Bliss

The NASSCOM conclave this year is happening on 27th and 28th October, that is today and tomorrow. The crowd this year at the conference was a lot higher than I expected. I’m sure their could have been more than 1000 people participating in the event. It’s a full 2 days event and this time they were able to attract more crowd into the event because they did a pretty good job of online promotions and partnered with some leading product and Social media companies.

There was quite a good coverage from the press as well. This time the highlight of the event was its speakers. Guy Kawasaki started the events with a very interesting speech and set the standards quite high for rest of the speakers. You can find his presentation in slideshare.  After that, there were a few unsessions and workshops happening parallelly at various halls in Hotel Lalit Ashok, Bangalore.

You can download the information on the sessions and speakers here. A few distinct highlights about this meet up was that NASSCOM has got some really good speakers running sessions and discussions that startups can really connect with and take home some valuable information.

All conferences that I have attended in India has one same basic flaw in organizing the sessions. They are always too basic, repetitive and CEOs go on their ego trips to explain how they faced a particular problem and overcame it successfully. But I always ask, no 2 problem are same and there is no guarantee the same solution will work the 2nd time. Then why would I be interested in your sessions?

But always these conferences invariably becomes an event where the intelligent start up entrepreneurs end up taking nothing home – besides the bags and stationary of course.

But today, I got to say that even though it had the same shades in some of the sessions, the key-note speakers really stole the show. 2 outstanding speakers of them were Guy Kawasaki and Naeem Zafar.

Naeem has promised to upload it to slideshare as well. Guy spoke about “Art of the Start” and Naeem spoke about “The art of writing a business model”. As an entrepreneur and an active member of a startup company I was able to trace back my steps and got my plans reassured that we are moving in the right direction with the right team. Also I was able to take home information with me home that will practically help me in marketing my products and services.

Now thats the kind of stuff entrepreneurs wat to hear in a start-up conference. And NASSCOM managed to pull that off quite well this time. There were tweetup sessions as well with Guy and discussion sessions with speakers CEOs, VCs and other big guys you might have wanted to talk to. Those things were organized quite well.

There were stalls with lot of companies showcasing their products and other sessions that we were a part of as well, but as I said they were moving out of the intended direction or was uninteresting (I mean the ones you really don’t have anything to take home).

Overall it was quite well-organized event so far and we’ll be joining them back tomorrow for rest of the sessions and discussions. Will fill you guys on it a well once I’m back tomorrow. Today was truly long but untiring experience.