Author Archives: Amit

Desiwiki… community aggregated resource for startups & entrepreneurs

Desiwiki is a wiki that aggregates resources/info about how to set up and run a startup in India. Started by Prabhu Subramanian (who blogs at DesiStartups), Desiwiki is trying to leverage the power of community knowledge sharing in a structured way. Most people who run startups & also write a blog, would have at some time or the other, blogged about the task of running their companies. I have done that extensively on my personal bloghere’s a post about how to tackle red-tape in the ROC office, here’s another one about putting together a simple, low cost conference room for your resource constrained startup. Satish Talim (who runs the Pune Ruby group) has an EXCELLENT series of blog posts detailing the entire process of registering an IT company in India… I am sure a quick google search will throw up really useful resources elsewhere on the Indian blogosphere as well. These resources if bunched together could be very helpful to first time, budding entrepreneurs. Hence getting people to aggregate their experience on the wiki is a great idea.

The wiki can become a valuable resource for information about legal, financial, operational aspects of running a company, specially in the initial phases.

So if you have something to share, register here for an account on the wiki and start contributing… Needless to say, this is not an advertising platform, so any surreptitious attempts to market yourself (or your company) is likely to get an immediate cold-shoulder by the administrators.

I just wish the wiki had a more imaginative name … the word ‘desi‘ sounds not just sickening, but also downright misleading as well.

Entrepreneurship storytelling with Nasscom’s Friday 2.0 sessions

friday_2_0.gif If you are a technology entrepreneur and based out of Delhi, you should book your date with NASSCOM’s Friday 2.0 sessions. These experience sharing talks are organised on the 2nd Friday of every month at the NASSCOM office in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. The idea is to get people from emerging companies to share their best practices in the areas of technology, marketing, business strategy, entrepreneurship etc., so that others could learn from them without having to reinvent the wheel. These talks are free to attend (unlike the talks that TiE organises) and are open to members & non-members of NASSCOM alike. NASSCOM wants more and more people (startups & emerging companies) to be benefit from these talks, hence they have been kept free of any attendance fees. The sessions are archived on the NASSCOM Emerge blog, and lately, they have also started shooting videos and sharing them on one of the video sharing sites for others to follow remotely.

These talks are not new- in fact, they have been organised for a couple of years now, but given that 2.0 is the ruling flavor these days and symbolises maturation, growth, repositioning, re-orientation etc., they decided to christen the sessions NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0.

Check out this page for details about previous sessions.