Proto.in: inside story
By Sumeet Singh

This post comes a fortnight after the end of Proto.in and this is primarily because all the other aspects of Proto.in have been written up by now.  And in true TechGoss fashion, we can now give you an accurate lowdown on the event. Proto.in is a pioneering technology start-up event in India. It is generally hosted by this guy called Vijay Anand who is brimming with passion with respect to startups. His goal is to build a lively thriving startup community in India.  And he is succeeding in spades.

Proto generally lasts for 2 days. The 1st day is where the organizers have sessions by industry movers and shakers. Generally these sessions are extremely interesting. I have been around for 3 editions and frankly this one (maybe it was the Delhi heat and the non existent air conditioning at the venue of IIT Delhi) was the worst in terms of content. But it was great fun nevertheless, as Proto always is.

Mahesh Murthy from Pinstorm, a Search Engine Marketing Company, spoke on ‘Marketing a StartUp’, and if anyone has heard Mahesh speak before it was the standard fare.  But Mahesh grabbed everyone’s attention when he said:  “when you are starting up, don’t hire from the IITs.  A graduate from IIT is almost always extremely full of himself because of the stupendous pay package he or she is being offered and that’s not the kind of attitude you want”.  He soon realized that this Proto was being held in IIT Delhi.  The audience has the same realization, but it struck a chord with them and they burst out laughing.   Techgoss loves such honest people.

There was a more mature gentleman (as compared to the median age group at Proto) from some advertising company, who spoke about ‘Branding Start – Ups’.  While he was earnest and well intentioned, it was clear that the kiddies knew more about technology than many of his generation.  And a few knew more branding as well.

I also noticed the absence of women at Proto.  Are women not tuned to the startup culture? I could count only 5 women present at Proto. And apparently there were close to a 1000 people present.

There were 2 hosts at this edition’s Proto.in and one of them was a woman (Divya, pictured in this article).  So, I think the organizers tried their best to balance the skewed ratio. But alas that was not to be.

I wonder why no woman writes about this and takes it up as an issue.

Apart from that, the other sessions were quite bland. Not spicy enough for gossip. Nothing much for a techgoss audience.

The 2nd day of Proto is what most people look forward to. They like to get a preview of the startups that are getting ready to take the world by storm.

But before I go on to covering Day 2, I must let you know about the gossip from preparation day for the startups.  Most of them were excited like school children at a candy shop and were constantly nudging the organisers to change their presenting order.  They kept pestering the hosts for changes to the order, which resulted in a few organizers getting a bit miffed.

Day two was upon us.  Details of some of the more gossworthy startups.

Picture recognition by Picporta:  Picporta is a social network and they own a technology that can recognize faces and then automatically tag pictures associated with the face.

So think about it this way.  Once the machine recognizes that the face is ‘you’ - then all your pictures on Orkut/ Facebook/ Flickr can be automatically tagged using this technology. Interesting and innovative.  There are a couple US Based startups working on the same. One example is Ria's Like.com, but Picporta is more advanced. There is also Polar Rose, again PicPorta beats them hollow. A young humble team from Ahmedabad is taking the world by storm.

They plan to integrate technology that can recognize faces in videos and also have a Desktop application. The drawback is that the system needs to be ‘trained’ often in the first few steps.  The goss is that PicPorta is wasting it's time by building a social community. They should just focus on the technology and get acquired by Flickr/Facebook/ Google. 

I sort of agree!

The Hiring Tool: Tries to be different from a Job Board. So when Naukri sells the Job, they sell a database. So volumes are great. The Hiring Tool tries to get consultants on board. They pay consultants and effectively add a stakeholder to the value chain. So it’s the consultant’s job to bring users into the employer-employee ecosystem.

Makes job finding more personalized but it comes at a higher price and volumes are dependant on human beings. So if the consultants are inactive, the service dies.

They are trying to innovate a little with respect to the Job Site market, but the market is overly saturated.  The Goss is that they are not overtly impressive.

(The Hiring Tool nudged the organisers for changes in slots a little too much.  And they are only a month and a half old.   A little too raw to understand how Proto should work)

LifeBlob:  LifeBlob is a social network who is saying they have a supposedly different approach to social networking. Saturation anyone? Have they heard of Facebook? Or Orkut?

So, on the LifeBlob platform, there are tags associated with events and places and once a tag is placed to an event it goes on to a timeline.  With this you can view the proto timeline or a timeline for the freedom struggle or a timeline for the city of Delhi. That can have privacy issues. But yes, it can be used as a handy tool for education.

I wouldn’t migrate from my existing social network for this. But go ahead, give it a try. This is a young team from Bangalore trying to make a mark. And deserve our support.

The Goss is that Lifeblob is a copy of Nokia’s LifeBlog in terms of functionality and interface.

Blink: Superb product. It’s impressive. It’s intuitive. It’s a winner. Blink was easily the best demo at Proto.in.

They brought in a shopping cart which had a touch screen based smart computer mounted on it. Within that computer, a consumer can browse the entire supermarket, shop without moving, get offers as he moves across aisles (because of sensors attached throughout the shopping environment) and they can add a to do list on the computer. The interface is much like the iPhone, at least that the first impression and that’s cool.
 
The goss is that they already have a large national retailer in the loop.

The price of these carts may be a hurdle.  At around Rs. 20,000 it could be a deterrent.

Ferox Foods:  They were a non-tech company and going to make Makhana Flakes and Pop Corn. Makhana apparently has more protein than eggs, fish and chicken.  They have just developed the product.

Why am I writing about them?  Because when they were displaying their product, Makhana Flakes, someone asked them:  “is that supposed to be edible?” as the product was visually challenging.  Some would say ugly.  The presenters piped up: “not yet”.  This had the audience let out a sigh of relief and burst out laughing.

Bhism Narayan Singh of Makhana Flakes also got the audience laughing when he said that “after seeing the complex technologies everyone must be hungry so let’s talk about food.”

Take a look at the other companies that presented at Proto.in at this link

Techgoss note: After the 1st day of Proto.in, Medinama, an increasingly popular Digital Media Blog, hosted its launch which included a discussion as well as a meet, greet and network

The Goss is that Nikhil Pahwa, Medianama’s Editor (former editor of ContentSutra) deliberately decided to host the Medianama launch during Proto because most people from all over the country affiliated with India’s Internet Community would be in Delhi for Proto anyway. That’s a smart way to kill two birds with one stone.

Seems like some of the organisers of Proto were a little upset about this. But no love was lost anyway. None of the Proto organisers made it to the event though.

But some Proto delegates went. And so Proto Day 1 was dry possibly due to the audience making a beeline for the Medianama’s event. 

Medianama’s event itself was a resounding success. The discussion had a panel of respected names like of Mahendra Swarup, Chief Mentor of Smile Interactive, Murugavel Janakiraman, CEO of Consim Info (Bharatmatrimony Group), Sanjeev Bikhchandani, MD of Info Edge (India) and Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-Founder of WebChutney.