Startup City @ Bangalore

Wow!!! was the expression I had when I came out of the startup city event organized by SmartTechie magazine, the first of its kind in Bangalore. The event was meant to create awareness among technology enthusiasts about various successful startups in Bangalore and encourage the entrepreneurial spirit in them. The event was held at NIMHANS convention center, Diary circle, Bangalore on the 24th of May, 2008 . It was a whole day event. There were talks and sessions given by leading entrepreneurs and technology evangelists in the morning. There were also parallel sessions going on in the morning where folks who have an idea to start a company can meet VCs one on one and discuss their plans. This in my opinion was a great opportunity for many budding entrepreneurs.

Among the talks that were given in the morning session, the one that impressed me was Lead India winner R.K.Mishra’s talk on his entrepreneurial journey and his subsequent interest in community service and social work. True to his statements in the Lead India finals, “That is why my motto is ‘work more, talk less”, he really is a man of actions. For the rest visit his blog and his website.

The afternoon session was open for us to go and interact with the startups who had put up stalls there. Due to a huge crowd I was not able to spend time with all of them and discuss the technologies they work on. But a few of the stalls I visited impressed me.

OboPay’s concept of using the mobile as a virtual debit card to handle transactions was good. But I am not sure on their revenue model. As per their explanation, they dont charge the user anything for sending the SMS to Obopay’s SMS short code for transferring money from one’s account to the receiver’s account. Their revenue model at this time seems to be only entering into partnership with banks. I am not sure this is a sustainable revenue model as the banks may not see a value add after sometime unless obopay provides other value added services in the interests of the banks with which they are tied up. Also I am not clear on how secure their mode of trafer is. They have a few questions to answer. A similar service is provided by mCheck also. Check out their service here. This one looks impressive.

Soliton’s demonstration of its camera that identifies defective parts in a manufacturing pipeline was very impressive. They demonstrated it by letting the audience draw a circle by hand and let the camera detect whether it was a perfect circle or not (mathematically speaking, since there is no perfect value for “pi” there is no perfect circle yet.). Being a Coimbatorean I have a great admiration for Soliton as it is started by a Coimbatorean and has a development and support centre in Coimbatore too.

Though most of the startups were in Web 2.0 what I was interested was the startups in telecom domain. I went around and collected few materials on Sloka Telecom and Starent Networks. Sloka is working in the WiMax space and Starent is working in solutions for 3G services, IMS and thier unique ground up solution called “Inline services” which enables operators to define value added services inline with the core network elements. This approach is quite different from some of the out of the “box” (box here means the network element) mechanisms that many companies are still struggling to define for customized services.

And finally for the negatives. The ugly face of Bangalore’s infrastructure showed up here too. There were frequent power cuts during the morning sessions and the audience were left to sit in the dark auditorium way too often.