Just got back from an enlightening 4 days at the GSMA conference in Barcelona - got to see new companies working around social networking tools and mobile tv - i guess that was the main theme of this show. content content and more content and some more content

Everyone was doing / trying to create a social network and somehow get people hooked onto their platform. I asked if they were making money - and not surprisingly everyone candidly admitted that they were in the red. Best of luck to us all I say!!!

Met up with Ajit Joakar (http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/) and was fortunate enough to get a dekkho at his presentation. (Its on his blog now)
Also a shoutout to the Indian GSMA / Mobile Federation - please try to take up a pavilion in the next conference - I saw stalls from Sweden, Israel, UK, Canada and France. They had invited smaller companies within their country, who could not afford to pay for a stall independently and hence were given small tables with their nameplates on it. (neatly done). This gives a big impetus to startups who are not revenue positive but would like to showcase their product in front of a global audience.

My guess is that they would have given some money to participate but essentially its heavily subsidised by the Mobile Federation of that country - if someone reading this can please reach out to the Indian Association it would be super. We need a platform on the global stage specially when India is one of the largest mobile markets.

I met only a limited number of Indian companies participating although i know that there are plenty more doing brilliant work but just don’t have the capital to go and present at the MWC.

One more thing before I sign off - DO NOT FLY ALITALIA - its the most thakela “uberscrewed”of all international carriers - pathetic - please tell everyone you meet or talk to.

Cheers

Akshat

I am just returning from an enjoyable session of BarCamp delhi (for the uninitiated barcamp is the free un -conference) , it was really interesting and informative (besides regular social networking , blogging stuff thats ridding high in India currently) , one session was worth mentioning was Amazon EC2 presentation by Amazon’s Jinesh Varia which allows startups meet demand and scale with any upfront cost , its a xen based solution which allows you to provision a new Instance in minutes , plus they have tons pre-built Images which they AMI for common scenarios like lamp , Ruby or Java stack and various OS images. You can use Instance till its required after that you can terminate it to save costs (beaware your data will be lost !! so take a backup of you data on Amazon storage service S3)Amazon also provides web services api to control these instances . Downside includes no static IP (you a need dynamic dns service ) and no instance suspend support .

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