Demopits' experiences at Headstart 09

I went to see the demo pits of Headstart 2009 at the NIMHANS convention center in Bangalore today. It was nice of the organizers to make these free thus providing good opportunities of interaction to the participating companies and also showing poor entrepreneurs like me that they care ;).

Over to the companies, there were some really nice ones. I found the demo from Artin Dynamic most cute (I know that is probably not a compliment a startup expects but can't help it). Basically how about having a power supply with a USB interface to the CPU. Now when the CPU is off, it basically cuts off the power supply thus eliminating the zombie usage completely. The product is called SPARA. Nice!

Then there were two companies that seem to be doing NLP analysis of the data in order to get structure out of them. One of them was alertpedia which monitors some selected websites in order to match the new additions against structured queries specified by the users. Whenever a match occurs, the user gets a alert. So you can say things like - I want to monitor "Bikes on sale in Bangalore" and it will be treated like a structured query. The second company was Meshlabs and the product was zimesh. The guy at the stall said that they do complete parsing of the data. Some of the data comes from various RSS feeds and also users can add any content into the system. Here the data seems more noisy and I am doubtful how well the algorithms perform and how scalable will they be as the site usage increases. Another thing would be to identify duplicates - something which they might already be doing but I forgot to ask. They were vague about the details on the NLP part and I didn't push too much :-).

Entrip guys were smart to have a Mac which makes everything look that extra good :-). But their site does have some eye candy. The basic premise is that you can plan your travel and then share the experience post travel. They have integration with lots of services like flickr, youtube, blogging platforms but why are they calling in "travel blog" or something like that, I don't know. It sounds very boring from the name. A team of 6 people from Pune is working on it for about a year now and they have launched few days back.

Then there were many more like wisdomtap, jobeehive, iduple, tringme and others. From a startup's point of view, I don't think they would have found many customers there but it is sure to give more visibility to them among the investors, bloggers, press and in the ecosystem in general.

There were also panels and talks for 2 days which I didn't attend. From what I am reading, the keynote of day 2 delivered by Ashish Gupta looks quite interesting. Read about it here - Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures.