Economic Times Power of Ideas contest 2009: IIITM students are making their mark

"I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out."
-Muhammad Yunus

This is all about grabbing small opportunities and converting those into bigger. Just turn your sight to the other side of the things, you would find many such opportunities.

Only one out of 20 business plans are read by prospective investors beyond the executive summary and only 6 out of 1000 business plans get funded on an average. The quality of the business plan is crucial for winning attention of investors, especially for a first-time entrepreneur who has no track record in managing own business. It is not only important for a business plan to have the right content, but it also must be organized into logical and clearly defined sections and presented in a way that is informative and maintains readers interest.


Economic Times Power of Ideas contest 2009 where our students have made it to finals of the contest among the best 254 to reach the VCs from Angel Investment Group in India. The contest is still going on and the results are awaited.

A team consisting of Mayur Gupta, Pranjal Prashar, Bharat Jain, Bhumpalle Vidya (all IPG2004 Batch) and Dr. P.K. Das (Associate Professor IIT Guwahati) has made into final 254.

"The Power of Ideas" was organized by Economic times in association with Indian Angel Network.
Purpose of this contest was to help entrepreneurs by providing them a platform where they can share their ideas with VCs and angel investors, and can get funds if viable.
First round of the contest witnessed more than 11,000 entries from all over India. ( see ideas.economictimes.com for complete analysis)
however 1000 entries moved to the next level where after a group mentoring session participants made Pitch on a telephonic conference with IAN members.

In the next round 254 entries made to the final list of the contest where after a personal mentoring session of a week participants submitted their B-plan and made face to face presentation with IAN members.

Now IAN will decide upon funding issue. Contest is over, now IAN will contact 'investible' B-plans.

P.S.: To read Pranjal's (one of the participants) experience about competition, you can follow here.

Kudos to Ashish Thakral and Sandesh

An honest but encrypted endeavors..........Advantal


"Start-up success stories during an economic meltdown have become as rare as orchards in the desert. But mobile application development firm
Advantal Services seeks to disprove pundits of doom. In fact, its founders, Ashish Thakral and Sandesh Tallera, both 25, believe that the recession has helped them bag more orders.

Advantal, which builds complex mobile applications for platforms such as Symbian, Windows Mobile and the iPhone, is flying high with its secure VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, a technology that enables making inexpensive voice calls over the Internet) solution that has, among others, found takers in the Israeli security establishment. It also supplies speech recognition and GPS technology tools to customers in Australia, UAE and Canada. The July 2008-founded Gurgaon-based company may be a new kid on the block but its founders claim to have already clocked $50,000 (Rs 25 lakh) in revenues and a full order book for the next six months. "
--Edited--

Read the article at this link