List of Conferences where we were Speaker

Organised by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, the India Digital Summit is the most prestigious and well attended event of the Mobile and Digital Industry.

In 2012, held at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, we were one of the Speakers in that conference where we offered a most impact full presentation and speech. The theme was Indian languages for that leg of the conference. In this public presentation, for the first time we suggested that the Panini Keypad's introduction of an innovation to the world on how we could type efficiently in non Latin languages on all types of digital devices was similar to the introduction of the Decimal Number system by India in the 9th century that gradually spread worldwide.

The copies of a recent special issue of the Thinking Aloud, a magazine of the IAMAI in which we had a nice article was also on the desks of the audience.

As winners, we also had an opportunity to present at the conference. We presented extremely well and it went down very well with the audience and we were immediately surrounded by many who were interested in this technology which we followed up on the subsequent days. It was important to create an impact in America. All of that travel was only for it.

We participated in the 12 day long World Telecom Development Conference which was being held at the impressive Hyderabad International Convention Centre. This is an international conference organised by the International Telecommunication Union and all member countries send their senior delegates, often ministers. We were admitted into the conference kindly by the ITU-APT Foundation, New Delhi of which we had become members recently and had presented to them. We made the best use of the opportunity and used the 12 days to show our technology personally to all the top office bearers of the ITU through official appointments, country delegates that had come, telecom regulators, ministers, industry players who had come and others. We were also covered by the media in Hyderabad, both TV and print. We made particular impression on the Secy Gen himself (Dr Hamadoun Toure) who congratulated us, assured all support and invited us to join the ITU as a sector member, which we did and perhaps are the only startup which is a member.

This 6 minute presentation was perhaps the best presentation we ever made. I think the audience gave us a standing ovation on that day. It was also our first public speaking on this. I had thought enough about what I had to say but during the conference it just flowed. We got an overwhelming response from the audience which was largely composed of tech enthusiasts and investors from Mumbai and other start ups. The Knowledge Foundation, organisers of the conference, perhaps have a video of the speech but the event was covered by ET NOW.

The VAS Asia 2012 conference was held on 06 July 2012 at the Le Meriden where we were a speaker. We did very well as a speaker on that day and several delegates came up to us that ours was the best presentation of the day. We had a large amount of interest generated in the audience.

The important point we were making before the audience was how Telecom operators would be the biggest beneficiaries of it if the regional language ecosystem flourished on the mobile phone. They would have more SMS sent, sent by people who would never send otherwise. It would cause a multiplication of VAS opportunities in regional languages and the most disruptive suggestion was storing address book on the phone would result in more calls. More Voice revenues.

This was organised at the grand Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) by the ICICI Knowledge Park and IKMC. Their ambition is to gradually build a conference on Innovation of Global standing. I liked that.

We were honored to be invited as a speaker and we did a very good job.

There were many distinguished people who spoke on that day. I particularly liked listening to Mr N Vaghul, Dr Bala S Manian and Dr MK Bhan. I thought if we had a few empowered elderly people like this also in charge then innovation has a chance in this country.

During the Mobile World Congress, Oracle had organised speaking opportunities for us in their stall. But these were for small groups of visitors at a time who gathered at the back of the stall. The Hall being the App Planet, it was attracting the right kind of crowd, sometimes thin, sometimes in numbers.

NASSCOM had organised a meeting with Mr Thomas Friedman during one of his visits to India. 6 entrepreneurs were called who gave a small pitch on their products. Our pitch had gone very well. We were hopeful that we could be mentioned in his column or one of his books. He was in India soon after launch of his book 'That used to be US'. There were others like Mr Som Mittal who attended that event.

Mr Aneesh Chopra was the first Federal Chief Technology Officer of the United States. And Mr Vivek Kundra was the Chief Information Officer of the United States. They along with Ms Neeru Khosla and other high level delegates were visiting India in 2011 during which they wished to meet some entrepreneurs. Economic Times organised a luncheon at a New Delhi hotel with them during which we were also invited and we made an impressive short presentation to the team and were appreciated.

There was another event where we were invited to Fulbright House to make a presentation to a group of US Diplomats from the region visiting New Delhi called Roundtable on Obstacles and Opportunities hosted by USIEF, Sept 2011.

One of the conferences where we presented very well was the Tie SME conference. Not only did the audience enjoy it very much, I earned a friend on that day in Kunwar Sachdev, MD of Sukam Power Systems Ltd who was also a panelist in the same session.

The Belgian Trade Counsellor, Mr Muller who attended that function invited us to join AWEXand to set up office in Wallonia, Belgium.

At the invitation of the Secy Gen himself, we offered a presentation of our technology at the ITU HQ in Geneva in Mar 2011. We elucidated about how this new way of typing could support all the Asian languages, the African languages whose aspiration was another inclusive alphabet and also all the languages of continental Europe who use accents and were now threatened to linguistic attrition, without any manufacturer having the need of building any printed keypads with any dependencies Soon after, the Secy Gen visited our stall at the MWC to congratulate us and there was an Innovation story on us in the ITU News.

We were speakers for this event which is a very important subject for what we do.

We were speakers at the Annual 3G Summit conducted where we gave a powerful presentation that created awareness and interest in the audience.

Organised by the IAMAI and W3C foundation, in this we made a most passionate presentation on the needs of regional languages and our solution, demonstrating how we could type very fast in Indian languages on a basic phone and those were received on every kind of phone over Unicode. The most interesting part of this was we spoke in Hindi this time and that was received very well by the audience.

This conference was held at the India Habitat Centre and was organised by the NIC and NICSI. We had an opportunity to put up a stall and offered a presentation. So many service companies working in this space were present, including Microsoft, Intel and many others.

Indian STEPs and Incubators Association organised their Annual Conference at National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad. This was very well organised and very well attended, particularly by many international Incubator organisations. We were invited to be one of the speakers and spoke about the Panini Keypad and what we felt were the advantages of operating in an Incubator.

The IIT Kanpur had organized their Annual student festival Techkriti during which they invited us. When we went there we realized that it was an absolutely awesome event. Heaven knows how they could manage to get a galaxy of eminent people from all over the world who actually descended in Kanpur. These also included student groups. We were blown away by a device that balanced itself on a ball based on advanced cybernetics, designed by a Swiss-German group who were there to present.

We too presented and it went very well, typically sending messages in Indian languages and taking tricky questions. In the second part, there was a panel discussion with some invited investors who were discussing that entrepreneurs need to take risks. My cheeky question from the audience was - between the entrepreneurs and investors in India, who according to them was more risk averse. We also had an exhibition stall that was doing well. There were South Indian colleges that had descended in droves. The event was very good and it was misjudgment on my part that we didn't plan to stay there for all the days. I could have met many great people and attended some cool events including Kailash Kher and Fire Dance!

This conference was organised by the ITU-APT Foundation and we were given to speak and got a very enthusiastic response from the distinguished audience which opened the doors for our attendance at the World Telecom Development Conference of the ITU at Hyderabad. And our subsequent membership in both ITU-APT and the ITU. We were probably the only start up which was a sector member of the International Telecommunication Union, Geneva, invited personally by the Secy General. India had 7 members.

One of the first presentations we made after we developed the Panini Keypad technology and it was running in all languages on phones and there were already growing users out there. It was to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. I thought that was very important that they must know. We were given an appointment to present which we did.

I was invited to speak by Telegraph, the organisers. I was delighted because I was born in Agartala and this was the farthest point from New Delhi where I had an opportunity to speak about this technology.

I gave a very good presentation and young people were very excited about it. And I had a great stay, we were put up at the local Ginger hotel.

As part of the Microsoft BizSpark Finalists, at Bangalore, we were required to make a presentation which we did very well.

We have made many presentations to the TDIL beginning in 2009. Ms Swarna Lata and others in the Dept have been apprised of the tech, its unique advantages and they have tried it out on their phones. We have been invited by them several times at other conferences/meetings initiated by them or the W3C where we continued to make our presentations for awareness of these developments amongst the related communities.
The Panini Keypad is mentioned in the TDIL website.

As part of the Red Herring Asia 100, held at Shanghai, we were required to present and we did a very good job. According to Asha Baxter, one of the organizers, our presentation made the most sense to her. We were one of the winners.

As part of Economic Times Power of Ideas, both in 2010 and 2011, we were required to make several presentations to the Jury. We were winners in both the years in these all India business plan contests attended by thousands of entrepreneurs.

Speaker on the theme of Rewards of Innovation in a technology based startup. National Webinar for Nurture Talent, 30 April 2011.

TIE Delhi-NCR had organised a Special Interest Group Seminar on Telecom at India Habitat Center, New Delhi. Sept 2011.

We were one of the speakers and gave a very good presentation. Mr Bobby Bedi, filmmaker of Bandit Queen, now into Mobile Entertainment was the moderator of the session.

Later two students from IMT joined us an interns.

And a Business Case Study was done by one of the faculty which was presented in an International Conference and later published in a book.

One of the very first presentation we did as a company was at the Amity University, on the subject of Hiring for startups. In 2008.

A quip I made during the conference was 'We don't have any jobs to offer, only work to offer, there is a difference.

Ms Vandana Sharma, Editor of IT (magazine of EFY group) was present for that conference. She empanelled me as one of her columnists and we wrote a few articles.

We will be a Software Ashram. This was even before we had this name.

These are interesting and insightful, you must read them.

There was a presentation I made at the Startup Saturday gathering at New Delhi.

Interesting, the event was held at the US Embassy Auditorium (American Center) in KG Marg, which explains the picture.

We offered one of our first public Demos at the Mobile Monday get-together at New Delhi.
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There was subsequently write ups by Mobile Monday, Bangalore.
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Organised by Agilent, DST, CII.We were one of the winners of the innovation competition.
And presented as part of the contest.
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Attended in 2009 and 2010.
In 2009, we also had a stall in the lawn.
Our Incubator had taken some space and several of us had pooled in to represent in that space.

That was the one in which Guy Kawasaki had attended.

Since I didn't have the airfare and wanted to go, NITEE paid for the tickets.

There were so many investors and I was already trailing them, pitching. I even got a few seconds with Guy near the elevator. Quite naive, the beginning of everybody must be this. If he doesn't do this, see this, he will remain uneducated.

Attended this. This was the one where Amartya Sen was the Chief Guest.

Organised by the GSMA and COAI. We attended.

As part of the Startup City companies, we gave a presentation at the Nimhans Auditorium, Bangalore.

We attended. My first visit to that lovely hotel tucked around New Friends Colony. Some networking.

There was a govt funded organization called CEWIT, BWCI and related names. They had organized a conference on standardization norms for Indian languages at the Samsung Research Centre (SISO) at Bangalore. We were there to reveal the Panini Keypad, met the industry representatives and henceforth engaged in information dissemination on the various issues of printed keypads, fonts, encoding, compression, usability etc that together made the whole picture, to the industry over email, the ignorance of which was being taken advantage of to misguide the industry with ridiculous proposals. This was finally successfully thwarted and Unicode prevailed. Some day, we will put up some of those correspondence and the story of how our Indian languages were saved from certain death by design.

This was held at the Convention Centre at the Rambagh Palace, Jaipur. This attracted a lot of delegates from African countries. We presented during the conference.

We gave a presentation at the Indian Linux User Group at the School of Information Technology, JNU Campus. It was very well received by the community. We were invited by Gora Mohanty and others like Kishore Bhargava were also present.

We offered a presentation to the troops of the Indian Army posted at the Signals Training Centre located at Goa. This was a special Sainik Sammelan held in the auditorium and the subject was introduced by retired SOinC, Lt Gen Prakash Gokarn, PVSM, AVSM.

It has been pointed out to us by others that the hand eye coordination that typing in Panini Keypad involves is the same kind of computer games that children with certain brain disorders are recommended to play with. We have been trying to bring this to the attention of advanced brain researchers and finally we succeeded. There is the National Brain Research Centre tucked in the forest just off the highway at Manesar. There we gave a presentation to Dr Nandini Chatterjee Singh and her students. Nandini in fact has previously published on how reading Hindi words activates more areas of the brain than English words, researches like that. She found our hypothesis interesting and worth studying and agreed to do so. We have to find the volunteers. On a similar premise, we believe that typing with Panini Keypad over a lifetime can slow the onset of debilitating diseases of old age countrywide.

We made a presentation to Guruji at the Chitrapur Math, Shirali, Karnataka.
This was arranged by General Maam. Guruji gave us special time, listened to us keenly and offered his blessings and assured support.

Sara Lacy, a columnist of TechCrunch was visiting India in 2011 in connection to a book she was writing about the region. She had a meeting with innovators in New Delhi at a rooftop restaurant in New Delhi. I was invited thanks to Pankaj Jain and we made our presentation.

We made a presentation to Mr Nandan Nilekani at the UIDAI office at Connaught Place, New Delhi.

Mr Nilekani was very impressed with our work and referred us to the UIDAI team at Bangalore with whom we worked to build prototypes for their use.

A delegation from FINNODE - a body to gather global innovations for Finland, visited our JSSATE STEP Incubation center in Sept 2011 and we offered a presentation to them which was very well received and several member tried our product for the Finnish language. Later the Director of FINNODE in India, Mr Riku Makela moved our case to the level of the CTO at NOKIA HQ who ordered an internal assessment. The CTO was wrongly advised by the Nokia Research Center that they were already offering a solution to type in Hindi for the S40 series phones in India which was superior. That was the multitap solution. A case of the "Not Invented Here" phenomenon. People can be so intellectually dishonest.
Know more about FINNODE