Proto.in July 2009 was Good!
July 26th, 2009
Hey Guys,
I attended Proto.in yesterday. One of the biggest changes that happened at this event was that, it became a one day event rather than the usual two day event. Of all the sessions that happened, keynote talk by Mr. Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Zensar and the “Angels can help you fly!” discussion from Mumbai Angels were very good.
The Event
This time, there were 15 products from a variety of areas including but not limited to Education, Internet and Mobile, Software etc. I liked the presentations from the companies namely English Seeko (a dial-in solution by phone to learn spoken English). Even though their demo was good, they would have lot of challenges with speech recognition. Then I liked the Credit Card Reconciliation System from Aerosoft. It was a very well put together presentation and I immediately understood their product’s validity from their presentation.
There was two presentations that did blow the audience away. One was from TouchMagix about their Microsoft-Surface-like product. Other was this launch of custom made bikes by Vardenchi Motorcycles in the range of Rs. 2.8 lakhs to Rs. 10 lakhs. They are already profitable and they brought 2 of their custom made bikes to the Proto.in stage to showcase them to the audience. They looked beautiful. When funds allow, I will surely design & get my own bike from them.
There was another company with the name GoVasool. Their presentation reminded me of the product named SpotEazy that presented during the first Proto.in in 2007. I couldn’t get their concept of why vendors would compete with each other to give a lower price for a select group of people. And then there was Vrixx (pronounced as vri-ksh), a end-to-end college management product, based on the all prevalent SaaS model.
Mumbai Angels
Near the end of the event, Mumbai Angels announced that they would pick two startups from the lot and give them the opportunity to present to the angels at their offices for funding. They picked Vrixx and TouchMagix. Congrats guys! It seems ConWizta (content management and testing application) missed that by a narrow margin.
Links
It was a good way to spend the weekend and this event is making me feel guilty every time because I haven’t started up yet.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Hey Hi,
Nice Coverup of Event…
Please upload snaps as well if you have.
_
Murli
July 28th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I thought u will write about the behind screens happening at PROTO and our ride back home ! Duh !
July 31st, 2009 at 11:03 am
@Syed: Don’t remind me of the ride back home! What was supposed to be a 1.5 hour flight became an overnight journey 🙂
July 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
hi aswin,
The touchmagix seems to be interesting.. I have been following the proto.in from some time now And i dont that in india you get to have a startup working on some core technology. Its 90% of is just a web based startup. But arent we tired of it. I think we need to have a hard core technology startup instead say some thing like slokatelecom which was a very good tech startup just got acquired by mahindra telecom. I think thats the way the startups should be…
-R
July 31st, 2009 at 11:02 am
Hey Ranga, I second you on your opinion. But there’s something. Starting up isn’t easy & am happy that more and more are coming out of their shells and trying their hand at starting up.