August 19, 2007

Bangalore Open Coffee Club debuts with 50 plus !!!!


India is truly revolutionizing and so are the guys in the Silicon Valley of India.Two of the major advantages of the Unconferences are "Knowledge Sharing" and "Networking".How does it feel to learn & network,every 2 weeks? Lot's of learning and this is where I would like to start my article on "The first meetup of the Open Coffee Club,Bangalore" which was held at BrewHaha on 19th August,2007(11:00 AM).Let's do a quick recap of the meet in a Q&A style:

What is Open Coffee Club (OCC) ?
The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.This is the online complement to that offline network. Meet people, find out what's going on nearby you and then go and take part. More about OCC here

What exactly happened at the event?
Since, this was the opening chapter of OCC, the expectation was around 20+ people but thanks to the power of "Word of Mouth marketing (WOM)" and "Blogging" , the turnout was surprising and was close to around 50+ surprised The event started exactly on time at 11:00 AM and than started a brief round of introduction, which lasted for around an hour.Being the first meet, it was quite expected that there would be a mismatch in the expectations and hence, it was very important to decide the agenda for the next meet.There were a couple of suggestions:
  1. What strategies startups should follow to compete with some of the big guns in the IT industry?
  2. Apart from an excellent idea, there should be a market feasibility(and scalability) and hence,How do we bridge the gap between Technology and Marketing?
  3. How does an entrepreneur share ideas with other people in the group and how can (s)he get an HONEST feedback about the same?
  4. How much should be the VC involvement in OCC ?
  5. Discussions as to whether any particular venture requires VC funding? ie Some insights into VC funding?
  6. Some of the mistakes that Entrepreneurs should avoid.
[If I may have missed out some of the things discussed at OCC , than kindly leave a comment and I would add it to this list :)]

Phew,after lot of discussions now was the time to network and I also shared my part-time, partly Non-technical idea with a quite a few people and was appreciated by some of them.This was a quick check as to whether I am headed in the right direction? lol

Some of the key highlights of the event:
Apart from the discussions, the other key highlights of the event were "Startup Funding" and "Mentorship for Entrepreneurs".These key issues were addressed by people from National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) - Laura Parkin(Executive Director, NEN & Wadhwani Foundation) & Sameer Kanth(Consultant, NEN Bangalore). Another notable attendee at the event was Yiting Shen from MIT Sloan school of Management. This is just a small example of a new and changed "Globalizing India" !!!

What exactly happened after the event (a Buffet Lunch Club) !!! smile?
Had a good lunch with Prateek & Nithya Dayal;the husband-wife team working on their startup Muziboo, Saurabh, Ramjee, Siva, Vaibhav.There were some interesting discussions about Business Blogging, Legal ways to increase traffic to your blog, Wordpress, UI Development, Unconferences, Networking .... After the talk, I thought that I should also start "Blog Consulting" wink

Crowd present at the OCC:
[Attendees who haven't provided information about their blogs are tagged with their email id's. Also,if I have missed out your name,kindly add it in the comment section...]
  1. K. Aditya
  2. Saurabh Singh
  3. Kaushik Gala
  4. Deepak Shenoy, founder of MoneYoga
  5. Pooran Prasad, co-founder of Zealous Solutions
  6. Vaibhav Pandey
  7. Harish Kumar, founder of OneBigWeb
  8. Sandeep C Senan
  9. Kiran Jonnalagadda aka Jace
  10. Manasi Baranwal
  11. Shivakumar Ganesan
  12. Prashant Acharya
  13. Gunasekaran S
  14. Sameerkanth , ConsultantNEN Bangalore
  15. Venkat Ramana
  16. Anand
  17. Piyush Gupta, Co-founder of RouteGuru
  18. R. Senthil
  19. Kiran Kadekoppa
  20. Parvez Ahmed
  21. Ajit
  22. Rohit Bansal
  23. Prateek & Nithya Dayal, Co-founders of Muziboo
  24. Karthik Jain, Co-founder of PicSquare
  25. Satish TJ
  26. Anshul Gupta
  27. Meera K , Community & News media
  28. Rajan, Co-founder of Motvik
  29. PV Sundaram
  30. Vipul Gupta
  31. Bhasker Kode,Co-founder of "The Returnable Project"
  32. Laura Parkin, Executive Director, NEN & Wadhwani Foundation
  33. Yiting Shen
  34. Saurabh
  35. Paveen Kumar
  36. Parineeth Reddy
  37. Harinath Pudipeddi
  38. Siva - now an Entrepreneur
  39. Akshat Choudary, Co-founder ActivMobs
  40. Amit Singh, Co-organizer of BCB4
  41. Ashish Solanki, Co-founder Yulop
  42. Puneeth Prasad
[Photo Courtesy : Jace]

Time to wrap up the coverage of "First OCC meetup".Last but not the least, thumbs up to the organizers of OCC - Ramjee Ganti and Vaibhav Pandey for taking this initiative and making this possible !!!

When does the next OCC happen?
OCC would be held once in 15 days and hence, the next OCC is on 2nd September,2007.For more updates , join the 'OCC Community Group'

What other bloggers are saying about OCC?
[If you have already blogged about OCC , than kindly add your link in the comments section...]

Ramjee Ganti - Bangalore Open Coffee Kick Starts with Bang

Hope to catch you all at the next "Open Coffee Club" in Bangalore !!!

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9 Comments:

At Aug 20, 2007, 10:25:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Really liked your blog posts. Specially this one ... Its great to have a link to every single person I met yesterday at open coffee club.

Prateek Dayal
www.muziboo.com

www.prateekdayal.net/blog

 
At Aug 20, 2007, 12:32:00 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Himanshu,
it was great talking to you too and will keep reading your blog:-)

Siva

 
At Aug 20, 2007, 5:18:00 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Linked you in my blog post.
Cheers,
Vaibhav

 
At Aug 20, 2007, 10:35:00 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

i see your point :) you're a good writer. this is a very well formatted and written event report.

 
At Aug 21, 2007, 9:22:00 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

Himanshu,

Thanks a lot for the linking up to most of the folks present.

It's time ! you can take up blog consulting, seeing the exp. with poonam and then here with prateek. ;)

 
At Aug 21, 2007, 10:23:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey,
@Prateek : It was nice talking to you as well and thanks for the positive feedback..This is really needed when you blog :)

@Siva : Congrats for taking the plunge and do keep me posted about your venture...May be I can blog :) See you at TiE

@Vaibhav : Thanks for the link back

@Snighdha : Is this Snigdha from LiveMint? Thanks for the positive feedback

@Ramjee : You are most welcome and thanks for organizing such a great event...Why don't we team up for Blog Consulting?

-Himanshu Sheth

 
At Aug 22, 2007, 9:33:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Too many things on the same day. I had to miss this. I will there next time

 
At Aug 22, 2007, 9:41:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey,
@Thej : The next OCC is on the 2nd of September,meet you there!!!

-Himanshu Sheth

 
At Jan 19, 2010, 7:20:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

great read. I would love to follow you on twitter. By the way, did any one learn that some chinese hacker had busted twitter yesterday again.

 

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