become victims of spam, phishing, spoofing, id theft etc. The solution could be to have a secure location for entering that info and should be accessible to the registered members of the network only. Or alternately as Niche Techie does, users may put in their aliases, but that would also lead to id verification problem for the venue host.

Eric Rosenfeld, one of the founders of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), gave this presentation at MIT back in February. If you have even a remote interest in finance (and even if you don't), this is an hour and a half very well spent. Eric is brilliant and fun to listen to.

  Alook at the way proceedings are scheduled for the day - 11th April 2009

The registration mechanism from this SSD onwards has been modified. Now the registrations are hosted by the HeadStart Network. Take a look at the SSD Wiki for the agenda as well as the registration mechanism. If you have any questions/comments, please feel free to email me at nichetechie@gmail.com

It's been a long road, oft-delayed, but we've officially started our private beta of Semblr today. The basic premise around Semblr is simple. It's an online marketplace where you can assemble your team of experts using a reverse auction process. It's a market where people that are looking for work can connect with people that need to get work done by bidding for the work. In this kind of economic climate there are more and more experts around the world that are available to help with projects that previously they had no time for. We want to make Semblr the go-to destination for experts and those looking for those experts.

If you have an expertise in Programming, Writing, Video (online and offline) and various other topics, come on over to Semblr and sign up for our free private beta. If you're someone who is looking for an expert to help you get something done, come on over and sign up.

We're just getting started so the marketplace is a bit small and we're launching with a limited number of job categories but we expect to grow the list over time to encompass all kinds of personal outsourcing categories. We will also be inviting new users almost daily to join our marketplace.

We look forward to all your feedback and we'll do everything we can to make the Semblr marketplace a profitable place for you. BTW, if you have suggestions on categories that you'd like to see added to Semblr, please let us know thru the contact form or via Twitter (don't forget to follow us on Twitter so you can get to see the latest auctions.

14th March 2009 saw the American Center in Delhi host the 3rd Startup Saturday Delhi event. Carefully screened and chosen were the presenters for this edition, after a not so enthusiastic response to the 2nd edition.

Michael Macy, the Cultural Attache at the American Center took to the stage before the invited speakers got there. He challenged the young people in the audience to use the recessionary period we’re in to find innovative solutions to problems that we face daily. He cited a few examples of companies that were started during recessions to being very large powerhouses today - including Microsoft. This was a small involvement from the hosts of SSD, and it proves that they are always willing to support such initiatives.

Next onto the podium was Mrigank Tripathi along with a demo of whats being done at his 2 month old venture - VoiceTap. The idea behind VoiceTap was conceived sometime in January and they have already reached Alpha. Mrigank expects to hit Beta in the next 4 weeks. Now for the concept, VoiceTap is a service that is trying to create a connect between Knowledge Experts and Knowledge Seekers. It is a platform where you get to speak and interact directly with experts: people who have ‘made it’ in the field that is relevant to you. The service will be delivered over the phone – and the calls will be scheduled based on the interest levels shown in that particular call - the level being judged by way of numbers registering as knowledge seekers as well as the curiosity in terms of questions being put up for the expert. They have partnered with one of the largest conference call providers for the backend technology, since getting a larger set of people onto a single conference call is quite expensive.

Link to Mrigank’s presentation about VoiceTap

Mrigank faced a lot of questions from the attentive audience. He identified revenue models under these heads - premium service where subscribers can take a 1-1 call for any subject, pay per minute, in-call advertising and sponsored calls. Authenticity of the experts and live calls were the basic USP upon which Mrigank hinges the success of VoiceTap. This link has the answers to a lot of questions about VoiceTap.

Next up was Wirkle co-founder Tarun Mittal. Wirkle is a products and services company in the mobile phone domain. He started off with a demo of few products in the Mobile VAS domain. They have an excellent product in the Mobileum platform. Its a patent pending platform, and is extensively provided to others who can build their products and services over it. This was first developed for the GSMA Mobile Congress, held annually in Barcelona, Spain. This is a platform thats based on the client-server architecture. The server collates information from a number of sources, and distributes it to the clients existing in the form of hand-held devices. Tarun went on to demo a few other applications in the social media space that work over the mobile phone device. Next in his kitty were applications for the iPhone. There is this special touch sensitive application available from Wirkle, that makes a “Kiss” sound when the iPhone is placed near human skin. Or at least thats where everybody could test it.

Link to Tarun’s presentation about Wirkle

Once the product demo was over, Tarun delved into the formation of Wirkle. The history has it that 3 friends working in US decided to come back to India and venture out on their own. Their exposure to an advanced mobile phone market in the western half of globe inspired them to start a products and services company in the hand-held device market. And thus was born “Wirkle”.

This happens when you come out of an interesting event. This blog post has already gone past a readable length. I am going to terminate it here. And modify the title to say that this is part I of the entire coverage from 3rd edition of Startup Saturday Delhi. Will be posting the second half in a day or two.

Registrations for Startup Saturday Delhi on the 11th of April ‘09 are open.  To register, simply sign up to the HeadStart Network and sign up for the Startup Saturday Delhi group (you’re on it right now :-), and post a comment to this posting saying your will be attending.  No need to post a comment if you’re NOT attending.  If you are a speaker, please register here as well.

Please make sure you are registered on the HeadStart Network and that you have filled out your profile.  Adding a comment saying that you will be attending without registering on the HS network will not be accepted. 

 SSD Apr 09 will be held from 2pm till 6pm.