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Early Stage Start-up? Your Chance to Get Market-Ready and Mentored by the Best Brains in the Business!

After a successful launch in 2013, TiE Bangalore’s AnthahPrerana is back with a bang!  It is not another business plan competition.  Think of it as an idea booster.  We pick the 10 best unfunded startups in commercial and social sectors, mentor them and get them market ready for exponential growth.

Last year, the who’s who of the Indian start-up ecosystem like Mohandas Pai, K. Ganesh, Krishnakumar Natarajan and Ashish Gupta picked the most promising ideas that TiE Bangalore began nurturing.  Out of the 10 winners from last year, 2 have already gotten funding: Tourlandish was accepted into the Dreamit Ventures incubator in NYC and TouchStone Equities invested in Channelyst.

AnthahPrerana Website imageThis year, we are partnering with Let’s Venture and IIM, Bangalore to deliver personalized help to our winners!  We have assembled another high-powered jury comprising of acclaimed IIM, Bangalore faculty, successful serial entrepreneurs and start-up experts at TiE Bangalore to select and mentor a new batch of start-ups.

Selection Criteria:

  • 0-3 years old companies
  • No angel or VC funding
  • Financially viable, for-profit ideas

What Do We Offer? (All for FREE!)

  • Showcase your idea to investors and start-ups gurus on Grand Gala Recognition night
  • Get highlighted on the extensive angel investor platform of our partner Let’s Venture
  • 2-day ‘boot camp’ with renowned mentors at our partner IIM, Bangalore’s campus
  • Automatic entry into our 90-day TiE-Turbo program with the best mentors in town

Key Dates:

  • October 31st, 2014: Deadline for applications (Apply now!)
  • November 27th, 2014: Announcement of winners
  • December 5th, 2014: Grand Gala Recognition night
  • January, 2015: 2-day boot camp at IIM, Bangalore
  • February – April 2015: TiE-Turbo mentorship program

Guest Post by Kunal Kashyap, TiE Banglaore

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Looking for business leads? Want to be seen among the top level CXOs and decision maker? @CeBITINDIA

The premiere edition of CeBIT in Asia is all set to get off to a very strong start. From 12-14 November over 600 companies spread over 9 topic clusters will showcase global enterprise technology innovations. 200 of these 600 exhibitors are international companies who are completely new to the Indian market. iSPIRT is a key strategic partner to CeBIT India and together the goal is to showcase India as a Product Nation both in Bangalore this year and Hannover in 2015. With a clear focus on IT.BUSINESS.100% the event invites Enterprise Technology Buyers with a clear B2B focus. As per the latest forecasts received from the organisers, the event, will garner close to 25,000 visitors. CXOs, IT Resellers, MSMEs and Government Officials from State and Central Ministries form the majority of the visitor base. The focus end user sectors for the event are BFSI, Automotive and Manufacturing, Retail, Healthcare, Education, R&D and Hospitality.

Want to Win the CeBIT Challenge? Here’s your opportunity

“If you are a start-up, then +91 is your code to connect with seasoned entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, mentors and accelerators and win a chance to showcase your ideas to a global audience at CeBIT 2015, Hannover, Germany.”

Technology, as the industry of choice for many of today’s start-up businesses, attracts investors and venture capitalists, and has enormous payout potential. While the appeal of launching a tech start-up is easy to understand, some entrepreneurs fail to cope with the unique risks they face being in the competitive world of technology. This is where +91 comes in.

The genesis of +91 lies in the Start-up Village that was started at CeBIT Hannover as an international initiative for digital pioneers, innovators and ground breaking start-ups. Initiated over a decade ago, the Start-up Village has since been supporting outstanding business talents and their exceptional business ideas, providing them with a platform for dialog, and therefore stimulating and accelerating innovation in the field. 

CeBIT INDIA

Business Technology +91 Start-up Challenge is being organized alongside CeBIT INDIA – Asia’s leading Business Technology and ICT Procurement Event will be held from 12-14 November 2014 at BIEC, Bangalore. CeBIT India needs no introduction. With the aim of showcasing New Perspectives in IT Business, India’s first CeBIT will cover the key IT trends of Cloud Computing, Strategic Big Data, Enterprise Mobilily and Social Media.

Along with its large exhibits, CeBIT India will also feature a series of engaging conferences, workshops and seminars by global thought leaders like Vishal Sikka CEO, Infosys and Mark McDonald Global MD, Accenture at their CeBIT Global Conference. You can download the brochure for +91 Start-Up Challenge for CeBIT India here

PLUGGED IN:  

Along with CeBIT India, a Consumer Electronic Show for consumers called PLUGGED IN will be organized, parallel from 14 – 15 November, 2014 at BIEC, Bangalore. Consumer Technology +91 Start-Up Challenge will be held at PLUGGED IN

PLUGGED IN is the largest consumer gathering and showcase of consumer electronics & technology in India! It is is a comprehensive convergence of all stakeholders in the Consumer Electronics & Technology sphere to engage, educate and entertain consumers like never before. It is a platform for new product launches and showcase of game changing technologies in the consumer technology industry. For more information visit the PLUGGED IN website. You can download the brochure for +91 Start-Up Challenge for PLUGGED IN here

iSPIRT SaaS Pavilion @ CeBIT India

With a view to showcase India’s product strengths, CeBIT India has partnered with iSPIRT to create an exclusive SaaS display. The organisers have built a smart all-inclusive package, which includes fully built and functional display space, central meeting area facilities and prime space on the CeBIT India show floor. In recognition of our partnership with CeBIT, iSPIRT members on the SaaS pavilion are offered a preferential participation rate. In addition to the SaaS pavilion, CeBIT and iSPIRT will work closely together to showcase product innovation in the +91 zone. Please don’t miss the opportunity and contact the CEBIT India team(Mls(AT)HMF-India.com) at the earliest, who will provide you details information on the challenge. You can find more information about the SaaS pavilion here.

WHAT DOES A START UP GET?

  • Showcase & Market:  An exclusive opportunity for start-ups to showcase and market products to their customers at +91 Start-up market
  • Workshops:  Exclusive access to workshops conducted in the +91 Zone by industry experts covering the core business aspects-Marketing, Finance, Operations and more.
  • Mentors: Interact with the best minds in the industry on one-one basis, receive valuable suggestions & feedback to enhance and add value to your business.
  • Network & Interact: An opportunity to network with fellow entrepreneurs, angel investor and venture capitalists, accelerators, experts & support programs, as well as interact with 25,000+ business visitors of CEBIT India & Plugged In
  • Attract investments:  With investors coming from all domains of thetechnology ecosphere, you get the best chance to attract investment.
  • Visibility: visibility through extensive media coverage and promotion across all mediums

AND WIN AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHOWCASE YOUR PRODUCT AT CEBIT IN HANNOVER, GERMANY.

WHAT NEXT? 

Participation for CeBIT India +91 Start-up Challenge is limited to only 50 Start Up companies and PLUGGED IN +91 Starts-up Challenge is limited to 25 Start Up companies. Please don’t miss the opportunity and contact the CEBIT India & PLUGGED IN team(Praveen.Nair(AT)HMF-India.com) at the earliest, who will provide you details information on the challenge.

 

 

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Redefining Enterprise Software with Open Source

Everyone knows that Enterprise Software is bloated with un-necessary fat. And the fat shows clearly in the way sales happens. In the latest book by Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz, he shares a story where in order to please a customer, they went and acquired a company, whose product was liked by the purchasing manager, so that they could bundle its software with theirs and win the contract. So clearly politics wins and the product is something that is incidental. I assume a whole bunch of million dollar deals happen like this. I have personally heard a story from from a smart sales person who sold a software worth Rs 1cr to a very large Indian corporate house and that software barely was ever used. I knew he was not bluffing because the purchaser, a high ranking corporate manager was standing next to him. Relationships sell, not products.

Contrast this with Consumer Software Products. Apple sells a beautiful piece of hardware (a computer + phone) and a complex operating system with amazing design for just $600 and makes 39% margin on it. I am sure the software that goes in the iPhone is worth thousand times more and is infinitely more complex than the piece of crap sold by Ben Horowitz or the smart sales guy. The difference is only in the volume. Given enough volume, great software need not be bloated or expensive. This gap between consumer and enterprise software is what ERPNext plans to bridge.

With ERPNext, we are going one step further. Not only are we pricing the product way below the market but also giving it away for free. To remove the fat, we did away with our entire sales team and started to make it easier for our customers to download and use our product for free. What this has done is that it has given us traction and a community. This community is our marketing engine that has consistently taken the ERPNext brand forward and we take pride when ERPNext is proposed as one of the “mature” open source ERP on third party forums. Whats more, this strategy has attracted sponsors who have volunteered to pay us money to accelerate the development.

Being an Open Source product, opens up opportunities that are usually not accessible to proprietary products. Software vendors and partners are already bundling ERPNext along with their offerings and plugins are being built. As the publisher, our focus is on continuously improving the quality of the product and helping the community with deployments and functional help. We so much diverse feedback, it is only natural that the product keeps improving.

To take this platform to the next level, we are hosting a conference in Mumbai on September 25th where we plan to bring together users, developers and partners to brainstorm ideas and identify opportunities growth. We would also like to invite the larger Indian software ecosystem to participate in this community driven and open source project.

To register for the conference, please go to the ERPNext Conf. site.

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How We Got The IT Minister Excited About Indian Product Startups & Made Him Our Spokesperson #UnleashTheEnergy

A behind the scenes account of how a showcase of 11 disruptive startups was put together in just 100 hours!

If you’re reading this, I’m sure  you are a part of the Indian product startup community in one way or the other. And unless you were living under a rock (which is fine, if you were busy hacking away or traveling to sell your product), you wouldn’t have missed that our Hon. IT Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad was in Bangalore on Tuesday meeting with the product startup community. iSPIRT hosted  the “Conclave for India as Product Nation #1″, an open dialogue between the Product industry and the IT Minister.

What made it all the more special was that the he was the first IT Minister to meet with startups and also that he first met with the startups first before meeting officials from his ministry! The Minister met with the industry leaders, gave a patient hearing to the needs of the product startups and also saw presentations from 11 disruptive startups.

And here’s what the minister had to say after meeting with the startups!

So how did we pull this off? And what if I told you that it was all put together in 100 hours. We ourselves cannot quite understand how everything fell into place! But as Sharad often says, when a bunch of passionate volunteers come together towards a common cause, magic just happens. At iSPIRT, we take our volunteering quite seriously. No wonder then, that we actually have open sourced our volunteer model through a whitepaper to help other communities benefit from it!

 

A text message from Rajan on Saturday morning got me involved. Could we get on a call, he asked. There’s an iSPIRT event scheduled on Tuesday and some help was needed. We spoke and I got to know that there’s an interaction with the IT Minister scheduled on the coming Tuesday. As part of the interaction, we needed to put together a showcase of disruptive product startups to help the Minister get a sense of the kind of impactful work being done and the opportunities ahead. There was list of companies drawn from across various segments and stages, with whom we’d need to connect and get their availability for the event on Tuesday. Tapping into our network of volunteers (many of whom are themselves startup founders and industry leaders), we gathered the contact details of these companies and started reaching out to the companies. These were companies spread across the country and we checked with their founders if they’d be available to present. Based on the availability of teams and the some intense discussion and debate among the Program Managers for the showcase, a short list of the companies presenting on stage was drawn up. The thought process behind the selection of companies was to give the Minister a good view of the breadth (sectors where product startups are making an impact), the depth (companies that have achieved global market/tech leadership) and how far they can grow with sound support from the ecosystem, which includes the government as well. We were immensely privileged to have Mr. Mohandas Pai spare his valuable time for multiple meetings through the whole process and share his inputs on what kind of stories would make the maximum impact.

Product Leaders with the IT MinisterArriving at the shortlist was surely a good beginning. They say well begun is half done. But the tougher half lay ahead! We were already at Monday morning, and within the next 24 hours we had prep up the presenters. Each of the companies were to have a short, crisp presentation with the key points to be covered in under 4 minutes! Shekhar went about this with the precision of a toolmaker, thoroughness of a scientist and the strictness of a school teacher! From putting together notes on what points to cover, iterating multiple times with the presenting companies on their presentations over a sleepless night, to conducting the actual showcase in front of the minister, Shekhar was always on.

(That’s me on the left  trying to get the slides up!)

The event received some very good coverage in the media. Below are some links:

Here’s hoping that achchhe din are indeed ahead for the Indian software product industry!

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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish #InnovateDelhi

This blog is part a recollection of the events of the Pitch Day. And part a farewell post to those amazing 112 students who continued to surprise us till the last day at Innovate Delhi.

This Sunday marked the culmination of the intense three weeks of action happening at IIIT Delhi as a part of Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy (IDEA). Where on one hand we have extended weekend based startup events happening in the country. IDEA could could be described as being on adrenaline, with more rigor, creative problem solving and the fun.

The day was a typical June summer in Delhi, by being slightly hot than what was comfortable. The past weeks saw nearly 40 teams working on their ideas, iterating and pitching leading upto the main event. Only the top five were to present that day. With the certificates of participation distributed, the focus was now on two major groups. The finalists who were presenting that day to the investors/judges were practicing with Randy. The others were setting in motion the open house.

Speaker
Kiran Karnik

With the judges comprising of a diverse and interesting mix. The spectrum ranged from Mr. Vinod Rai, the former CAG of India all the way to Dr. Pankaj Jalote, Director of IIIT Delhi. The sounds of healthy debates boomed across the hall with the judges talking to the teams. There were student groups working on their ideas even before they came to the program to others who pivoted on their ideas and names the day before. The variety ranged from an online wig platform called WigVanity to MyParking which helped people find parking spots in NCR.

With the open house being wrapped up all of us moved to real attraction of the evening, the top pitches. The  welcome note by PK from IIIT Delhi was followed by speaker talks by Kiran Karnik and Sharad Sharma amongst others. One could see the hunger for knowledge and the collective wave of emotion in the student audience when Sharad quoted number and facts about the software and the startup industry in India. Celebrating the pride in our product startups.

We soon began with the pitches which made for the highlight of the evening. Weeks of learning for the final teams reduced to just five minutes. Which could make or break their odds of winning. With Surfing Couch taking the top honours for their idea of providing free community wi-fi, Shoutstr and Ripple followed close on the heels for a podium finish. Aegis (wearable for women safety) and ZapApp were the other two startups vying for the top slots.

ZapApp
ZapApp

The student testimonials on stage were a perfect example of the diversity and broke the stereotypical mold of the impression we have of an Indian entrepreneur. There were ‘students’ coming from remote Indian villages to others who were married. Talking of age, a very interesting observation came across. All the finalist teams had atleast one team member above the average age with atleast a few years of industry experience. What inference should we draw from this, I’ll leave that to you.

With the events of the evening concluding, it was not long before students had crowded around their favorite judges soaking in what wisdom they offered and asking them a lot of questions. Rem Koning had to be excused towards the end, with the Delhi weather taking the better of him. Students just loved Sharique Hasan, with requests for IDEA ’15 already pouring in. But the hands down favorite was Randy Lubin, and it was not long before he was posing for pictures.

Surfing Couch is declared the winner
Surfing Couch is declared the winner

After three weeks you could see the camaraderie in the students, now working on the details to execute their ideas in the real world. As members of the Indian startup ecosystem, we take so many things for granted. But seeing a batch of the next generation of builders, beginning their startup journey reminded many of us about why we started in the first place. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Acknowledgments: No event takes place without the healthy support from a huge set of unnamed workers. Special shout out two amazing people who helped with the creating the digital record for the Pitch Day.

a. Bhavna Nagpal for helping with the tweets on @InnovateDelhi. You can see the entire chatter at #InnovateDelhi.

b. Tasveer, the photography club of IIIT Delhi for helping provide pictures for this post. They also have an amazing album covering the proceedings of the day.

With Inputs from Gurpreet Bedi, 

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Your Opportunity to Win a FREE Trip & Meet Businesses & Startups in Israel #StartTelAviv

iSPIRT partners with TiE Delhi – NCR & Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs to present Start Tel Aviv

Israel is known for its startups and Tel Aviv is a leading hub with a local  ecosystem  of  world  class  tech  talent,  dozens of  leading  multinationals  and  hundreds  of  tech  star  startups.

Start-TelAvivStart Tel Aviv from September 14th to 19th 2014 is an  International competition  in  the  framework  of  which  startups  from  different  countries  will  compete  for  the opportunity of a 5 day intense startup experience to learn from the startup ecosystem in Tel Aviv.  The prize is a paid trip where the 13 startup founders winners from around the world, joined by local Israeli entrepreneurs, to participate in “Start Tel Aviv” during the DLD Festival week, and participants have the opportunity to meet the coolest and smartest companies, techies, startups, designers, artists, scientists, investors, and cultural drivers from Israel and abroad.

The events at Startup Tel Aviv are as follows:
Day 1: Mentoring, Industry & Professional meets, M&A opportunities.
Day 2: Pitch to Investors and VCs. Visit Cities Summit Conference
Day 3: Tel Aviv DLD Conference
Day 4: Open Startup event across the city
Day 5: Tour Israel: Visit Jerusalem and the Dead Sea

Here’s your chance to connect with your Israeli counterparts, investors and VCs.  You should also use this opportunity to figure out if you can collaborate with your counterparts to go global.

Interested?  Here are the criteria based on which the selection will be made:
Criteria
1. Age of submitting founder: 25 – 40
2. Sectors: Web, Mobile, Security
3. Stage: Seed Stage

Competition Judging Parameters
1. Innovation
2. Team
3. Business
4. General
5. Creativity – Use a creative video to prove why this startup should go to Tel Aviv? Each company may submit a 45 second clip (maximum) explaining “Why should my startup go to Tel Aviv, Israel?” (this should be the first slide of the clip). Early submissions to be promoted on Social Media

For those of you interested, please submit the online application here

Initiative led by Rinka Singh, CEO, Co-Founder at AccelerateFire, on behalf of iSPIRT.

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Innovation and User experience are two areas where CIOs are willing to look at new things: Highlights of #InTech50 2014: Day 2

This post covers the highlights of day 2 of InTech50 2014.  The highlights of day 1 are here.

Before getting into the highlights of the pitches of the 50 companies, here are some important points from the expert talks and panel discussions.

View from the VCs:

Rob Heiman, Alok Goyal, Sandeep Singhal and Tim Goddard gave practical tips to the entrepreneurs.  Some highlights:IMG_3032

Quality of the team trumps everything else. Everything else – product, technology etc. are not as important as the team. In a startup journey, the product will change, technologies will change and pivots will happen. Hence the quality of the team is paramount to make corrections along the course.

The team has to be focused on one thing and believe in what they are doing.

VCs get tons of unsolicited mail. While they try not to miss any of them – it is better to go through a warm introduction through some common person. Otherwise, getting together will be difficult.

View from the CIOs

Chris Hjelm, Dawn Page, Jay Jayaraman, Damn Frost discussed their view of startups and what startups should consider when engaging with large enterprises.

  • Startups need to understand the business needs of the enterprises.
  • The startup’s product should solve their business problem.
  • Be relevant to their needs. For example, Mobile Security is a big pain point – and they will be very willing to anyone who has a good solution for them.
  • Don’t talk jargon to CIOs – cloud, unstructured data etc. do not excite them. That is not relevant to them. Talk to them on how you can solve their problems.
  • CIOs get tons of emails – identifying a good startup is like finding a needle in a haystack. Word of mouth is a very good medium as CIOs are very well connected with each other.
  • Be realistic about what you can and cannot do.  If a small startup promises to solve world hunger, credibility will be at risk and it can adversely affect the next steps.
  • Do your research on the CIO’s company, their technology choices and current technology investments. Most of the time, this information is freely available. Try to experience the business the CIO’s company is in and then explain to them how your solution fits into their scenario.
  • CIO’s are also looking at the business model of the startups to see if they are going to be long term players.
  • Innovation and User experience are two areas where CIOs are willing to look at new things.
  • One of the big challenges for large companies to work with small companies is scale. Usually, smaller companies do not have the resources to handle requests from a large company.
  • A good and respectable CIO has a lot of say in the company. So it is good to go through the CIO. At the same time, the business group should be excited about your solution so they can back the CIO’s decision.
  • For large companies – data is their most valuable asset. Non-essential data can be put on cloud, but the essential data has to remain on premise e.g. customer data, financial data, as that is very sensitive information.

IMG_3080

Rapid Fire Pitches

The 50 InTech companies chosen to present in the rapid-fire pitch were selected out of the 200 applications.  Each jury member independently scored all the applicants, and the top 50 were chosen.

The InTech50 companies are of different sizes and operate in varied domains. While some of them are leaders in their space and mentioned in Gartner’s magic quadrants, some are pre-funded startups with just a handful of customers.

Most of the companies have a global customer base.  Some of the companies have customers from more than 100 countries.

The 50 companies were categorized broadly into:

  • Experience and Engagement Management
  • HR – Recruitment, Survey, Talent Management
  • BI/Analytics/Social Analytics
  • E-Commerce
  • IT Security
  • IT Services Development

IMG_3063Each company got exactly five minutes to present their product in a rapid fire pitch. Thanks to the excellent planning and execution by Manjunath Gowda of I7 Networks, it was all smoothly executed and on-schedule.

You can learn more about these 50 companies in the InTech50 Booklet.

Awards

Five awards were given at the end of the day under the following categories.

  • Most Scalable Idea – Zipdial
  • Most Original Idea – Uniken
  • Best Value Proposition – Linguanext
  • Best Pitch – Unmetric
  • Most Popular Company – Sapience/TouchMagix

IMG_3042

Benefits to InTech50 Companies

In addition to the great learning from the expert talks and panel discussions, several companies got very good feedback from the CIOs on their product and many got good leads to pursue.   Overall, all the participants found InTech50 very valuable and were extremely grateful to iSPIRT for providing this platform.

Vasanth Kumar, Co-founder and COO of Sheild Square, said that  they got two “proof of concept” (POC) engagements at the conference.

Manjunath Gowda, CEO of I7 Networks also got two POCs and quite a few leads.

Satya Padmanabham from Zapstitch said he got to learn a lot from other companies as well about the different business models and it was a great exposure overall.

Varun Sharma from iViz security said they got good response from CIOs as well as other InTech50 award winning companies.   And it was a great platform to network.

Next InTech 50 is on April 15th and 16th 2015 at Bangalore.  Mark your calendars and be there!

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India is poised for success because of the 3 D’s: Highlights of #InTech50 2014: Day 1

InTech50 is a joint initiative by iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network.  InTech50 is a showcase of some of the most promising software products created by entrepreneurs from India.  This is the 1st InTech50 and is going to be an yearly event.

IMG_3047

The inaugural edition of InTech50 saw great participation: 50 Top Indian product companies showcased their products to 25 Global CIOs, 25 CIOs from top Indian companies, 25 top investors, angels and accelerators from US and India and several visionaries and media across India and US.

Piyush Singh and Sharad Sharma co-chaired InTech50 2014 and put together an excellent program for 2-days.  Day 1 was all about content-rich talks and panel discussions from visionaries and experts to inspire and guide the product companies. Day 2 was dedicated to the 50 InTech50 companies to pitch their products and was also interspersed with highly relevant talks and panel discussions.  This post covers Day 1, Day 2 is covered here.

Opening Session

Sharad Sharma shared some very interesting statistics in his welcome address:

  • 40% of Indian startups are in Bangalore
  • 40% of Asian statrups are in India
  • By next year, India will be the 2nd largest hub by number of startups.
  • 82% of Indian startups focus on a global market.

Read more statistics in the InTech50’s booklet.

Sharad mentioned that there are three broad areas where he sees growth in the Indian Software Product companies.

1. Software Infrastructure: This includes things such as security, BYOD, cloud, app management.

2. Decision Infrastructure: Analytics, Big Data

3. Innovative Applications.

One of the initiatives of iSPIRT is to educate small Indian businesses about SAAS potential and products. Today, this knowledge is lacking and these businesses are not informed buyers. So far, 60,000 small businesses have been trained by iSPIRT on SAAS.

Another iSPIRT initiative is working with the corporate development teams in large enterprises to foster M&A of startups.

Welcome Address

Dr. Srivatsa Krishna (IAS, Secretary for IT, BT and S&T, Government of Karnataka) enthralled the audience with his presentation on “Why India Rocks”.

Dr. Srivatsa shared interesting facts that to establish his premise of Why India Rocks.

  • Indian IT Industry contributes to 8% of GDP and 25% of exports.
  • 80 of 117 CMM Level 5 companies are Indian.
  • IT revenues grew from USD 100 million revenue in 1992 to USD 100 billion in 2013.
  • 100 Indian companies have more than $1 billion market cap.
  • 150 of Fortune 500 companies have R&D centers in India.
  • 400+ of Fortune 500 companies outsource work to India.
  • Literacy in India has crossed 80%
  • By 2020, there will be 20 lakh IT professionals in Bangalore.
  • Along with IT, Gaming and Movies is also growing big time in India. Labs in Bangalore created substantial portions of movies such as Skyfall and Life of Pi.
  • A huge Media City is being planned in Bangalore where most of the post-production work of movies is envisioned to happen. The Media City will do to the digital movie and entertainment industry what Electronic City did to the Indian IT Services Industry.
  • What started as labor arbitrage in the initial days of IT industry has now grown up in the value chain. Mu-Sigma is an example of a world-class product company from Bangalore that has now more than 4000 employees and is the 2nd largest big data analytics company in the world.

Bangalore is already the IT capital of the world. The next step is to make it the Innovation and Startup capital of the world.

Dr. Srivatsa mentioned that the government is being a catalyst and enabler. Along with the big cities, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities such as Mysore are also being developed.

One of the initiatives is to offer land for free if the company creates jobs. For every 1000 jobs created, the Govt. of Karnataka will give 1 acre of land free on a long-term lease.  There are also exemptions from outdated labor laws and special tax breaks are available to encourage the Software industry.

On the flip side, he also mentioned that there are challenges such as being ranked 132nd in the world to do business, long time taken in courts to enforce contracts etc. The good news is that that government is working harder and faster towards making it better.

Opening Keynote

Kiran Karnik, Member, National Innovation Council, Government of India, visionary ex-President of NASSCOM, and the prestigious Padmashree award winner, delivered the keynote.IMG_3011

Mr. Karnik said that Innovation and Software Products are the two main areas that will drive growth for India.

According to him, India is poised for success because of the 3 D’s:

1. Democracy: Though there are some bottlenecks with respect to government speed and enforcements, it is trying its best to promote the industry and is improving day by day.

2. Diversity: Most of the innovations happen when there is good diversity – e.g. bay area and east coast of USA.  India also has a varied diversity and the cross-pollination fosters creativity.

3. Demographics: The largest chunk of the population of India is young and this human capital is a great asset.

India has the unique combination of cheaper, better and quicker.  Some other countries have one or two of these attributes, but India has the unique advantage of possessing all three attributes. The Indian work ethic is now famous in the world.  While this is giving an edge to India currently, our future depends on how we innovate and differentiate.

The Indian IT Services industry has done tremendous service to the country and has created a very good foundation of talent and branding. The product companies should now leverage this and take us to the next orbit. The future of India is in Software Products.

DNA of product companies is different from services companies. Not just in India, but world over, due to the different goals and business models. It is difficult for service companies to become product companies.  Startups are ones that will make disruptive products. Startups should target global markets, but they should also leverage the local markets for validation, testing and getting the product right.

Highlights And Takeaways from other sessions

Product successes are happening from India and we will see many more in the coming years.

During the early stages, startups must incentivize early adopters by giving them special deals such as co-development, deeply discounted prices, royalties etc.  From the early days on, it is best to build the product along with a live customer.

Companies should keep an eye for serendipitous events and leverage them.

Shoaib Ahmed of Tally said that they resisted the urge to take to services. They remained focused on being a product company. According to Shoaib, the key reasons for Tally’s success are the mantras of “Customer First”, “Partner Growth” and “Building a Reputation”.  They also leveraged inflection points in their industry – for example, when VAT was introduced in India.

 

IMG_3032

Product Design and User Experience

Karthik Sundaram, from Purple Patch, shared his insights on product design and user experience, emphasizing that products should pay close attention to the 4Cs of great design:

1. Clarity.

2. Context (of the user).

3. Confidence (make the useful feel confident to use the tool easily)

4. Cheer (make it an enjoyable experience.

The current trends are predictive design, self-service design and ubiquitous design (across all devices).

The mindset should change from ‘What can the product do?” to “What can it do for the customer?”.  If focus is lost from the customers’ needs, the product will become irrelevant. For example, Netflix and Amazon were disruptive to Blockbuster and Barnes and Noble because they made it that much easier for the customer.

Rishi Krishnan, from IIM Indore, gave his insights on how to make product innovation work.  According to Rishi, if the following three attributes are satisfied, the chances of success increase by a large amount.

1. Painpoint. It has to solve a real painpoint for the customer.

2. Wave. The currently talked about area, which is doing the buzz.

3. Waste. Areas where there is lot of wastage are prime candidates for companies to optimize.

One example he gave was of Vigyan labs in Mysore. Vignan labs are working on controlling power consumption in data centers.  They are satisfying all the above three attributes and hence he sees a very good future according to him.

Rishikesha gave another example where he contrasted Ace Commercial Vehicle (4 wheeler for last mile transport of goods) and Nano car, both products from Tata Motors. Ace has been a tremendous success, while Nano is not. And the primary reason is that customers drove the requirements for Ace, and customers were involved at each stage from conception to delivery. Market input is key. Product managers should know how people use their product and in what context. Concepts such as lean startup are very relevant for startups.  You need to do rapid experiments to validate your assumptions. Experiment with business models too, not just technology. For example, Google does around 20,000 experiments every year – only 500 of them go live.

Mukund Mohan, from Microsoft Ventures, educated the audience about the cultural differences between Indians and Westerners using vey effective role plays. For example, how Indians expect the product to speak for itself, and focus more on the product features rather than customer needs. One of the key takeaways is to understand the customer in their context, understand their pain points and establish a personal connection.  First ensure that the counterpart is interested in doing business with you – that is the first step before looking into the merits of your offering.

Valuation

Rob discussed several technical terms and valuation methodologies, making the audience realize that it is a non-trivial and complex subject. The key takeaway is that the VC financing terms are more important than pricing. Make sure you consult a professional and understand the financing terms before you sign up with investors.

Try to create a competitive process for the VCs. Having multiple VCs interested leads to a bidding process and gets the best deal for the entrepreneur.

Investment is a relationship game.  Find a VC with whom you can gel well. This is going to be a long-term relationship and it is very important that you like each other. This is the most important consideration and the not the amount of money being invested or the amount of dilution.  If possible, find an investor who has got reserves for follow-on investments. This will be useful if you need more money as the investors also want to protect their prior investments in you and will be more open to invest if they can.

Another key takeaway is to not raise money when you are desperate. Better to raise money before you get to that state. And maintain your momentum during the fund raising process to show continuous results. Find VCs whose strategy and success fits your business. Understand what is important to your prospective investors.

Manjunath Gowda sold S7 Software for US $8.5 million in 2010. S7 Software was in the space of Software Migration and built tools and provided Software Migration services. While pitching to BlueCoat – a US based company, BlueCoat expressed interest in acquiring S7 Software to become their India R&D center. The valuation was very tricky and Manjunath was recommended different models by different gurus – such as discounted cash flow analysis, multiple of annual revenue etc. Manjunath quickly realized that these models were not relevant in his situtation. Manjunath found out the real reason why BlueCoat was interested and what BlueCoat would have gained from the acquisition – in this case the engineering talent of S7 Software. Once that was clear, the valuation focused on benefit to BlueCoat and not on the standard textbook models.  To paraphrase Manju – ‘Similar to how beauty is in the eyes of beholder, valuation is in the eyes of the buyer”.

Kumar Rangarajan from Little Eye Labs, the current rock star of the Indian Software Product ecosystem (first Indian acquisition by Facebook), gave an inspiring speech about their entrepreneurial journey and how they were focused on their vision and were flexible to adapt and planned for acquisition as their exit strategy.

Please continue reading the highlights of day 2 here.

 

 

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#InTech50 – The Secret Sauce

InTech50 is a big success.  The visiting CIOs went back happy. The InTech50 startups are pleased with their POCs and leads. Press has celebrated the new platform and has heralded its importance to the Indian IT industry.

Bk2T11PIIAAvVkGThey say that the biggest enemy of success is fear of failure. No, that’s not true. The greatest enemy of success is hubris. This happens when one forgets the core driver behind the success. In our case, this core reason for success is our volunteer model. And, at this moment of success, I want to take a few minutes to talk about the volunteer heroism that went into InTech50.

Nobody illustrates this volunteer heroism better than Manju Gowda (i7 Networks). In spite of his startup being a critical phase in its buildout he made magic happen. He looked up 350, yes 350 product startups, and wrote to them about InTech50 explaining why they should file an application. He also anonymously wrote all the InTech50 blogposts! He reached out to the Indian CIOs as well. And he is the one who came up with the idea of using tables instead of booths (which worked well and saved Rs 5L). He ran the 50 pitches like clockwork using his grace and humor. This ate into his own presentation preparation but he never complained. If you ever need an example of a selfless, passionate and heroic volunteer, please think of him.

Besides Manju, Praveen Hari (ThinkFlow), Sumeet Anand (Kreeo), Aditya Bhelande (Yukta) and Nakul Saxena (iSPIRT) were other active volunteers. There are two other people who were instrumental to InTech50.

Arvind Kochar is one of them. This was his first time at this and he stayed on top of everything on his plate. He displayed stamina and speed over the six months of planning.

Avinash Raghava – well, what does one way about him other than that he was his usual self: a superman saint. He let nothing fall through the cracks. He kept innumerable balls in the air. In his inimitable way he brought out the best in everybody that he touched. It’s an open secret that everything that iSPIRT does has “Avinash-inside”.

The most important person behind InTech50 is Piyush Singh (Co-Chair). He is the one who turned a hazy dream about creating a new platform into reality. He had the gumption to go to his fellow CIOs and tell them that India will be a Product Nation and they must come and leverage this opportunity today. It was a tough sell. They viewed India as a land of services, not products. And needed to carve out a whole week on their calendar to be at InTech50 for two days. Piyush pulled it off and we had 25 Global CIOs here. This is a testament to his missionary zeal and deep-seated confidence in the Indian software product companies. Like other Founder Circle members of iSPIRT, he truly believes in the larger “Product Nation” cause. But what’s most striking about him is that he has no airs and is a doer par excellence. He worked alongside everybody else as another volunteer. How many Fortune 500 CIOs you know who will do that?

We have learnt over the years that no path breaking effort is a straight line. What makes magic happen is the heroism of iSPIRT volunteers. These thoughtful practitioners are at the core of what we do.  They are ones who make the ecosystem better and lift all boats.  We salute them as we celebrate the success of the first InTech50.

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Innovation Leaders coming from India #InTech50

We are only 9 days away from the inaugural showcase event.   We are  looking forward for the CIOs to dawn upon Bangalore to see the InTech50 – 2014 companies.  These are the 50 best Enterprise Indian Startups as selected by the Advisory Board.

Providing the startups exposure to Innovation leaders is a huge step in their validation and evolution to next stage.

Let me take the opportunity to welcome the CIOs from India who are going to be at the event. Their presence will bolster the startup activity in India and we are hopeful that it will give it the necessary fillip for these innovative companies to positively impact the Indian corporate enterprises.

Below is a list of luminaries from India who are going to be present for the occasion. Let’s all welcome them to the occasion:

  • Anil Khatri, Head IT, South Asia, SAP
  • Annie Mathew, CIO, Mother Diary
  • Atul Jayawant, Group CIO, Aditya Birla Group
  • Avinash Velhal, Group CIO, Atos India Pvt Ltd
  • Darshan Appayanna, CIO, Happiest Minds
  • Harish Lade, General Manager IT, Asian paints
  • Harmeen Mehta, CIO, Bharti Airtel
  • Meheriar Patel, CIO, USV Ltd.
  • Nandkishor Dhomne, VP-IT & CIO, Manipal Enterprises Pvt, Ltd
  • Raghuram M, Group CIO, Mphasis
  • Sameer Ratolikar, CISO, Axis Bank
  • Srinivas KRD, CIO, Cairn India Limited
  • Subrahmanya Gupta, Boda Group, CSIO, GMR infrastructure ltd.
  • Sudip Banerjee, CIO, Reliance Capital
  • Sumit Chowdhury, President & CIO, Reliance Jio Infocom
  • Suneel Aradhye, Group CIO, RPG Enterprises
  • Viral Gandhi, CIO, Cox and Kings
  • VVR Mohan Babu, CIO, ITC

We will soon be sharing another list of Innovators who will be participating at InTech50

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Last 10 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India

The countdown to InTech50 has begun – as we are nearing the event that takes place on April 9-10, 2014 in Bangalore, to witness the 50 Most Innovative Products from India.

We now present the last 10 finalists for InTech50 2014 Most Innovative Products after announcing 40 finalists in our previous rounds. (See the complete list here)

  • AppExe from Mobilous is a zero programming product building tool that requires no development expertise. Apps built by AppExe are fully cross-platform –iOS, Android, Windows … including HTML5 capable. It offers easy integration plug-in framework to connect with backend databases – SAP, Oracle etc.
  • CereBrate is a digital platform for hospitals to manage customer experience and engagement. The product’s intuitive and powerful analytics enables the hospital management to identify areas of concerns and take action. Seamless integration with Hospital Information System using HL7 allows hospitals to ensure enhanced customer experience.
  • Continuity Patrol™ from PerpetuuitiTechnosoft, based on BS25999 standard provides full automation of the workflow activities that enables a single-click Disaster Recovery solution to enterprises. Its real-time dashboard provides ‘C’ level executives with complete visibility into health of the DR environment and services. Its cloud based business model helps customers maximize cost savings in a virtualized environment.
  • Heckyl – FIND provides real time news and data analytic platform for retail traders and brokerages. The app gets integrated with trading terminals to provide quality Information, Visuals, Heat Maps of Sentiments and Market Data to help traders find trading opportunities in this dynamic market.
  • Interview Master is based on the concept of automated video interviews, which comes with provision for recruiters to pre-design questions, setup interviews, and invite any number of candidates quickly and efficiently. This is followed by an automated process that also helps candidates with limited technical knowledge to attend interviews that are available in a structured inbuilt evaluation tool to the line manager at his convenience.
  • InstaClique is an engagement and conversion solution for E-commerce stores that converts casual online viewers to real customers by re-creating the social offline buying experience. This enables virtual shoppers get a personalized experience based on their shopping activities and preferences.
  • ILANTUS Unified Express  provides one-time sign on for all browser based application with self-service password and synchronization. Users can seamlessly access any browser based, web or cloud applications on their workstation without retyping their username/password. This helps enterprises adopt cloud applications in a secured way by providing industry standard protocol based on single sign on.
  • Linguify from LinguaNext is a zero-code change application solution that helps transform the way global corporations, software application vendors, and system integrators address the multi-language requirements for their applications. Linguify translates screens, reports and files to any language without requiring access to the application source code or database.
  • Notiphi is a leader in location analytics. By directly measuring locations through smart phones and leveraging big data technologies, Notiphi is able to understand the real-world paths and consumer behavior patterns, which empowers brands to send relevant rich media content to focused audiences.
  • ZapStitch is a Cloud data integration platform. It lets you seamlessly sync and integrate data between various Cloud/SaaS business apps without any custom programming or engaging API developers. The product meets the requirements of business managers who want to flawlessly integrate and sync data between these apps.

We congratulate all the 50 companies who have made it to InTech50. We also take this opportunity to thank each one of you for your participation and interest in InTech50 nominations.

Let’s keep the spirits high!

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Innovation Leaders coming from the US #InTech50

We are a few days away from InTech50 – a very warm welcome to CIOs and technology leaders from all parts the world to Bangalore. These leaders are responsible for bringing about Innovation in their corporate environments and are congregating in Bangalore to see the 50 best Enterprise Indian startups – the InTech50 list!

This gathering is a huge step for the Indian product ecosystem because it brings, for the first time, CIOs and technology leaders to India to see the early stages of broad spread software product innovation. The smartest CIOs already leverage product startups to infuse innovation in their business. I congratulate the top 40 companies who are picked already and look forward to the announcement of the remaining 10.

These have been carefully selected by the Advisory Board from the 200+ Indian Enterprise product companies that applied. Below is a list of luminaries who are going to be present for the occasion. Let’s all welcome them to InTech50:

➢ PATRICK FUNCK SVP, CIO Accretive Health Company Vertical: Hospital & Health Care Company Size: 1001-5000 employees

➢ DAWN PAGE, Managing Director, Citibank Company Vertical: Financial Services Company Size: 10,001+

➢ JAY JAYARAMAN, Vice President, Global Strategic Innovation &Technology Alliances Colgate-Palmolive Company Company Vertical: Consumer Goods Company Size: 10,001+

➢ CHANDRA VENKATARAMANI, Chief Information Officer, Convergys Corporation Company Vertical: Outsourcing/Offshoring. Company Size: 10,001+ Employees.

➢ JACK PRESSMAN, Executive Managing Director, Cyber Innovation Labs, LLC (“CIL”) Company Vertical: Information Technology and Services. Company Size: 51-200 employees.

➢ CHRISTOPHER T. HJELM, Senior Vice President & Chief Information Offier, The Kroger Co. Company Vertical: Retail. Company Size: 10,001+

➢ ANUP NAIR, Senior Vice President and CIO Vantiv Company Vertical: Financial Services. Company Size: 1001-5000 ➢ Damon Frost Director at P&G Company Vertical: Consumer Goods. Company Size: 10001+

➢ KSHITIJ MULAY, India IT Leader (GBS) Procter & Gamble Company Vertical: Consumer Goods. Company Size: 10001+ employees

➢ TARUN SAREEN, Head, EMC IT – APJ COE and APJ Theater Lead EMC Corporation Company Vertical: Information Technology and Services Company Size: 10001+ employees

➢ PARTHA SRINIVASA, SVP and Group CIO, HCC Company Vertical: Insurance. Company Size: 1001-5000 employees ➢ Piyush Singh Sr. VP and Chief Information Officer Location: Cincinnati Area Company Vertical: Insurance. Company Size: 1001-5000 employees

➢ GREG TOEBBE, Sr. Vice President Great American Insurance Company Vertical: Insurance. Company Size: 1001-5000 employees

➢ KETAN MEHTA,  CEO of MajescoMastek Co-founder and Board member of Mastek Company Vertical: Information Technology and Services. Company Size: 1001-5000 employees

➢ STEFAN VAN OVERTVELDT, CTO of MajescoMastek Location: Mumbai Area, India Company Vertical: Information Technology and Services. Company Size: 1001-5000 employees

➢ GEOFF SMITH, IT Strategy/Leadership CIO Roundtable Company Vertical: Management Consulting

➢ MAHENDRA VORA, Deals and Partnerships Vora Ventures LLC Company Vertical: Management Consulting

➢ ROB HEIMANN, Director River Cities Capital Funds Company Vertical: Venture Capital & Private Equity Company Size: 11-50 employees

➢ RAVI KOKA, Head of Insurance Products Polaris Software Labs Inc. Company Vertical: Management Consulting Company Size: 51-200 employees

➢ PHANENDRA BABU GARIMELLA, VP of Engineering, Aurea Software Company Vertical: Computer Software Company Size: 201-500 employees

➢ KARTHIK SUNDARAM, President & CEO, Purplepatch Services LLC Company Vertical: Marketing and Advertising Company Size: 11-50 employees

➢ MARK A. BUNCH, AVP and Enterprise Architect, Great American Insurance Group Company Vertical: Insurance. Company Size: 1001-5000 employees

We will soon be sharing another list of Innovators who will be participating at InTech50

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Next 20 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India

After announcing the first 20 companies, we are pleased to announce the next 20 finalists for InTech50 – Most Innovative Products from India.

Picking just 50 finalists from over two hundred wonderful products was one of the most challenging jobs for our iSPIRT panel of selectors this year. We have been narrowing and narrowing the choice until we got down to 50 great products.  

Although selecting 50 was really daunting, yet it was greatly satisfying to appreciate so many innovative products from young and innovative startups. The names of the next 20 finalists (in alphabetical order) are:

  • a-mantra is a web based integrated facility management software that is developed in a modular architecture by Satnav Technologies. Asset Management controls the assets and its location. Fixed assets, IT assets and consumable assets can be managed using asset management.
  • Aujas Networks: Digital technology makes informative content easier to find, access, manipulate and remix, and to disseminate. Aujas’ Secure Digital Content Solution helps companies prevent unauthorized usage of digital content.
  • BrandIdea Enterprise Market Analytics™ is a SaaS-based, self-service, Business Intelligence enterprise tool for the FMCG vertical, aimed at the business user. It is powered with in-built granular information on Demographics, Income, Economic, Category and Micro data. It overlays the Client’s internal data to drive insights across – Market Potential, Media, Distribution & Sales for any geographical area in India.
  • Capillary Technologies’ suite of Intelligent Customer Engagement™ solutions enables businesses to capture and analyze data on customer behavior and shopping preferences through digital and mobile channels. Capillary’s customer engagement solutions enable merchants to provide real-time personalized recommendations to shoppers and allow merchants to offer relevant promotions across any channel of choice.
  • CloudByte offers solutions built for cloud and virtualized environments. CloudByteElastiStorTM is a full-featured storage software product that provides dynamically selectable performance to each application or tenant by continuously monitoring and adjusting key storage performance characteristics including IOPS, throughput, and latency.
  • The Ezetap solution is an end-to-end service that includes a mobile card-reader, a configurable mobile application and a flexible platform that allows Ezetap or any third party to build and turn on value-added services that are tightly integrated to its core payment service.
  • Hoverr.me is a native advertising platform that leverages eyeballs over celebrity photographs in the content publisher websites and redirect it to the E-commerce stores. The computer vision technology fetches similar looking clothes from e-commerce stores and provides it when someone hovers over the celebrity image and encourages instant buy option.
  • iViZ is the first company in the world to take ethical hacking to the cloud. iViZ has built a unique Artificial Intelligence based technology to simulate a human hacker which shows all the permutations and combinations of possible attacks and defenses against a hacker. The technology has already received a patent in USPTO and multiple other patents are under review.
  • LocoBuzz is an award winning Social Media Analytics and engagement platform, which offers unparalleled workflows along with insightful visualization of the digital chatter. LocoBuzz is a tool for brand reputation management, Lead Generation Analytics and Infographics.
  • Nanobi Analytics is a next generation analytics platform built with a highly scalable cloud based architecture. The nanobi analytics platform enables end-to-end capabilities for delivering analytics starting from push/pull data through a variety of interfaces, through to quick/instant data visualization. Its REST architecture enables a seamless API based connect to any other cloud platform or data source, for easy integration and data interface.
  • Ozonetel Systems: CloudAgent is India’s first Multi-Channel Cloud Contact Center which enables SMEs to set up their sales/support agents on a plug & play basis. It is a browser based system which operates on PSTN Cloud and calls for zero hardware and software installation at agent side.
  • ShieldSquare: For online business (classifieds,news/content portals, Ecommerce/marketplaces, Travel Sites), scraping of content by un-authorized bots is becoming a major concern that is affecting the competitiveness of the business. ShieldSquare uses big data analytics to block bots/scrapers in real-time there by increasing the traffic, revenues of the online business as well as cut costs in terms of infrastructure, resources.
  • Stelae Technologies: It offers content transformation software, creating structured, indexed, searchable and enriched output from unstructured content in multiple formats like PDF, ASCII, Word, HTML etc. This enables customers to re-utilize the information on multiple supports like print, web, hand-held devices etc. and store in easy to retrieve archives and make it readily available to their users, cost effectively and rapidly.
  • Pawaa has built a technology platform that secures files and documents. The technology can be seamlessly integrated with any application or use case and allows exchange of files securely. The platform is unique as it overcomes the limitations of encryption on enterprise, mobile and cloud.
  • Qubole Data Service (QDS) provides a Big Data Platform in the AWS and GCE clouds. Our award-winning cloud-optimized and auto-scaling Hadoop technology allows customers to run Hadoop in a cost-effective manner in the Cloud. Its user Interface make it simple for data analysts to use big data technologies like Hive, Pig and Sqoop, Presto and Oozie to integrate and analyze data from a variety of sources.
  • Thinkflow Software: Available on-cloud and on-premise, Thinkflow apps platform is helping enterprise app developers build business applications faster. The platform has modules to create process flows, create alerts, configure business rules, design forms, digitize documents and an inbuilt module for business process analytics.
  • Thinxtream: It offers PrintJinni – Consumer Printing Apps on iOS, Android, RIM platforms offering great quality, accuracy, wireless printing to any vendor’s printer. It also supports email, photos, PDF files, Microsoft® Office docs, Webpages and more. It is available in all major languages worldwide.
  • TouchMagix: MotionMagix™ Interactive wall/floor, a gesture based tracking technology lends any wall or floor the qualities of motion-sensing. The vibrant and customizable high resolution content responds to the consumer movements and encourages further interaction. A wall/floor projected advertisement/game can react as and when customers approach the zone.
  • Unmetric: Its product offers the ability to collect, interpret and take action on information – regardless of business field. Its offering are focused on providing social media teams. This provides the ability to understand and distill insights from competitive and complementary brands that are active on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc.
  • VoxApp is a mobile survey product used by brands and research companies to get consumer feedback and on-ground market information in real time. In India, of the data collected for brand tracking, retail audits, stock/sales tracking, the bulk are executed on paper/ laptops with issues of data quality and turnaround time that are solved by using VoxApp’s mobile data collection platform.

About InTech:  InTech50, a joint initiative by iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network that recognizes most promising software products by India’s entrepreneurs.

The elected products that represent inspirational and pioneering concepts in software will be showcased at InTech50, a two-day event to be held at Bangalore from April 9 -10, 2014, where global CIOs and transformation leaders will be present.

(Check out the First 20 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India. Stay tuned for the last 10 companies which we plan to announce shortly.)

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Second 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India

InTech50, a joint initiative by iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network, that recognizes most promising software products by India’s entrepreneurs, is pleased to confirm the Second set of 10 selected products from over 200 nominations. Check out the First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products.

InTech50 logoThe elected products that represent inspirational and pioneering concepts in software will be showcased at InTech50 , a two-day event to be held at Bangalore from April 9 -10, 2014, where global CIOs and transformation leaders will be present. 

How we picked out the Top 10 showcase products:

It is quite an honor to be in the InTech50  considering there was an overwhelming response for product nominations.

An esteemed panel of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), venture capitalists, and product leaders from previous successes have evaluated the nominated products.

The products have been selected based on their capabilities and uniqueness, while having the potential to transform the world around us.

The Second 10 finalists for InTech50 2014 Most Innovative Products (in alphabetical order) are:

  1. Contify is a Web Intelligence application for enterprise and teams. The product mines virtually all relevant online sources for information and converts it into easily accessible qualitative and quantitative insights on customers, competitors, and markets.
  2. i7 Networks is a 100% Agentless-way (ZERO-Touch) of detecting all personal devices, secure quadrupled fingerprinting (US patent-pending) of devices and apps etc. and provides network behavioural analysis. It then denies access to infected and compromised personal devices connecting to the network.
  3. KiSSFLOW is business process automation software that is deeply integrated with Google Apps environment. KiSSFLOW is the #1 app in the Google Marketplace in its category and has more than 5000 organizations and active users spread across 120 countries.
  4. Kreeo is a “Collective Intelligence & Unification Platform” for Companies which addresses three important aspects of effective information/knowledge management – Expression, Organization and Discovery (EOD). It provides a unified platform where information is shared/aggregated in various contexts and is intelligently organized around various concepts of relevance.
  5. MindTickle is a cloud based learning platform which enables businesses to create, deliver, manage and track online courses. It is easy to create courses on MindTickle by uploading or embedding existing content (videos, PPTs, PDFs, quizzes, etc.).
  6. RazorFlow Dashboard Framework helps you build interactive dashboards in HTML5 that work well on all modern devices. You can configure components of the dashboard using an intuitive API, which will intelligently render the dashboard according to the capabilities and form-factor of your user’s device.
  7. RippleHire is a technology product that gamifies employee referrals and enables social recruiting. By empowering the most effective way you hire (Employee Referrals), it reduces your hiring cost and effort and unlocks the multiplier in your employee social networks.
  8. Sapience is an innovative, patent-pending software solution that delivers over 20% increase in Work Output, from the existing team. Sapience achieves this through Automated Work Visibility, without requiring any change in process or extra management effort.
  9. SignEasy is a simple and convenient app for businesses and professionals to sign and fill documents from smart phones and tablets. You do not need a printer, scanner or fax machine. SignEasy is currently available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry.
  10. Seclore FileSecure is an Information Rights Management (IRM) solution which allows unstructured information (documents, emails, drawings, images,) to be remote controlled. It is possible to share information but have control: WHO can access the information, WHAT can each person do and WHEN does each person use the information.

Check out the First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products. Stay tuned for the remaining 30 companies which we plan to announce in the next few days.