Proto II took place at Chennai over the last weekend (July 21st- 22nd) and was a big success. It evoked participation from all quarters this time around- startups, investors, media, supporting organisations, sponsors etc and at the end of two days of demos, networking sessions, experience sharing moments etc, everybody I met felt that the event was a vast improvement over its first edition and a rightful step towards achieving its stated intent of becoming India’s biggest showcase for upcoming technological innovations/companies. Consider the following:

Not Just India, but S. E. Asia – Amongst the 22 startups that were showcased, 3 were from Malaysia. This shows that in the years to come, Proto could have an appeal that goes beyond just India, it could have a pan South East Asia footprint. The Malaysian contingent, incidentally, seemed quite in awe of the whole event.

Startups– The event showcased 22 startups (check out the slideshow for a quick walkthrough) ; there domains represented were the internet, mobile, enterprise, software besides some non IT/software companies.

Some of these startups have earlier been covered on this blog; amongst the new ones, a few looked quite promising from a technology perspective and certainly worth a mention here.

Mocodile– a mobile startup that allows you to send any document (doc, xls, ppt, jpeg etc) from your PC to your GPRS enabled mobile phone. The application looked very easy to use and serves a real need.

Buzz Works– a mobile startup that is building a voice enabled search engine for searching local utilities from your mobile phone.

MineKey– I found this fairly intriguing; on the face of it, it looks like a recommendation engine that can be embedded into blogs, websites in the form of a widget for suggesting similar posts, links etc. But their future revenue model actually works very similar to that of PPC online advertising networks (like adwords).

Tyroo– the ad network from Smile Interactive that has recently roped in Yahoo as a strategic investor.

MDT– the Malaysian startup that is offering a dramatically cheaper solution for the RFID space, where prohibitive costs have not allowed the RFID industry to pick up the way it was destined to.

VC firms/ investors- There was greater participation from investors this time around. The M&A guys from Google, Yahoo were present; so were top tier VC firms – Sequoia Capital, Draper Fischer Jurveston, Canaan Partners, Helion Ventures, Clearstone Ventures, Mentor Partners, Nea Indo US Ventures, SVB, Upstream Ventures, Gabriel Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Footprint Ventures, Matrix Partners, GreyLock Partners, NorthWest Ventures, LightSpeed Ventures, Plus Ventures, iLabs, Ojas Venture Partners, IDG Ventures, Nexus Capital, Inventus capital, Jumpstartup …thats quite a list. The investment arms of some corporates were also present – Reliance, Siemens, Mahindra. This shows that Proto has started blipping on the Indian technology investors’ radars and cannot be overlooked.

Supporting organisations – Supporting organisations for Proto included TIE, IAMAI, Nasscom and their representatives were present at the event.

Media – The media was in full partcipation, there was a official press conference and at an overall level, the media strategy for the event worked well this time.

Overall the general vibes that one could feel at the event was very positive. It was great to see different constituents of our tech ecosystem come together in an effort to build that ecosystem from the grass roots level. (I plan to write about this aspect in a detailed blog post later) The next edition of Proto is scheduled for Jan’08, though the venue is still not decided. Here’s to an even better Proto next time around.

Jajah, the VOIP startup (often referred to as the 2.0 version of Skype) has launched in India. Jajah uses the internet to initiate calls from/to your regular landline or mobile phones. Unlike Skype or Google Talk, one does not need to download any software; neither does one need accessories like headsets, microphones, phone cards etc. All you have to do is to specify your own number and your calling number and Jajah initiates the call. Jajah’s calling rates are claimed to be much lower than corresponding rates from mobile phone or fixed line telephony companies. Jajah, whose long term mission is to “make voice free” operates in 55 countries and has more than two million international users.

Jajah calls can be initiated from their website only (either desktop or mobile) and that might limit its appeal. But they have have a bunch of tools to extend their calling functionality to different applications – Firefox, Plaxo, Outlook etc. As a promotional initiative, Jajah is offering very low call rates (Rs 3.2 per minute) between India & US/UK till Independence Day. Other promotional offers are detailed on this India specific website launched by them.

How does Jajah stack up against Skype in real terms? Skype was possibly one of the most disruptive mass market, global scale technologies that emerged post the dot com bust. Can Jajah disrupt what Skype has achieved? This seems highly unlikely. Skype bought cheap VOIP calls to the desktop, while Jajah brings VOIP to our POT (plain old telephones) and thats the basic difference. However it still needs you to be near the internet (either on a desktop or mobile) for the call to be initiated. This means that anybody who can make a Jajah call can make a Skype call as well. Disruptive technologies need to change the rules of the games- quite clearly, Jajah, while being different, does not really do so. This factor may possibly limit mass scale adoption of the product. (However Jajah says that it is working on solutions whereby calls can be initiated without access to the internet- now, that is something to watch out for whenever that happens)

Something worth knowing is that Jajah is funded by Intel Capital, the VC fund run by Intel. So it has pretty strong forces standing behind it.