Just came back from Bangalore after attending #nasscompc. It was a huge gathering – 1000+ delegates and many eminent speakers from India & Silicon Valley. The mood was very upbeat and most of the speakers were of the opinion that this decade will see many successful product companies coming out of India
There were many parallel sessions also so unfortunately it wasn’t possible to attend each session. Amongst the sessions that I attended, I really liked Vinod Khosla, Vivek Wadhwa, Brad Smith, Naveen Jain & Anand Rajaraman. My key takeaways from the conclave are as follows:
Out of the box thinking
“Invent the future rather than extrapolating the past” – This is the mantra with which Vinod Khosla kicked off his session. He gave numerous examples to convey the point that we should not worry too much on predictions by experts because more often than not they have been proved wrong. Rather we should apply out of the box thinking and challenge conventions to create successful & disruptive products.
Naveen Jain told that If you want disruptive thinking, go to people who know nothing about the problem. Experts can only provide incremental solutions and so each one of has an opportunity to create solutions in areas other than our expertise. Lessons from one field can be very well applied in other fields.
Opportunities galore in India
Vivek Wadhwa was very upbeat on the opportunities existing for Indian Entrepreneurs in India market. He mentioned that certainly there are so many challenges in India like infrastructure, corruption, illiteracy, health care but that also means a lot can be done here. With the cost of hardware & computing coming down significantly, there is a scope of creating lots of low-cost products that can be successful and would serve a social purpose as well.
Brad Smith (CEO of Intuit), talked about a very interesting initiative by Intuit India called Fasal which is targeted at creating wealth for farmers by giving then a timely information on agricultural content via SMS. 4.5 lakh farmers are actively using this service
There was a session on how to leverage the big Indian SME market to build a billion dollar company. Shoaib Ahmed (Tally) & Vinay Gupta (Via) shared their experiences and were very gung-ho on the opportunities in SME market. Vinay stressed on the importance of the understanding of macro-economics, segment economics and knowing how to scale up.
Big data & Analytics is going to rule
There was not a single speaker who didn’t mention about the multitude of opportunities in Big data. Vinod Khosla interestingly pointed out that the biggest Big data project in the world is currently running in India – referring to Aadhar (UID) and how this can be leveraged in multiple products.
Anand Rajaraman told that for the first time we have so much social data (from Facebook, Twitter etal) in public domain. From this social data, interest graphs of people can be populated. The Social data combined with data of customer’s interaction with the brand can give lot of insights.
As per Naveen Jain, big data analytics will ultimately lead to change in paradigm from Search to Discovery. When asked, he also agreed with my suggestion that there is a huge scope of Big data analytics in Recruitment (getting the right people)
Sustainable Philanthropy
This concept is new to me and I was really excited to know about the work Naveen Jain is doing in this regard. The idea is how you can impact a million people.
Naveen Jain has launched an incentive prize of $1 million for whosoever creates a Digital Doctor – an expert AI software that can run on a low cost $35 Android tablet like Aakash and diagnose common diseases. Such a device can impact the lives of millions of people in rural areas. What an innovative way to drive developers to create such a software…
Upcoming Trends
Most of the speakers converged on the opinion that there are numerous opportunities in the following fields – Health, Education, Shopping, Talent Marketplaces, NFC, TV 2.0, Robotics, Genetics, UID, Artificial Intelligence
You can view the profile of the speakers at the following link – http://npc2011.sched.org/attendees/speakers/full/1#attendee-list
Originial Post by Vishal Saha can be accesssed here
Related posts
- The outline of the 2-day agenda of the NASSCOM Product Conclave, 2011
- Setting the agenda for the 2011 Product Conclave
- The Valley Indians are coming to NASSCOM Product Conclave 2011.
- Building Product to Business – How NASSCOM Product Conclave can help you?
- What can one expect from Nasscom Product Conclave 2011
