@ STARTUP CITY

I had been to a convention yesterday, organized by SmartTechie called Startup City. The program was to showcase the works of the some of the high-technology startups that have been groomed in Bangalore. The were also some sessions & panel discussions catering to the startups' needs.

A panel discussion moderated by Dr. Y.L.R.Moorthi (an IIMB prof) focussed on marketing techniques for startups.
Bharat of Amazon.com opined that a strong word of mouth is essential for a startup.
Paul Murphy of Microsoft felt that its important to build a good network of partners, a B2B network.
Suresh from Nokia said that a product needs to have key differentiators & it needs to be innovated continously.
If you were wondering what were these people from the big companies doing in a convention meant to focus startups. The answer is these companies were main sponsors for the event & these companies are supposed to have initiatives specifically focussed on startups as customers. (I haven't been able to explore them yet)
In the Q&A section, when someone asked how the big cos reward failures. Paul answered that his department used to give bonus to the concerned executives on each failure!!

Later, I attended a seminar by Jinseh Varia from Amazon Web Services on Utility Computing or Cloud Computing.
Basically, Utility Computing has emerged with the idea that access to servers for storage or computation is no longer dependent on the server location, thanks to high speed broadband. Hence there's no more need for companies to have their own dedicated servers. Instead, they can make use of several terra-byte servers from host companies who provide the service for a fee. Use of such a service are supposed to allow you to work "under the clouds", anywhere on earth. This is also supposed to make your web portals more agile to sudden spikes in accesses.

After this I visited few of the desks of startups & got to see some of the cool work that's currently being done by these cos. Surprisingly, most of the apps showcased were for m-commerce, mainly catering to the local market.
A application developed by Seclore caught my attention. This application allows secured, password protected access to documents (MSWord, PDFs, etc) having different options to save locally, print, distribute, modify the document, etc.
I also got to talk to guys from Sloka Telecom who have developed a patented architecture for WiMAX. I was awestruck to see a Base Station of a size of a 14'' laptop, this was drastically smaller compared to its UMTS equivalent that I work on. The company has already deployed its solution in France, Sweden, Indonesia, etc.

Even though I wanted to attend few more sessions & explore more stalls, I was constantly getting calls from my gang to return soon as we had to go to Bonda's marriage. So with a heavy heart, I left early.

my recent updates

Dear friend,
I am sorry I was not able to write much in the past few weeks. Colloquially speaking, I have been "busy like anything" or "sakkat busy maga" in the last couple of weeks. :)

The IEFC loan rejection has had few serious repercussions. Now I had to apply to Indian banks which besides the exorbitant interest rates require an endless number of docs to be submitted. I finally got all the relevant docs ready & submitted my loan application last week. I would be hearing from the bank about my loan in a week's time.

With the Indian loan I can get only half of my estimated expenses. In order to show to the Visa authorities that I have sufficient funds to fulfill all my expenses I needed to prepare another extensive set of docs. The entire last week was spent on collecting that. This week I need to get all my finance docs certified by a CA. After this is done & I get a sanction letter for my loan, I can apply for my Visa. I hope to do this ASAP.

I am also working on tickets booking & on the look for a good laptop.


Things have got a bit hectic at work place also. I submitted my resignation last week & have got a mail mentioning the formalities of the exit process. I need to follow up on this.
I'm currently working on quite an interesting & a challenging feature. I need to finalize the Deisgn Document before quitting.


The biggest causality of my hectic schedule is my reading. I've stopped reading Telecom Flash newsletters altogether. In my mailbox I see I have 30 unread CS newsletters. I hope I finish going through them before the content becomes too stale.

Despite of all this I've able to take some time off to meet my would-be class mates gang from Bangalore yesterday night. Chatting with this guys definitely helps to take off some pressure since these guys are also sailing in the same boat as I am.

Bonda's marriage, the 1st marriage in my gang, is coming up this weekend. Vinay, Viji & I had been to Commercial Street in the evening to get a nice little gift for him.
Its Sunday 11 PM now & another weekend draws to a close. Time to sleep & prepare myself for another high activity filled week. Good night.

its voting time guys..

Just a week to go for the 1st phase of Karnataka state assembly elections & the campaigns are reaching a feverish pitch. Thanks to the Election Commission, buntings have been banned, effectively eliminating pollution due to plastics & the use of loud speakers has also been banned that has reduced the regular din that we were so much used to all this while. Doesn't this seem a lot more mature now? The way to go for the largest democracy & unarguably the country that sees the maximum elections in a year.. :)
The candidates don't seem have an option but goto each voter & literally beg each one for his/her vote. This might help them in shedding a kg or two from their bodies.. :)

It was shocking to see a common problem among all the leading parties: so many contenders for a single party ticket. This has lead to quite a few skirmishes, the defeated has promised vendetta. I felt a bit pity for these guys; the booming economy has created so many nouveau riche & each of are in a mood to "serve the people". How can you accommodate all of them without increasing the seats? Why couldn't have the delimitation committee created some more constituencies?

If you are a rich guy, planning to stand for elections, here's an argument you could make: each year the IITs & IIMs increase the number of seats to accommodate the ever increasing number of applicants, in the same vein, why shouldn't EC increase the number of constituencies?

For the rest of us, from the voting fraternity, who still don't know how to choose the "best among the worst" (as one thinker asked us to vote), here's an argument that you could make: Why shouldn't the ballot paper contain a "none of the above" option? There have been on & off discussions on this & I think its something worth a try, instead of lamenting on low voter turnout.

As for me, I am still thinking how to make the "best among the worst" choice. If you know how to make this choice please let me know.. :)
Happy voting !!