Startup Weekend comes to Hyderabad

Youngsters with ideas for a mobile or web-based application can pitch it to senior professionals and build it up with their peers at the Startup Weekend, set to take place for the first time in Hyderabad at the Indian School of Business.

To be held from September 2-4, the 54-hour non-stop event brings together developers, graphic designers and business people, and is designed to help them find partners, form a team and turn an idea into a prototype over a weekend.

According to Pankaj Jain, lead organiser of the event in India, the idea is to bring all necessary inputs into one room including a panel of industry leaders, venture capital funds, angel investors apart from designers and other technology professionals.

Startup Weekend is a Seattle (US)-based non-profit organisation, and has organised over 150 such events in 40 countries since 2007. In India, the event has been held in Delhi and Bangalore so far.

The Bangalore event saw 67 ideas and 15 apps built, according to Chaitanya, one of the organisers of Hyderabad event. He said, “Bangalore is a much more tech startup oriented city, where 95-100 people attended. In Hyderabad, we are expecting 60 participants and 10-15 students,” he said.

The mentors for the Hyderabad event include Sharlin Thayil of Bharti Airtel Ltd, Janakiram Mocherla of Amazon, Krishna Natarajan of LV Prasad Eye Institute and Subba Dukkipati of Indian Angel Network (IAN).

The early-bird participation fee for the event is Rs 2,000 for professionals and Rs 1,000 for students with valid identity card.

Jain said there were plans to take it to Chennai and Pune in the next six to 12 months, and that there was quite a bit of demand from Delhi and Bangalore for more such sessions.

“It all depends on the local community members. We would like to see more support in the form of mentoring, investment and tech support from entrepreneurs and established businesses,” he said.

Ozonetel had sponsored the Bangalore event and is the lead anchor of Hyderabad session.

Ozonetel director CSN Murthy said the company had offered Rs 60,000 worth of credits on its Kookoo cloud platform for selected entries at the Bangalore event and was looking to offer more at Hyderabad.