Barcamps Mumbai and Bangalore

Looks like Mumbai and Bangalore Barcamps will be very close to each other. Bangalore planners met this morning while the Mumbai ones met in the evening. Given the usual lead up time needed, both are likely to end up being close to each other.

This will be very interesting for me; being on both teams. Bangalore one is the larger, older and more mature one while Mumbai one is just starting out. Also Bangalore is a city where one can’t throw a stone without hitting a techie. In Mumbai, there is an mazing variety even though the financial world dominates the mindscape. With the schedules matched up too, it’ll be easier to observe and compare.

This also seems to be the time when techies reassert themselves. We’ve already had a Devcamp. Now both Barcamps are highly likely to have a codecamp as well.

I attended the Mumbai planners meet. The planners group has expanded to include several BCA1 folks and some folks from BCM2 participants. Looks like an awesome party already.

DevCamp Bangalore 1

Just left DevCamp Bangalore 1. Its another offshoot to the Barcamp movement that is sweeping across India. As Sidu put it at the begining, there have been many focussed *Camps but not a Devcamp yet, so here it is. I thought it was quite appropriate that it happened at Thoughtworks where we had revived Barcamp Bangalore with BCB2. I too spoke a bit about Kickstart and the upcoming Startup Saturdays.

While I couldn’t stay at the camp the whole day (I’m in the plane waiting for the flight to take off), it already felt like a great camp. Content is good. I liked participating in the “Is facebook an Enterprise App” slot. We didn’t reach any conclusions but was nice to be hearing from Martin Fowler himself on this. He stayed away from most of the things but did comment that “enterprise grade” tends to be more of a marketing statement than anything else. Sadly, our time came to end just as we were warming up.

I missed Rajiv’s product launch. He caught me later and gave me the due lashing. Sounds like an interesting product to check out. Link to follow.

MoMo Vs MMS

Its the second MMS for me and I’m enjoying it a lot.

My mind was drawn to a comparison of MoMo and MMS formats. MoMo format (as in Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad) usually has one presentation/theme a meeting and intense discussion about that one topic only. It also has a fairly high frequency with one meeting a month. MMS on the other hand has no theme and last at least one whole day. In fact, it is like a BarCamp around the theme of mobility. So, one sees a whole lot of variety in a single day.

In summary its depth vs width. Take your pick.

Mobile Monday Delhi 2

I’m at MoMo Delhi 2. With around 175 registrations, it promises to be an exciting one. Of course, it IS another MMS – Mobile Monday Saturday!

Who comes to Unconferences?

Sandeep Singhal asked an interesting question at the begining of his talk: How many of you want to be entrepreneurs and how many of you are already one? A large number of hands went up on the first and very few on the second. Clearly unconferences attract aspirants. This is evidenced also by naivette that one sees in the questions asked etc.

The good news is that a lot of the aspiring entrepreneurs at least at Barcamp Bangalore were working at an idea or had a ready concept or were looking to launch. Good deal flow for VCs such as Sandeep.

Mobile Mondays & BarCamps

I’ve blogged earlier about Mobile Mondays and BarCamps in India. I believe that such unconference mode forums are key to building Indian Innovation ecosystem.

The premise is quite simple. Upto a few months back the biggest obstacle to building an Indian Innovation Ecosystem was lack of serious risk capital in India. Sure VCs have been around for some time but most were busy doing late stage or pre-IPO deals. By some estimates, less than 5% of the PE money that got invested in India was into early stage deals. This is fixed given several funds such as IDG, Helion etc have announced $ 100 M+ funds for early stage investments in India. Helion partner Sanjeev Agrawal was recently in news for 3 deals he’s about to close soon! So money is a problem of the past.

Now the problem is the lack of a ecosystem platforms; forums where different people can meet and gain from each other. Ideas seldom make money on their own. Great ideas in fact are good ideas built on top of other good ideas. Similarly, a single person seldom is responsible for a success. More often than not, its a team that wins. All these meeting of ideas and people are possible only if good forums exist. TiE has been doing a good job in this respect for some time. But more is needed to build a momentum and to attract aspiring innovators. IMHO, Barcamps and Mobile Mondays can play that role.

Its nice to be able to back up opinion with action and I’ve been able to do that for some extent. Today both Mobile Monday Bangalore and Mobile Monday Hyderabad were held with TCS sponsorship. The last MoMo Bangalore and MoMo Mumbai were both sponsored by TCS. Next up is Barcamp Bangalore where close to 300 people have already registered for 200 seats! Again, we are happy to extend support. Next up are Barcamps Delhi and Pune. Both will be supported by TCS.

Hope to meet more interesting people and have rich conversations all through December.

MoMo Bangalore

It was great fun to attend the MoMo Bangalore. Rishit had an excellent presentation on VAS. He covered the intricacies of the VAS space with respect to GSM, reliance and others. It was great because he covered things in great details and had data to to share. The key take away was that big opportunity lies in reaching the B&W low cost handsets that comprise the rural/semi-urban users. I know its not a great insight but the detailed discussion made it an inescapable fact.

The greater fun was the interaction. This is how a unconference should be. We had a conversation!

The mixing post the talk was good too. It was a lot better than Delhi as there were entrepreneurs everywhere. And there was huge qualitative difference. The entrepreneurs here had feet on ground and knew the stuff they were talking about rather than just unending optimism. Gives me a lot of confidence about India spawning start-ups and about us building a silicon valley like ecosystem here.

MMS (Mobile Monday Saturday!)

The first MoMo Delhi was held last Saturday. It was an interesting mix of people and companies.
There were two mobile based social networking start-ups: Linksurf and Yaari.com. Neither were exciting and the homework seemed incomplete. Yaari.com is perhaps the better one. If one sets aside the mobile aspect which probably won’t work, they may well create an Indian community on the web and set themselves up for sale to say MySpace who would want to catch up with Orkut. But its a very iffy proposition given the biz models in social networking are still scaling up and that its very difficult to transfer a community and to integrate two different look n feels. It’ll be interesting to see how the look n feel of yaari.com shapes up.

Another company was webaroo which allows for for offline browsing and search on a mobile device. I agree with the need for offline browsing but its easily met otherwise. For example, if I want to browse stuff offline I just open it in new tabs in Firefox and read them later, typically in a flight. I’ve never had heavier needs but I do remember leeching software from my student days that could download an entire site. Webaroo is better with its compression and web-packs for organisation of content. But will someone pay for it? Probably not and I guess Webaroo knows it and hence the software is for free. They intend to earn revenue through ads. That would kick in only when they have volumes which seems to be far off. But they seem to be ready for the long haul.

The gyan sessions were boring. Its the same things recycled again and again! I haven’t kept close tabs over the mobile world and if I found the content recycled I wonder what the others thought.

The last was a panel discussion. I almost skipped it. Panels are usually insipid for me. However, I couldn’t leave for some other reasons. In the end, it was great that I didn’t. Manoj from Airtel was just awesome. He came out strongly in defence of operators with statistics and ground level realities that only an Ops guy can. One of the panelists Alok Mittal has captured this well, so I’ll not repeat.

At the end of the day, I was:
1. Excited by the enthusiasm of the people in start-ups/looking to start one
2. Disappointed by lack of maturity among entrepreneurs. There is a need for education on the kind of plans that can get funded. Instead, there was frustration about some plans not getting funded without any realisation that the plan may be bad.
3. Disappointed by the plans/businesses that I heard. Except for one (and he didn’t present), all were tweaks trying to ride the wave of web/mobile 2.0. But I guess its a good enough hit rate.
4. Happy with connections revived and new ones made.

Looking forward to more of these. Would attend the MoMo Bangalore at the end of this month.