It has been well over a week since BarCamp Mumbai 3 concluded and apart from a few photos, I have not blogged about the event — which is a bit of a contrast to the amount I wrote about it prior to the event. I did do a post-event analysis, but in the magazine which constitutes my day job and well, it was a mostly critical piece — read it here. Reason: I came away quite disappointed with BCM3 — lots of young, enthusiastic people and loads of networking, but that was about it. Very little that I saw in terms of entrepreneurial buzz. Not too many great ideas at the demos, mostly aimless exchanges of business cards, bad infrastructure and a good measure of corporate product pitching. Maybe part of the overall disappointment stemmed from the fact that this was my first full-fledged BarCamp and the expectations were inordinately high.
Anyhow, going by the negative sentiment that my magazine piece elicited — nobody can take criticism, especially from a journalist — I thought I would run a little contest here. Earlier today on Twitter I invited people to write in on ‘Do BarCamps help entrepreneurs turn ideas into real businesses?’. If you are an entrepreneur who has started a company or is on the verge of starting one, write in a 300-word piece on the above mentioned theme and send it to snigdha (dot) startupcentral (at) gmail.com. I will publish the best piece here and pay the author as well — a modest Rs 1.50 per word. You probably don’t need the money but any effort should be rewarded. Look forward.
Mulling Over a New Kinda Barcamp….
Barcamps, they are happening everywhere now. There are debates and raging discussions on as to whether we “interpreted” the format right, but whether or not, its still going on. Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Kerala, Hyderabad and…
hi vijay: is that beginning to a larger piece?
and btw, you might just win the contest because no one has sent in entries yet 
*fingers crossed and does a quick math to figure out the prize money*
Darn! I knew i should have written more
“Do BarCamps help entrepreneurs turn ideas into real businesses?”
Barcamp is not only for making ideas into business,its about learning,sharing and to do any thing in open environment. Sometimes people get in contact with other campers (and few old friends) i personally know couple of folks who get inspired from barcamp mumbai 2 and started the stuff, launched, acquires a firm and some more stuff !
hi raxit, agree. i’ve met a few entrepreneurs too who have been inspired by barcamps to startup on their own. but entrepreneurship, i think, is just a by-product of barcamps. and that is how it should be. the real purpose of a barcamp is to share ideas…and hopefully that will at some point lead to new businesses.
Snigda, I might not agree that startups and barcamps are related actually. There are folks who do barcamps with a complete focus on education. For one, we have been thinking about one like that here in India. Especially with guys like James Tooley and a host of guys talking about privatization, alternate education and all, its quite a topic to grasp.
Barcamps work where different people with tall perpectives come together. What you see as the “avalanche” of information, is essentially the tall perspectives coming together to collide, and when ideas collide, there is always sparks that fly.
It could be a startup. or it could be a revolution. Or just a drastic lifestyle change.
My beef is the lack of focus. Hence instead of mountains, we are all running in the plains, wondering if we should be flying kites instead
hey vijay, i think you’ve hit the nail on the head. so would it be audacious of me to ask you to write a guest piece sometime. i have a topic in mind and we should discuss it offline.
*looks you up on gtalk to ping*
Barcamps may not help turning ideas to reality immediately, but it does help a lot to find out if your ideas are worth. For ex., I met Aditya of indipodcast and I could discuss some of the queries he had. Alap of linkbunch got some great feedback from the people there and it must have helped him a lot. Nirav of BlogAdda.com spoke to bloggers directly for their feedback since maybe they were the target audience for his website. Individually, all of them would have benefitted and for student like me there are so many things I learn by just seeing! It’s a great place to discuss and like a soundboard understand what might or might not work.