I was invited to visit the Nvidia Tech Week this past weekend (February 25-26, 2012) at their facilities in Pune. This is a great concept – getting employees to invite friends and relatives to actually see what their company is all about is very good social outreach and a fantastic marketing initiative. If more tech companies in the area do similar events once or twice a year, it will help lift the shroud of technical opaqueness around them. I think hosting similar events in area colleges will also help students realize that even VLSI/Embedded Systems Design is cool.

I was given a personal tour by Sandeep Sathe, a Sr. Development manager at Nvidia and also met with Jaya Panvalkar, Sr. Director and head of Pune facilities. There was enough to see and do at this event and unfortunately I was a bit short on time. It would have taken a good two hours for a complete walk-through, so I decided to spend more time on the GPU/HPC section though the Tegra based mobile device section was also quite impressive. It’s been a while since I actually installed a new graphics card in a desktop (actually, it’s been a while since I used a desktop), but graphics cards have come a long way! Nvidia is using standard PCI Express form factor cards for the GPU modules with on-board fans and DVI connectors.

The following are key takeaways from the demo stations I visited

GeForce Surround 2-D

Here, Nvidia basically stretches the game graphics from a single monitor to three monitors. Great for gamers as it gives a fantastic feel for peripheral vision. The game actually doesn’t have to support this. The graphics card takes care of it. The setup here is that while the gamer sits in front of the main monitor, he also sees parts of the game in his peripheral vision in two other monitors that are placed at an angle to the main monitor. I played a car rally game and the way roadside trees, objects moved from the main monitor to the peripheral vision monitors was quite fascinating.

GeForce 3-D Vision Surround

This is similar to the above, but with 3D. You can completely immerse yourself in the game. This sort of gaming setup is now forcing monitor manufacturers to develop monitors with ultra small bezel widths. I suppose at some point in the next few years, we will be able to seamlessly merge graphics from different monitors into one continuous collage without gaps.

Powerwall Premium Mosaic

Powerwall is a eight monitor setup driven by the Quadro professional graphics engine. Two Quadro modules fit into one Quadroplex industrial PC to drive four monitors. Projectors can also be used in place of monitors to create a seamless view. The display was absolutely clear and highly detailed. The Powerwall is application transparent. Additional coolness factor – persistence data is saved so you don’t lose the image during video refresh and buffer swaps. This is most certainly a tool intended for professionals who need high quality visuals and computing in their regular work. Examples are automotive, oil and gas, stock trading.

PhysX Engine

PhysX is a graphics engine that infuses real time physics into games or applications. It is intended to make objects in games or simulations move as they would in real life. To me this was very disruptive, and highlight of the show. You can read more about PhysX here. It is very clear how PhysX would change gaming. The game demo I watched had several outstanding effects: dried leaves moving away from the character as he walks through a corridor, glass breaking into millions of shards as it would in real life. Also running was a PhysX simulation demo that would allow researchers to actually calculate how objects would move in case of a flood. What was stunning was that the objects moved differently every time as they would in real life. PhysX runs on Quadro and Tesla GPUs. It is interesting to note that Ra.One special effects were done using PhysX.

3D photos and movies

Next couple of demos demonstrated 3D TV and photo technology using Sony TVs and a set of desktops/laptops. Notably, the Sony 3D glasses were much more comfortable compared to others. Nvidia is working with manufacturers to create more comfortable glasses. There was also a Toshiba laptop that uses a tracking eye camera to display a 3D image to the viewer regardless of seating position without glasses. It was interesting. However, the whole 3D landscape need a lot of work from the industry before it can become mainstream.

Optimus

What was explained to me was that Optimus allows laptops to shut off GPUs when they are not needed. They can be woken up when high performance work is required. This would be automatic and seamless, similar to how power delivery is in on a Toyota Prius. This sort of a technology is not new to computing – a laptop typically puts a lot of components to sleep/hibernate when not being used, but the GPU is not included.

Quadro Visualizations

This allows 2D/3D visualizations for automotive, architectural and similarly complex systems for up to one thousand users at a time. You can easily change colors, textures, views so everyone can comment and give constructive feedback. I was not sure if the design can be changed on the fly as well. Nvidia is working with ISVs like Maya and Autodesk on this.

Tesla

Tesla GPUs use chips that are used for high performance computing and not rendering, which is different from what Nvidia typically does. The Tesla modules do not have any video ports! It has a heterogeneous GPU/CPU architecture that saves power. In fact, the SAGA-220 supercomputer, dubbed India’s fastest, at ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Center facility uses 2070 Tesla GPUs along with 400 Intel Xeon processors. In addition to supercomputing, Tesla is very useful in 3D robotic surgery, 3D ultrasound, molecular dynamics, oil and gas, weather forecasting and many more applications.

Tegra Mobile Processor

Next few demos showcased the Tegra mobile applications processor based on ARM Cortex A9 cores. The HD quality graphics and imaging were impressive. It is clear that smartphones and tablets of the day are clearly far more powerful compared to desktops of yesteryear and can support highly impressive video and audio in a very handy form factor.

In all, I had a great time. As I mentioned earlier, Nvidia along with other tech companies in Pune should hold more of these kinds of events to give technology exposure to the larger population in general. I think it is important for people to know that the stuff that makes Facebook run is the real key and that is where the coolness is.

The funding happened as part of the Finale of the Super Angels show of ET Now. (We’ll update this post with a link to the video of this show once it appears on YouTube.) RainingClouds got into the Super Angels show as a result of being one of the winners of the PuneConnect 2011 event organized by PuneTech along with Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) and Pune Open Coffee Club. (There, AppSurfer is referred to by its older name, DroidCloud).

Here is a description of DroidCloud from PuneConnect 2011:

DroidCloud allows users to try and use Android apps from any desktop web browser. Normally, applications intended for Android phones cannot be used by people who do not have an Android phone. DroidCloud gives every user a virtual Android phone in the cloud that they can use to run apps. This is useful for app developers to demo apps to clients, app publishers to show demo of apps to potential customers and users, and different teams in large organizations to collaborate on apps.

The DroidCloud team consists of Aniket Awati, Ratnadeep Deshmane, Amit Yadav and Akshay Deo, all techies from Pune.

Background

• Suhas joined BMC Pune and was given the job of creating an innovation incubator within the company.
• This was the second attempt at creating an incubator in BMC. A previous attempt had failed spectacularly. The previous one had been started with great fanfare, with a 100 people team, and over time, it went down to 80, to 60 to nothing. With this history Suhas started his incubator with zero employees, and minimal fanfare.

On Innovation

• Suhas defines innovation as “Ideas to Cash.” This is important. The focus on cash, i.e. revenues, was an important difference between this incubator and the previous incubator, and also other research labs in companies around the world. Invention for the sake of invention, research for the sake of research is something that they definitely did not want to do. The wanted to ensure that everything they do has a direct or indirect revenue impact upside for BMC.
• There actually exists a document called “The Oslo Manual” which is a set of guidelines for how to do innovation. It is a free PDF that anyone can download, and Suhas recommends that to anyone interested in innovation.
• The Oslo Manual points out that innovation can happen in 4 different areas Product, Process, Marketing and Organization. Suhas adds a 5th category of innovation: “User Experience”

The BMC Incubator

• Why does a product company need an incubator? Product teams get bogged down by tactical improvements for existing customers, and the larger vision (beyond 12-24 months) does not get attention. Startups innovate all the time, and BMC does buy innovative companies, but then integrating them into the company is a huge overhead, and fraught with risks. It would be much more efficient to do innovation in-house if it could be made to work
• The incubator is a separate team who can focus on these issues. It is a small team (about 25 people) compared to the 200 people in just one of the product groups that BMC has. And these 25 people try various different innovative ideas, 9 of 10 of which are bound to fail. But even that failure adds value because that means there are 9 things that the 200 people product team does not have to try out – hence they’re shielded from dead ends and unproductive explorations.
• The mandate for the new incubator (partially based on lessons learnt from the failure of the previous incubator was):
  • Don’t alienate the product teams – you’ll never succeed without their help and blessings
  • Understand the base products thoroughly. Superficial understanding of the issues, toy applications, will not earn the respect of the product team
  • Frequent communication with the business teams
  • File many patents

• The Process

  • The incubator takes inputs from:
    • The office of the CTO, which strategizes and puts together a vision. Before the incubator team, the office of the CTO would hand over the long term vision and strategy to the product team, which was ill equipped to handle it. Now, the incubator fits this gap
    • Product Business Units
    • Customers and Partners
    • Academia (what is the latest in research)
  • The idea backlog is looked at by these three teams:
    • The governance team which meets once in 6 months
    • The alignment team which meets once a quarter
    • The execution team which meets once a month
  • The output of the incubator are:
    • White Papers
    • Prototypes
    • Delivery
    • Patents
    • Innovation Culture
• Challenges for an Incubator
  • How to measure innovation? Number of patents is not a good enough metric.
  • Motivation: the motivation for the incubator and the people on the team must come from within. Creating the motivation, and staying motivated, in the face of 9 failures out of every 10 ideas tried, is difficult.
  • Difficult skill set: the team needs people who are smart, intelligent architects, but also hands on developers, with ability to switch context frequently, understanding the overall BMC vision, ability to sell/market ideas internally, and most importantly they need to be technology as well as business savvy. Finding people like this is a tall order.
• The incubator only does small projects. There are two kinds of projects: “research” and “prototype”.
  • Research projects which are just 1 person 1 week, where that person is supposed to study something for a week and come back with a report.
  • Prototype projects are just 2 or 3 people working for a maximum of 2 months to build a prototype – not necessarily a shipping product. The prototype should prove or disprove some specific hypothesis, and there is a tricky balance to be made in deciding which parts of the prototype will be “real” and which parts will be simple mocked up.

Future Directions

• From technology incubation, they want to move to co-innovation, where they work in conjunction with product teams, and customers to innovate.
• After that they would even like to do business incubation – where the product team is not interested in looking at an adjacent business, in which case the incubator would like to have the ability to go after that market themselves.
• The Indian IT industry, from humble beginnings, is moving up the value chain.
  • First we were doing cost arbitrage (1990s)
  • Now we have process maturity (2000s)
  • The next step would be to get product ownership, and product management here (2010s)
  • Finally, in the 2020s we’ll be able to do innovation, incubation, entrepreneurship
  • The bottomline is that Indian IT industry should be focusing on taking on more and more Product Management responsibilities

Questions from Audience

• Q: The incubator needs people who understand the current products thoroughly. Which means that you need to steal the stars from each product team, because you cannot really hire from outside. And obviously the product team is not willing to give up their stars. How do you solve this problem?
  • A: In general, trying to get stars from the product teams is not possible. You wont get them, and you sour the relationship with the product teams. Instead, what works is to hire the smartest outside people you can hire and then make them learn the product. These people are then teamed up with the right people in the product team during the ‘learning’ process. The learning process is still a bit ad hoc and we haven’t yet formalized it, but at the very least it involves doing some work hands-on.
• Q: What do you answer when a product team asks what is the value you are adding?
  • A: We constantly worry about the value we are adding, and we keep pro-actively stay in touch with the product teams and constantly keep reminding them of the value we add. If it ever happens that a product team asks what value you are bringing, you are already too late
• Q: How are you engaging in academia, and what else would you like to do?
  • A: Currently, we get interns from academia. This allows them to do look at projects that would not get “approved” as regular projects, because “it’s just an intern project.”
• Q: Customers are in the US. Product Managers are in the US. And you cannot innovate unless you understand customers and have close ties with the Product Managers. How do you do that sitting in India?
  • The head of the incubator must be the ultimate product manager, and more. First, s/he must have almost as much understanding of the market and the customers as the product manager of the actual product. In addition s/he must have a vision beyond just what customers want, so that they are able to generate innovative ideas. Successful engagement and understanding of Product Management is key to success of an incubator.
• Q: How do you ensure that the output of an incubator prototype is actually accepted by a product team, and how does the process work
  • All prototype projects require buy-in from the product team and other stakeholders, agreeing tentatively that if the prototype is successful, the product team will actually put that project onto the release schedule. Once the prototype is completed, it is incorporated into the release schedule, and the 2/3 people who worked on the prototype transition into the product team temporarily.

Agenda

Keynote speakers:

• Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Deputy Director General of Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI)
• Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT-Bombay

Other speakers include Dr Aditya Abhyankar, HoD, Department of Technology, Pune University, IITB, Dr Deepak Khemani, Professor IIT Mandi, Dr Abhay Jere, Persistent Systems Ltd, and Dr Girish Palshikar, Tata Research Design and Development Centre.

These are the papers that have been selected for presentation at Compute 2012:

• Scalable Lock-Free FIFO Queues using Efficient Elimination Techniques
• A Robust Neural Network Classifier to Model the Compressive Strength of High Performance Concrete Using Feature Selection
• Mining Research Abstracts for Exploration of Research Communities
• A Generic Topology Discovery Approach for Huge Social Networks
• Multimodal Biometric System Based on Hand geometry, Palmprint and Signature
• A Review of Path Planning and Mapping Technologies for Autonomous Mobile Robot Systems
• A Knowledge-based Formalization of UBL Processes using Hybrid programs
• GPU implementation of a novel hybrid lattice Boltzmann method for non-isothermal flows
• Texture Edge Statistics for Efficient Retrieval of Biomedical Images Recognition and Classifier
• Enabling High Performance Computing using Microsoft HPC Server
• RobExT: A tool to customize microarray data for Cell Designer and Cytoscape
• FIRA – A novel method for benchmarking the cache hierarchy.
• Insertion and Querying Mechanism For A Distributed XML Database System
• Parallel Algorithm to Evaluate Contextual Features for Term Weighting
• Reconstructing the Software Environment of an Experiment with Kameleon

For selected posters, the program committee, and other details of the conference, see the conference website

Registration and Fees

The conference is open to anybody. Fees are Rs. 3500(2500) for professionals, Rs. 2500(2000) for academics, and Rs. 2000(1500) for students. (Numbers in parenthesis indicate rates for ACM Members). Register here.

The conference will be at YASHADA, on Baner Road, near University Circle.

Demo Space for Pune Startups

ACM Pune also invites technology startups in Pune to exhibit their products to the ACM audience for a fee of Rs. 5000 for one day. Selected startups will be provided with one table and a standee for the exhibition. This is a chance for a startup to reach out to a very select audience of computer science professionals from all over the country. For more details, watch for an announcement on the Pune Startups mailing list.

About ACM Pune

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society for the Computer Science/IT community, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession for the past 70 years. The ACM India council was formed 2 years ago with a mandate of playing an active role in the science and profession of computing, with a special emphasis on India.

ACM Pune is the Pune chapter of ACM.

Fab.com started off as Fabulis, a social network for the gay community, but pivoted to a daily design deals site.

This is the second Pune-startup by Jason Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Fab.com. Earlier, he had started social|median, again with True Sparrow Systems of Pune, and this had a successful exit to Xing in less than an year.

In general, Jason Goldberg seems to have perfected the art of co-founding a startup with a development team in fully in Pune. This is not outsourcing in the regular sense of the word; he works with Pune based True Sparrow to build a dedicated team for his startup, he works very closely with the team, involving them in the conceptualization, architecture and design of the product, and spends one week out of every 6 in Pune. For more details on how he does this, check out this PuneTech post from his social median days: How social|median is Developed out of Pune

In any case, the full article about Fab.com’s funding is here

Innovize Tech has built a software product, called Sapience, that helps companies measure the exact amount of time spent by employees in various work related activities. When Sapience is installed on employee PCs, it automatically figures out what work was done, by whom, for how long, and for what purpose. It produces reports that highlight gaps and deviations from pre-determined goals. The basic idea is to provide managers with data that can be used to drive efficiencies, detect underutilization, and compare with industry metrics. Sapience protects privacy of individual employees by only providing aggregate data and trends for teams > 10 employees in most cases.

Here’s their pitch from the press release:

Sapience’s key USP is that it delivers automated visibility into Enterprise Effort. It is cloud based, though an on-premise option is available for large enterprises. Their client portfolio is expanding rapidly, and currently includes large and medium IT Services firms like Zensar, product ISVs (IDeaS, Bio-Analytical Technologies), KPOs (SG Analytics), and Engineering Services companies such as EnVenture and Excelize.

Innovize has been founded by Shirish Deodhar, Madhukar Bhatia, Swati Deodhar, Hemant Joshi – Each has 25+ years of technology and leadership experience in US and India. They are Serial Entrepreneurs with 2 previous successes (Veritas Software India, and In-Reality (sold to Symphony)) in outsourced product development. Shirish, Madhukar, and Hemant were first together in Veritas Software

Innovize is also one of the companies to get multiple honours in the PuneConnect 2011 event recently held in Pune, (which PuneTech helped organize).

Read the full press release about this funding

To a large extent, the computer technology in India is synonymous with software technology. So, when we found that Renu Electronics manufactures all its own hardware for all the products it sells, including LCD panels, and that this is all being done in a small building on Baner Road, we were shocked.

Renu Electronics, founded by Ajay Bhagwat, has generally maintained a low profile, but has a very interesting story to tell.

Early Years

Ajay has an interesting educational background. After his engineering at IIT-Bombay, he went to the US on an L&T scholarship, and did his Masters from the University of Iowa. Here, he excelled, finishing his Masters in 9 months, in the process getting some really interesting results. Specifically, he figured out an algorithm in control systems to determine whether a particular system’s transfer function could be identified adaptively or not. This result was useful enough that some senior professors from UIUC and industry folks from GM requested him to do some additional work on this algorithm to get some specific results they were interested in. For this additional work, which he did in a few months, he got an one more Masters degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

1990s – Starting Renu Electronics

Ajay came back to Pune in 88, and by 1992, had decided to start Renu Electronics, 100% export oriented unit selling HMIs (human machine interfaces; i.e. front end control panels for industrial control systems). The basic idea was to sell a common front end panel that could talk to many different backends and give the customer a common interface. The trick is to be able to talk all the different protocols of the different backend systems (which did not have standards or interoperability). This was done using a core firmware and then pluggable drivers for each backend – which also made it easy to add support for new backends. This was a big improvement in usability since having to teach floor technicians a different front end interface for each backend manufacturer was a major pain point for his customers.

At this time, the majority of the business came from white labeling this technology to established brands. Even GE approached them and started selling this technology under the GE brand. He was one of the few people in India at that time who was exporting technology to the US and Europe instead of importing it. When he was filling out a customs department form for this purpose, he got scolded by the customs officer for putting machinery in the outgoing column and money in the incoming column. The officer knew that things are supposed to be the other way around. It took a long time to convince him that the form was indeed correct.

Building Products

Renu’s flagship products are HMIs which allow industry floor operators to do configuration entry, monitoring of status, alarms in case of exceptional conditions, production of reports, and trends (graphs).

By 1995, Renu had decided that they would manufacture all their own hardware. By designing the entire system in-house they were able to achieve efficiencies that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. For example, they used the 8051 chip, and made maximal use of all the features of this chip, so that they were able to do alarm handling, interfaces, dual-port communications, using just the internal RAM of the 8051 chip – which is just 256 bytes. This gave them a huge cost advantage. At one time, they got threatened by a competitor from Europe that dumping (i.e. selling a product at a price less than it costs to manufacture) is illegal and they would take action. The competitor was very surprised to learn that Renu was actually making a 20% profit in spite of the ridiculously low price.

Renu have always been a product company. They have never done a custom product for anyone, and they’ve always owned their own IP.

Initially, they were only providing the front ends, but soon they wondered whether they they should make their own PLC. All the top PLC companies were Renu’s customers, and Renu did not want to upset the customers. But it turns out that customers actually encouraged Renu to enter this space. They were not worried about competition from Renu, but were happy that Renu would understand the market and domain even better and come up with even more innovative products that they could white label.

Renu was the first company in the world to put the PLC in the HMI itself. This works well for smaller systems. But it also led to too many different products and was messy in terms of sales and marketing – and was confusing to customers. So they designed a modular system which allows PLCs to be chained together to create simple or complex PLCs depending upon what exactly the customer needs. This makes it easier for the customer to create a customized system that exactly meets their needs, without having to go for a high-end, expensive system. The fact that the HMI can be with the PLC, and there is no new system and software to be integrated and learnt is another advantage. Now, finally, they have started a line of modular PLCs without the HMI, and most growth in recent years is coming from
the modular PLCs (with or without HMIs).

Focus on Quality

One of the biggest problems faced by Ajay was that neither he (nor most other people in India) understood how to create an industrially robust process. This resulted in manufacture of components that had latent problems – i.e. units that work perfectly fine, but stop working 6 months later. After they continued to have latent failures they learnt from their customers the various things they need to do to ensure long-term quality of their devices. They spent lots of time and money getting in-house quality control equipment and processes. This high level of quality control results in very reliable products – and this is now one of the USPs of Renu Electronics.

We took a tour of the premises and saw some of the advanced equipment used for testing at Renu. There’s one unit that allows devices to be tested at temperatures from -40 to +60 degrees Celsius. Another unit allows humidity testing up to 98% humidity. A voltage fluctuation/spike/pulse tester can produce a spike of 2Kv in 1 nanosecond. This is in addition to vibration testers, RF interference testers, and 60+ other tests. They have installed anti-static flooring on their manufacturing area. This is very expensive at Rs. 1600 per square foot, but has paid off handsomely, because their latent errors are now down to almost zero.

Staying Ahead of The Curve

Renu believes in implementing processes that they believe are the right thing to do in the long term irrespective of whether they are immediately required by customers or the law. For example, Renu is one of the few ISO-14001 compliant companies. Sometimes, this causes a problem for other companies, because Renu sets the standard and soon the others are expected to follow. On the other hand, sometimes this causes a problem for Renu.

For example, Renu was one of the first companies companies that was ROHS compliant. For this, they had to invest in ROHS compliant machinery and components – which cost significantly more. Further, their running costs went up, because the components they needed on a regular basis were more expensive. But, they’re still ROHS compliant because it is the right thing to do. This story has a happy ending (financially) though – from 1st January, 2012, this investment is going to pay off because there are two new Indian Government directives that will enforce control of hazardous materials, and Renu will already be compliant, whereas other companies would have to struggle.

KPIT Story

Ajay Bhagwat was also one of the promoters of KPIT, one of Pune’s most well known software services companies.

When Ajay was in IIT, he was very interested in music, and would organize and compete in music competitions (he was one of the people behind the creation of a program called Sur-Bahar, which still happens). Shirish Patwardhan was one of the people Ajay used to bump into at music competitions at IIT. Later, in the late 80s they met again in Pune, and started talking about starting a company for doing software products/services. So Ajay joined the software wing of Kirtane and Pandit (an accounting firm) and KPIT was born. Ajay helped set up the quality systems, and the embedded team for KPIT. Although Ajay has been out of day-to-day functioning of KPIT for a long time, he was a director of KPIT until recently.

Contributions to the tech/startup ecosystem in Pune

To those watching the startup ecosystem in Pune, it is clear that Ajay is also one of people helping TiE Pune’s revival this year. This year, TiE has had fortnightly ‘My Story’ sessions with very interesting and accomplished entrepreneurs, and monthly ‘Breakfast sessions’ with more free-wheeling discussions on issues of interest to entrepreneurs. This vitality of TiE in Pune is a very welcome addition to the startup ecosystem in Pune, and will certainly go a long way in cementing Pune’s position as one of the top destinations for doing startups in India.

As a charter member of TiE Pune, Ajay also sets aside 5 to 6 hours every week for one-on-one mentoring of entrepreneurs in Pune. This is a non-trivial time-commitment for any busy executive, but even that, says Ajay, is not enough. There is need for more mentorship of entrepreneurs in Pune. If you have a startup in Pune with actual revenues and enterprise sales, we would suggest talking to Ajay
for some guidance.

Two emerging cleantech companies with very strong links to Pune have made us proud recently.

Pune based ‘First Energy’, one of the pioneers in the clean burning stoves business, was recently chosen as one of the ‘Technology Pioneers of 2012′ by none other than the World Economic Forum. This honor was bestowed on only 25 startups world-wide! Big congratulations to Mahesh Yagnaraman and First Energy. The announcement can be found here

In other news, ‘PK Clean’, a plastic waste-to-oil startup, took the runners-up prize in the ‘CleanTechOpen 2011′! They also took the grand prize in the ‘Air-Wast-Water’ category. CleanTechOpen is considered the ‘Academy Awards of Cleantech’, choosing the most innovative and impactful cleantech companies from the US. ‘PK Clean’ has a very strong Pune link: we are their proving ground. Their pilot plant is based here and their founder, Priyanka Bakaya, is originally from Pune with strong family ties here. Big congratulations are also in order to ‘PK Clean’ and Priyanka! More details can be found here

I am sure ‘PK Clean’ and ‘First Energy’ will add to the likes of Praj, Suzlon, Thermax etc, companies that are worldwide leaders in CleanTech and call Pune their home! No other city/industrial cluster in India can boast of this distinction!

In another little news, I’m sure a harbinger of more great news to come, Pune-originated ‘Carbon Clean Solutions’ (or CCS for short) was recently invited to attend World Economic Forum. Looks like tomorrow’s great cleantech companies have two things in common (besides strong technologies and founders): they have very strong Pune links and they all have ‘at-least-two-word-names-with-spaces-in-them’ Maybe CCS should relocate back to Pune, they have a leg up with a three-word name! Hint, Hint, Aniruddha Sharma!

Demo Hall at PuneConnect was overflowing with the who's who of Pune's IT and Startup community

12 Pune technology startups were chosen from about 30 applicants to showcase their products at PuneConnect 2011. The 12 companies selected were: AdMogul, ApplyEzee, BizPorto, CoTrakr, Deja VU 3D, DroidCloud, InnovizeTech, IntouchId, kPoint, ReliScore, Vaultize, and World Without Me.

Short write-ups of the 12 companies can be found here.

All 12 companies got to demo their product to the who’s who of Pune. Senior members of SEAP, and Charter members of TiE Pune were asked to vote for their favorite demos and the top 4 companies get a chance to present at the bitter “Advantage Pune” conference being organized by Zinnov in Pune, in December 2011. Separately, 4 companies were selected to be part of the “Staring Up” show on ETNow, and their pitches were recorded to be televised nationally on ETNow on 15th November.

Companies selected for Advantage Pune

These 4 companies won the top votes from Senior Members of SEAP and Charter Members of TiE Pune, and hence get a chance to get exposure at the national level at the Advantage Pune conference in December where lots of India’s larger IT companies will be present. The winners are:

1. kPoint
2. Vaultize
3. InnovizeTech
4. DroidCloud

Companies selected for Starting Up show on ETNow

4 Pune companies, InnovizeTech, ReliScore, DroidCloud, AdMogul were selected to be part of the Starting Up program on ETNow

These 4 companies were selected by the selection panel consisting of Gaurav Mehra, Suhas Kelkar, Moti Thadani of SEAP in consultation with Sudhir Syal of ETNow, and they got to pitch their startup to a panel consisting of Nickhil Jakatdar, Gaurag Mehra, and Suhas Kelkar on a program recorded by ETNow to be televised nationally later.

The winners were:

1. InnovizeTech
2. ReliScore
3. DroidCloud & AdMogul

In this program, InnovizeTech got the top marks from the judges and hence gets a direct entry to the final round of ETNow’s SuperAngels’ show where they get a chance to pitch for a million dollars of funding.

The Starting Up now show recorded at PuneConnect will be telecast on Tuesday, 15th November at 11pm on the ETNow channel. It will be re-broadcast 9pm on Saturday, 19th November, and 10:30am and 7:30pm on Sunday, 20th November. It should also become available on YouTube and PuneTech will post a link to the YouTube video.

Other Media Coverage

The event was very well covered by local and national media. The Financial Express, the Financial Chronical, Business Standard, and the top Marathi newspapers Sakal and Maharashtra Times all carried detailed articles about PuneConnect. Three of the articles mentioned all 12 companies, and one of the articles mentioned ReliScore and InnovizeTech.

Pune Mirror had a half page article on World Without Me as a direct result of being featured in PuneConnect 2011.

Overall, we believe PuneConnect 2011 was a huge success, and we hope to do many more such cross-organizational initiatives in the future.

(Disclaimer: Navin and Amit of PuneTech were deeply involved in the creation, conceptualization and organization of PuneConnect, and are also the founders of ReliScore one of the companies that had applied for PuneConnect, got selected in the final 12, and also got selected for the ETNow Starting Up show. Due to the potential conflict of interest, Navin and Amit did not play any part in the selection process which was done entirely by people from SEAP, TiEPune and ETNow. For similar reasons, non of members of POCC who are in the PuneConnect organizers team played any part in the selection.)

Investment proposals are being accepted upto 30 November 2011.

Here are more details from the Venture Center website:

The Entrepreneurship Development Center (‘Venture Center’ ) recently received approval under the scheme “Seed Support System for Start-ups in Incubators” of the Technology Development Board, Department of Science & Technology to host a seed fund with a corpus of Rs 1 crore.

The purpose of the seed fund is to provide a technology driven startup with the much-needed early stage financial support for deserving ideas/technologies requiring up-scaling and related work.

Incubatees of Venture Center are encouraged to contact Venture Center for further information.

Quantum of financial assistance to the incubated entrepreneur

• Minimum: Rs. 1 lakh
• Maximum: Rs. 25 lakhs

The disbursement is normally linked to benchmarks / milestones. Broad Areas to be covered under the financial assistance include:

• Product development
• Testing and trials
• Test Marketing
• Mentoring
• Professional consultancy to engage Professors / experts with small firms
• Filing of Indian/International patents
• Man power for day to day operations
• Any other area as deemed necessary and recommended by the Management Committee.

Here is a list of make/break criteria for applicants:

• There must be at-least one dedicated entrepreneur involved in the venture
• There must be a formal business plan
• The venture and the team must have high ethical & professional standards
• The venture must have a strong technology/knowledge component
• EHS requirements must be met
• Key Proof-of-Concept must be demonstrated & must be reproducible
• The venture must be registered as a private limited company, or must be in the process of registration
• The amount of funding requested must be less than Rs 25 lakh
• The entrepreneur(s) must be willing to share equity in the venture
• The seed funds requested must be for activities such as product development, prototyping, scale-up, developing IP portfolio, test marketing, trials, certification, testing

Applications for the seed fund will be reviewed based on criteria such as (but not limited to):

• Is amount of funding requested enough to reach critical milestone?
• Does the venture have a clear, potentially significant/singular value proposition
• How big/fast growing is the potential market?
• Are target customers clearly identified?
• How credible is the technology? (Is PoC credible in the opinion of subject-matter experts?)
• Are there regulatory/certification/policy risks?
• What are the sources of sustainable competitive advantage (eg. novelty, patentability, etc.)?
• What is the quality of the business plan (revenue model, product roadmap, market segments, etc.)?

Typical terms for seed funding:

• Investment mode: Equity ownership in a private limited company
• Equity stake for seed fund: 10% – 25%
• Investment amount: Rs 1 lakh – 25 lakh (preferably, Rs 15 lakh – Rs 20 lakh)
• Investment to be deployed in instalments, tied to significant milestones
• BoD representation: 1 BoD seat or 1 BoD observer, with special rights
• Promoter/founder stakes: Vesting requirements
• Reporting: Bi-annual presentation to seed committee + Quarterly/annual financials

Application forms can be downloaded here

Business plan templates and other details are available at the Venture Center website

For more information, please contact bdm@venturecenter.co.in