Here we are; the last day of HeadStart 2008. The morning session started with key note presentation by Dr Peter Hofstee, Chief Scientist, IBM Research at Almaden Research Center, USA on Cell Broadband Engine.

Srini Vudayagiri – LightSpeed VenturePartners

• The largest Venture Capital is Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) with $1.2 Trillion in portfolio
• Create a value for Stakeholders is the key in Entrepreneurship

• Screening Ideas: 5 Questions
  • What important customer problem can you solve?
  • How are you going to do it?
  • How many customers are there that are willing to buy from you?
  • Why can only you provide the solution?
  • How can you defent against others?
• Identify stakeholders – Who are they?
  • Do i want to become famous or do I want to be rich?
• Identify Consumers
  • Consumers for Mobile space today in India are majorly in ABCD (Aaya, Bhai, Carpenter & Driver) consumer segment.
• Funding Partner
  • Startup costs
  • Marginal costs
• Capital / Financial Markets
  • M&A options for growth
  • Exists
  • Scarcity value: education/retail
  • Liquidity – local/global
• How many Digital Signage companies got funded in India in last 5 Yrs? – 6 Companies
• Employees
  • Talent Pool / quantity
  • Perceived positioning of sector
  • Compensation
• Regulators
• Analysis of Business Ideas
  • Truly new, novel and innovative ideas < 3%-4%
  • Rest 96% are Enhancement to existing ideas
• Few thoughts of Srini
  • Most businesses fail in les than 2 years
  • Less than 1% of the business plans submitted to VCs get funded
  • Failures are PLANNED by lack of planning
  • VC funding does not mean me the business is path breaking/disruptive.

You can write to Srini with any questions/project proposals – srini {AT} lightspeedvp {dot} com

Startup Funding – Ganapathy Subramaniam, myDuniya

• Entrepreneurship
  • Possessed by a Grand Vision
  • Market driven approaches
    • Products for a upcoming market
    • New ways of addressing an existing market innovative delivery
  • Capability Driven approach
    • Build a compelling busines model
• Funding sources
  • Seed Investors (Friends, Family, Angel Networks, Early Stage VCs , Corporates, Incubators, Customer, Partners)
  • Venture Capitalists
  • Special funding programs (TDB etc)
• An important aspect of checking your business plan is going to Seed Investors.
• VCs Checklist
  • Vision Congruence
  • Large and growing opportunity?
  • Tam fully committed to the cause?
  • Experience relevant and sufficient?
  • Can the business model be validated?
  • Is it scalable and defensible?
  • Are the risks acceptable?
  • How can the risks be mitigated / eliminated?
• VC Interaction Challenges
  • Small no. of deals get transacted per partner/firm/industry
  • Getting to reach/deserved attention is tough
    • Art of getting introduced
    • Elevator pitch
  • Research/Reference/Focus
  • Selling the idea to the partner/firm
• VC Engagement Cycle
  • 3-9 Months for fund raising
  • No/interesting in a week
  • Multiple intensive interactions
  • Progress to Term sheet in 4-10 weeks
  • Closing in addition

• Valuation
  • Rule of thumb/comparables
  • Competition/market factors drives prices
  • Serial entrepreneurs get a healthy premium
  • Alighment of interest and balance of motivation
  • Valuation + Conditions!

With this, the morning session concluded. Its lunch time. In thepost-lunch session, we have Product Management by Deepak Srinivasan and Cost based funding & culture in startup’s by Ashwin Mahesh. So, stay tuned.

Afternoon session of HeadStart kicked off with Embedded & Silicon systems segment presentations / demo’s and concluded with a fantastic panel discussion for which Dr S Ramesh of General Motors, Giri Krishna of Texas Instruments, Ganapathy Subramaniam of Cosmic Circuits and Devesh Garg of Bessemer Venture Partners providing key insights into technology and VC presence in this segment.

Vayavya Labs – Device Driver Generating Tool

Developing the world’s first automated device driver generator too.

Benefits of DDGen

• Productivity enhancement tool, designers to move higher abstraction levels
• Enforces right framework for development
• Lowers customer support costs
• Practice true re-use
• Specification to aid silicon verification and device and system modeling

BioEnable
Developing products & services based on TCP/IP, Internet, Biometrics, RFID, GPRS, GPS, RF Wireless.

iWave
iWave specializes in providing turnkey embedded hardware and software design services and design solution.

Mango Technologies
The Mango Advantage:

• Reduced time-to-market: Handset software is ready within 3 months as compared to 6 to 9 months- Mango Application Framework comes with a designer tool, a phone simulator and test interface. With these tools more than 80% of the UI development and app integration can be done on the PC.
• Customized UI for different segments of users- New UI experiences for the end consumer with distinctive usability aspect in the UI/application design
• Customized apps for ULC market requirement- Provides distinctive features and applications for a market segment and facilitate quick construction of mobile handset software. (E.g. very lightweight download client, mobile payment, SIP stack etc.)
• Component based open and extensible architecture-A shift from the traditional, linear and layered architecture, this facilitates easy addition, removal and modification of parts of features and third party applications. Smart integration with new applications
• Low cost solution for price sensitive market
• OTA downloadable native Applications and themes- A feature that excites users and operators alike.
• Low memory footprint-which is very critical in entry-level devices.
• Portability across hardware platforms- With the protocol stack and OS interfaces abstracted into and restricted to one layer designed on POSIX standards to make it generic.
• High Scalability in architecture and thru Linux binding for quick OSS app integration.
• Rich Toolset

PS: I am no authority on Embedded not do I posses enough knowledge to comment on this subject. So, reproduced what the presenters spoke and also referred to their websites for more information.

Day 3 of HeadStart will be very exciting. We begin the day with Identifying and validating business opportunities keynote session by Srini Vudayagiri. So, tune in without fail.

Also, there are 100 free passes to give away for this session. Write to sbhagavatula [AT] gmail [dot] com

Day 2 at HeadStart started off with a bang. The inaugural key note presentation was given by Ram Shriram of Sherpalo and he had many things to share. Key summary of the presentation is that Mobile and Web Applications are going to be the future of Technology.

I am here at the venue trying to live blog to share my experiences here. So, if the writings are a bit raw, you will need to bare with it 🙂

Sonim – The all weather phone

As part of technology presentations, Sonim demonstrated their all weather phone technology.

• Key aspect of the phone is that it works from -50 Degrees to +50 Degrees weather (Snow, Desert, Sea etc)
• 500,000 key press guarantee and 200,000 PTT press guarantee.
• Target customers are Hospitals, Factory, Police etc.

They are looking for Innovating Entrepreneurs who can build applications for their phone.

Q: Do you use a high level OS/how can u support third-party applications?

A: Our next gen phone will help solve this problem

Q: Do you support OTA?

A: Yes

Q: Are your applications only for your phone or for other phones?

A: Our applications run on Windows Device and NXP. We are concentrating on Windows Mobile.

Q: What is the exact OS this phone works on?

A: Philips NXP

Digital Wireless

A technology innovation and licensing company focused on enhancing the usability of hand held devices.

• India is a very interesting market for us for the variety and complexity it has in its dialects.
• Our usability research indicates that end users spend up to 10 minutes looking for certain letters.
• At time one needs to press the same key 12 times to print a single alphabet.
• Fastap – One Keypad, Two levels of functionality
• Provides two levels of key pad for easier handling

Q: Have u targeted countries like Russia?

A: Yes, in Ukrain

Q: Did you do any statistical analysis for your product?

A: Yes.

mobisy

Mobile + Easy = mobisy

• Facebook on mobile browser
• Share pictures
• Facebook on MobiTop – Will help you synchronize with your facebook contacts
• What else we can do? Access to native Handset Data and functionality and offline mode
• Key Features – Easy development in AJAX, Deployment over internet, Mash-up of mobile device access and Internet and provides offline access.

Q: Is MobiTop platform independent?

A: Yes and No. People can develop applicatios for MobiTop using Java Script

Sloka

• Working on WiMax applications and services
• 3.4 GHz is licensed for India and we cover this region
• We wanted to change the way networks are deployed
• We could get to 50% of our goals

tringme

• Widgets which can help you stay connected always.
• From the widget on the profile page, you can call the person on the device to which he/she has configured.

I am really impressed with this application. Am definitely going to signup 🙂

Panel Discussion

Rajesh Srivatsa – Ojus Startup Ventures

Muralikrishna – Sasken Communications

Jagannath Rao – Motorola

Alok Mittal – Cannan Partners

Viswanath Ganapathy – HoneyWell

Karthee – QualCom Capital Funds

Rajesh Srivatsa – rajesh[at]ojusventures[dot]com

• What we have seen in the last 3 years is around $4 Billion investments into telecom space.
• 158 companies taking less than $10 Million in 2007
• In 2007 there were 9 investments
• Shift in focus to carrier class consumer applications
• Popular sub sectors – Mobile VoIP, Mobile Social Networking, Mobile Content Sharing, Mobile Banking, Idle Screen Advertisements, Location based Application and Anti-Spam
• Understand the ecosystem and trend in your business arena.

Muralikrishna

• Personal opinions on how the industry changed – Going digital improved the industry, SMS – made the phone multi-functional.

Jagannatha Rao

• When another 10 people out of 100 have mobile phone GDP goes up by 0.6%
• Challenge – Creating a general purpose hand held
• Infrastructure – Cost, Geography coverage and energy
• Build it for India and take it to the world next 🙂

Alok Mittal

• Mobile phone is exciting in India. 400,000 users and growing by 200,000 every year.
• Range of opportunities are limited and this is exciting.
• Mobile phone as a lot of potential as media.

Viswanath Gapanathy

• Provided an overview of 802.XX standards
• Mobility in WiFi – Moving Client, Load Balancing.

Karthee

• We have invested in60 companies in last 10 Years.
• Four categories of investment – Application development, Gaming, Payments, Mobility

HeadStart 2008 started with a bang this morning at the JN Tata Auditorium, IISc Campus, Bangalore. Registrations began early at 8 AM and are still continuing as I write this post (10:30 AM IST). There are many technology enthusiasts who are here and also the media is covering the complete event. There are quite a few Live Bloggers too 🙂

More to follow, keep an eye….