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BarcampMumbai - The Evolving Tech Community & Culture (Check Pics)
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As mentioned in the ealier post WATBlog was at the 4th edition of the Barcamp Mumbai which was being held at the IIT Mumbai SJMSOM Institute of Management. Now for those who dont know the concept of barcamp is an international one and it basically is an ad-hoc get together of techie and tech/startup enthusiasts and is an unconference completely driven by collaboration and community feeling among the event planners, participants and speakers.
Here are all the sessions that happened over the 2 day Barcamp in Mumbai. We attended a few of them and here are some of the stuff that was talked about..
We attended the session by Opera where Shwetank a web evangelist from opera gave interesting insights on the mobile internet usage in India vs the rest of the world. Some stats are given below:
1) 8 out of the top 10 mobile phones used to access opera mini are Blackberry’s in the USA whereas 8 out of the top 10 phones are nokia’s in India.
2) Less than 3 % of Indian women use mobile internet via the opera browser.
3) Highest user traction on mobile internet is for gaming downloads, music downloads and video downloads worldwide.
We also attended a session by Entrip.com a visual travel blog focussed on the global audience. Nicholas Adams the Director of Entrip said that travel is much more than just eticketing or ecommerce. He said that travelling involved several modes of transport, local flavours and little nuances which can be shared and add value to several others looking to plan a trip. He said the core business model of entrip was not ecommerce but was advertising.
Another product demo was made by iRefr.com a job referral site much like Yellojobs and Techtribe.com. They are still in closed beta and they claimed that their product would not only provide incentives for referrals but also provide tools to users to make referrals hassle free.
Day two had an interesting session with Anand Lunia of Seedfund who revealed what they look for in startups while seed funding. Here was his list of things:
1) A team of founders is better than a single founder. At seed stage quality of team is very important
2) We look at business which give 10 times return on our investment over 3-5 years.
3) We are focussed on tech investments we dont do real estate or retail.
4) We prefer Mumbai or Bangalore based startups as we have a base there or startups willing to relocate to these places.
5) We never take majority stake in the startup. But we may have a tag along and a drag along clause i.e. Incase the entrepreneur wants to exit he would have to sell our shares first before he sells his. Also incase we want to exit we can offer the entrepreneurs shares at the same price we are selling ours.
Barcamp in Pictures
The most interesting part of Barcamp are the pictures we took as they give an insight into the evolving tech <geek> community and culture..
Barcampers attending a Mattress Session (half of the sessions were given in this way!)
Post It Culture to register sessions
The Pizza Lunch Party!
No Beer in ‘Bar’Camp .. But lotsa Cola..
End of Barcamp even the Cow turns <geek> in search of Pizza!
We thoroughly enjoyed the barcamp experience and hope to see an even bigger and better barcamp nest time around.
good one!
I read your Barcamp 4 post on this blog. Thank you for writing a post on our camp on WATBlog.
I was looking to try iRefr. This is the first time, I decided to not register completely - because the form was too length. I was looking to try the service and refer a few friends. Why can’t I just register to refer and not fill my entire resume.