Author Archives: Amit

Product Demo day at Mobile Monday Delhi IV

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The fourth edition of Mobile Monday Delhi happened yesterday. The venue was MDI Gurgaon and sponsors included MDI & Nokia. It was attended by app 75 participants. The theme for the day was demos from mobile product & services companies and the line-up included 10 mobile startups (just two of these were Delhi based, rest were from Bangalore, Chennai & Hyderabad) A quick walk-through is in the slide deck below.

MOMO Delhi is fast taking on the reputation of being a vociferously argumentative, no-holds barred forum. Who can forget the epic debate (debate or war???) that erupted during MOMODelhi I, with Airtel’s COO, Manoj Dawane v/s rest of the crowd about the role of telecom companies. We saw shades of that yesterday as well. Nokia’s Regional Director for Forum Nokia gave his keynote address (including a preview into Mosh) and during the Q&A, Nokia’s “supposedly monopolistic & developer unfriendly” policies were completely ripped apart by the audience. He was clearly cornered there and had no answers. Notwithstanding the great products that they make, Nokia has to do some serious rethinking about how they can get the mobile developer community on their side. This event should serve as an eye-opener to the prevailing undercurrents that exist amongst that community.

The participating startups included :

BanKaro: This is a community based mobile spam filetring service that can supplemnet the DNC when it gets launched in India (due on Sep 5th, 07). As the name suggests, their motto is to ban the mobile spammers. The audience loved their session.

160by2: This is a recently launched SMS based contextual advertising service from SMS Country; they are doing a few pilots currently and they seem to be picking up momentum. Overall this looked a simple but well implemented initiative. The key is that it is SMS based (no GPRS reqd).

GPSWATCH: Interesting demo for a product that turns your mobile phone into a GPS device. Not currently available in India though.

PhoneStacks: This was a demo from SPOKN, the Hyderabad based VOIP startup about a mobile P2P client that theoretically has the potential to become a nightmare for the telecom companies. This session was lively and spawned a long dicussiion about the prospects of this technology in light of recent reservations from the govt.

Mundu: This demo had Atul Chitnis (from Geodesic) showing off Mundu Radio & Mundu IM in his own characteristic style. He also talked about how they managed to launch Mundu IM for the iPhone within days of iPhone’s launch (as also about TechCrunch’s diatribe on Mundu IM being a paid software, which incidentally, it is not). The products look very compelling indeed.

Richard Kramer (Arete Research); Arete is a London based mobile/telecom consulting & research company and Richard’s presentation was a plain speaking reality check about what actually seems to be working in the mobile space. His message- while a lot is talked about Mobile2.0, GPRS enabled services, mobile search, advertising etc, the only real commercial successes globally are the old warhorses- email (Blackberry), ringtones/wallpaper downloads and text SMS.

Other startups were old-timers and have been covered previously :

– RouteGuru released a mobile version of their map-direction service
– Demo of Zook, a mobile search engine from Ziva
– Buzzworks: a voice enabled mobile search engine
– Mobisolve: a multi faceted mobile marketing service

BlogPane…a smart blog widget for tracking your alma-mater blogs

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1.jpg Blogpane is a smart embeddable widget, that you can be used to track all the blogs from any educational institute. To use it, you have to first get your blog added to your alma-mater’s blog list by sending an email to the Blogpane guys. Once thats done, go to this section of the Blogpane website, select your institute form the list (the list currently includes all the IITs & the IIMs only), generate the code and put it into your blog’s side-bar. The pane does the rest- you can now navigate the tree menu and drill down to the different blogs that are listed there. Blogpane is the endeavour of two working software professionals who graduated out of NIT Calicut- Ajith & Antony. The webapp is currently under developement and they aren’t necessarily planning for a business out this at this stage. BlogPane’s punchline is “Trees connect people” and it certainly does justice to the proof of concept.

bp1.jpg

The idea is refreshingly original, simple & works well; but it does not seem monetizable to me, except through online advertising. Some quick feedback-

– getting blogs enlisted through email is cumbersome; a web based interface with self-signup would be much better

– no point in restricting this only to educational institutes; once people have left their alma-mater the hangover wears out making the list less relevant as time progresses; the same idea can be extended to organisations, groups, specific communities etc. A web interface where people can start and add their own lists is possibly the way to go. Though students certainly are a good way to start this off.