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If you think it is hard to be an entrepreneur, you should try bootstrapping

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I met with 2 entrepreneurs from the Microsoft Accelerator last week for lunch. Both are among the nicest people I know.

The first entrepreneur used to have a really easy job at a large technology company. He had a 9-5 assignment and as comfortable a life as you can imagine. Great pay, good work-life balance, and a family that was very happy and content. A year ago he decided to leave and start his own company. He asked his spouse and a close friend to join him as well. They are among the best developers, architects and engineers I have worked with given how diligent, thoughtful and industrious they are.

The first 4 months were spent trying to better identify the problem they were solving, which is one of those that’s really easy to explain, but hard to pinpoint. Meaning, the problem when articulated, was one of those which has everyone go “Yeah, that is a problem”, but when you dig deeper after 30 min, there were many workarounds that people had already figured out.

They struggled and pivoted, changed course, modified their release plan and kept brainstorming, talking to each other, seeking advice from many people and finally released an absolute dud of a alpha version. I used it and I am not sure what it did.

They changed course again. Over the next 6 months, they hunkered down, painfully pivoted and modified their goal posts again. Released a beta version, which most people went “huh?”.

I personally know that even if they did not succeed, they were so good that they’d get a job at any large tech company in a matter of a month. They were that good.

I was happy that they persisted though and secretly hoping they release a product that everyone of their critics would go “Oh wow. Like wow. Really”.

They left the accelerator a few months ago. The last 3 months had been the most painful he said. He had so many fights with his wife, his father, his co founders, family and many sleepless nights, that he was extremely tired and at the point of giving up.

The team stuck through the lows and kept trying to find a way to solve the problem they felt was rather important to solve.

When he met me last week there was a man I met who had been to hell and lived to tell the tale.

They had just raised $800K in funding (money in the bank, yay!) and had commitments for another $200K.

Then he mentioned how he endured the lows and the number of days he cried and wept himself to sleep over the last 2 months,

I could relate. Those are exactly the set of emotions I have been through many times in my life.

The first 6-12 months of your bootstrapped startup are hard. If you think something is hard, take that and multiply it over 100 times, and imagine doing an alpine, freestyle, obstacle course avoiding maneuver on a double black diamond. It is that hard.

The worst part of the journey is the emotional roller coaster.

The downs, the further downs, the abyss and the chasms. There is no up. A “down” actually seems like an up.

The second entrepreneur’s story is more poignant.

I met him 8 months ago when he was introduced via a mutual friend. He was a very experienced trade professional with over 20+ years of successfully running his own company, but not in the technology space.

Here was a man, who had made good money, built great relationships and had some excellent success as a services professional.

He and his American co founder then decided the future was in building a product. The only problem was they were not developers or technical people. They had to hire a team of technology experts to build their product.

They were bootstrapped as well. He and his wife, put their life savings into the product. His co founder moved from the US to his homeland to reduce costs and they started building their product. His co founder continued to talk to potential American customers remotely and keep them excited about the opportunity.

They did get a “verbal commitment” from angel investors in Hyderabad, who backed off at the last minute. They had been bootstrapping for over 21 months.

The most amazing part was their customers were so excited to use the product, some of them gave an advance (small amounts of money but real hard cash) for their product.

Since they were not technical experts, they made many product mistakes. They underestimated the amount of time it would take, they put a really bad user interface together which most people could not figure out and they also hired wrong.

The most poignant part of the story was when he told me that his wife and he had to move apartments 3 times (that’s 3 moves) in the last year just so they could keep reducing their monthly burn rate at home.

Imagine moving kids, your wife, uprooting your family so many times so you can follow your passion.

He caught up with me to tell me about their seed round. They just closed $500K with a commitment for another $1 Million from investors outside India.

To them and all the other entrepreneurs who have endured these and many worse things, there’s nothing more I can say. I am just in awe.

When you could easily “get a simple job” and “enjoy life”, you chose to take the road less traveled and the harder path.

There’s another part of the story I want to highlight.

These stories are ones that ended on a happy note – well they both got funded.

For every two of these entrepreneurs, there are 100’s I know whose story did not end up with funding.

It ended with a company that closed, or a marriage that fell apart and a kid that had to go to a tier 2 college, because they had spent a lot of their life’s savings in their startup.

To them as well, I say “you tried, and did not succeed, but you did not fail”.

Those who “failed” are the ones who did not try at all.

The ones who failed are the ones in a safe job, 9-5 assignments who keep telling me “they want to start a company some day”.

I think we should have entrepreneurs that succeeded and those that did not succeed.

I liken it to giving the gold for the successful ones and silver to the unsuccessful ones.

The ones watching on the sidelines and commenting are the ones that “failed”.

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Is there any advantage for an enterprise #startup product company to start in India?

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Last night I had the chance to be at the event organized by Helion Ventures on Enterprise product startups. The event itself brought about 50 entrepreneurs and investors in the space. I believe the best part of these events is the quality of individuals, which has a direct correlation on the quality of the conversations. This event brought the best folks building enterprise software companies in India.

As a prelude to the conversations, Helion shared results of the survey they had commissioned. This survey had many CIOs (of Indian companies) and about 50 entrepreneurs building companies in the space.

While the results of the survey will not be surprising to those who live and breathe enterprise software, I thought I’d first highlight 3 most important things I took away from the event.

  1. Over 60% of CIO’s in India, were willing to “kick the tires” or talk to startups, engage with startups, conduct POC’s and look at early stage software solutions, but only 13% were willing to buy. Entrepreneurs selling to Indian CIO’s know this very well. CIO’s cited lack of understanding of enterprise support requirements and deficient customer service as the top 2 items for their unwillingness to purchase. (P.S. I rolled my eyes on this one. My 2 cents, they are just amazingly risk averse).
  2. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, cited the (in) ability to sell (hiring sales people, delivering strong sales value propositions and building great sales teams) as the #1 issue they faced, followed by hiring and building great product management talent in their companies.
  3. Finally both entrepreneurs and investors were more likely (over 60%) to focus on North American markets as their first (and in many cases only) target, followed by Indian markets or global markets. Another part of the survey was size of the target customer. While many were focused on large enterprise, there was a good mix of SMB targets as well.

The more interesting part was the discussions and key questions that followed, each of which could be a blog post in themselves.

  1. Is building an enterprise company out of India, an advantage or disadvantage?
  2. What should investors in enterprise software do to create a better environment for startups?
  3. Is field sales dead?

There were 2 other questions, but these were the most interesting to me.

Participants gathered into teams of 10 people each and they had to discuss the question and help come up with some potential topics and points to consider for research.

We did come up with a framework for the first question – when is building an enterprise company out of India an advantage and when is it not, and when is it a disadvantage.

I’d love more feedback on the framework we came up with to answer the question #1.

Manju Gowda (from i7 networks) and Sachin were part of the team that presented our point of view. The key framework we came up with was a 2X2 matrix with Cost of the product and Value delivered to the customer on the 2 axes.

If you look at the 4 quadrants, only if the Average Selling Price (ASP) was low and the value the customer got was very high – both in terms of time and the economic benefit, was being an enterprise software company from India an advantage. So SaaS companies that offer an order of magnitude better capability and value at a much lower price point (small enough to buy online without a sales person’s help) then being in India helped.

If however the ASP was high and the value from the product was high as well, then unless you have a field sales team that can help sell, you have a distinct disadvantage being in India.

Similarly, if you had a low priced product and the value that the customer got was low as well, it is neither an advantage nor disadvantage to be in India.

Finally if you the ASP is high and the value a customer got was low, then US enterprise software Product Company would do better.

We gave many examples how this model makes sense, but since this was something we came up with in 15 min, I was curious what the rest of you think?

Except if you have a low ASP and unreasonable ROI (Value) for the customer, I don’t think enterprise startups benefit from being founded in India.

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Be Happy

I have a new farewell greeting that I am using. I think that “Bye” is too short and best for acquaintances, “Cheers” or “Ciao” is too European, and “Take care” and “Good bye” are too mundane.

So I am going to start saying “Be happy”. It signifies what I wish for others.

Lets see where this goes.

Be happy.

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What matters more at the earliest of early stages? Team? Or Idea?

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I have attended over 45 hackathons in the last year. Some as a mentor, some as a participant and most as a judge. There are many biases I have, including a “developer bias” – I prefer developer heavy teams to MBA teams or sales teams etc. I know some of these biases and many I am not aware of.

So, it is always fascinating when I get a chance to meet the individuals first before they form teams and then see them selling their ideas to get quality hackers, hustlers (presenters, more than sales guys are needed for a hackathon) and hipsters (designers) on board.

I have been doing an experiment to help me understand how to evaluate teams and ideas better.

The experiment is fairly simple. On a white sheet of paper, I put the names of 5 people I think are the likely to win at the beginning of the hackathon. This may be based on just a 2-3 minute conversation with them. I dont know what goes in my mind, but I want to document it. I think I judge how they introduce themselves, what the first few words are, the background and education, etc. I think I have the same judgment biases as most investors and entrepreneurs have, so it is very likely that the top 10 on my list will be the same as any of the other folks who are judging or mentoring. I have shared these notes and the top 10 list with other mentors and asked them to share theirs as well.

Then when the ideas are being pitched I write down the top 5 ideas. I am sure many biases are being played in my mind again. I generally dislike the education and ideas aimed at solving problems that college students have, for example looking for mentors or finding internships. I am very partial to solutions aimed at developers or marketing audiences.

Usually at the end of this process I have my top 5 or 6. The reason is that I have found that in 4 out of 10 cases the “good person” on the list does not choose a “good idea” or the “good idea” has some “average teams”.

I have tried to then map my initial “picks” against those that win the hackathon eventually. In the 11 hackathons that I have consistently done this over the last 2 months, there has been only 1 case when a team from the “other list” has won the hackathon. In 6 of the remaining 10, my first pick has gone on to win and in the remaining 4, my first pick has made it either to 2nd or 3rd place.

I thought I was doing pretty good. Over the last 5 hacakthons I have let other judges and mentors in on this experiment and asked them to rate before and after so they can get their before and after picks.

Turns out most of the judges were in the same ballpark. So, my entire basis for being able to judge good teams was as good or as bad as other judges. There is no proprietary information to leverage since the meetings and information exchanges are so short.

The second part of the question is what mattered more – a good team or a good idea – this is only to win the hackathon.

Turns out good ideas win more hackathons than good teams in 5 of my 11 cases. I have insufficient information to find out how many of the good ideas will eventually turn out to be good startups, given how nascent some of the ideas and teams were.

What I also think is that even if I took someone reasonably tech savvy regardless of experience, they would have a similar “wining picks” ratio.

This also calls into question the “experience” judges and mentors have gathered over the years and the exposure they have to all other competing ideas and companies. Turns out all that experience is possibly useful at certain other things, but at the earliest of early stages, it does not require a rocket scientist to figure out who wins the hackathon, within a low margin of error.

What do you think? Or am I taking limited data and generalizing to a trend?

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Interesting ideas from the #prarambh #IIMUdaipur hackathon

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I am in the beautiful city of Udaipur for the weekend to participate in the IIM Udaipur Prarambh hackathon. The IIM itself is only 3 years old and is located within the campus of MLS university in the city.

There were about 70-80 participants from various cities and towns near Rajasthan and a few from outside the state as well. 26 ideas were presented on Friday and of them 6 ideas and teams were formed (ones with the most votes). The city of Udaipur itself was a major draw and it is a delight to be here. The lakes, palaces, food and colors are amazing. The city slows you down with its colors and diversity and that is a great thing.

I was both a mentor and a participant. Here are the final 6 ideas that got the most votes. To see photos from my trip, check out my facebook newsfeed.

1. Anhad: This team was trying to solve the problem of helping students in the the 8th to 12th grade think beyond Engineering and Medicine. In India, thanks to lack of mentors and successful role models, many young students are forced to choose these two fields to study after high school. Ahnad is developing a website which will feature role models from 1000’s of alternative careers and professions. The idea is to expose students to find local role models who they can get inspiration from. E.g. A student in Bangalore wants to become a Radio Jockey, then Anhad will bring a local RJ to the school and have all students who want to be RJ’s attend the session and ask questions, interact and learn from the artist.

2. FindGuru.in Focusing on hobbies, this team wants to help you find a “guru” who can teach you to play the guitar, or tennis in you neighborhood. There are many competing services that do the same, so they want to focus on building a comprehensive profile for each “teacher”. The ideas is that everyone has some innate knowledge or skill, with which they can team someone else, so finding and connecting them is what FindGuru is trying to do.

3. WedWay. This is a pretty cool idea. High end weddings are elaborate affairs in India, with some costing upwards of $250K. Coordinating all the guests pickup, ceremonies, events, sharing photos and the like are currently done by the Wedding planner using WhatsApp. They plan to provide a mobile app to help wedding planners coordinate better. The app will be available to guests as well, to upload each of their photos, checkin to locations, explore local sights, share images from their camera so the entire wedding can be viewed through multiple lenses. There are a lot of other features planned to make sure the right people are picked up at the hotel at the right time, guests can interact and get to know each other, etc.

As an aside I have a perspective on “Use and throw apps” that are a growing category, which I will write more about later.

4. BuzzCaptor. The idea is to capture trends on twitter and facebook to categorize them into streams that are easier to consume. Aimed at PR professionals, the product will help them find influencers and key publications to target by category. E.g. You are Reebok and want to launch a few LeBron James shoe, you can with BuzzCaptor identify the top influential folks who talk about shoes, find out which color and patterns are trending on social media, etc. Another idea that has many competitors existing already.

5. Artin: This is an idea that pivoted from providing art & sculpture as a service to helping high net worth individuals find curated artists who can deliver on commissioned art pieces. Initially their idea was similar to ArtFlute, but since high-end “art as a service” has fairly limited demand they have pivoted to providing a marketplace that helps artists connect with art connoisseurs who want custom art at their home or office every month / quarter / year.

6. HelpmeHelpU. This started as a generic “Find real time answers for your questions” when you need them service to something that’s still evolving. The problem they are trying to solve is when after searching for 20 min and reading Quora, Stack Overflow and other websites you still dont have the answer to your question and need to find an “expert” immediately and get some real time help. They planned to make money by charging a commission to help connect you to the right expert. They were evolving into a book rental marketplace and finally a real time second opinion app.

The eCell at IIM Udaipur won the NEN award for “Entrepreneurship cell of the year” in North India. The event was extremely well organized, they have a encouraging coordinator in Joel Xavier and some very enthusiastic students who were all thrilled to host their first hackathon.

If you get a chance to visit Udaipur either on business or pleasure, dont miss the awesome local food – Pyaajz ki Kachori, Mirchi Bada, Jalebis and other delights. There are several local eateries but we went to the Jayesh Mithai Bhandar, which is a disarming roadside, hole-in-the-wall store which is a local favorite.

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5 very interesting #startups at the NASSCOM Product Conclave in #Pune

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The super hospitable people at Pune invited me again to their wonderful city to participate in the NASSCOM Product conclave #NPC #Pune event. Having been there at least 10 times in the last 2 years, I have a very soft corner for Pune and its really wonderful entrepreneurs. We have 5 companies (out of 31) at the Microsoft Accelerator which are from Pune. That’s the largest representation outside Bangalore.

The NPC event itself was a 1 day workshop format session (as opposed to the 3 day Oct NPC in Bangalore). Most of the workshops at the NPC13 event were repeated at this event. Over 400 entrepreneurs registered to make this the largest attended startup event in Pune.

I flew in early with the Intuit team who run a great workshop called “Design Awesome”. It is a hands-on, instructor facilitated 2 hour (abridged) session for product entrepreneurs. I had the chance to meet a few startups myself during the event, and there are the top 5 that caught my attention.

1. Sujata from Ascent Informatics provides a SaaS service for monitoring industrial devices in real-time. Think of the multiple devices that are used in a manufacturing setup and how one can monitor them to check for pollution, maintenance, performance and energy.

2. kPoint Tech had Sunil tell us about their cloud-based video creation and sharing platform. The example I thought was the most relevant, was many product marketing folks do 1-2 hour webinars. These are “recorded” for future review. The problem is they are long and are not easy to search, splice and view in pieces. They host and manage your videos with their technology.

3. Qualitia has built a Selenium based test automation platform that does not require scripts. If you have ever written test scripts using products such as WinRunner or LoadRunner, you know how much of a pain they are to maintain. Rahul and team have built a product  to reduce time and maintenance for testing.

4. SaveTime Technologies helps you find the right doctor quickly. They have a fairly large database of doctors and reviews from patients in Pune. Mitesh and team have built a product that is like ZocDoc and others, but up and running already.

5. ANTfarm robotics was a pretty cool product that helps you control the electrical devices at home using your mobile phone. Subhojit has built a pretty cool product that helps you switch on your microwave, fan, lighting etc. even if you are not at home using your mobile device.

After the event, where I had a 2 hour workshop on Sales for startups, (Check out the tweets yo), we went to Bedekars for the world famous Misal Paav.

Intuit Team outside Bedekars - Misal Paav
Intuit Team outside Bedekars – Misal Paav



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Some very interesting #startups at the Wharton India Economic Forum #wief14

I am at Philadelphia this weekend, participating at the Wharton India Economic Forum 2014 with Sanjiv Bikchandani, Alok Kejriwal and Rajesh Sawhney. The forum brings together about 100+ students, local entrepreneurs and investors together for a day long session. It is hosted by the the Indian students who study at the Wharton school of business.

This year they hosted 10 startups (5 in the idea stage and 5 with some traction) to pitch to us for both investment and feedback.

It was great to see some very interesting companies from both India and the US. The 5 idea stage companies had 3 women founders as well and some very compelling ideas.

Here is a summary of the companies.

Idea stage companies. This session featured companies founded by Penn or Wharton students.

  1. AmbitionI: Neha and her cofounder are building a product that uses algorithms to help career counselling for young professionals. Imagine you are working at a large company and always wanted to be an Investment banker. It will connect with your Alumni network and LinkedIn to find out who are the folks that have a similar background as you and have already become investment bankers. Then you can learn how they became an investment banker and figure out how to get some advice to make a career change.
  2. Level Counsel: Aditya and his cofounder are targeting Indian and Chinese XI and XII grade students who need advice on which colleges to apply and which major to pursue. These students will be matched with students who are currently studying at the colleges they want to apply to and connect them so they can get mentorship and advice. They are trying to disrupt the existing career counselling services offered who charge a lot of money to help students make choices on college applications.
  3. Travel Gourmand: If you are travelling to a new location and would like to taste local food but don’t know where to eat or if the restaurants are hygienic or not, this app is for you. They pair you with a local “food guide” who will take you on a 1-3 hour “food tour” and take you to some local hot spots and places to eat. Sayeed Banerjee has a team in Delhi who can help you with food tours in Delhi currently. They plan to expand beyond Delhi soon.
  4. Vhelp: If you are looking for some advice from a lawyer, or a doctor but are not able to get a person at the location you are at, then Kushboo and her team can help. VHelp gets you experts at your fingertips. This is a platform that will help you get advice if you are a rural location but don’t have experts available locally.
  5. WishGuise: This app won the Idea stage competition. Tanvi Chopra’s company helps you rent high street fashion and Ethnic Indian wear. Indian women spend a lot of money on ethnic wear, and they end up not using them too frequently. I think they will have a challenge to prevent perception that they are renting used clothes, but if the top designers are willing to sign up and offer their latest, then I can see how this can scale. It is similar to a company called Rent the runway in the US.

Later stage companies. This session featured many companies from India who applied to the program directly.

  1. Qlicklet: Vivek and his team help monetize Wi-Fi Hot spots at various locations in India using advertising. They are currently running at Delhi airport. If you as a consumer want free Wi-Fi and are willing to watch an ad before you get access to free Wi-Fi for 45 minutes, this app is for you.
  2. Targeting Mantra: Saurab’s company provides analytics and tools to eCommerce companies to help them increase their conversions. They currently have 10 eCommerce companies in India including Yehbi using their product to personalize the website for users and increase customer conversions to purchase.
  3. Sammaan: Ifran’s company provides a mobile van that reaches out to remote villages and rural locations which have no hospitals. This mobile van makes money by charging patients Rs. 25 per visit and also makes money by offering discounted prescription drugs and referrals to diagnostics providers. The cost of each mobile van is about $50K and they are currently operating 1 van in Patna.
  4. ZoomCar: David and his cofounder are building the ZipCar for India. They offer self-driven cars for folks that would like to rent a car for a few hours or a day. They currently offer 6 types of cars currently from Reva’s to Scorpios. Operating currently in Bangalore, this company is currently in the Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore.
  5. Zostel: This company with 7 founders, some of whom are currently studying in IIM Kolkata offers hostels for backpackers. I met the company before in Kolkata and they are currently operating 2 hostels in Jaipur and Udaipur. They offer a very edgy brand and great value for money at Rs. 400 per bed per night. They are currently seeing 60% utilization at their 2 hostels, and are primarily catering to international travelers. They plan to expand to Goa, Mcleod Gunj and other locations. They won the competition for later stage companies.

I absolutely loved meeting with local entrepreneurs and was part of the VC and entrepreneur panel where we talked about the investment scenario in India and the challenges faced by Indian entrepreneurs worldwide. Wharton accepts about 850 students each year for their MBA program and nearly 50 of them are from India, so they have a lot of knowledge about India and problems faced by Indian entrepreneurs.

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Why WhatsApp is an absolute steal for Facebook at $19B

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I have been the contrarian on the Whatsapp deal with Facebook. I think this is an absolute steal for Facebook. Here is why I think that:

The email address was the unique id to identify anyone over the last 30 years. Turns out that’s only true for about a billion to maybe 2 Billion people. Now, almost everyone that has an email address (or will very soon) has a facebook account.

The mobile phone number is the new unique id. That will be the unique identification for the NEXT 2 Billion people OR more.

By any conservative measure, Whatsapp will be at 2 Billion people in 2 years. They have executed so well so far to get to 450 Million users that it seems very likely they will get there.

There is a small risk they may not, but a risk Zuck’s probably willing to take .

So, if you were Zuck and you got 2 Billion user’s unique id for 1/10th of the price of his company.

Twice the number of users at 1/10 of the price. That’s got SALE written all over it.

Why would you not do that?

FB has 1 + Billion users and is valued at $160 B with a revenue of $6 Billion.

WhatsApp will have 2 Billion users and is valued at $16 Billion and is breaking even / profitable already.

No brainer deal and an absolute steal in my mind.

The future of communication is up for grabs as well. Email is clearly not the preferred medium for my kids and the younger folks.

My kids only use Whatsapp. They also use YouTube as their search engine instead of Google or Bing.

These are the BIG changes being driven by MOBILE.

That’s the future. And Zuck now has gotten relatively cheap insurance against being a small player in mobile.

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Why I think mobile apps are going to die in 3-5 years

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I was at a panel yesterday talking about the “Appification of India”. This was part of the Social Media Week event.

I made a statement and tried in 2-3 min to clarify what I meant, but did a poor job of it. I thought it is better to detail my thoughts on this blog post.

I believe in 3-5 years mobile “apps” will be dead.

They will be replaced by a set of backend services that will be controlled by the smartphone OS.

As a user the only “UI” you will care about will be your phone UI controlled by the phone or provider. The current set of “apps” will be invoked on demand from the cloud by the OS (or the service layer developed by another 3rd party company).

The current problems with apps are well known. Besides games, which make up the significant part of the downloads, the problems with all other apps are: App discovery and app monetization are a huge problem for developers. Remembering which apps to use and managing the apps on your mobile phone are huge pain for users.

I believe Apps get in the way of what users want to do.

You want a car ride from your restaurant to home. Why do you have to remember that the Uber app is the one to use, then search for it on your phone, bring it up, click a few buttons, etc.

Now imagine if you either spoke to your phone or typed on your phone – get me a car to go home.

The phone has a set of pre-determined services which can all handle the request “get a car”. The OS (or service store) on the phone will negotiate with these services to get you the best service (depending on whether you have previously preferred best price, best car, etc.) and confirm that you will have the car in a few minutes. You dont have to remember that you have to open the Uber app etc.

Now at the back end, it will get more interesting if these “services” will bid (auction style) on fulfilling the request.

Which is why I believe the OS wars are done and finished. Android won.

Now let the service management layer wars will begin.

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The InMobi #freedomhack had 200+ registrations and some amazing ideas

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On Sunday I had an opportunity to judge the InMobi #freedomhack. Mohit Saxena, who cofounded InMobi, invited me to be a part of the event which attracted over 200 teams to hack for Aaron Swartz.

I think they had not anticipated such a large crowd to show up, so only 47 teams were chosen among the 200+ teams that submitted their hack ideas.

As an aside, I love hackathons. There’s something about a) hanging out with developers, b) hearing some really raw interesting ideas and c) building something from scratch that makes me happy.

I only had about 2 hours to be there since I had to go to judge another hackathon, but here are 7 ideas that I enjoyed learning about. I wish these hacks would go on to become some very interesting products. These were not the “winners”, but are the ones that I liked the most. In no particular order, here they are:

1. Socket_Timeout: This idea involved an integration with your calendar to look for “downtimes”, during key long weekends, etc. and suggest trips that you can take. It will then curate the best pictures from Flickr and Instagram in the key locations and “motivate” you to go there. They also help you with the entire planning (when to book tickets, when to book hotel, etc.) by looking, at your calendar for periods of “downtime” to help you get these tasks done.

2. WiseViz. There’s loads of data and many ways to represent the data with charts and graphs. Folks like me though, never know what the best way to show some piece of data is. This app will integrate with your data source and suggest the best way to visualize that data.

3. Lazy: Email platform with an appstore. Email products such as Gmail and Outlook have extensions and add-ins, but imagine an very simple email client (web or mobile) which has an appstore where you can add any number of “apps” as you please. If you dont like the “compose” feature that comes standard, you can choose from any number of “compose apps”. Another e.g. If FedEx sends you an email saying here is your tracking number and a link to their website, their app, instead, can directly show you the status of our package without you leaving your email client or clicking on the URL. I love the concept of email app store actually.

4. Miners: All Street Journal curates news and assigns latitude and longitude to each of them (where possible) to help you get a sense of what’s happening where. A map interface shows all the news (instead of a stream of news, which is currently the norm) with pins to show you the “hyper” location of the news. You can have filters such as crime news and create a heatmap of where specific categories of news are more prevalent. Great view of hyperlocal news.

5. Alpha-Devs: A mobile app, which will check the status of the person you are trying to call (who you have to know and connect with in the app), and suggest the best time to call based on their calendar, status message, location, etc.

6. Xteenz Hack: A hackathon voting app. It allows you to review all the hack abstracts and upvote / downvote ideas submitted and continue to refine half-baked ideas.

7. Finzo: a Peer-to-peer bitttorrent-enabled device that takes all the “free” data on the web – Khan Academy and Wikipedia for example and makes them available offline for people in rural / remote areas without constant Internet access.

The top 3 winners for the #freedom hack were – Power Train – a hyper local security for women / children app, Loners – allows you to connect with other lonely people near you to play games or chat online and Miners.

P.S. If you get a chance to go visit the InMobi offices, you should. They have the coolest office I have seen in Bangalore by a wide margin. Photos of the space on Facebook.