business management, marketing, technology & entrepreneurship in a 365X24X7 world

BarCampDelhi3 happened last Saturday and was a smashing success. The event was being organised after a whole year, so lots of people were waiting for it in anticipation. The venue was the Impetus Tech office in Noida (big thanks to them for volunteering to host the event). Here are the key highlights:

The Participants: I’ve heard of dwindling audiences at BarCamps in other cities but Delhi kept its date by more than doubling participation. We got close to 175 campers (against 235 signups, a 75% attendance rate); At BarcampDelhi2 we had about 75-80 people. Many of the participants were first timers, having read/heard about it on blogs, newspapers & magazines, national TV etc. This demonstrates that the flurry of Barcamps in Indian cities (over the last 18 months) has built up a critical mass and taken the concept beyond the early adopter crowd. The audience was a mix of developers, startup entrepreneurs, designers, bloggers, media folks etc. I was surprised to find amidst them a group of tech professionals who were working with the government (in its various depts, agencies). And the youngest camper was this cute 6 month old baby girl (photo below) who slept through most of the sessions and occasionally had to be cajoled not to cry, disturbed as she was by the surrounding chaos.

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The Speakers: Check out the wiki for the sessions. The noteworthy ones included a very well analysed presentation by Prashant Singh about the state of user generated content in India, a live demo from the Vinsol team on deploying a ROR app on EC2 & a talk by Vineet Tyagi (Impetus) on Agile Development & practises. The Amazon Web Services evangelism team (currently visiting India from Silicon Valley) had an extended session about how AWS was a game changer in the global internet infrastructure sweepstakes, with its battery of services that include S3, EC2, AMT etc, besides lesser know projects such as ‘Grep the Web’. Interestingly enough, this was followed up by a presentation from The Sun Startup program which also is aimed at the startup infrastructure mgmt space, but from a diametrically opposite angle (the talk incidentally was given by a SUN affiliate and not SUN’s evangelist, who had signed up for the event but did not turn up).

The Mood: The mood was effervescent and infectious. Sessions took place amidst the usual self-organising chaos; some first time attendees (rather speakers) were found complaining about the sub optimal presentation set up in one of the rooms- I guess it’ll take them a while to understand the BarCamp culture and how you need to find your own audience rather than depend on the organisers to deliver to them a room choc-a-bloc with an eagerly awaiting, rapt audience.

The Real BarCamp: Once the pseudo one got over, the group headed to Ruby Tuesday at Noida’s Sector 18 for the “Real” Barcamp…pictures on flickr.

iNeed: During the opening introductory session, we realised that many people were there looking for something- possibly employees, cofounders, facilities, incubators etc. To help them get the word out, we quickly converted the whiteboard into a bulletin board dubbed “iNeed” (think apple). By the end of the day, the whiteboard resembled a graphiti wall with people scribbling all over it (check out the slide no 2 in the deck). Some quick improvisation that proved useful.

Check out the long list of blog posts detailing the event.

Delhi’s third tryst with BarCamp is happening on the 8th of Dec. This is a follow-up to the earlier editions- BarcampDelhi1 (held in March06 at Adobe) and BarcampDelhi2 (held in Dec06 at ImpetusTech). So its been a while since we’ve had one and thought that the first week of December (alonside Delhi’s mild winter weather) is an opportune moment to put this together. The venue for the event has not been decided as yet. Here is the Barcamp wiki where you need to signup..

If you are in Delhi and happen to be a tech professional, startup entrepreneur, investor, media person, blogger or just a curious onlooker, THIS IS the event to attend and network with like minded folks. In true BarCamp spirit, we’ll try to keep the event as ‘unconference‘ as possible - non commercialised, no rockstar keynote addresses, no sales pitches & no audience-only participants.

Here’s how you could participate-

1) If you wish to attend - go to the DelhiBarCamp3 wiki and add your name to the list of ‘campers’ (the site is a wiki, so anybody can edit it)

2) If you wish to share your experience with a talk or presentation - add your name & topic in the section marked as ‘proposed sessions’.

3) If you wish to help organize the event - get in touch with any of the planners mentioned on the site.

We need your help in spreading the word around, so please blog this as loudly as you can; tell your friends, colleagues & acquaintances.

Look forward to seeing you there…

I couldn’t resist blogging these two slideshows that have been uploaded to slideshare. A great tribute to India’s stunning run at the T20 World Cup. Enjoy! (the first one has the Chak De India audio as well)

I gave a talk last Saturday at IIT Roorkee titled - ‘Conducting a Market Study & Developing the Business Model’. This was as part of a lecture series that is being organized by EDC (the Entrepreneurship Development Cell) at IIT Roorkee. The talk was about a generic approach to conducting product feasibility studies and the way to go about developing the business model. I fell back upon our slideshare experience to explain some of the points in the presentation. The slides from the talk are shared below.

Roorkee incidentally, is India’s oldest engineering school and it was taken into the IIT fold in 2001. Before the talk, I had some time to spare and I spent that time going around the campus and took some snaps with my mobile camera (shared below).

Its great to see how most engineering & MBA schools in India now have an entrepreneurship cell and are making efforts at promoting it. This certainly was not the case a decade ago (when I graduated from engg).

The fourth edition of Mobile Monday Delhi is being held on the 18th of August. The focus for this event is on startups who want to demonstrate their mobile products/services. The event is sponsored by Nokia & MDI and the event is being held at the MDI premises at Gurgaon. Mobile Monday events at Delhi are usually well attended and allow for interactions with mobile enthusiasts, developers, entrepreneurs, investors etc. So if you have an interest in this space and happen to be in Delhi on that day, don’t miss this. Go add your name to the wiki now!