After Barcamp Ahmedabad 1 Ahmedabad saw its second Barcamp on Sunday. Barcamp 2 Ahmedabad was sponsored by SUN Startup Essentials and had a few startups showcasing their products there.

The first session was Vaibhav, a Ph.D student in IIM-A on rural opportunities. Vaibhav felt data can be a huge service in rural sector. Something that can be leveraged to reap profits, as well as make a difference to the needy. His idea was if we can have enough rural incubation centre, we can have a large number of entrepreneurs coming from the rural background while this can also be turned into a profitable model. He went on to explain how such an organization, working in rural canters, collecting data, can provide consultancy services to the rest of the world, based on the strength of data that they have. He gave an example of World Bank and how it earns a major part of its earnings through consultation. He can be reached at vaibhavb@iimahd.ernet.in.

The second session I attended had the team of Smita and Ram, presenting on their startup RangDe.org. RangDe is a microlending platform. The website is based around the concept of microcredit. So, we have a lot of NGOs and other organizations doing providing microcredit to the rural population. But what baffled TangDe founders Ram and Smita were the interest rates of 24%-50% charged by these organizations. SO, off they started, with a platform of their own, RangDe.org. The interests charged here is 8.5%, the lowest, they claim. Liked the idea

The third session I attended was for Rivals4ever.com. We have covered this startup in the past here. Nothing new here, except that the idea of the startup occurred to him after watching a movie (Fever Pitch) with his wife. How I wish he would have done a little research, too.

Session 4 was by Trivikram, who spoke on how education in regional language can add far greater value than when imparted in a medium like English. Giving the example of China, he told in China has translators for every language. The translators can translate an entire manual of, say, Maruti 800 in Chinese. A worker, just by reading that manual, can then assemble and entire Maruti 800 car in China. According to Trivikram, this is the reason for the progress made by Chinese in manufacturing. Trivikram was looking for some language translators who, according to him, can do more than simple copy-paste translation. Translators who can bring in some value into a translated piece.

Session 5 was for a startup called Jaldibol.com. Actually, its not a startup in the right sense of the world. The company, Gloscon has many such properties. It encourages its employees to come up with ideas that can be turned into web properties.  It then gives time and help to the employees to work on those ideas. Once executed, it gives a stake to the employees in that idea. So, Jaldibolo.com was one such idea. They called it “Citizen Journalism” and it was about submitting user generated news, views and reviews on the website. That’s right. I asked the same question to myself - what is the novelty? Anyways, founder Roshan Shah came and explained the idea to the audience there.

Session 6 was a presentation on Cityplots.in, another initiative by Gloscon. This was a property portal, currently focused on Ahemdabad and Gujarat, explained the developer Priyanka Pandey.The high-point of this website, according to Priyanka was the use of Web2.0 features like reviews, ratings, comments etc to the featured properties. Priyanka was overly excited about the use of Ruby on Rails technology used in the development of the project and spoke very little of the end usability for the user. I hope this improves with time.

The Barcamp in Ahmedabad is not as tech-oriented as the ones in Mumbai or Bangalore. The Barcamp movement here is still picking up. I hope the quality will only improve with each Barcamp.

 The organizers were Aditi Gupta, Netra Parikh, Prashant Zaveri  and Leo.

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