Skip to main content

Startup Weekend - New Delhi -2011

By C Chaitanya
Another Startup Weekend is here, this time in Delhi and as usual KooKoo,Ozonetel is proud to be associated with the event. I will be attending the event and will be around to help the participants to build stuff on KooKoo if needed.

Startup weekend has certainly come a long way in India and it is really pleasing to see the ecosystem slowly building up. Recognition to Startup Weekend and the teams participating in the event has certainly gone up with more and more partners joining the event. And this time, the prizes are just awesome. It makes me want to do another startup :).

For teams participating in the Delhi Startup Weekend, the following are a sampling of the prizes:
  1. KooKoo - 3 months free Silver egg plan.
  2. CPBX - 3 months free One India plan.
  3. Directi - Free domain and hosting for winning team
  4. Morpheus - Direct entry to a selected team to the new Morpheus batch.
And I am not even counting the prizes which will be revealed at the event. Suffice to say, that all the resources needed for a Startup(payment processing, communications, hosting, mailing, customer feedback etc) are all taken care of.

So all you need to have is an Idea. Come with your Idea, pitch it, form a team and build an MVP. After the weekend is over, if you plan on continuing with your idea, then your phone communications, hosting etc are already taken care of for the next 3 months. So you will have 3 months at the minimum to figure out if you are able to create traction for your idea without spending too much money. That, I think is a very good deal.

See you in Delhi.

To know more about Startup Weekend, please this blog post.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

By C Chaitanya
Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...
Read more

Telugu ASR speech data collection

By C Chaitanya
Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...
Read more

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

By C Chaitanya
Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...
Read more