StartupCentral

While in Delhi last week, I managed to pop in to mingle at the Nasscom Emergeout Conclave 2010. Alok Mittal and Harish Gandhi from Canaan Partners and Suvir Sujan from Nexus Venture Partners were among venture capitalist attendees. And there were plenty of startups, of course, which made lunch-time and the post-lunch period great for networking.

It is good to see Nasscom, the ‘big boys club’ for many years, batting for the little people. Here’s the list of companies that were judged the League of Ten for 2010 out of a total of 50 select emerging companies:

8K Miles Web Services On-demand talent pool and computing infrastructure solution for small businesses.

CoCubes SMS-enabled online platform for connecting colleges, companies and students.

EKO India Financial Services Financial transactions via mobile for rural populations. Read the full story

Now is probably not the best of times to go looking for venture capital, but it is definitely the right time to network at every possible forum. And if you are a product company and in New Delhi, the latest Nasscom Friday’s 2.0 workshop on ‘From Product Creation to Marketplace Creation – How Indian Product Companies Can Create‘  coming up on April 17 may be a good place to pick up some tips on marketing. This is being held at the Nasscom office in Chanakyapuri and starts at 3.00 pm. Agenda below:

1. Defining a market
2. Fundamental concepts of marketing: Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning, Differentiation, Value Proposition Creation
3. Sales versus Marketing: The fundamental difference
4. Product Life-Cycle Management and the role of marketing – the SIVA model, Blue Ocean Strategy
5. Knowing the ecosystem: Your customer does not buy in isolation
6. When does the marketing of the product Start?
7. The ‘immutable’ laws
8. Some ‘zero cost’ marketing tools to get started
9. What should I do? – Participant case study discussions

If you are in Chennai, also plug into the second edition of the Nasscom EmergeOut Conclave

Nasscom’s 2008 Innovation Awards kicked off the final leg of the selection process on Monday, December 15, and even among the clutter of startup networking events underway between now and January-end, this one stands out for its sheer outreach and potential business impact. The final leg, simply dubbed ‘Roadshows’, will showcase 24 shortlisted information technology and business process outsourcing companies at four venues — Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai. Winners (Nasscom has not specified how many) will be chosen when the showcase period ends on December 23. There are six startups among those shortlisted for the roadshow:

iViz Technologies, Kolkata

MobME, Cochin

Sloka Telecom, Bangalore

iKen Solutions, Mumbai

Agile Labs, Bangalore

Systems Biology, Pune