Pranav Bhasin

Believe it or not, this is Bangalore and this apartment complex has been built and maintained by Larsen and Toubro. Thanks to Abhishek, I took this shot last week when I visited my friend Xp’s home there. The light was very low so I shot this at ISO 1600 ( which is the max my Canon 1000D supports ) which is the reason for some noise in the photo.

View all the photos from this shoot

Learn how to shoot photos like these

This week, I was invited by VC Circle to be a part of the panel discussion on “Bengaluru’s Ver 2.0 Technology Story” in the VC Circle BengaluruInvestment Forum.

The discussion was themed around how the technology story of companies in Bangalore is in a next generation transition and was ably chaired by Jessie Paul. Other eminent members in the panel were Sanjay Nayak of Tejas Networks, Sean Blagsvedt of Babajob, Manohar Atreya of o3 Capital and Sunil Maheshwari of Mango Technologies.

The discussion started with Jessie doing a recap on the formation of software services industry in India as a result of globalization and posing a few questions to the panelists.

Sanjay, who has raised 5 rounds of private financing till now added that companies in the west are more focussed on marketing and adoption of products whereas companies in India are more focussed on building great technology. He emphasized that technology does not build great companies, great marketing does. He also stressed the need of participation by the government to help take the sector to the next level and push India into the reckoning as the hub for software products.

Sean emphasized on the fact that while the services industry was timely and was responsible for creation of a lot of jobs in the market, it has not done anything for the masses. Until we setup an infrastructure where it is easier for entrepreneurs to come in and create companies out of India, we cannot move to the next level. He also stressed that the current venture funding setup seems to work in the west but may not be suitable for India where a lot of companies can benefit from a small amount of capital vs a few companies benefiting from a large amount of capital.

Sunil added that companies that do not wait for the next game changing opportunity to become obvious and drive change will be the ones that will be successful. He cited the example of iPhone which was conceptualized by Apple with zero experience in mobile device area – the product has been extensively copied by competitors but no one has been able to dislodge Apple from the slot it has occupied.

Manohar gave his perspective on the venture business where he said that venture funds are in the game to make money and hence they remain extremely choosy about their investments. He also pointed to the fact that venture industry in US started in early 70s whereas the one in India started in 90s – as a result, the industry is still in its learning phase and will take some time to mature. He advised entrepreneurs to be patient, persistent and remain passionate about the idea and be prepared to slog it out for a year and a half to receive capital for their venture.

For my part, I added that to build a successful business, you need to have a combination of Market + Idea + Capital. With the mobile phone market exploding in the past few years, this creates a lot of users and plenty of opportunity for new business to use it as a channel to enable their services. In 2000, a similar proliferation of web services led to the dot com bubble, but the market seems to have learnt from it and the investment in mobile companies, though growing at an encouraging pace is not yet showing the signs of a bubble.

The salient points from the discussion were summarized by Jessie and followed up with questions from the audience. Overall, it was great connecting with the fellow panelists and I had a good time in the panel and overall at the VC Circle conference.

Continued from the previous article here.

The second meetup was a panel on “Building social platforms for social activists” involving Jasmine Shah (@jasmine441) and Parul Gupta (@NGOPost) moderated by Gaurav Mishra ( @gauravonomics ). After a quick introduction by Keerthikiran (@keerthikiran), there was a passionate discussion between the panelists with references to how they use social media for their respective causes.

Here are some bullet points from the discussion:

• NGOPost membership jumped from 1k to 25k when they got a Google Grant for free Adwords ads
• Jasmine explained Janaagraha’s REED framework for improving urban quality of life
• Social activism platforms like NGOPost and Janaagraha can bring about much needed change wthn our country
• Why create a social platform when you can use Facebook or Twitter? Because each community has a unique soul
• How important is local language for a social platform built for social change? It’s important but not easy
• Janaagraha will build the critical mass of people who any cause can leverage
• We see google translate is a great way to localize content
• The internet is global. Why limit a platform to a country (like ngopost) or even a city (like janaagraha)? Web platforms need to build offline volunteer networks & real instituions to really bring about real change
• How important is it for corporates to support social causes? How can social platforms be designed to encourage this?
• How can social organizations shift the discussion from problems to solutions?
• How can social organizations use the internet to engage older citizens & not only the youth?
• Do overlapping web-based social initiatives dilute activism, instead of promoting it?
• Overlapping mediums if coupled well, will actually generate more buzz. at the same time, one should have a hub
• How do you use social platforms to bridge the gap b/w talk & action?

Here are a few photos from this meetup ( all pics here ):

Its been some time since I reported an event on my blog, so I thought why not start with this weekend’s Social Media Club Bangalore meetup.

The Social Media Club Bangalore was started around 2 weeks back when Vijay ( @amnigos ), Hrish ( @dhempe ), Freeman ( @freemanindia ), myself ( @amnigos ) and a few others met up at Jaaga and shared our coordinates and learnt more about each other. This week, Gaurav Mishra ( @gauravonomics ) was in town, so SMC Bangalore got a double boost and hosted two back to back social meetups.

The first meetup was a panel on “Indian web 2.0 startups targeting the global market” involving myself ( @pranavbhasin ) and Vijay ( @amnigos ), morderated by Kaushal ( @ksarda ). There was a good crowd turnout with the discussion and queries delving into very practical areas of using social media to promote a startup. Some of the bullet points from the discussion are ( in no particular order ):

• Social media is about conversations, not conversions
• Have tangible and measurable goals for your social media campaign, but do not link them directly to user acquisition
• It is possible to get trial enterprise users via email marketing, but difficult to convert them
• Indian audience behave differently than global counterparts online in giving feedback – Indians only give feedback when there is a problem whereas global audience will give feedback when they like something too
• Indian startups targeting the global market well: Zoho, Deskaway, FusionChart, Dimdim
• Indian users will pay for a physical product but will not pay for a subscription
• If you plan to start up, focus on revenues from day 1 – not every company can scale to the size of a facebook
• Tips for startups: launch quickly, test multiple designs, ask users for feedback, iterate endlessly, build in virality
• Brands should use the social media effectively. They should not spam users based on certain keywords
• Agencies need success stories from multiple markets before they recommend a new social platform to clients
• The only way for a social platform to grow cost effectively is through invites from present users
• Non-users always give positive feedback
• Figuring out a revenue model is more important than acquiring users
• Mentions on big tech blogs only result in temporary traffic peaks, not long-term users

Here are a few photos from this meetup ( all pics here ):

See all my photos on my lifeblob photo sharing and discovery page.

See all the photos on my lifeblob photo sharing and discovery page.

This is the time for technology events in Bangalore. The latest one that I heard of is the Forum Nokia Developer Conference 2009 that is happening on Dec 7, in Bangalore at Hotel Taj Residency.

This year’s event promises to be very special with live demos, real-life mobile application stars who ‘wowed’ the world with their mobile applications to win fame and fortune, and much more. Also, explore how Nokia’s new Ovi Store ensures developers have easy access to publish applications and content to millions of Nokia devices through a unified publishing channel.

Get to know the dynamic technology platforms for creating truly compelling user experiences. Get to learn new skills, new connections, and new ideas to create tomorrow’s technologies. You can find more details at http://bit.ly/FNDC09 .

And last but not the lest, there is a Nokia N97 up for grabs too. So check it out!

Guy Kawasaki is in Bangalore and yesterday I had the opportunity to meet him in the tweetup at Nasscom Product Conclave.  He is a very friendly person and went into great detail on the strategy he uses to market AllTop over twitter.

Now, I have great respect for him as a person and as a thought leader, but there are some things that I did not like about his talk.

But before that, here are the things that I liked:

a) Insight on into how automating your tweets can save you a lot of time and effort.
b) Stats on how tweeting the same post at different times of the day can almost double your hits.
c) Emphasis on the basic twitter principle – provide value to your followers.

Things that I would have loved to hear in the talk:

a) How to build a complete marketing strategy around twitter and other social media tools?
b) How to measure the return on investment – even though twitter is free, you spend time on it and that costs money?
c) How does twitter compare with other online marketing media in terms of value for your investment?
d) How long does it take for your twitter activity to start bearing fruit?

Things that I did not like about his talk:

a) Too much self-promotion – alltop and tweetmeme appeared over hundred times in the talk.
b) The proposed strategy of using alltop content to generate tweets seems like self-fulfilling prophecy. Makes me think if the real purpose of the talk was to talk about twitter or to make everyone in the room build alltop pages.
c) His strategy would work for twitter users like him that have a very high following ( because they are a celeb, role model etc ) but what about tweeters who have not acquired that status yet?
d) His strategy is synonymous to twitter spam – I believe that sooner or later, filtering systems will be built on twitter to filter out spam and that will be the end of this strategy.

What is your opinion of the talk? Do you agree with my assessment here – do let me know! BTW, here are some shots that I took during the tweetup:

Find all the Guy Kawasaki NASSCOM photos here!

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?