@ 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.