“The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many.” – John Naisbitt
This quote was proven right as over 100 people turned up at the Mu-Sigma Office in Bangalore early on a lazy Saturday morning, the theme of the month being ‘Big Data’.
The audience mostly comprised of BigData enthusiasts and startups, dreaming to make it big in this booming space. Here is a quick round up of the sessions of the day:
Speaker #1– Mr. Dhiraj Rajaram, Founder of Mu-Sigma
Dhiraj kicked off the much anticipated talk by emphasizing the importance of focusing on real problems, more than solutions. He quoted incidents from his life to explain his philosophy. He explained the positioning of MuSigma in the spectrum of opportunities and the way things work at Mu-Sigma. He used an interesting analogy from the epic Mahabharata to explain how one should eye entrepreneurship. Here are a few interesting quotes from his talk:
“I’m excited about the word ‘Decisions’ and the way people make decisions”
“Take risks, be aggressive, passionate, open your third eye!”
“Be problem driven than solution driven”
Demo #1 – SurfMark – Mr. Kapil Kumar
A search for SurfMark throws this up – “Take full screenshots of web pages and directly add your notes and highlights to them. Save pages continuously and automatically organize them around topics including travel plans, job searches, DIY projects and academic research. Full text search.”
This browser add-on tool was demo-ed by Kapil Kumar. Kapil touched upon the need for better bookmarking solutions, especially in the realm of web research and collaborative research and explained how SurfMark catered to that need. He shared his experience of how his team tried to make it B2C initially and gradually moved to B2B. He pointed out an important feature of SurfMark – It not only stores links, but also data, thereby enabling a full text search on the data.
Headstart wishes you goodluck, Kapil!
Speaker #2 – Mr. S. Anand – Chief Data Scientist, Gramener
The engaging talk that ensued was by Mr. Anand of Gramener, a Bangalore based B2B big data company that deals with data visualization. Anand traced his tryst with data over the years and explained Gramener’s offering. He used extremely interesting examples to show the audience the power of data visualization – how not-so-obvious facts become glaringly obvious with visualization. The examples he used stemmed from a variety of fields – sports, education, demographics, food and more. Gramener has handle data volumes ranging from as low as 10,000 rows to as high as 1.5 TB of data. He encouraged the big data enthusiasts in the audience to follow the work of Edward Tufte, a pioneer in the field of data visualization.
Demo #2 – PromptCloud – Mr. Prashant Kumar
The second demo of the day was by Prashant Kumar, Founder of PromptCloud, which is a vertical agnostic, DaaS (Data as a Service) platform. Prashant briefed the audience about the offering. He also mentioned the primary target customer segments of PromptCloud – Market Research and E-Commerce. He answered several questions posed by the audience, mostly to do with the offering and the nature of data collected and crawled.
We at Headstart hope that PromptCloud will soar high and go places. All the best, Prashant!
The talks and demos of the day were followed by a lightning pitch/mini demo by Gunjan Kejriwal of Roomys.in, a web based platform to find roommates. Gunjan explained his idea and also took feedback and suggestions from the audience. This was followed by a brief networking session which brought the packed-house October edition to a close.
We have a very exciting chain of sessions lined up for our next SS event on 9th November 2013, which will revolve around ‘Social Entrepreneurship’. See you there, folks!