Upcoming Events (Till July 2013):

Pune 3rd Edition

April 5th - April, 7th, 2013 

Chennai 8th Edition
April 19th - April 21st, 2013

Trivandrum 1st Edition
May 3rd - May 5th, 2013

Bangalore 3rd Edition
May 24th - May 26th, 2013

Pune 4th Edition
June 14th - June 16th, 2013

Honestly, this has been a long time coming, but we needed some sure shot data before we made the call. With In50hrs Bangalore underway and having to announce the next set of dates for the events, we thought it was time we made the announcement.

The Story of Delhi:

We love the city of Delhi. Just being in the city brings back feelings and emotions like any other, but its also been a tough city to grow an ecosystem. Personally, we’ve done several efforts in the past to grow a community there - via OCC etc, but the understanding has been very clear - if people from elsewhere can grow a community, Silicon valley would have remote branches by now. Communities can only be grown locally. All other factors are a matter of support and strengthening. We havent been able to find that anchor. I believe events like Startup Weekend, PeerHack and Product Nation will be the one to build that community. Which also means Delhi has options and we are leaving it to good hands.

We did two editions in Delhi, and the logistical cost of bringing team, materials, and getting the word out (for an event where the principal objective is not to make money) didnt make sense - not with the fact that there is a lack of a community, and Delhi is overly business sided that makes technical hackathons and prototyping events quite a challenge. We were constantly getting requests from a lot of folks asking, if they come and pitch on Friday, if we’ll have the prototype ready by Sunday - that’s delhi for you. Quick, and to the Point - on the Business front.

We run these efforts on shoestring budgets. And The Startup Centre is a Startup of Startups - we arent venture funded, or backed by a large corporate. Its a small group of individuals wanting to make a difference and hopefully build a viable business model around it - by virtue of making entrepreneurs succeed extremely well. Somewhere there was a disconnect.

 

Hello Trivandrum

Make no doubts about it though, we are expanding. There are two more cities coming up, but we wanted to see and strengthen where we are far more effective. We have been taking a call, and even asking people from our community where they are based out of and would like an event like In50hrs.

Kerala has been on our minds for a while now, and it was just a matter of picking between Cochin and Trivandrum. (Cochin is still in the race though).

So we want to do one edition of In50hrs in Trivandrum. We are not sure if that IS the place in Kerala or If Cochin is the place, but the participation we see should help make that decision. 

As a Startup, it all fundamentally comes down to one rule: Try a lot, keep what works, cut off what isnt working. So we are trying a lot. And hopefully will continue doing more of what and where its working.

In the meantime, We look forward to saying Hello to Trivandrum.

Trivandrum 1st Edition
May 3rd - May 5th, 2013

Leave your Email Address to be Notified.

 

 

We are hosting In50hrs in Bangalore - for the second time - at the same ThoughtWorks Office. The ambience and the hospitality of that bunch is hard to bunch.

So in the same serene environment as last time, we are back and this time, this is the line up of Mentors who will spend two days at the event - working with the teams and prepping them up and the Jurors who will give feedbacks on Demo Evening on Sunday.

 

Mentors:

1. Deepak Shenoy (Entrepreneur, Financial Whiz)

2. Hitesh Gupta (UI / UX)

3. Pratyush Prasanna (Technologist - Founder of a Health Startup)

4. Arvind Devaraj (Android Expert)

5. Atif Haider (Technologist, LaunchYard)

6. Surendran Mahendran (Co-Founder, MarkupWand, YCombinator Startup)

7. Joylita Saldanha (Product Guru)

 

Jury:

1. Prateek Dayal of SupportBee

2. Shivkumar of Exotel

3. Rutvik Doshi of Inventus Capital

4. Rahul Chowdri of Helion Ventures

5. Nagarjun Kandukuru, Thoughtworks

 

… Along with the Team of In50hrs - Vijay Anand and Shayon Mukherjee of The Startup Centre

 

We will be adding a few more in the next few days. But if you are looking for a start for your venture, this seems to be an apt way to go for the launch of that Idea.

Registrations for the last few slots here.

We get this question a lot. What happens to the teams and Prototypes after In50hrs. Thought we’d answer:

There are three key things to achieve in event like In50hrs:

1. Form the Pitch and prove the capability to attract a team

2. Test Drive the team

3. Build a prototype that encapsulates the essence of the idea and allows you to validate it with people without necessarily having to be there in person.

The next step after In50hrs would be to take the time to build that prototype into a product - and that is a longer process. You have to get the userflows right, setup the landing page, the login screens etc etc, and flesh out the MVP that one will pay for, and sign up a paying customer.

The Startup Centre has a programme named The Resident Programme which works closely with teams to do this - including taking them to customers to market validate it. (http://www.thestartupcentre.com/…)

There are a few things you should do, no matter what, just right after In50hrs:

1. Setup your landing page

2. Give it a name and get the url

3. Host the Prototype online under a subdomain (http://prototype.xyz.com)

4. Make a video of that one key feature of the product - as built in In50hrs, and
use that to get signups for your beta.

5. Apply for the TSC Resident Programme - or start working on building the Product.

In50hrs is now a growing baby, a really really fast growing baby. We have been around for close to 2 years now, and close to 14 events down across four different cities - and we are making plans to expand.

Before that however, we wanted to do a few tweaks.

We started In50hrs with a rather straightforward agenda - bring people together and let them prototype. Over time, we thought it made life simpler by segregating ideasmiths, developers and the designers and incentivizing folks seperately. While that has been interesting, we are evolving In50hrs in a slightly different tangent.

While the 500+ ideas we’ve heard are all interesting and the 180 Prototypes that have come out are meritorius, the 25 startups is the number we are trying to improve.  When we looked at all that we can do, one thing came out to us - to dig up more solid problems to solve. At The Startup Centre, we have been noticing the same thing, that startups that solve a real problem swing by most of the issues that most entrepreneurs crib about - with a solid problem and a persuasive plan/prototype/product to solve it, it looked like most of the battle is won.

In50hrs Bangalore will be the last of its old edition. Starting from the Pune Edition, In50hrs will be about solving some real world problems. Towards that end, we are collating the meanest, and the tougest problems from entrepreneurs all cross to bring them to you - this will be across healthcare, education, retail, enterprise et all (17 sectors identified so far)  and even some nifty prizes behind some of the promising Ideas/Prototypes to solve them.

You are still welcome to bring your own problems - that you see, and the idea, pitch, form teams and prototype. In50hrs as a platform just will offering a bit more than what it has so far.

We are excited about the journey ahead. Hope you are too.

The hotcake idea of the event was iVolunteer.

iVolunteer - Ask any event organizer about having volunteers at their event, they’d get back to you with what a pain is. Volunteering is fun to a lot of folks but to dig out interesting events that goes good with their line of interest is just left to oblivion. iVolunteer aims at solving the problem staring with getting folks up for volunteering for NGOs is a gamified model.

• Heisenberg - Platform for marketers in both offline and online segment - Most successfully running companies look forward to run ads in the offline and online segment and as a result to that, leads start to generate. The  problem kickstarts right there. The marketing team is stranded clueless about where the conversion is happening from and how they’d manage all the leads that get generated. So, Heisenberg comes to a rescue as a system to manage all the leads in effective way by letting the companies track online conversions and take voicemails for companies to get back to the leads generated in a more structured and easy format. 

• bazaarSquare - Searching for the product availability and the best price in the stores in a location is a daunting task. Local Search aims at Social-sourcing the data from the brick and mortar store and lets you search in real-time to find the best prices and availability for the products you want to buy by having detailed product information and user reviews from the real users around the area, so that you can be confident you’re getting a product that fits your needs. 

We had around 12 Participants during the event and 28 for the demo evening with 3 Jurors at the venue.

The Developers who won Rs. 25000 worth of  VPS Credits from E2E Networks are:

• Gurteshwar Singh
• Neetesh Gupta
• Amit Singh Sethi

A Big Thank You to the Jury who helped shape Ideas to Interesting Prototypes with their valuable Inputs and Feedbacks. 

Jurors - Deepinder Goyal from Zomato, Amit Somani from Make My Trip, Dhruv Kapoor from Helion Venture Capital  

Some great words about the event:

“The event really helped us get a sense of direction, mostly because of various interactions and the awesome feedback we got.” - Gurteshwar Singh

Facebook Album of the event -> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.550863048280553.125458.427343437299182&type=1&l=06f443591c

In50hrs Chennai, the first event this year ended with a bang! A variegated set of ideas got prototyped.

The hotcake idea of the event was Toungez.

Toungez - In couchsurfing style, that allows people find local (language) support, when travelling. We often travel to places of a different dialect and get stumped at various places not knowing how to respond when people speak to you in a different language altogether. Toungez comes to a rescue as a mobile app with a repository of native language speakers, by letting you call them who can help you out, bridging the communication gap.

• Twitter Chat - A better way to do a DM conversation - offline from twitter. Most business connects happen over social media in the current era. After a couple of to and fro messages(or @mentions) on twitter, you’d want to take things the old school way of emailing each other. Twitter Chat aims at being a new age tool that lets you have a real time conversation, following up with the earlier conversation on twitter.

• Shopzi - The challenge with garments online, is that reviews and recommendations are yet to be cracked. There is a huge galore of fashion apparels across various online fashion stores making it difficult for a consumer to circle down onto something interesting. Shopzi wishes to be ‘the’ place where one can compare designs, prices from and also take a sneak peek at new fashion trends.

• Quiz.io - Quizzes are now just an email away. It’s a pain for a lot of teachers and professors to make questions and answers and upload it to a web app/module for students to take quizzes. Quiz.io makes it easy by letting educators make quizzes with just sending across an email.

• TubeWall - An online video editing service, which will allow users to enhance the experience by slicing and adding own comments. Whenever we watch videos online, we always have something to say like “notice this at that time” or wish to point out something particular. TubeWall

• Conneck.me - A social discovery app. . Most Networking happens at events. But at the same time its hard to find people of similar interests or cadre. Connect.me aims at solving the problem with its interesting algorithm that matches based on connect/proximity as  app.

• Simple CMS - A site builder that anyone who doesnt know to code can use to build sites. It’s known that building a website is not an easy job for most non techies. Simple CMS aims at being a simple tool for people

• Microfin - A Microfinance Manager for NGOs. Raising money is the easiest bit in an NGO. Channelling the fund and making sure its rightly used is a big challenge by itself. Microfin comes as a boon for NGOs to funnel and track the fund wisely

• Demovote - A social activist app, allowing constituents to know what their electoral candidates stand for (policy wise). Demovote lets you get all the information you need with the click of a button.

• RC Laddu - A Responsive content Concept, with adaptive content depending on devices. We live in a world where technology is advancing at lightning speed. With that, the way consuming content across various blend of devices has had a drastic change.

A Big Thank You to all the Mentors and Jury who helped shape Ideas to Interesting Prototypes with their valuable Inputs and Feedbacks.

Mentors - Dorai Thodla from iMorph, Mahul Shah from Amazon, Prasannan, an Independent Mobile Consultant

Jurors - Dorai Thodlafrom iMorph

Some great words about the event:

“Was a great experience. Met some awesome people at the event and yeah, gave some shape to our idea” - Anand Ravichandran

Facebook Album of the event -> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.536897833010408.124100.427343437299182&type=1&l=c92ae0e1fb

We have all seen the adverts and the search for the perfect co-founders: The Hacker Ninjas, Rockstar designers, the Designer Gurus, The Pixel Movers, but hackerstreet has been home to one of the most elegantly written co-founder post that We’ve come across in a while.

Which got us thinking - What does the right pitch look like, when you are looking for a teammate with a complimentary skillset? This applies when you want to try it for In50hrs, or be it for the startup ahead.

1. Lose the Jargon

When you are writing, you want to assume that the person you are talking to, doesnt get flattered by the jargons out there - big data, analytics (or in the last five years, Social Media), etc etc might not get the attention of anyone. But if you are specific to the point to exactly the core technology you are using, you might get some crisp and sharp eyes on your post. Getting to the point, helps.

2. Lose the Adjectives

We do not believe you are looking for an actual Ninja. Provided that, you will attract the wrong kind of audience - mostly aspiring, but not there yet types - who are the wrong audience for you, and the job at hand.

3. Introduce yourself, not by how you see yourself, but by how others see you.

I have yet to see a post that says “I am known to make some major leaps of faith, i fall often, but i always learn a thing or two out of it - atleast the hope I hope so - and get back on the horse”, adding to it, experience in the domain (if you are the business guy), and the kind of places you’ve worked in will get you bonus points. Keep it real.

4. Explain the venture that you’ve set yourself to embark on

This is the toughest, because anyone with an idea is brimming with excitement and there is no blemish, but only a bed of roses and all thorns are ignored. In our opinion, thats the wrong start to a venture, it means infact that you are still short of your research. Writing about your venture in a realistic sense, who the competition is, and the opportunity you are after, will win you some very special brownie points. Remember to face your fears early on than later.

5. Explain what you bring to the table

Make it very very clear. If we are looking for a co-founder out in the open, go as wide and complementary as possible. Most co-founders who are friends tend to carry overlapping skillsets, but if you are looking out, see if you can make it complementary. But first, and if there is trust to be built, make it very clear what you bring to the table.

6. Why is this different, new and why should anyone care?

There must be an assumption as to why you believe this makes sense. For Freshdesk for eg, that case was simple. “There is a large number of Small and Medium enterprises that are using Zendesk and as shown in the hackernews thread discussion, they are increasing the price and there seems to be a large unmet audience”

7. What you are looking for in a teammate

Spell it out. What are you exactly looking for in a teammate? Are you expecting the other person to go meet other people? travel? make sales? and keep in mind that the roles are equal, and one is not blatantly holding more power than the other.

8. What is the End goal?

Are you looking for a teammate for a competition, a hackathon, an idea-to-prototype event, or is the plan to do a startup? If a startup, what would be the commitment and is there funding / avenues to raise money - all of that would have to be laid out. Lets say you already have a team and product in place and you want to experiment with some new ideas - and this might not become a new startup, but just a new product to your existing line, then make sure its clear in the messaging.

9. Wear their hat.

Imagine life from the other side of the table. Lets say you are a developer with mad skills or a designer with a good sense of colors, lines and design. Or an ideasmith who has a knack for spotting opportunities. What are each of these looking for in an ideal teammate? What would get their juices flowing to want to partner with anyone. Make sure that somewhere in the pitch, that is covered - a technologist/developer joins a team for many many reasons - might be for money, might be for the thrill of learning something, might be just for fun, but make sure you know what you can promise and deliver on.

10. The Essentials: Clarity and Modesty

In everything carry a sense of modesty. This is a partnership you make towards a venture - and its risky and there are rough seas ahead. Keep things simple and straightforward early on. Be modest - better yet be yourself.

Need an example? Check out the post in Hackerstreet.

 

Note: Sitting on an Idea, that you would like to prototype and validate? Participate in the upcoming In50hrs - coming across Chennai, Bangalore, Pune and Delhi. Register Now

Great amount of tussle for finish the prototypes fast.  

The hotcake idea of the event was iWish.

iWish: A Social Network to Huddle and make your Wishes come true. Well, everyone has wishes. Some come true and some don’t. Most don’t come true as most dream of the craziest things possible. Nevertheless, they are dreams and there isn’t a limit. So, there came iWish, from Radhika Singh and Milanpreet Kaur. iWish lets you add-in your dreams to their social network and lets you know if there is someone(like you) wishing for/dreaming about getting a similar dream, enabling you to huddle with such and live it for real. 

 

We had around 26 Participants with 7 Mentors and 4 Jurors at the Venue, Persistent Systems, showcasing 7 Prototypes on the Demo Evening.

List of Prototypes that got demoed:

• Ubique: Add Topics to your Conversation. Google Groups, Facebook Groups, Whatsapp Groups have conversations happening all the time. But there comes a point when the group is left barren due to the lack of topics to talk about. Ubique is aims to solve that. How? By pushing-in new topics that are related to the past conversations in the group or anything breaking.

• Pingstry: An App Database tailored to find the apps you are looking for. There are a zillion apps across various marketplaces. There is no simple way, yet, for anyone to find an app that they want other than typing in the name of the app. Pingstry lets you search based on categories, mix and match of features, and discover the apps you didn’t know, they exist.

• Event Kiosk: A iPad App to find in-event information. Finding who’s at the event, who’s speaking, who’s who is a pain when one happens to drop-in at an event. Event Kiosk aims at solving the problem of getting the information right when people check-in at the event venue enabling them to discover all the information they want, on an iPad, docked at various points in the venue area.

• FYIP: Authentic n Social Product Review Database. In the current era of Electronics, it’s hard to find reviews that you can trust. FYIP aims to solve the problem by being a social base for authentic reviews where friends and family could easily make decisions of buying the products without having to budge too much on the thought process.

• AdsHub: A New-age D2D2C Advertisement Platform for Mobile. Every Developer obviously wishes to see many, download his/her app and use it. But in reality, though a lot of love the app, the download doesn’t quite skyrocket. AdsHub aims at enabling developers to publish ads of other apps in a peer to peer fashion hence enabling more downloads from the users.

• Project Resolution: A Cheat Sheet for Android App Developers. It’s a pain for an Android Developer to get real world, accurate information like Resolution, Touch Density, Battery and such about the current devices. Project Resolution is a cheat sheet that has all the information a developer would need before launching his/her app, hence enabling to pick the devices he/she would trust. 

 

A Big Thank You to all the Mentors and Jury who helped shape Ideas to Interesting Prototypes with their valuable Inputs and Feedbacks.  

Mentors - Akshay Mathur from ShopSocially, Sarang Lakare from IntouchApp, Amol Vedak from MobileWare, Aditya Kulkarni from Pubmatic, Sahil Khan from The Tossed Salad, Patanjali Somayaji from Motorola, Amit Dixit from FirstFuel Software.

Jurors - Roby John from June Software, Arun Prabhudesai from RedBus, Sagar Bedmutha from Optinno Mobiletech, Parag Dhanuka from Nexus VP. 

 

Some great words about the event: 

“Enthusiastic People All Around” - Akshay Mathur

“Best Event Attended Till Date” - Pratik Nikam

 

Facebook Album of the event -> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.526239354076256.122227.427343437299182&type=1&l=087b27a6c0

In50hrs Bangalore was a blast! Great amount of energy and a ton of ideas got pitched.

The hotcake idea of the event was Design A-Board.

Design A-Board - An Interior Designer Palette on the Web. We all go through different interior designs magazines and dream about the picture perfect house while talking to an interior designer but when it comes to reality, we realize that as there is a huge communication gap between the designer and you as the mediums used are broken and there is not a simple solution for a designer to just showcase the best picks for the house like the type of flooring, the shades of paint and the subtle things for the decor. So came the Idea “Design A-Board” from an Interior Designer, Taru and the Hacker, Shubanshu.

We had around 38 Participants with 8 Mentors and 7 Jurors at the Venue, ThoughtWorks and went house full during the Demo Evening.

List of Prototypes that got demoed -

• Hunger Free India: A Portal to give away excess food cooked. India is a country where population needs no mention. Everyday, we hear about hunger-stricken stories and at the same time, amount of food wastage that’s done in several restaurants, malls and such. Hunger Free India aims at solving the problem by connecting Food Donors to Takers to achieve a Hunger Free India.

• SocioG:  A Kickstarter for High Impactful Social Causes. Every time we come come across a newspaper article that talks about something cool, something innovative, something that could be a social game changer, we have a slight rush of blood in the head to help such causes solve big problems. SocioG helps you discover such projects and lets you be a part of it.

• G-Track: Realtime Tracking of Heavy Vehicles. It’s a tremendous pain for a logistic chain to keep a track of all the shipments in real time and there is no cost effective solution in the market that could be viable to any. G-Track aims at solving the problem in a very simple fashion. Adding to that, they wanted to bring in on-the-fly fuel and engine check system on board

• Get Driving: A Portal to find the best driving schools. Finding a nearby driving school from peers is fairly easy but when the point comes to finding good ones, women friendly, there is no way out. Get Driving is the perfect pitstop for that.

• Speechly: A “Voice” based Social Network for Mobiles. In the current age of Open Social Networks, text has been ‘the’ only primary means of communications limiting interactions. Speechly aims at taking this a step further by enabling users to leave a voice message for people to interact. Aiming at Non-English speaking Countries and the Rural population set.

• Source-it: Tech Enabling the Mom-and-Pop Shop. Every Time you wish to get something from a nearby ‘Kirana’ shop, you’d be like, “What’s the number?”, “Would they have it?” and so on. Source-it aims at solving the problem.

• Real Estate GIS: Precise Real Estate data on a Map. Most site these days talk about ‘availability’ of places to buy, places to rent and so on. When it comes to the point of tapering to your needs, you are lost in oblivion. Real Estate GIS lets you find every tiniest detail of information you need in a very intuitive format, on a map.

• 50focal: Video Production and Publisher for Corporates. A lot of events happen in a company and most that happen, are internal. The video capture quality of most look as though they’ve come out of a blind alley as most are not really professional and even if they are, they are just put up on a hard disk and be long forgotten. 50focal aims at solving the problem also enabling the corporates to manage their video lot in a much better format.

• My Share Plex: A portal to exchange unwanted goods. In this electronic era, we tend to buy just too many unwanted products and this, of late has become an ongoing phenomena. My Share Plex makes it easy for someone to put up their product on the website and the site automatically figures out the credibility of it, making it easy for anyone to buy it with ease.

• One Bucket List: Bucket Listing Made Easy. Everybody dreams. Places, Cars, Exotic Food and what not. One Bucket List is exactly something one could crave for. Add all things awesome on mind that you wish to do and make sure things happen soon. The app is live at http://onebucketlist.com

• Keysome: Hotkeys for Everyone. “Too many browser tabs”, “Isn’t that Tab already open?” is pretty much a common thing you hear from your peers. Keysome, a Chrome browser plugin that helps you shift between tabs with just hot keys and predefined hotkeys that are shortcuts that would let you open frequently opened websites hassle-free. The website is live at http://keysome.in 

 

A Big Thank You to all the Mentors and Jury who helped shape Ideas to Interesting Prototypes with their valuable Inputs and Feedbacks. 

Mentors - Vasudha Chandak from Practo, Hari Shankaran from HackerRank, Vaidhy from Apigee, Ravi Padaki from Pravi Solutions, Freeman Murray from Startup School, Venkat Mangudi from Venkat Mangudi Consulting, Prayank Swaroop from Accel Partners & Kiran Jonnalagadda from HasGeek.

Jurors - Shashank ND from Practo, Phanindra Sama from RedBus, Sanjay Anandaraman from SeedFund, Pallav Nadhani from Fusion Charts, Ketan Hajarnavis from ThoughtWorks, Sanjeev Gadre, Rohit Singhal from SourceBits. 

Some great words about the event:

“Seeing ideas come to life and the infectious enthusiasm” - Venkat Mangudi

“Energy - Ideas - Enthusiasm - Hope - Fire in the Belly” - Ketan Hajarnavis

 

Facebook Photo Album of the event -> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.513376592029199.119880.427343437299182&type=1&l=000e20a1a3

 

Registrations for In50hrs  Pune are now OPEN.