The Open House has been a great success at Startup Saturdays across the country. Its a session where the entire audience discusses and shares experience on a pre-decided topic. It brings out multiple points of views and the richness of experience across startups. Entrepreneurs have benefited a lot from such exchanges.

Now we are taking Open House to the next level where geographical boundaries don’t matter anymore. Similarly, the restrictions on time are also easy. What matters is sharing experiences and ideas and then building upon what you get from others. We’ll do this via a Twitter conference.

A twitter conference as the name suggests is a conference on twitter. Use of hash tags separates the conference content from the rest of the twitter stream. So, participating in the conference is as simple as attaching a hast tag to your tweet and following the hash tag. One can follow a hash tag by searching for it using twitter search or tools such Tweetdeck. Tweetchat automates the entire process of tagging and following and gives you the feeling of a chat room. One also need not get restricted by the 140 characters that Twitter gives us. One can always write a blog post and tweet the link with the hash tag. However, do make sure that your tweet gives a reason to click on the link and do link your blog to this post for easy tracking.

We will keep the conference open for an entire day and then summarize the significant bits in a blog post here. The first Headstart Open House on twitter will be on Finding the first customer and will start at 10 AM on 3rd July. Please use the hash tag #HSOH for the conference and also for all tweets about the conference.

RSVP here. See you on the 3rd!

Headstart Open House on Twitter

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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.

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The August edition of Startup Saturday showcased two of the finest efforts in the domain of clean tech. While the term clean tech is in a lot of discussion, these days, there are a number of concepts that need clarifications, and when it comes to start-ups in clean tech, SSB is always at the forefront with its showcase! In fact, we had rush not just in nominations, but also amongst speakers and the demos in Lightning Pitches - we had more than we could accommodate and till the last minute, this kept us on our toes! So finally, NextGen PMS and AutoBoxx Automation were the ones that comprised the main demos and we had a number of speakers that made us decide about having a panel discussion. The concept of a panel discussion during an SS event was one of the two ‘firsts’ that we had  - the second one being mentioned next.

One of the newest feather in our cap was the concept of live streaming of the event, thanks to mobisy.com. The idea sprung up from the fact that we needed online videos of the event for archiving and streaming over the Net. In fact, our media partners have always been interested in having a copy of the part they have sponsored and live streaming really served this purpose.

Since this was an experimental effort this time, we have further efforts to improve the quality, lighting, timing and other related aspects of the video. View videos

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The way the volunteers have been supported by the people who attend SSB events was so clear when we faced a hitch in the mobile camera used for live streaming (it’s battery went off!) and immediately, one of the members of the audience offered his phone’s battery to continue the recording. Thanks to this spirit that SSB events have been so successful in Bangalore.

­ NextGen PMS are involved in the entire green chain, and are involved in estimating carbon waste footprints, and providing

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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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The Open House has been a great success at Startup Saturdays across the country. Its a session where the entire audience discusses and shares experience on a pre-decided topic. It brings out multiple points of views and the richness of experience across startups. Entrepreneurs have benefited a lot from such exchanges.

Now we are taking Open House to the next level where geographical boundaries don’t matter anymore. Similarly, the restrictions on time are also easy. What matters is sharing experiences and ideas and then building upon what you get from others. We’ll do this via a Twitter conference.

A twitter conference as the name suggests is a conference on twitter. Use of hash tags separates the conference content from the rest of the twitter stream. So, participating in the conference is as simple as attaching a hast tag to your tweet and following the hash tag. One can follow a hash tag by searching for it using twitter search or tools such Tweetdeck. Tweetchat automates the entire process of tagging and following and gives you the feeling of a chat room. One also need not get restricted by the 140 characters that Twitter gives us. One can always write a blog post and tweet the link with the hash tag. However, do make sure that your tweet gives a reason to click on the link and do link your blog to this post for easy tracking.

We will keep the conference open for an entire day and then summarize the significant bits in a blog post here. The first Headstart Open House on twitter will be on Finding the first customer and will start at 10 AM on 3rd July. Please use the hash tag #HSOH for the conference and also for all tweets about the conference.

RSVP here. See you on the 3rd!

Headstart Open House on Twitter

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