Sriram Krishnan™ Live

This coverage is brought to you by Ramkumar Shankar and me, during the Excitera’s Innovation Challenge final round presentations 2007. We took turns blogging while the other person stretched his legs or yawned or fidgeted. Both our teams qualified to the finals of this competition. We sat on the first row…busy blogging away. We were the only ones with a laptop there…

Here’s what my team won:

• 75,000 SEK and also support to start a company.
• 100,000 SEK in ear-marked funds for founding a company.
• An offer to join the incubator IQube.
• Free telecom infrastructure from Telenor during the company’s first six months of existence.

6.20pm
Opening speech by head organiser. The tone is set. It’s all in Swedish from now on. =( Why can’t organisers like Excitera or SSES etc organise something in English for a change? This would be excellent for a more global crowd.

6.25pm
Next up, is Ericsson’s Head of Innovation. Nice colourful ppt slides but he mentioned the hackneyed word “User Generated Content” =(
He speaks about the mobile phone as a wallet.
Ahh more market research. Some consulting firm brainfarted these numbers I guess. Ahh yes, it’s Gartner.

6.28pm
Oh no! More numbers! His talk on youtube reminds me of bubblare, a Swedish look a like
Example: SeeMe TV. They pay customers 0.01 pounds whenever a user video is downloaded. Service to expand.1.2 million pounds from 12 million video downloads. Interesting concept.
Ahh more colourful ppts. AND User Generated Content AGAIN!
Next slide, empower the consumer.Mobscene example. Interesting widgets.

6.30pm
This is getting interesting. I don’t understand one word he’s saying but his ppt says it all.
Integration of TV services. Mobile Joost in the future?
Everyone is reading his slides. There’s too much information there!

6.32pm
Ahh it took him 15 minutes to start on Ericsson. Nice on him.
World’s first Trial Interactive Mobile TV
World’s first Trial Personalised Mobile TV Advertising
He seems very excited – lots of hand movements
A mention on Click Through Rate
He’s still on the same slide =(

6.37 pm
MMS GPRS stuff
Best revenue model is from Ericsson! Yeah!

6.38 END!

Competition 1 - Judging the pitches!

6.39 pm
3 finalists from the other competition. 3 minutes each pitch.

Start! He is speaking in Swedish. It’s called Anti-Acne Plasters.

Everyone raised their arms for a question he posed.

He seems nervous.

It was good, looks like he made it on time.

Next Pitch: insuKid

Two guys, look much more comfortable than the first. Seems to look down way too much though.

Seems to involve lots of chemistry, molecules and stuff. The other guy taking over. 60 seconds left.

6.45 pm
Third pitch: YourChoice

It has something to do with mobile tv and 3G.

They don’t have anything written down either, look quite comfortable.

She said Sweden has 1 million 3G subscribers, my Swedish is good.

Quite a nice pitch, it goes back and forth between the two.

6.50pm

Another presentation before the start of the pitches. This one from Telenor, one of the sponsors of this event. A more interactive presentation. Not many numbers so far. A nice picture of a family. And he’s not standing still. He’s actually walking around and cracking jokes.

6.51pm

Juries. Around 5-7 of them. He asked for reps from Iqube but no one responded. He is naming the finalists now! We are the first to present!

Competition 2 - Start of 1 min pitches!

6.52 pm
David is on stage! He is representing Sriram’s team. Started! He started!
Stuttered a bit!
He is looking at the paper quite often. And is done!

6.53 pm
Next up, Carry Security. She’s looking down all the time. We spoke to this
presenter before the event started. She’s working on
it alone and around her mid 30s to 40s. She hasn’t looked up. Ahh yes she did!
Once.

6.54 Wow, 1 minute is really fast.

6.55pm
Next up is Connections. Michael’s other team. English!
New dimension to social networking. Slightly slow his presentation. But
clear. Trust?! Must be ramkumar’s work. He’s in this team apart from Michael!

6.56pm
Date Challenge up next. They look really happy and cheerful. She looks good too.
Probably the best pitch so far?

6.57pm
Experience next. A 1 minute pitch is so much harder than a 3 minute
pitch.

6.58pm
Drug Notifier. Same guy from the first 3 minute pitch! The small guy He looks
much more comfortable now, but still a bit
nervous. Speaks very slowly and clearly though.

6.59pm
Happy Birthday. Something about free mms? 1 minute is so short, yet they go back
and forth between the two.

6.60pm
Ice Breaker. He seemed nervous at the start. It continued much better now
though. Right on the dot it would seem.

6.61pm
Mobikk. The guy alreadty has a t-shirt with Mobikk on it. Nothing written down,
seems quite confident. Showed a picture with his
logo on the phone too.

6.62pm
Need you need me. NYNM. I thought acronyms were only in Singapore. In
English. Finally an idea we can understand! It’s
about helping people apparently. You help someone, and you get points which you
can redeem for other things.

7.07pm

The jury’s gone to discuss. We have some entertainment now. Whoa, one guy has a sword. Scary.

Ok, definitely martial arts stuff. Hmm, nice spacey music. Guy with sword on now. The guys with swords are creepy. It’s not good sitting in the front row now.

7.20pm
Waited for 10 mins.
Results for first round are out. The guy is holding 3 big cheques.
First place goes to the small guy. 100,000 crowns!
2nd place – Your Choice. I thought their pitch was actually good.
3RD place – insuKID.

7.25pm
The wait continues for second competition.
Word to sponsors now.
Waiting waiting. Still word to sponsors.
He mentioned food, now everyone’s restless.
Sriram the glutton took another food voucher.

7.30pm
Results out.
Date Challenge: 2nd runner up
Need you need me: 1st runner up
Attention! won! Sriram’s team. First place! 175 000 crowns!