Impressions From The Future

This is my first time to momo Bangalore edition. I was well before the said time. This is because in every event I go, I clearly felt that I am not able to meet atleast a quarter of the people who drops in. So thought of dividing the networking into two sessions - before and after the event.

There was a last minute speaker change- and guess who - Sanjay Swamy from mchek. Swamy had a talk on Mobile VAS 2.0 . Oh Yeah- The 2.0 phenomenon has grabbed VAS too. What’s changing this VAS sphere to 2.0 I am not able to get. Swami had an interesting point that programming for low end mobiles including ULHCs can be done if we have higher footprint in the SIM card.

But that all depends on the operator coz he it’s his forte & he is the one going to supply the SIM. Again cementing the walls of ‘walled garden’ ? Also existing SIM cards has to be upgraded for this, plus you cant download or install any apps - only what the operator can give. Developers ???
Btw, hope that the 1 GB SIM card which will be commercially available from Msystems by this year end will do a disruptive change in this sphere.

The last day had two keynotes by Peter Mukherjea of Star TV and Sanjeev Kumar of Portal Player. His views were on contents that are omnipresent and the concept of “media fatigue” because of numerous media. Sanjeev narrated his entrepreneurial journey and how well will Murphy’s law play in this arena. The one law on “It always takes longer” is sure a point of concern.

The other tracks were on Sports and retail. I was at retail only for a few minutes. Some one in the panel shocked the audience on the fact 40% of medicine available in India is fake. I want to delve deep into this fake/ spurious areas. If we can come with some innovative solutions thru technology and contribute a little mite it will be of great help to the people.

All over the evening and into the night it was great networking. Lot of people with great enthusiasm and energy. All the way TiE-ISB was fun and fruitful.

Day two was wonderful in the sense there were people from areas of my concern. There were four tracks. I went for internet technologies and technology.The other two were on IT services and Real Estate.

Ajit Balakrishnan of Rediff was First among Equals in the Internet Technologies panel. He was all about web and how had rediff withstood the dotcom burst by taking a look West policy of tapping NRIs. User generated content will drive the web. Rediff connexxions is a step in the right direction at the right time. Ajit also had advised on some entrepreneurs working on some sector specific portals. Cool n great dude.

And there was speech and discussion by Sandeep Murthy of Sherpalo, Sanjay Swamy of mChek, Raghav Kher of Seventymm.com, Samir Sood of Google, Probir Roy of Paymate and Ganesh Rengaswamy Greylock Partners. Raghav was very bullish about online DVD rental and his point on the fact that copycat models of companies in US is not that easy and India and its hinterland are really different market space is truly valid. Probir’s concerns were on issues regarding regulators, how their product waited for two and a half years to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I remember Sucheta Dalal wrote a wonderful piece on Financial Express how regulators and market are out of pace some time ago.

The afternoon track on Tech had Ashok Jhunjhunwala from IIT-M. How TeNet is transforming telecom and other technologies that empower people from grass root level was really gud. Ajit Deora of Light Speed Ventures was another point man. His question to the audience “Do you think VCs are interested in you/ your technology ?” was caught with silence. Deora said “No”. Indeed it was a frank speech and I liked that. While most went on beating the bush he gave a distilled point. VCs are here to make money. ROI is their concern. Buddy Prashant has a post here. The two sides of the coin. An indepth analysis is always needed before embarking on a trip to VCs. It’s all in - What stage you are ? What you want from them ? And how much you will give them Back ?

The Day-1 of TiE ISB was basically about jump starting your venture. It was all for wannabe entrepreneurs. The first of the sessions was by prof. Chandrasekhar from ISB . It was all about Innovation in Entrepreneurship. The one thing which I saw from the start of this session was that the audience was able to shoot their questions at any time. Indeed it was what has made all the sessions more lively and interesting.

One great thought was cross breeding the functions of several industries to create a new industry. This is like taking the functionalities of Travel industry and trying to combine with that of hitherto connected space of say Medical…Now we have got Medical Tourism.

The second session was led by Vani Kola of NeA IndoUS Ventures & Sateesh Andra Endiya Ventures. The session was aptly named as scaling the mountain. Vani stressed much on Persistance. And one example she gave eas about Vinod Khosla. When he was in the process of making of the Sun- he said to VCs that he will not leave the room if they dont fund him. Gretta ! Andra enlightened on some points of when to pitch to VCs, how many VCs to go on the initial go etc.

The next was a from duo prof. Ramachandran and Raj Gollamudi, Founder of BlueStream Ventures. The prof had a good interaction. His examples were great and oh buddy We are in a B-School ! Raj was pounded with questions about VCs, VCs and only VCs.

The fruitful day ended with a panel discussion-Financing your dream moderated by Mahesh Kanumuri, Arivali Partners. On the panel were Ashhar Farhan , Packetcell Networks, Debashish of Goose Technologies, Lakshmi Akkaraju , Musecurity Inc & Prasad Yelamanchili , Teleonto. Ashhar was upto the point. His advise on keep your team small so that you need much small fund to go on, Only go with a proto to the VC this is esp true if you are in a s/w start up and be dynamic are here to follow.

It’s good and bad that Nokia S60 Tech day coincided with TiE-ISB connect. I decided to go only for the Business track. As everything else clashed with TiE-ISB. Well it was Nokia’s forte and there were much for the promos mostly on technologies like Adobe’s Flashlite and Symbian. ITFinity was invited for a talk on why they choose Symbian. Flashlite is rapidly catching up in the market and developers were encouraged to go for it. As of now Nokia is shipping more devices with Flashlite than any other manufacturer. All the presentations are available for download here.

And there were IIIT guys and their prof .Vishal Garg on show case area with some really innovative products like tele medicine and all-in-all control remote. Gud Show !