Startup Saturday Pune - August 2010

Today’s Startup saturday was about hiring and retaining talent. It was an interesting group discussion rather than boring lengthy presentation. The discussion was headed by Marcus Hegi of Colayer who spoke about various strategies adopted by Colayer for hiring and retaining talent. (more…)

Mr Shetty of MT Educare spoke at Startup Saturday Mumbai and later we interviewed him about his journey, entrepreneurship and education sector. Valued at over Rs 100 crores (i.e. 3 years back when they raised funding), MT Educare has explored a nation wide market that is growing at a rapid pace.

Q Can you tell us briefly as to how you started on your entrepreneurial journey?

A: Mahesh Tutorials began as a coaching and tutoring entity in Mumbai in the year 1988 and has now reached the status of a corporate entity as an Educational Service Provider branded as MT Educare, with a wide product portfolio which includes Pre-school and Day Care centres, Language Labs, Test Preps, Centre of Excellence for Training and Development and Corporate Training as its forte which attracted investment from Helix investments, Private equity fund in the year 2008.

The inspiration to start Mahesh Tutorials was towards taking up a bigger cause and making a difference with the ability one possessed - “Passion for teaching”.

Contributing towards a competitive education environment and creating success stories among future generations was the dream and the focus was to create, nurture and maintain the highest standards of teaching delivery.

Today, MT Educare has a strong presence with 172 centres across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, internationally in Dubai and approximately 2-lac alumni, all over the world.

Q You are one of the very few entrepreneurs who took the plunge before 1991; can you tell us how you felt about the changed business environment post 1991?

A: In 1993, when the Government of India liberalized the economy, a multitude of avenues were created.  As capital norms, licensing issues and demand for trained human resources were brought to global standards, the decade ensured that education was clearly seen as the ladder of growth and a leveler by the common man, which has lead to a spend of 33% of

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Quite easily the most impressive travel blogging application we have seen, Entrip was showcased at HeadStart and Compute 2009 earlier this year.

Entrip from Headstart Network Foundation on Vimeo.

Alertpedia is a very interesting alerting service that works on structured queries and could be a very useful tool for both online visitors and publishers.

Alertpedia from Headstart Network Foundation on Vimeo.

The July edition of Startup Saturday Delhi had three entrepreneurs share their candid and inspiring stories with the audience. The Shullick Hall at the American Center was packed to the brim with avid listeners. In addition, the first open house discussion session was also hosted.

Aditya Sahay began with an insightful account of the predecessor to his product RadBox. A graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, he had co-founded the very niche B2B service called ClipWeave in 2009. It offers video indexing and analysis, primarily targeted at television production houses, news agencies, filmmakers and advertisers. Sahay says most media archives have tons of digital video content that can be put to good use, except for the major snag that videos aren’t indexed and searchable. One cannot search to locate a particular shot or event within a video clip, unless one manually looks for it in a linear way.

The core business proposition was using their technology to automate the video indexing process. This posed several technical challenges for Sahay, including the extraction and recognition of text from speech and news headline scrolls, detecting commercial breaks and tagging of video clips. Apart from these, he had to step out of his comfort zone and plunge into marketing and sales where he quickly improvised and improved his skills.

Twitter quote:

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The topic for Startup Saturday November was Ecommerce / Online Retail in India. We saw a good combination of startups showing their wares, and stalwarts sharing their experiences. We began with a demo of an energy saving app ‘ENPOWER’ by Creative Riot Software. The Creative Riot team has won multiple awards from Microsoft, IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad etc and they have a simple power saving application that can save energy worth millions (billions probably) every year for enterprises and consumers. The demo by ENPOWER is well summarized by Pluggd.in.

Next, Mr. Sanjay Mehta, Jt. CEO of Social Wavelength spoke about Online Retailing in India. In a previous avatar, Sanjay has been one of India’s pioneering Internet entrepreneurs, with an online apparel retail store, Homeindia.com (a company he sold in 2007). His presentation had a four point agenda:

1. Whats going wrong right now, with online retailing in India
2. Is there hope, and what will it take?
3. Simple questions every online retailer needs to ponder upon and
4. A bonus: An e-commerce business idea

All in all, a thoroughly informative session, about the dos and don’ts of building a successful online retail business! His presentation is

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