A preview of Industry-Startup collaboration at Startup Saturday Bangalore

Headstart Network Foundation

December 15, 2008 4:40 PM

Startup Saturday Bangalore, December was held at a Honeywell India which is just down the road from IIM Bangalore. Harsha Angeri, Director, Strategy & New Initiatives from Honeywell India spoke about the challenges bigger companies face to innovate and explore new areas of growth. The Honeywell program which will be announced shortly alongwith Headstart, will enable startups and Honeywell to collaborate with each other. The benefits to Honeywell are manifold with this collaboration – they get the domain expertise of the startups, they get to explore new areas without much risk and they get reach to the end-consumer in case of B2C startups as Honeywell deals mostly with B2B customers. The benefits to startups are also manifold – Startups gets access to the customer and realworld feedback, they also get Honeywell’s feedback in areas which Honeywell is strong and they also get the market reach and credibility by dealing with a larger company such as Honeywell. It’s a win-win situation for all those involved in this collaboration.

The product demo was by Namit Nangia of LifeMojo. He dwelt on the importance of nutrition and how lifemojo pro (their product) which is delivered via a website can help their users lead a more healthy lifestyle. Lifemojo can help you come up with a personalized nutritional diet and users can also get in touch with nutrition experts using their web portal. The access to the website can also be provide busing mobiles so that people have access to their custom healthplans on the move. Lifemojo is a good product in the personal and preventive healthcare market niche – a nascent segment but a rapidly growing one. During the snacks break, Lifemojo had setup a laptop so people who were curious about Lifemojo product could testdrive and know more about it. Their presentation is in the full post below.

Earlier in the day, Vikram Murudeshwar, my colleague from Akamai spoke on “Saas and Cloud Computing”. He dispelled some of the myths behind SaaS. SaaS has greatly levelled the playing field for startups. If you have product that is useful, your go-to-market time and time for rolling out incremental updates comes down phenomenally. Also as a provider, you have greater control over the environment in which your software is deployed. The picture is not completely rosy however as SaaS providers have to work harder to secure their customers data and ensure compliance. Cloud computing takes the concept of SaaS to the next level from just software to hardware and infrastructure for building and deploying software using virtualization and using intelligent network optimizations. Attendees had several technical questions regarding scaling a website from a single server to a distributed datacenter model. At this point, I jumped in to provide some answers based on my experience. It was a good interactive session with a mix of technical and business questions which continued into the snacks break.

LifeMojo’s presentation is here

Subscribe to our Newsletter

We share content on startup learning, team building, leadership, raising investments etc. Subscribe below to stay connected