It was more than a house-full session at the North Pergola, IIMB, this Saturday, with around 110 people coming in for the May ’09 edition of Startup Saturday Bangalore. The theme being analytics, there was a mix of young and experienced folks, from a variety of fields. The talk began with Anunay taking us through the journey of Marketelligent.com, right from the time they were incubated at NSRCEL, IIMB. It was interesting to know that he did not know his partner till just one month before they started up – it was a perfect match of a marketing guy with an analytics nerd and it seems to have worked out pretty well. There was a discussion about the hesitance of conventional venture folks in funding efforts related to analytics. This was eased for Marketelligent by angel investors. Anunay’s talk was sprinkled with numerous questions from audience, which he fielded well and which resulted in a really lively discussion. This was continued by Partha from AnalyticsQuotient.com, who are primarily into the FMCG domain and have started up since a bit more than half a year. Partha showed a focussed approach to the basic situations in decision making and how a combination of science and an artistic approach leads you to business insights. Analytics Quotient (AQ) goes beyond just the statistics part of it and helps global customers to see a bigger picture of the situation. Both Marketelligent and AQ, cater primarily to the global bouquet of customers. With limited time and increased audience enthusiasm, the speakers got less time to talk about the pitfalls faced by them, some of which were taken up later in the networking break.
The event went ahead with a short talk by Kallol Borah, one of the founding directors of Headstart.in. He highlighted the activities of Headstart and described the efforts of the volunteers in five cities of India. He also had questions for the audience, such as: how many of them came for focussed networking and/or how many of them came in for the theme; how many of them will be interested in an organized membership for Headstart.in and what would be the membership fees that they would be willing to pay; a decision for an online poll in this regard was made. A number of pros and cons of this approach were thrown around by the audience. A warm networking plus coffee session followed.
Nitin Godawat from Decidyn and Madan Pandit from Textualanalytics.com took us through some basics and futuristics topics on analytics. Nitin clarified the role of analytics in the variety of domains it is used in – in fact, he showed how the word ‘analytics’ is misused and overused many a times. Aided by examples from the finance and the health-care domain, the audience saw the real iceberg of analytics from the tip of business decisions. The growth of analytics post 2002 was shown to be phenomenal in India. Possible career options in Analytics and the tools in current use, were also a part of this talk. Madan touched upon some futuristic concepts related to analytics in text based analytics for documents and voice modulation analysis.
A talk on the incubation facilities provided by NSRCEL was the concluding event, where A Suryanarayanan, COO of the center, guided the audience about the activities at NSRCEL. The enthusiasm of the audience was visible from the fact that the hall was still occupied till beyond an hour of the scheduled completion of the event.