Karnik also talked about funds being a key hindrance for most folks to start, but also mentioned that there are plenty of avenues that are coming up, such as the Department of Science and Technology, DSIR, DIT, etc. who have government funds allocated towards starting new ventures and technological development. Karnik said that it’s a positive note that for the first time in India we do have an internal market that we can address.
This year’s edition began amidst talks of market slowdown and inflation. According to Karnik, “In good times, you are always conservative. But when inflation is 12 per cent, and the need for productivity and efficiency becomes crucial for survival, anybody will be open to looking at startups - if they have a solution.”
Rediff.com also launched its developer programme at Proto.in. The developer platform project is named ‘Sociali’, and Rediff iShare their video sharing platform is the first property of Rediff.com that is opened for application developers.
The fastrack sessions on the first day at Proto.in had a series of talks by people who have been a part of the start-up revolution in India. This session started with Murugavel Janakiram of Bharat Matrimonial who spoke on building services for India - The Art of Pricing. The fastrack sessions also had talks by Narayan of 20:20 media, Amit Ranjan of Slideshare, Sanjay Anandram of Jumpstartup, Gaurav Bhatnagar of Tekriti and Shashank Ghosh, a film director. The day ended with an open discussion on Freeconomics.
The second day at Proto.in was when 16 firms demonstrated their products and services to an open audience. This edition’s start-ups included firms in sectors such as e-commerce, food processing, recruiting, enterprise solutions and consumer Internet firms. The start-ups that were presented were - Blinkmagic - an online retail startup that is building a play on online shopping experience. NextBit Computing presented its OOH tool called gCoSign that enables centralised Web interface to control the OOH installations remotely.
The day ended with an Innovation Brain Jam, with start-up ideas from the audience, a session that was quite some food for thought for entrepreneurs.
The event was represented by over 30 venture capital firms across the globe including NASSCOM's India Innovation Fund, NEA Indo US Ventures, Matrix Partners, Erasmic Ventures, Nexus Capital, Band of Angels, Mumbai Angels, Canaan Partners, Sequoia Capital, Charles River Venture to name a few. |
