Now this is interesting in a murky kind of way. Tata NEN Hottest Startups 2008 has whipped up a minor storm because it is allegedly “forcibly nominating startups”. Yusuf Motiwala, founder and CEO of Bangalore-based VoIP startup TringME, blogs that the company has turned up on the contest’s list of nominees despite emailing in a specific request to “withdraw” its nomination. Here’s an excerpt from his post on why TringMe did not want to participate in the contest in first place:
“It’s really very simple. NEN-HS is a contest and hence by definition every company that participates – having spent quality time filling up the detailed forms – needs to be given the same shot and fair treatment by the organizers. In other words, the playing field needs to be leveled before the innings begin. However, NEN has conveniently positioned few startups in the beginning and after few days of voting, they started introducing other startups into the race. This is completely unacceptable way of running the contest. It’s like giving one set of racers a benefit of starting early in a 400m race. How can this be fair and just?”
This is the second instance of the contest’s nomination process being in the news for the wrong reasons. Earlier this month, Pluggd.in, a technology startup review website based in Bangalore, alleged that NEN had used the website’s name to nominate startups without its prior permission — see Pluggd.in’s post on the incident. I’m beginning to think that NEN is committing these misdemeanours on purpose — to stay in the news.
I wrote earlier that contests that rank startups and that too via a public voting system are fundamentally flawed — read post here. A few more such incidents and Tata NEN Hottest Startups will the most rocking startup ranking contest ever in terms of publicity. How much it is going to benefit entrepreneurship is anybody’s guess. I’m apprehensive now about who the five final winners will be — ‘may the best man win’ is certainly not the philosophy driving this one.
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This is not good and Tata like organization should avoid such stunts to be in news.
Very unfortunate and patehtic on Tata’s part.
This is not good for the promotion of entrepreneurship or for the business plan contest format. Prior contests conducted by TiE and student groups like e-cell at IIT Powai show that these formats work if run properly.
I hope that someone at TATA sees the last response and how their name is getting sullied by this, and ensure that any problems in the format or the conduct of the TATA NEN Hot Startups contest are addressed asap.
Our company got a very biased and hurried review from one of the experts in the TATA NEN Hottest Startup contest due to which our reputation has suffered. WE are fighiting a bttle against the ridiculous system setup by TATA-NEN. Help us with this crusade, here is out post and update on the issue: http://www.technacular.com/2008/12/27/misguiding-expert-comments-tata-nen-hottest-startups-contest-2008/