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Get Funding For Your Startup In Bangalore

SLP Bangalore (www.startupleadership.com) is offering 3 startups the opportunity to participate in the SLP Venture Capital Competition (VCC)- an intense yet fun experience where you present your startup pitch to entrepreneurs and senior Venture Capitalists and get valuable feedback.

VCC engages three different groups — entrepreneurs (you), SLP Fellows, and Venture Capitalists. During the first half of the day, the 3 startup teams will present their pitches to team of SLP Fellows. In the second half, startups and SLP Fellows will present these investment terms to investment committees (constituted of real VCs).

SLP would value the involvement of your startup in their competition. You will get exposed to local VCs, get a chance to practice pitching to real VCs, and hopefully pick up new ideas, due diligence questions and feedback for your own fundraising process. Note that you have to be willing to spend a day with them on the 10th of March, 2012.

Please note that they are looking for early stage startups that are already doing business (not “ideation” stage), and have some kind of market validation behind them. To take part in this excellent opportunity please fill the form here. Based on the information provided as asked in the form, only 3 startups would be selected for the VC competition.

Preparation: Investor quality pitch (template will be provided)

Date: 10th March 2012

Time: 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Location: Near M G Road (more details later)

Contact Persons:

Soumya Das (soumyad@gmail.com)

Amit Sharma (amitdce@gmail.com)

Shivoo Koteshwar (shivoo.koteshwar@gmail.com)

If you are not from Bangalore, but have an idea which you believe in, then head here to get some funding / feedback.

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CalTiger — What Ever Happened To It ? ..

2000 saw the dot com bubble burst. That was the time when a lot of big names had a  tough time and a ton of smaller start-ups came into existence. That was when the internet was just beginning to get affordable. New ISPs sprang up every day and in the meiee, a Calcutta based ISP called Caltiger, came up with a cool new idea, called in short ,”free.”

Yes, free dial-up! It was a huge sensation. Go to www.caltiger.com (don’t bother going there now, the site is just a landing place for loads of ads now), register an account, describe your likes (I wonder why this would be important.. advertising I bet 😛 ) and download the software to access ‘The Free Internet’. The software acted as a dialler; it would, ummm, also place an ad toolbar on your desktop.

Users abandoned this model as quickly as they got hooked on to it. Getting connected was like winning the lottery, and just in case you did, getting a reliable connection was like winning the state lottery and the national lottery on the same day. Add to that the toolbar, which blocked a quarter of the screen; and yes, it was resource hog too (on the 64 MB RAM machines of the day, which were quite a thing to own), causingthe machines to freeze. The company soon walked the plank.

Actually, the idea could never have lasted. Imagine something like that today: we’d probably have a Firefox add-on to get rid of the ads. And theres broadband, noone would be stuck on a dialup just because its free. And coming down to silly things, there’s always the idea of using your monitor’s controls to make the screen larger vertically and then moving it down!

Caltiger is such a classic example for how disastrous un-planned startups are. I wonder what was running in the heads of all the guys who were behind this. The model is just similar to – I’ll provide free High Definition Channels, but all you’ll get to watch are the ads I show 😛