TiE-ISB Connect 2008, TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge 2008

May 6, 2008 · Posted in Entrepreneurship · Comment

TiE-ISB Connect is back with its highly successful business plan presentation opportunity. Entrepreneurs are invited to submit a maximum of 5 page abstract of their business idea to TiE-ISB Connect Committee to get the opportunity to meet and interact with leading Capitalist’s of the world on November 5-7 as they seek to fund bright ideas and cool start ups. Participants for the 2008 Business Plan Presentations can register at http://www.tie-isbconnect.com. The last date for submission of Business Plans closes on 15th June 2008.
Over the last 3 years the event attracted over 1000 business plans and over 50 Venture Capitalists.

The second edition of the TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge is planned for this year. The contest invites applications from entrepreneurs (startups and early stage companies). Interested participants need to download and submit their applications from the contest website. The deadline for submission of applications is May 12, 2008. Eight teams will be shortlisted and invited to present in front of a jury.

Benefits to the participants include mentoring sessions, access to investors, profiling in media and invitation to an exclusive ISB program.

Tags: <Entrepreneurship>

Vodafone to launch iPhone in India this year

May 6, 2008 · Posted in Mobile India, Tech tidbit · Comment

As per a release, Vodafone will be launching the iPhone in ten countries later this year, including India. Unlocked iPhones have been available in Indian gray market for some time now.

It’ll be interesting to see if these unlocked phones will get blocked now that Vodafone is officially bringing the iPhone to India.

Tags: <Mobile India, iphone, vodafone>

Is Facebook India launching soon ?

May 6, 2008 · Posted in India Social Networking · 1 Comment

Is Facebook India launching sometime soon ?

It appears that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg is in India currently, as evident from contents of an internal letter published by TechCrunch today. So, what is he doing in India ? Could it be related to an impending India launch ?

After all, MySpace India officially launched a few weeks back. And even though Facebook grew at a much higher rate in India, it considerably lags Orkut - the social networking leader in the Indian market. Probably, Facebook wants to counter these attempts and enter the market before its too late to the party.

If you have any tips, feel free to leave them in the comments or drop me an email.

Tags: <India Social Networking, facebook, myspace, orkut>

Fostering Entrepreneurship does not translate to handholding or babysitting

May 5, 2008 · Posted in Entrepreneurship · 4 Comments

Since the startup-entrepreneurship ecosystem in India hasnt fully developed, folks are bound to have questions - genuine questions related to VC funding, entrepreneurship, technical questions, operational questions etc.

However, I’ve noticed a somewhat disturbing trend amongst the younger, college going demographic, who are aspiring to become entrepreneurs. They’re looking for way too much hand holding and probably misinterpreting what entrepreneurship really means.Â Let me elaborate. I frequently get emails (generalized below) of the type

“Have a Web 2.0 idea. How do I go about implenting it ?”
“Want to start a social networking company. How to do it ?”
“Interested in starting gaming company. How to proceed ?”

I thought these were one-off occurrences and ignored them. However, I started noticing more of such questions pop up else where. For instance, check the “Ask the expert” section on the NEN website. There are a lot of open-ended questions and it seems as if several of them are looking for like the procedural guide to starting a business.

Tags: <, india entrepreneurship>

AdvocateKhoj, Indore360, AllIndiaDeals v2

May 5, 2008 · Posted in India Web 2.0 · Comment

AdvocateKhoj is a new service, where advocates compete for your business. Here’s how it works:

You post a short description of your legal needs by answering a few questions
The service then notifies available lawyers about the new case posting
They can review your case and then respond to you about your case details
You can review their responses, view their profiles and then decide which lawyer to hire

The service is pretty much similar to LendingTree, ApnaLoan, albeit for legal services. One of possible issues that might arise is whether users will be able to trust the lawyers via the service. Till the service sees some user adoption and builds feedback data related to the lawyer profiles, users may be apprehensive in using AdvocateKhoj for major legal jobs. The service, however, can be of good use for startups, who need to be frugal on such aspects.

Indore360, as the name suggests, is a Joomla based portal for the city of Indore. It has events, forums, maps, classifieds, yellow pages etc - all you’d expect from a city based portal. Some parts of the site dont work too well in FF v 3.

AllIndiaDeals, which I wrote about earlier, has refreshed their design and launched some nifty features like “Local deals”, “Deals for NRIs”,Â user forums etc. Check them out.