Published by Vinayak Hegde on 15th December 2008
Talk on SaaS and Cloud Computing by Vikram Murudeshwar, Akamai Technologies India.
Startup Saturday Bangalore, December was held at a Honeywell India which is just down the road from IIM Bangalore. Vikram Murudeshwar, my colleague from Akamai was the first speaker. His talk was on “Saas and Cloud Computing”. He dispelled some of the myths behind SaaS. SaaS has greatly levelled the playing field for startups. If you have product that is useful, your go-to-market time and time for rolling out incremental updates comes down phenomenally. Also as a provider, you have greater control over the environment in which your software is deployed. The picture is not completely rosy however as SaaS providers have to work harder to secure their customers data and ensure compliance. Cloud computing takes the concept of SaaS to the next level from just software to hardware and infrastructure for building and deploying software using virtualization and using intelligent network optimizations. Attendees had several technical questions regarding scaling a website from a single server to a distributed datacenter model. At this point, I jumped in to provide some answers based on my experience. It was a good interactive session with a mix of technical and business questions which continued into the snacks break.
The Presentation is below:
Collaboration between Honeywell and startups by Harsha Angeri, Honeywell India
After the snacks break, Harsha Angeri from Honeywell India spoke about the challenges bigger companies face to innovate and explore new areas of growth. The Honeywell program which will be announced shortly alongwith Headstart, will enable startups and Honeywell to collaborate with each other. The benefits to Honeywell are manifold with this collaboration – they get the domain expertise of the startups, they get to explore new areas without much risk and they get reach to the end-consumer in case of B2C startups as Honeywell deals mostly with B2B customers. The benefits to startups are also manifold – Startups gets access to the customer and realworld feedback, they also get Honeywell’s feedback in areas which Honeywell is strong and they also get the market reach and legitimacy by dealing with a larger company such as Honeywell. It’s a win-win situation for all those involved in this collaboration.
Lifemojo Demo by Namit Nangia
The last talk was by Namit Nangia – the CEO of Lifemojo. He dwelled on the importance of nutrition and how lifemojo pro (their product) which is delivered via a website can help their users lead a more healthy lifestyle. Lifemojo can help you come up with a personalized nutritional diet and users can also get in touch with nutrition experts using their web portal. The access to the website can also be provide busing mobiles so that people have access to their custom healthplans on the move. Lifemojo is a good product in the personal and preventive healthcare market niche – a nascent segment but a rapidly growing one. During the snacks break, Lifemojo had setup a laptop so people who were curious about Lifemojo product could testdrive and know more about it.
Click here for Startup Saturday November 2008 Edition.
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 11th November 2008
The November edition of Startup Saturday Bangalore featured a talk by Sharda Balaji of Novojuris on “Legal pitfalls of a startup”. This was followed by the demo of citizenmatters.in by Meera K and Subramaniam Vincent.
Sharda Balaji is the founder and director of Novojuris which provides legal services to startups and entrepreneurs in the technology domain. She has managed the legal aspects of the Purvankara IPO and was previously working with Intel Technology India. She said that every entrepreneur should understand the concept and the intent of the law. Entrepreneurs address legal matters reactively only when they encounter difficulties which can cause complications and loss. She gave a brief overview of the legal forms for incorporating the company. Having worked with a corporate big law team as well as on her own she was able to give an insider’s perspective on how law firms operate and what are the criteria which a entrepreneur should follow while engaging with a lawyer or a law firm.
She also addressed some other issues such as capital structure of a company, equity allocation between founders and dilution during funding rounds. This was followed by an interesting and interactive discussion on moonlighting and skunkworks projects. Several entrepreneurs moonlight on their startups while working for another firm. They should clarify with their company’s policies regarding regarding intellectual property and conflict of interest agreements with their legal counsel. If this due diligence is not done, it can cause problems later on when the startup is incorporated even when the entrepreneurs has left his previous job. Her presentation is embedded below:
Citizen Matters is a Bangalore focused and citizen-oriented news publication. They publish in-depth news, analysis, features, opinions, and information/event listings, covering city public affairs, community and culture in Bangalore city. Citizen Matters is published by Oorvani Media, an independent local media firm founded by Bangaloreans Subramaniam Vincent and Meera K. Bangalore is a city in transition, with much of the growth of the city spurred with the help of migrants who fail to connect with the city. As a result many of the migrants are unaware of the local culture and local issues. This problem is not limited to migrant population but also to the people who have been living in the city for decades. Citizen matters deals with this problem by commissioning articles on local issues and by using citizen journalism. Currently, this is one area where mainstream media is found lacking.
Citizen Matters is built on Ruby on Rails and extensively uses open source software. Citizen matters is a for-profit startup which plans to raise money by selling advertising and doing public-funded journalism. One of the suggestions was to raise money using micropayments from readers to cover local issues such as traffic problems or development of lakes. There was a good interactive discussion on social media and the use of technology which followed this. Do visit their site at citizenmatters.in. The presentation by Citizen Matters is embedded below:
