Vinayak Hegde

Headstart has been growing fast since a bunch of us started off in 2007. Initially it was just Startup Saturday in Bangalore and then Arpit and Aditya started the Startup Saturday in Mumbai. Now we have grown to 6 cities – Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune – where Startup Saturday is held every 2nd Saturday of the month. Startup Saturday are a great way to have face-to-face interactions with other entrepreneurs, founders, investors, service providers and consultants. We have hardly spent any money on publicity but the richness of interactions and the value that Startup Saturdays created help create word-of-mouth publicity. In fact Vivek Wadhwa recently attended Startup Saturday Delhi. He has mentioned Startup Saturdays in his series on Techcrunch.

While Startup Saturday has been great for interacting with local entrepreneurs, the Headstart Network mailing list provides another great platform to interact with other entrepreneurs all across India. We have been deliberately loose with the moderation and have seen several great conversations happen over the mailing list but slowly but surely the mailing list itself is becoming a victim of it’s own success. Earlier we had just 2 moderators but now the count of moderators has grown to 5. The list itself has grown from few hundred members to more than 2500+ members across India. We have had to introduce some guidelines to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the list and also to make the archives easily searchable since there is a wealth of information there. These are guidelines and not rules as strict enforcement of rules sometimes stifle conversation that we all value so much.

Headstart Mailing List Rules:

Headstart Mailing list has grown to more than 2500+ members consisting of Entrepreneurs, Investors, aspiring entrepreneurs, consultants and service providers from all over India.

The traffic on the mailing list has also grown to more than 400 messages per month. To maintain the quality of messages, the moderators of the mailing list who are volunteers of the Headstart Network Foundation have decided to enforce some rules to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio. This mailing list is primarily for
entrepreneurs and startups so it will help if the posters ask themselves these questions before posting the mailing list (to make the life of moderators easier – BTW these are the questions moderators ask themselves before allowing posting):

1. Has this question been asked before ? – Suggest searching the archives before asking questions on the mailing list. Many questions such as which hosting provider to use have been answered many times
before.

2. How is this information _specifically_ useful for other entrepreneurs or other startups ? – Especially for those posters who post information regarding other conferences / seminars / tutorials / workshops ?

3. Is this a personal reply to the poster ? If then I would request posters to directly answer to the poster and not the mailing list.

4. Is this message relevant to the objectives of the mailing lists (helping startups and entrepreneurs) and does it follow the guidelines of the mailing list ? Please refer the guidelines below before posting.

Guidelines:

1. Please prefix informative links and posts with [Link] in the subject of the messages.

2. Please prefix queries with the [Query] in the subject of messages.

3. Please prefix queries regarding events such as conferences / seminars / worskhops with [Event] in the subject of messages. Also putting the deadline (if any) in the subject is useful.

4. Please prefix messages for office space / space sharing with [Office Space] in the subject. Putting the locations of the area & city (such as Indiranagar, Bangalore) in the subject header should it make it easy to search.

5. Please prefix offers for Funding / Investing startups with [Fund]

6. Please prefix hiring / jobs descriptions with [Jobs]. Also describe what your startup does (with founders background) and if you offer options/other facilities. If the jobs are not for startups these posts will be rejected.

Last but not the least Please read “How to ask Questions the smart way ?”. This is directed mainly towards technical folks but is still useful for other people. This will increase the probability of finding the answers to your questions quickly.

You can subscribe to the mailing list online here

Please leave any reactions in the comments.

We recently had our flagship event Headstart 2010, Hyderabad . This was the fourth edition of Headstart and the first one in Hyderabad. The previous editions were held in Bangalore and Mumbai. The event was co-located with ITsAP (HYSEA) at the HICC Hotel in Hi-Tech City. We had a good response from the startups.

This time we had a similar format as the previous Headstart. The on-stage demo and demo-pit were provided free of cost to the startups (We only charged for registration of the startups). The startups made good use of the demo-pit space. A few startups generated quite a bit of buzz including Notion-ink (makers of the Adam Tablet PC), Robosoft Systems (Makers of duct cleaning robot), Sysblitz (on-demand Business applications), Youpid (Tapping into the marriage market using social networks), Go-live gaming (Educational products using gaming) and Innoz (A student startup from Kerala that makes mobile applications for filesharing).

The complete list of selected startups

Two of the panels “Unconventional Sources of funding” and “Business Plan mistakes” were well received by packed halls. The questions posed to the panelists and the conversations with the attendees during the conference pointed to the fact that the startup scene in Hyderabad is still nascent and needs to mature as compared to Mumbai and Bangalore. We were happy to help connect many people in Hyderabad through the Headstart event and our regular Startup Saturdays there.

More coverage

• On Twitter
• On Swaroop’s Blog – one of the panelists on “Unconventional sources of funding”
• On the Youpid Blog – one of the startups in the demo-pit

Alexis Ohanian ( kn0thing on twitter) – the co-founder of reddit (and the creator of the beloved Reddit Alien) was in Mysore for the TED conference. He took a break from the TED conference to meetup with a bunch of redditers. For those who don’t know he is also the publisher of XKCD books and all the proceeds from the book go to building a school in Laos. It was interesting talking to him about startups, startup school, Paul Graham, ycombinator, traveling in India, the startup scene in India, Social media [link to TED Presentation] and of course reddit.

We gave him a sampling of Indian food (Coconut Groove) and sweets (K C Das). Thanks to @dhempe and @pswam for organising this tweetup.

Headstart 2009 went off really well. I could not attend many of the talks as I was making sure the startups were not having problems in the demo-pit and scheduling VC-startup meetings. Some very good products startups demoed at Headstart 2009 including Indusgeeks, CashNXT, Verismo, TringMe, WisdomTap, Jobeehive, Meshlabs and Artin dynamics. The startups that demoed at Headstart were of the highest quality and won many awards at the International level as well.

• Verismo won the best of the Best award at CES 209 in the Media technology category.
• NetPrice Services- ( AdoRoi ), is among World’s 100 most innovative, disruptive and high growth companies, driving the future of technology. They made the “Red Herring 100″
• Tringme was featured on Gigaom and CNN Money.
• CashNXT was featured on ReadWriteWeb

The entreprenuer’s roundtable (especially Sujai Karampuri’s talk) and Ashish Gupta’s Keynote on second day generated a lot of buzz. Luckily I was able to attend Ashish Gupta’s keynote. It was excellent. For those who missed it the videos whould be up sometime next week. (If you want to be notified of that please follow @headstartdotin on twitter or join the friends-of-kickstart mailing list).

The photos are also up at Flickr.

Satish Mugulavalli – Founder of Verismo Networks demoing Vunow

Aditya Mishra (Director, Headstart) and Anant Krishnan (CTO of TCS) after announcing the Co-innovation program in collaboration with Headstart.

Kallol Borah (Director, Headstart) inaugurating Headstart and Compute 2009

Prasad Ram, CTO, Google India talking at the Cloud Computing Tutorial

Rameena Rabeedin of CashNXT demoing their product in the Consumer Products Section

Anthony Hsaio of Entrip demoing their Webapp in Consumer Products Section

Sujai Karampuri delivering his hard hitting talk on VCs in the Entrepreneur Panel

Venki Nishtala, CTO, Rediff talk at the Cloud Computing Tutorial

Dr Chandrakant Patel keynoting at Headstart / Compute 2009

Press conference during Headstart / Compute 2009

Apul Nahata demoing VoicePHP product lauched by Tringme

The ragtag bunch of volunteers that made Headstart / Compute 2009 happen

We were also able to use the social media effectively. Quite a few Many people wre talking about Headstart and it trended on Twitter. Here is a screen shot of the same

The best part was the startups enjoyed it and were able to talk to investors. More than 15 VCs / Angels / Early stage investors attended the event. There were more than 150+ one-on-one meetings with startups with 27+ startups that I know of. I am counting only the formal ones as the VCs got a chance to talk to individuals startups at the demo-pit. Al in all it was great success as we got all the stake holders in the system together.

The Colocated technology conference ACM Compute 2009 also went off well with the ‘Cloud Computing’ and the Search and Social Platforms’ attracting the most crowds. More tech deep-dive tutorials are planned in the coming months. Also Srinivas annonced the launch of Distinguished Speakers Program at Compute 2009. Details about that soon. Join the ACM Bangalore mailing list for updates.

Press coverage was good with Times of India and Deccan Herald covering us among others.
Links to online press coverage:

• CIOL – 10 Best Product startups
• IT Examiner – Meltdown causes slump in Indian Startups
• Silicon India – Risk Averse VCs
• Silicon India – Cloud Computing in India
• CXOToday – Startups don’t address Customer issues
• CXOToday – Internet Based startups Hit Indian Market

We had a lot of nominations for the demo pit and on stage demos at HeadStart and Compute 2009 and it was tough to narrow down the field to 20 odd participants for the demo-pit. I had a tough time handling all the feedback from the judges and communicating it back to more than 100 startups that had applied during the holiday season. But it was worth it. Here is the final list of startups that will be present in the demo-pit. Amongst them the cover all the kinds of startups from across India (self-funded / seed-funded / VC funded as well as various stages of product development amongst them). The ones to demo on stage will be announced on the 9th of January at the event venue. You can see these kickass startups demo on stage and in the demo-pit by registering for Headstart 2009.

Cashnext is founded by serial entrepreneurs Anish Achutan and Rameena Rabeedin (who are still in their 20s). Cashnext builds products such as low cost ATMs, smart teller machines, P-O-S terminals, a mobile payment and branchless banking gateway.

Indusgeeks is India’s first and largest Virtual Worlds’ Development and Services company based in Mumbai. Indusgeeks creates 3D immersive spaces on the Internet for Education and Training, Marketing and Communications and Virtual Events. Metamersive Learning Spaces is a solution developed by Indusgeeks to address the enterprise, higher education and K-12 market. MLS looks to improve delivery of education and training through interactive, multi-user, real time virtual spaces. MLS will be available under both the Software as a Service (SaaS) and Licensed software models.

TringMe is the world leader in web-based telephony and was the first one to demonstrate flash-based telephony. It provides a carrier grade unified communications platform which handles over 20 million calls every month. TringMe’s vision has been provide easy to use APIs to developers so that they can quickly, reliably and tightly integrate voice in web and mobile applications.

SysNucleus build products and solutions in the system software space. Sysnucleus has expertise in areas like Windows device drivers, USB, Bluetooth, Virtual device drivers, Wireless sensor networks and other embedded related software. They are self funded and based out of Cochin, Kerala and will demo their product USBTrace.

Kreeo is a user-driven collective intelligence and semantics based knowledge management platform for both individuals and enterprise. Kreeo enables sharing and collaboration in knowledge ecosystems to enhance productivity. Kreeo is provided as Open Web and Enterprise Suite. Kreeo Enterprise is provided as SaaS or Captive Implementation model along with customization and content related services.

JobeeHive.com is a unique professional-social network focused around employer and salary information. JobeeHive.com enables users to rate/review companies (they have worked for), research on salaries or a prospective employer as well as get more info about a company – be it job offers, announcements, business opportunities, etc.

Alertpedia.com is a comprehensive online alerting service for delivering the right information at the right time. You specify what you like to be alerted about (e.g., bike on sale on Bangalore Craigslist, food recalls). alertpedia monitors several reliable online sources, and alerts you over SMS/Email when the relevant event happens. Alertpedia is a self-funded start-up based out of Bangalore and New Jersey.

WOLF is a 100% browser based Web Application Designing & Development Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for creating mashable and interoperable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Business Applications on the internet without writing a single line of technical code. It provides a quick, easy, flexible and cost effective way of building customized web applications, targeted towards Business Users.

Travelgrid is a product by Channel mentor that helps automate the travel policy process. Channel Mentor has widened the scope of the product to include visa request, insurance request and guest house room inventory. The Travelgrid product is delivered using the SaaS model.

CinnamonTeal Print and Publishing provides services for individuals and institutions that wish to self-publish. These services include editing, proof reading, cover design, page layout, translation, digitization, factual research and other similar services. The digital print-on-demand service is central to their service and can do print runs from one to more than 500.

Entrip tries to solve the main pain-point for consumers in online travel – the lack of usability and user friendliness on the (online travel) web, as well as in the fragmentation of online travel service. EnTrip has developed a new kind of web application and user interface: completely Map based and interactive to overcome this problem.

Biokleen Labs manufactures natural, non-toxic cleaning products for home or business use. Biokleen products are concentrated in order to leave the smallest footprint on the environment and deliver exceptional quality, value and results without negative effects to the user or the environment. The products are biodegradable, release no harsh fumes and are gentle to sensitive skin.

SnappyFingers is a Question and Answer search engine. It crawls and indexes FAQs on the Internet and displays search results in a easy to view Question/Answer format. The site is in beta, and has a database of approximately 10 million questions. SnappyFingers uses Amazon Web Services such as EC2 and S3 to build a generic framework which is scalable and fault tolerant.

Verismo Networks is redefining the home television experience by bringing millions of free internet videos around the world directly to your TV — all of this without a computer. Verismo’s VuNow platform transforms the TV set into a powerful multimedia hub with an unbelievable level of choice and ease in accessing digital entertainment. Verismo Networks is a privately held company based in Mountain View, California, with offices in Bangalore, India

CashURdrive is India’s first and only “On-Vehicle Advertising Company”. People can put promotional corporate stickers on their self-owned vehicles by signing up with CashURdrive and go by their daily routines. The vehicle mileage is verified using satellite tracking and the car owners are reimbursed with free fuel at HPCL and BPCL fuel pumps.

Ktwo is a innovative product based company based in Bangalore employing more than 250 people. KTWO specialises in last metre connectivity products which cater to the healthcare, logistics and automotive industry verticals. Ktwo will demo Kspeak – a bluetooth-based hands-free car kit.

Netprice is a award winning startup (Red Herring Asia 100 Winner, Red Herring Global 100 Finalist 2008). Their product AdoRoi is a solution to advertisers for measuring the ROI of all media types on a single platform which makes performance of conventional ads comparable to performance of online ads in real time. AdoRoi business method is patent pending in USA and copyrighted in India.

Artin Dynamics is a company delivering products in the AI domain. Their product SPARA helps companies save and manage power costs related to computers and peripherals. It is capable of conducting high level power management features like monitor control, core handling, CPU throttling as well as the normal power management options like Hibernate, Shut down, Standby on a distributed network. The hardware unit works on patented technology known as ETL or Enhanced Trigger Loop and interfaces with the computer using a USB port.

AuthWave Technologies is a Bangalore based consumer security software startup. They have developed a fundamentally new approach to Internet security. AuthWave’s MobiAuth product is a mobile based integrated two-factor user authentication and transaction security solution to protect online portals against all threats including most sophisticated phishing and malware attacks.

MeshLabs Inc.™ is a developer of software solutions that discover and deliver concept-based personalized knowledge from any given content source. Meshlab’s solutions are built using emerging technologies in the areas of semantic web, human-machine synergy, enterprise 2.0, and social networking. For enterprises, MeshLabs offers eZi™ as a standalone or add-on solution in license and SaaS model. Consumers on the web are offered ZiMesh™, our semantic PKM service at www.zimesh.com (currently in private beta).

Taroby is a SaaS based messaging and collaboration suite that enables sharing of email accounts among team members. “Sharing” implies that emails are accessible to all team members working on a particular assignment or project, with the possibility to assign messages directly to individual team members.

WisdomTap is based out of Bangalore. WisdomTap helps users decide which product to buy based on their unique needs. At the same time, it helps online retailers increase sales by converting more browsers to buyers. Wisdomtap crawls the best social media sources to generate impartial product reviews, ratings and recommendation, based on patent pending algorithms. Users access this decision making information via the web, the retailer website and the mobile phone.

iDuple is a self-funded startup. iDuple’s Small Business Startup Kit is a SaaS[Software as a Service] product, where customers only need to pay a particular amount every month to subscribe to the service. The package includes all the necessary web softwares required for a startup or SME. This package makes the life of any startup or SME easier as they do not need to worry about the IT infrastructure anymore, and thus they can concentrate on their core business.