Author Archives: Amit

TiE Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge 2008 – The winners are Druvaa, Equitas & iKen

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The results of the TiE Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge 2008 are out and the top awards have gone to Druvaa, Equitas & iKen (there is no specific gradation in the prizes). The finals for the business plan competition were held today at New Delhi and the awards were announced at an entrepreneurship / startup gathering in the evening. Congrats to the winners. Iken has also been awarded the Microsoft award and a direct entry into the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program.

Some snaps from the event ….

Quick note about the three winners :

– Druvaa is a 10 member startup based out of Pune and is in the data protection and backup storage space.
– iKen Solutions is a software company specializing in intelligent business systems backed by hybrid AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques. It is an IIT Bombay research spin-off.
– Equitas is a Chennai based microfinance orgainisation for extending micro credit to people who are otherwise unable to access finance from the mainstream banking channels.

The jury for the competition comprised well know entrepreneurs & startup mentors – Raman Roy of Quattro, Pramod Bhasin of Genpact, Saurabh Srivastava of TiE, Mahesh Murthy of Pinstrorm/Seedfund, Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Naukri.com & Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners.

The award ceremony was preceeded by an open house discussion on entrepreneurship challenges in India. This was led by Shireen Bhan, CNBC India’s leading business news reporter.

Instablog rolls out user generated video news and it is impressive!

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Instablog, the blog & citizen journalist network has launched a daily video show called Global Report. The show is styled on the familiar television news format and features short video reports from their reporters in different parts of the world. Check out the screenshot & the video below- the final production is quite impressive. This show is available in different video formats and also for mobile devices, including the iPhone.

The video show is a powerful exposition of citizen journalism at its best. Media consumption habits for certain sections of the society are changing, courtesy the internet. I now spend lesser time reading the morning newspaper, which has been substituted by what I read online- either on online news channels or via the blogosphere. And while my own example is a slightly skewed sample to extrapolate to a larger audience, the change is incrementally perceptible for large swatches of metropolitan India.

Screenshot:

The most challenging thing in producing a video show of this kind is managing the logistics on a continued basis, apart from achieving consistency in production quality. You can do it for a short duration fairly easily but getting this running as a regular show is a demanding exercise. This is what Instablog says “….putting a daily show together of such magnitude has been an adventure in itself. We have writers sending us information putting their own lives at risk to get the truth out. We have literally put together a global news organization using tools which have to be available in even some of the world’s poorest countries….“. I can imagine that.

Instablog (for those who might be unaware) is an excellent social media news website. They have over 25,000 registered members and gets more than 3 million pageviews per month. And you can’t but feel jealous – they are based out of Shimla, the popular hill station in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. WOW! Having an office overlooking the Himalayas – I could kill for that!