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.

To help the Indian Startup Ecosystem in some small way, we’re going to be involved in setting up the Delhi chapter of Startup Saturday which is a part of HeadStart. We’d like to use this forum to help startups in the Delhi/NCR region showcase their products to a community of peers, media, and investors.

If you or your company is interested in demoing, please complete the form below.

This posting doesn’t have anything to do with tech or other geeky stuff. However, being a foodie, I just had to write about my experience at Wasabi in New Delhi.

Wasabi is a fairly new Japanese restaurant located at the Taj Hotel on Man Singh Rd. in the heart of New Delhi. I first heard about the restaurant a few months ago from my wife. I was fortunate enough to have dinner at Wasabi yesterday. It was a special occasion and Chef Vikram and the rest of the staff at Wasabi made it extra special.

We started out with vegetarian sashimi and vegetarian sushi rolls. Vegetarian sushi rolls are fairly common at most Japanese restaurants around the world but this is the first time we had heard of vegetarian Sashimi. Vegetable sashimi is a platter of raw vegetables such as cucumbers, papaya, radish, asparagus, avocado, seaweed, and a few other items. Chef Vikram came up with the idea by adapting the idea of traditional Japanese sashimi to the Indian palate. Raw vegetables might not sound all that interesting until you have the chance to eat them the way Wasabi serves them. All the vegetables are freshly imported from Japan and they taste incredible. Combine them with some fresh wasabi and soy sauce and you’ve got a combination that will surely bring your taste buds to live. Accompanying the sashimi were vegetarian sushi rolls, also extremely fresh and very tasty.

After our appetizers, we were brought a combination of vegetable teppanyaki, a very special order of rice made with matsutake mushrooms, and one of Chef Vikram’s specialties, a tofu steak. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the names of all the dishes. I was a bit more focused on gorging myself on great food. All the food was exceptionally tasty and really had no need for extra garnishing or condiments of any sort.

To top off our incredible meal, we had a bit of the Wasabi Green Tea cake. Wow is about all I can say! Unfortunately, we were so completely stuffed, there was no way we could have any Japanese tea after dinner. I’m saving that for next time.

I highly recommend going to Wasab when you’re in Delhi. The decor is very pleasant, the service is exceptional, and the food is the best vegetarian Japanese food I’ve ever had. Thanks Vikram, Deepak, Sumitra and everyone else at Wasabi!

OSSCamp is gearing up for another meet on September 27th and 28th in Delhi. The volunteers have just spent a great deal of time and energy rebuilding the OSSCamp.in site and it looks great. Take a look at the site, sign up, think of a way to participate and join us on the 27th and 28th for some great talks on Open Source technologies and meet some really cool geeks

OSSCamp Delhi is just around the corner. On Saturday, 21st January, 2008 Open Source enthusiasts, users, and businesses will be gathering for a BarCamp-esque information exchange at The Indian Social Institute on Lodi Road in New Delhi.

Details of OSSCamp Delhi Summer Edition are here. Join Us.

I stumbled upon HungryZone which was launched by the same folks who came up with HungryBangalore. I never used HungryBangalore before but when I saw that I can get reviews of restaurants around Delhi, I had to delve into HungryZone (there are a total of 10 cities covered by HungryZone).

I was pretty disappointed by HungryZone. I could not narrow down restaurants by PIN code, area, cuisine type, vegetarian or non-vegetarian, or any other criteria. Once I clicked on Delhi, I got an alphabetical listing of restaurants all over Delhi. Almost all of the restaurants had only 1 review.

To help them out, I looked around and found a restaurant, Machan, I had been to and added a review for it. The basic information that HungryZone provides about the restaurant is a good start but perhaps some more information would be helpful.

The concept behind HungryZone is great but there’s a great deal of footwork required to get restaurants to signup and accept coupons, take orders online, deliver, etc. It’s also a great deal of work to get people around cities in India to contribute their reviews of restaurants. Perhaps, HungryZone would allow users to add a restaurant and a review about it. For example, I went to Chonas in Khan Market today and the appetizers, main course, and service service was great!! Avoid the Strawberry “Cheesecake” though.

It took some time to get the correct MMS settings for the iPhone but below is a screenshot of the exact settings to be used with Vodafone in Delhi when using SwirlyMMS for the iPhone. The same settings should work with Vodafone users in the rest of India and I would love to hear from those of you who have gotten it working. Unfortunately, SwirlyMMS doesn’t yet allow receiving MMS messages but the developers are working on adding that feature in soon.