StartupCity- startup showcase, conference, unconference all under one roof….

Tags: bangalore, event, startups

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The Smart Techie (the technology magazine) is organizing an event called Startup City- this is a potpourri of a conference, unconference (birds of a feather gatherings) and industrial exhibition style startup showcase booths. The event is slated for the 24th of May in Bangalore. The formalized conference is a day long event and features prominent industry members, VCs etc (the agenda is here). Startups wanting to exhibit their product or conduct live demo sessions would have to pay 30K for a 3X2 metre booth. Quite a few startups have signed up already - Sloka, Netcore, Pramati, mChek etc). Attending the event is complimentary for technical professionals- they have to register using this form and once approved the invitation will be emailed back. Alongside the conference & the startup exhibition, there will be a closed door CEO conclave, to be attended by CEOs and Managing Directors of over 150 startups. This is to facilitate an informal discussion amongst the senior management about best practices.

The event is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Nokia & Amazon.

To facilitate networking during the event, the event organisers have created an online tool called Smart Connect. Attendees can log into the tool and find out who else is attending, send them messages and even connect with the speakers before the event itself. Sounds quite an idea.. lets hope this actually works out well.

I am a trifle intrigued by the idea of startup showcase booths. While I am not attending the event itself, I’d be interested in knowing how this actually works out. We have all become used to the idea of startup presentations, live demos etc in a conference or unconference style setting. Can startup demo booths prove more effective in catching attention and creating awareness? Do any of the readers of this blog have any prior experience of this? How does this actually work out? Do share your feedback in the comments section.

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Entrepreneurship storytelling with Nasscom’s Friday 2.0 sessions

Tags: delhi, nasscom

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If you are a technology entrepreneur and based out of Delhi, you should book your date with NASSCOM’s Friday 2.0 sessions. These experience sharing talks are organised on the 2nd Friday of every month at the NASSCOM office in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. The idea is to get people from emerging companies to share their best practices in the areas of technology, marketing, business strategy, entrepreneurship etc., so that others could learn from them without having to reinvent the wheel. These talks are free to attend (unlike the talks that TiE organises) and are open to members & non-members of NASSCOM alike. NASSCOM wants more and more people (startups & emerging companies) to be benefit from these talks, hence they have been kept free of any attendance fees. The sessions are archived on the NASSCOM Emerge blog, and lately, they have also started shooting videos and sharing them on one of the video sharing sites for others to follow remotely.

These talks are not new- in fact, they have been organised for a couple of years now, but given that 2.0 is the ruling flavor these days and symbolises maturation, growth, repositioning, re-orientation etc., they decided to christen the sessions NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0.

Check out this page for details about previous sessions.

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Win 10K: Grab photos of Mark Zuckerberg in India and guess what he’s upto…

Tags: facebook, India

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Australia based Indian technology gossip site, TechGoss is offering 5K for the first, exclusive photos of Mark Zuckerberg in India. And another Rs. 5000 for a detailed story on his stay in India. The sender’s anonymity is guaranteed. The Facebook founder is apparently visiting India at present and not much is known about his plans, or the reason for his coming here. As the Techgoss article points out, Facebook has to probably deal with a completely different Goliath in India - Orkut, whicj has a very limited reach in the US. Top 10 countries for Facebook are USA, UK, Canada, Turkey, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Columbia and South Africa.

In all probabilities, this has to do with the impending launch of Facebook India, close on the heels of the launch of YouTube India. Can’t think of any acquisition moves here - the homegrown Indian SNS sites are unlikely to be having any M&A appeal to Facebook.

So all you Indian Facebook junkies- this is a chance to earn a few quick bucks! And yes, no photoshopping allowed! Otherwise Techgoss is likely to get inundated with tons of photos of the Facebook wizkid standing next to the Taj Mahal, India Gate, Gateway of India….

Here’s something I did for fun….

DJ… you owe me 5K for my photoshoping skills…

Update: My photoshopping skills are not bad after all. Valleywag, the gossip website seems to have linked to the spoof …

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Confession: It’s official now! SlideShare loses its (financial) virginity

Tags: funding, slideshare, venrock

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Just wanted to confess on this blog that my startup, SlideShare has now officially lost its bootstrapping (aka financial virginity) status. And we have entered into a serious relationship with one of those big venture firms in Silicon Valley. This was not an impulsive decision; the marriage was preceded by a courtship that lasted a couple of months- horoscopes were matched (Indian style), the (technology) pundits were consulted and each party tried to woo the other with candle-lit dinners, chocolates, long midnight serenades etc. Here’s hoping this relationship blossoms into a life-long partnership for the benefit of the extended family (the slideshare community).

And if you are bored of reading drab press releases announcing funding news (like I am), check out the slide deck below. This is a makeover that our design team gave to the official press release. It is based on a very popular presentation style on slideshare that has almost achieved cult status now!

| View | Upload your own

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ReviewGist - Intelligent comparison shopping

Tags: comparison, reviews, shoppping

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ReviewGist is a startup based out of Gurgaon, India. ReviewGist is a review and price comparison website, allowing you to view reviews and best prices of the product, from a lot of review and shopping websites in India. ReviewGist is one of the few Indian startups to get a mention on TechCrunch.

The first thing one would notice is the extremely neat, intuitive and professional layout of the website. Many more review comparison sites seem to exist today, the popular ones being compareindia.com and wize.com. Many dedicated online shopping sites also perform price comparisons. However, where ReviewGist stands out is that it claims to do semantic processing of all the different reviews it crawls for a particular product and performs the rather difficult task of converting highly subjective reviews and opinions/comments into purely objective points, categorized as “positive” or “negative”.

Ex. If a review mentions “the phone has a good flash”, it would automatically detect that the reviewer is talking POSITIVE about the “flash feature” and would group the review appropriately, which is pretty innovative. You can however make out that some level of plain keyword matching and human intervention has also gone in behind the scenes.

ReviewGist does not provide any reviews of their own. The entire website is driven by aggregating data from external websites. The layout and look and feel of the website might give you a false impression that the website performs a comprehensive review of all products in that segment. This however may not always be true. Moreover, the number of categories are also restricted to certain pre-defined but usually popular ones.

The debate over such summarized and concise reviews over a detailed analysis of the product from trusted websites like CNET is totally justified. When making a big purchase, one might be tempted to read a comprehensive writeup about the product rather than tidbits about the product from various resources. However, it can be argued that one review site may not cover all aspects of the product in equal detail and may or may not be biased towards a particular product.

The basis of comparison provided by ReviewGist may not always be satisfactory enough to decide which of the two products is better. Say, you cannot compare digital camera’s solely by how good their flash, battery life, megapixels etc. they have. Some finer points regarding the camera and subtle advantages and disadvantages of the product may be completely ignored by a comparison website simply because they do not provide a basis of comparison. Despite all the comparisons, I am still tempted to click on the reviewers links and read the detailed article as well.

Online shopping has not really picked up that much in India so far so I am not sure how useful it is to provide price comparisons from various online vendors. Most people would use it to get a good idea of the best deal they can get when they negotiate a deal offline.

Overall, a good consumer product discovery & research site. Gist of all expert opinions at one place, making shopping decisions simple, fast, accurate and authoritative.

Review written by Gaurav Gupta

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Ready to download Barcamp signages & pictograms…

Tags: barcamp

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Here’s a simple but really useful resource that would help all Barcamp organisers. I found this slide deck on slideshare; it consists of a clutch of signages that would come in handy while organising a Barcamp (e.g. signages for cafetaria, toilets, no-smoking et al). They are creative commons and ready to download, print, copy, use and extend. This has been shared by Kosmar, a German web-designer.

| View | Upload your own

You can download the deck here.

This is something really adorable about the BarCamps. People volunteer to do all kinds of things, purely out of their own interest. Hardly anything needs to be paid for.

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Novix - Video Streaming over GPRS

Tags: gprs, mobile, streaming, video

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Novix is a mobile startup based out of Mumbai, India. Their product Novix Live provides audio-video compression technology which aims at delivering quality video experiences to user on their mobile phones. Novix enables compression of high quality videos in real-time over low bandwidth networks like GPRS. Mobile companies which have content like mobile videos can use Novix’s data compression algorithms to provide a better video experience to their users. Novix Live claims to stream both live and pre-recorded content over low bandwidth channels. Mauj, one of the biggest mobile aggregators in India is using their technology for mobile video streaming.

Video streaming currently works only on Nokia Series 60 Version 2 handsets and hence the number of users which can currently view their content gets extremely limited. You need to install a plugin on the phone’s default browser to gain access to the videos in the the Gallery section of their demo site (http://mobi.novix.in/). Though the number of videos in the gallery are limited, you can still get a decent idea about how the overall experience on the phone will be like. In our tests, the application failed to give a smooth experience in the first attempt- the browser first crashed and the second time, it took about 2 minutes for the video to buffer initially and a playback of 2 seconds made it re buffer content.

Nevertheless, video compression technology can enable entertainment and educational content to reach remote areas where cellular phone networks are available. Mobile based video conferencing may also become a possibility. Novix also supports video compression to the extent of compressing a full movie into a typical 128MB memory card on your phone. There is also a Mobile Video Streaming SDK called Novix Sparx that developers can download to build their own video-centric applications based on their technology. This SDK is available for download here.

GPRS being a slow and costly affair in India, Novix is taking quite a daring step to promote video streaming over such networks. As better data services become available and with the upcoming 3G revolution in India, much better video experiences can be expected on mobile phones over a period of time.

Review written by Gaurav Gupta

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Macabre but hilarious… IIT Kanpur website hacked!

Tags: hacking, IIT

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This is serious but also funny. IIT Kanpur’s website has been hacked, possibly by Pakistani hackers! For an institute whose computer science department gets the best of the IIT brainers, this must be embarassing. Apparently, this is not the first time the website has been hacked; as this blogpost & this screenshot indicate, its homepage was earlier modified into the McDonalds Indian Institute of Technology!

And the hackers seem to be ‘benevolent‘ as in evinced by this statement - “we are hackers, not criminals…protect your website….

Thanks Bhups (an IITK alumunus) for the tip-off…

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Case Study- Is your business really Internet centric?

Tags: case study

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Update: Readers seems to be clamouring for revealing more about the business in question; unfortunately doing that is likely to give away the identity of the person (partially if not wholly)… and I have promised not to do that. What I can say is that the business is B2C in the area of personal financial management. It is not a new service in itself, rather it facilitates an online version of what has traditionally been an offline service. The service is not technology intensive… but requires some specialised financial knowledge. Your suggestions could be directed at how personal financial advisory & management services can be scaled into a large business and whether & how the web can play a big role in this… think of any other similar examples in this space.

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This (i.e. the title) is the question I would request all web entrepreneurs to consider deeply while they are planning for their venture. The internet’s significance and hence it’s importance for different ventures is variable- for some, the web is the be-all and the end-all; for others it may represent a significant sales channel but nothing more; for some others, it may largely be a image building vehicle with no sales impact; for yet some others, the internet’s biggest role may lie in its Long Tail effect making it a not-so-significant sales channel, but something that is good to crow about in front of the media folks… there is a whole continuum. It’s possible that in the hype & hoopla surrounding the consumer internet (specially Web 2.0, social networking etc), you may end up having a disproportionate expectation of what the web can actually deliver for you. Here’s why I am saying this-

One of Webyantra’s readers wrote to me asking for advice. He runs a startup in the personal financial services domain and is trying hard to scale his business, having successfully built an initial version. He has the right academic background, he has a great team with him and he also has an initial bunch of paying customers for his service (which is proof that the basic concept works fine). His problem is to expand his business, find new customers etc. As you will find below, he has done a number of activities already. I am intentionally not naming the person, his company or his domain (though I have taken his permission to write about this and reproduce the email that he sent me).

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Hi Amit,

I have this startup called …. It’s an online platform where one can ………. from anywhere in the world. I have been pushing sales left right and centre but have no clue how to market this online. I kinda busted most of my money building it (I know its stupid but I guess am still a bit young to get away with it) and now need some direction in terms of creating buzz in the internet community.

Till now i have been scouring forums wherever there is even a slight mention of …. and putting my two bits about the company, I have also been doing crazy ass chain mails and all and putting in discounts and quasi refferal schemes. I started late with my operations last year but invested about 30,000 bucks in google adwords and rediff.com. should I put in more money there this time? What else should I look at? I don’t have too many friends blogging but would it help if they profile my site? Should i try putting it in social networking sites? Should i try the new yahoo tool for personal advertisements? Is it effective?

Till date I was not looking at VC and all but since am kinda bust and would need to look for a job to tide over my substantial loans (I literally have about another 4 months of cash), I need to drive sales this time so that i pitch and get some damn funding.

I have been reading your blog for a while and had made sure my site was 2.0 all because of you (am serious, the guys who developed the site took 4 months to do it cause they just didn’t have a good ajax guy to integrate the damn thing.). I really would be grateful if you could give me a few pointers. I am not asking you to profile my site as i am not ready with the new rules yet, I just need pointers and am desperate!

Best

…………..

This email actually shook me up because of two reasons. Firstly, because of it’s hard-hitting frankness. And secondly, because honestly, I could give him no advice. Whatever I could have suggested, has already been attempted. However I had a phone chat with him and in the end, I think he is over-relying on the internet for his business. Its possible that he can get some sales online, but I don’t think it will be very significant. The internet may get him some random users from some God Forsaken corner of the world due to the Long Tail effect, but that’s not enough. I think he should concentrate on offline channels largely. And that’s exactly what I told him. That’s my hunch, though I have no specific knowledge of his domain.

What do you feel? Can you share some advise for him on this blog? I think he could do with some. Mine has not been very helpful till now!

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SlideShare getting disrupted by massive DDOS attacks

Tags: DDOS, slideshare

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Just wanted to drop a quick note here that SlideShare is being hit by DDOS attacks. In fact, this has been happening since last week, and the website has been off-air intermittently during this period. We had been debating internally, whether or not to go public with what’s happening behind the scenes. We decided to come clean as we owe an explanation to our users for our recent outages. Techcrunch broke the story today and the post captures the events fairly well. As one can make out, their seems to be a highly orchestrated attempt to punish the website for having content, that in our opinion is well within the rights of free speech of our users, and does not violate our TOS in any way. Having experienced this first-hand, I can add (to whatever TechCrunch has reported) that all this appears to be part of a well oiled machinery to control internet content. The repeated surreptitious attempts to coax the passwords with obviously untrue stories, the daily dose of take down notices, email spoofing, calling on the office telephone with a threatening demand for the account credentials!

Frankly, given our current traction and focus, we were under-prepared for this kind of an incident, so it has come as a rude shock. But we are getting back to speed (although the site is again experiencing problems as I write this blogpost) and getting prepared for further problems… stay tuned…. will keep you posted.

Update: Here’s a traffic snapshot of the first DDOS attack on SlideShare and the spike it caused. As you can notice, this was many times our normal bandwidth throughput and led to a complete choking of the incoming internet pipes at our webhost. In hindsight, we could have done a few things differently to have avoided this, or mitigated its effect, but that’s only now. Somebody emailed me asking for the technical details of the attack…my apologies, I don’t think I’ll be able to share everything on the blog.

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