Attended headstart - a 3day meet on startups - firstday

The first demo is from 90-degrees. This searches for paths of trains and airlines and gives a connected path. For example, if u want to go from place X to place Y, this gives different paths such as go from X to Z through flight and from Z to Y by train. The data based on which these paths are generated is almost real time. So there will not be much of the scenarios like, even though the search result shows there is a path (means the tickets are available) and the corresponding travel site shows there are no tickets available.

The second demo is from Proficio geo technologies. The company is having 25 employees. The product is in the geographic related. Some of the products are iciti local, iciti traffic, iciti mobi. The main use of this is you can register your home address here. Anybody can take a printout of ur address from this site and reach ur house. The data is real time with the actual city routes. The map data is provided by some third party. It seems 3000 users are getting registered per day. Data being submitted by the user goes through the moderators. It seems routeguru and yuloo(not sure of the the spelling though) are competitors for this.

The third demos is alabot. Its a 2years old company. The product is in AI. There will be bots, answering your queries entered in natural language and also performing any tasks u wanted to do online. The goal is something like, if u want to book a ticket from X place to Y place, the bot will do the booking for u. This is started as an academic project. There different bots for each of the fields such as travel,retail bot multiple domains. Because of some technical issue, the demo did not work.

The fourth demo was from sneakcast. This is an academic project in US. It involved a 4 member team.
The product is video search, which is based on the facial(object) recognition and semantic search. This checks for relevancy in the vid by analyzing the frames if the videos. The revenue generation model could be video contextual ads. For example car crash vid will have ads like insurance companies. The suggestions from panel members was that to sell/license the product to youtube like companies. Because, the content is not owned. blinks, tuvio dabbles could be competitors. The HW cost put so far was around $2 million. Because of the huge computational power needed for the decoding of video frames. This presentation is having the ppt, which is clearly visible till then all were not readable.

The panel contained two VCs
DFJ vc, which makes 1 to 10 millions of investment. They said that advertising is not much of revenue generation model in India. They also said that transaction based or subscription model like Naukri are good models for revenue generation for the web startups.
Bessmer vc, having a venture fund of about 1.3 billion. Invested about 500 million in India.

The afternoon session started with a keynote and the following are the demos, which are presented after the keynote.

The first one was from drishti (drishti-soft). This was established in 2005. This is a leader in providing cost effective crm,erp solutions in India. They provide call center/BPO softwares. Novah(not sure of spelling) could be a competitor for this.

The second one is Gradient product from Infosys. There seems to be no innovation. The panel feels it does not make sense to develop this product. A guy from infosys from the audience tried to support the product explaining the infosys business use case on that product.

The third one is Twist from Thoughtworks. This is basically in the area of testing tools. It addresses issues dealing with large test suits. This enables automatic testing for AJAX. Amazon torque could be a competitor for this.

The fourth one is from Symantec. xsft; xen software based fault tolerance. Here most of the panel members did not agree that the presented idea is not feasible. I felt this as a typical scenario of experienced people not accepting some of the things just because they did not know that they can be achieved. A guy from the audience agreed that it is feasible, and asked the presenter to look at denali vm, which could be a competitor for this.

The fifth one is Purplebytes from Pramati Technologies. This seemed more like a simple project, without any innovation. This is a dashboard with collaborated editing. The main advantage is easy to use. Sharepoint and Guru does the same.

There was Ramesh Loganathan from Pramathi Technologies in the panel. He told, they were thinking online store solution for social networking, webdesktops are the next big things in enterprise space.
The best thing that happened in the panel's Q&A session, which happened after the demos was a small discussion on Indian colleges, and our college name (IIIT, Hyderabad) was mentioned. A Lady from Accenture, who is very much impressed with the IIIT students raised the topic. The topic was started as she was aware that Pramati Technologies were offering some courses in IIIT. She frankly said that IIIT w.r.to infrastructure or no.of Phds is no where competent with the foreign colleges. As it was true, I could not do anything, if it was about the no.of entrepreneurs, I could have told the info I have. I strongly feel that IIIT should present innovations in each of these startup conferences. Then only the VCs and investors get to know about the strength of IIIT.