Images: StartupCentral

Editor’s Note: StartupCentral is a media partner for Startup Weekend Bangalore

Boot Camp

First up is Boot Camp, a feature that is being introduced by Startup Weekend for the first time in India. The camp kicks off on Friday evening at 3.00 pm and is being held at the Google office at Old Madras Road. Microsoft will be taking a session, apart from one-on-one and open sessions with other experts. Follow the link for the detailed agenda. Dinner is pizza.

Mentors & Judges

Participants will get to interact with a host of mentors as they go about building startup prototypes. The list of mentors includes Narasimha Suresh or TeliBrahma, Rajesh Srivathsa of Ojas Ventures, Shaymal Mehta of Techjini and Vivek Ravisankar of InterviewStreet. The judges who will pick the winning startups include Shekhar Kirani from Accel Partners, K Rajinish Menon from Microsoft, Sanjay Anandaram from JumpStartup and Amitabh Shrivastava from Indian Angel Network.

Prizes

Finally, what can you expect to win, apart from building a startup, at the event? A bunch of people have pooled their resources to come up with an array of prizes. Here’s the list:

• The top three teams win a BigRock goodie bag which includes a free dot IN domain and web hosting package. All participants will get a free domain a 25 per cent discount on hosting packages.
• Winners will receive KooKoo Goldenports for six months. All teams will get a KooKoo Silver Egg account free for three months.
• Startup accelerator SpringBoard will enable the top two teams to bypass the initial screening for the SpringBoard Accelerator Programme 2012.
• InterviewStreet is giving away prizes of the top three teams. The details of the prizes are yet to be announced.
• eLagaan is offering participants and winners discounts on fees.
• All participants will get a Rs 100 recharge coupon from MobiKwick.
• The top team will get free office space for one month from TechJini and the runner up will get mentoring.

See you in Bangalore.

Editor’s Note: StartupCentral is a media partner for Startup Weekend Bangalore

Discount for StartupCentral Readers

StartupCentral readers can avail of a 10 per cent discount on ticket prices. You can click through the logo at the top of this post to register. Enter the discount code ‘GRABITNOW’ to avail of the offer.

Rules & Tools

• Participants are expected to bring along their own laptop computers, mobile phones, business cards, notepads and 3G datacards (just in case).
• Friday evening (January 20) is reserved for idea pitches. Each pitch will be allocated 60 second. No props or slides will be allowed.
• A single ticket covers seven meals, snacks, access to resources from sponsors and infinite coffee!
• Get the complete agenda here.

Some feedback from people who have attended previous editions of Startup Weekend in India:

Gaurav Lochan (SW Bangalore, March 2011) – “I took part in Startup Weekend Bangalore March 2011 because I was contemplating quitting VMware to go join or start a company. At SW Bangalore I pitched an idea, formed a team with strangers which built an android app and a rails site, made a bunch of friends, and managed to sleep a few hours too.”

Sarvjeet Ahuja (SW Delhi, March 2011) - “My hunger for getting into something new and exciting was taken care by the event and its after effects. Prior to that, I was running a small sized software services company, catering to US clients. After the event, I only work for start ups, professionally and personally. This is what I always wanted to do and that single event gave me what I was craving for.”

Also check out the current Bangalore edition’s video teaser:

Editor’s Note: StartupCentral is an online media partner for Startup Weekend Bangalore.

Here are the dates for the next three editions:

Mumbai: June 17 to 19
Bangalore: June 24 to 26
Pune: July 1 to 3

Each edition will have a limit of 40 seats. Application forms available here.

Image Courtesy: L-pad

How long have you been thinking of moving on? Why?

About three months, since December. I was getting a little bored with what I was doing. As an investor you have to have a lot of strength not to get involved on the technology side. Entrepreneurs here run very slow overall. The ecosystem is not mature. If you have a new idea, the competition does not exist. Or you don’t have money or vision. That has been nagging me for some time. If I give advice to an entrepreneur, he take his own time. Then I want to jump in and write code. Being a techie I was getting bored not doing things myself. That was the key reason.

How did Bitzer Mobile happen?

I had been brewing the idea of starting a project on my own. Then I found a couple of friends who had started this company in the enterprise mobility area. I knew them from my earlier startup. The vision is to become the RIM (Research in Motion) of the applications economy.

Tell us a bit about the founders of Bitzer Mobile.

Ali Ahmed, who is the CTO of the company, conceptualized the idea about eight months ago and built a virtualization platform for the device. Naeem Zafar, who is the CEO, has led several high-tech startup in Silicon Valley and teaches entrepreneurship at the Haas Business School at the University of California Berkeley. I joined them two weeks ago as vice president of India operations.

Will you move back to the US?

Not immediately. Maybe in a year. We’re setting up an India development center and just did out first hire yesterday. We need to set up a sales organization as well. The development team should have 10-15 people by the end of the year and at least five within a month.

What’s your key takeaway working with entrepreneurs here?

Barring a few most lack the big vision to build multi-crore businesses. It may be because they have not been exposed to a lot a big success stories here.

How can that be fixed?

Well entrepreneurs need to think big. It’s okay to start small but the vision must be big. Second of course is the availability of capital. Kosmix which got acquired by Walmart this month had raised over $55 million from venture capitalists. The point is that money was available. I know smart people at places like Yahoo! India and professors at IITs who have good ideas. But who is willing to take a wild bet on them? If you look at Silicon Valley, most of the brave new world investing is done by investors who have been former entrepreneurs.

Given this environment, what are the survival chances of outfits like Morpheus?

Morpheus is just one part of the game. You need multiple vehicles for sustainable impact. There are about 15-odd venture capital firms investing at the later stages. We need 3-4 times that number at the early stages and another 3-4 times that at the angel and seed stage.

Image Courtesy: Indus Khaitan

January is also the month when the two rival startup networking conferences — HeadStart and Proto.in — go head-to-head. Last year they had their respective events on the same days. This year better sense seems to have prevailed. Not much available yet on the agenda and speakers at Proto.in — badges for bloggers are available on the blog — but let’s hope, getting into journalists’ minds aside, the event continues with the good work of showcasing startups from diverse sectors.

As a startup, you should be looking forward to Startup Saturday coming up under the banner of Kickstart.

Right now, the inaugural keynote by Dr. C Mohan, chief scientist IBM India is going on. He is speaking on innovation and technology with IBM as a case study.

More to come on the same location. Stay tuned!

For more on the Bangalore OCC, read a detailed post on the event and its participants on Himanshu Sheth’s blog here.

Also bumped into an interesting blog called Technofriends — it makes technology simple for simple people, like me. Thanks Vaibhav (Pandey) for linking me up to it.