In this previous post, I had said that Proto is India’s first staged event for showcasing emerging technology startups. I am happy to report that the event lived up to its expectation. In a span of eight hours, 27 companies held the stage for 8 minutes each, presenting to an audience of 325 people, all of whom paid money to witness the show. At the end of the day in his concluding comments, Atul Chitnis, remarked that it was a striking achievement that such an event was held in India at all. In hindsight, I would still maintain that while Proto was no Demo, what we witnessed at the ICSR auditorium in Chennai on the 20-21st of Jan, 2007 was a first of its kind event in this country and a pointer to the shape of things to come.

The event featured 27 companies (original plan was 30, but 3 companies dropped out at the last moment) across various domains ; some of the demos were for finished products, while others were pre launch previews into upcoming ones. In case you want to run through the list of startups that were showcased at Proto, check out the slideshow below

(you can use the buttons in the slide player to navigate the slides)..









Kiruba has published an excellent visual commentary on Proto; Swarup has an exhaustive blog post covering the event including key features of each product demoed; WatBlog has a list of all the 30 companies that were featured and 15 others which made it to the first shortlist; Gokul has shown great perseverance in shooting a video of each presentation and uploading to YouTube.

I’d like to share my Proto experience through a bunch of candid expressions about things that went right at the event and a few areas where we could have done better.

Some highlights of Proto..


– Proto was a staged event, hence it was important to put up an efficient display on the final day. Staged events are about showmanship and about the visual impact. What we finally achieved on the day of the event left me really surprised. In the span of eight hours, 27 companies showcased their creations in front of a big audience; there were no delays, no stoppages, the laptops were shuffled over with an astonishing efficiency. Overall the proceedings were near flawless. And I feel, not just me, this caught a lot of other people by surprise as well.

– We had a practice session for the presenters one day ahead of the event. Mahesh Murthy and Atul Chitnis sat trough the entire day giving feedback to the presenters about their product, their presentation style etc. And it made a HUGE difference. I was present all along and the difference between the presenters on the day of the rehearsal and the actual day was remarkable. Moral of the story – for a staged event, practice is of paramount importance.

– Some products were being displayed publicly for the first time. Sloka Telecom set up their entire Wimax broadcast and receiving stations within the auditorium and demoed a short clip from the movie ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ using WiMax. SpotEazy and IXIGO showed off early stage prototypes of their work in progress products.

– The spate of BarCamps in the last year have built up people’s expectations in a different way. At a BarCamp, you don’t need to be selected. It is free & open and hence you get to see quite a few products, which don’t really make the cut. Proto was different. More than 100 startups filed nominations and finally the best 30 were selected. Some of the companies that narrowly missed out from getting selected would have felt the pressure to have been better. Thus while open/liberal events like BarCamps don’t put the pressure on products to improve, an event like Proto will.

– Before the event, we were constantly been pilloried for not disclosing the names of the selected startups. We were getting requests from potential sponsors, from the media, from participating companies, from outstation participants (who wanted to decide whether it was worth coming to) to disclose the names of the selected companies. Some people even tried to sweet talk us into divulging the names. But I think we did the correct thing by withholding that information. Maybe in future, we might do it differently but for a first day-first show, this strategy was correct.

– I think there was a lot of anticipation whether any of the startups would receive funding as a result of Proto. Check out the comments section in this previous post. This issue was brought up during the Q&A session at the end of the event as well. I think this is a superfluous question and displays a thorough lack of understanding of the funding process. Decisions like funding, acquisitions are highly orchestrated events and they happen after days/months of ground work. If your product has inherent potential, you will get funded, Proto or no Proto. But Proto is a good way of making a splash and catching the attention of interested stakeholders.

– I got a chance to interact with Mahesh Murthy during the rehearsal and see the ‘mind behind the man’ at work, while he was giving feedback to the presenters. I was REALLY impressed; he talks hardcore commonsense. I wish he had stayed on for the main day.

Some areas where we could/should have done better..


– Some of the demos/presentations were just too technical. There was little attempt to explain the business situation, the actual problem the product solves, let alone any talk about the revenue model. After all this was not a technical seminar, rather an event with a wide cross section of participants.

– As Atul Chitnis remarked, we did not publicize the event well enough. While Proto in the coming days is likely to be featured extensively in the mainstream and online media, what he said was true, we could/should have done much better.

– The participation from potential investors (VCs, angels etc) was not upto our expectations. One simple explanation was the fact that we had not disclosed the names of the companies, so people were unsure whether “it was worth coming to”. But still we need to understand this better.

– Because of my Webyantra experience, I am aware of many startups who are working on innovative products (specially in the web space) that they should have demoed at Proto, but they did not file nominations. I would like to understand the reasons that prevented these companies from doing so.

Overall I think what we achieved with Proto 2007 was a rock solid start in India, to the very concept of staged events that showcase innovative technologies and products. We hope this is just a precursor to an exciting journey in the years to come.

IndiaInteracts is a recently launched social media website with a twist. Instead of taking the ‘Web2.0esque’ (not sure if that word exists) user contributed route, it is attempting to break the stereotype and aggregate content from three disparate sources- self generated, user contributed (or generated) and from other online media. Initially I had trouble understanding the website’s positioning, but on thinking through, I would describe it as something of a ‘news centric social media platform, that is operating at the crossroads of the traditional and alternate media‘.

IndiaInteracts is the effort of Subbu Murugan and his friend, Srini, both of whom are US returned techies. They run a software development firm in Chennai called VentunoTech. They wanted to create an internet based platform that leverages the good points of both, the traditional reporting oriented media, and the burgeoning socially generated online media. Time will tell how successful they finally are, but their creation looks like an interesting experiment to me, for I can’t recall seeing anything quite similar to this.

The website was launched in September and is currently getting about 1500 unique visitors daily. The site’s design is geared to provide an internet platform, which allows user interactions by blogging, rating or commenting on content created by them (i.e the IndiaInteracts team), content created by the users themselves (in the form of text, video, images, audio) and content created by traditional online media. Accordingly, it has different sections featuring the popular rages of the times– news, videos, movies, blogs, and gossip. The homepage is reserved for news and it has a heavy flavor of current affairs. The news section has a contiguously boxed layout, that is a departure from the typical ‘title-hyperlinked’ format. As you scroll down the homepage, the rationale behind this layout hits you instantaneously. The movie section features video trailers for popular current blockbusters besides various movie reviews. The video section is quite interesting; you will find a host of videos featuring contemporary South Indian politicians & news makers, that have been shot by the IndiaInteracts team. Besides these, you can upload your own videos, and even embed Youtube videos into various channels. The blogging section contains a bunch of news/politics centric blogs. And the site is now available on the mobile http://indiainteracts.com/mobile/index_pc.php.

Subbu thinks that the site’s revenue model in future will be based on charging advertisers for product placements, transaction charges based on users ability to sell/rent content on the site, besides platform licensing to other geographies and communities.

Overall, IndiaInteracts comes across as a hybrid of the Web1.0 & Web2.0 paradigms. There is certainly something new in their approach to social media. Designing such a hybrid site is also not an easy task, and I quite like the site’s overall character and its look/feel. One specific feedback I have for them pertains to the strong South Indian focus in their content. Nothing wrong in it, except that it inherently narrows down the site’s appeal and makes the content less relevant to a wider Indian audience. I am not sure if this is intended or it is the outcome of current geographical exigencies. But this factor is unlikely to help them when they try to monetize the site though PPC based internet advertising or they approach investors for funding. I hope the other parts of the country are not excluded from this very interesting ‘social media experiment‘.