The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad’s center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship started recently. The center is part of IIIT-H initiatives to combine research and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship with highest quality education. The center was set up to imbibe creative, strategic, managerial and transformation thinking amongst students.

SETU software systems became the first company to be incubated & housed inhouse in IIIT-H, with the base technology offered from the CEO, Prasad Pingali’s PhD work at the institute’s LTRC lab. The co-founder of this company is Prof. Vasudeva Varma, who is also the chief scientist in the company. SETU Software system is a product & services company operating in the area of Indian Language search & information extraction.

As part of their academic partnership within 2 months of setting up the innovation center, SUN Microsystems extended support to the Institute by giving servers and software platforms. The Institute received financial support to projects from Governmental scheme DSIR’s TePP and DIT’s initiates for entrepreneurship development.

Guy Kawasaki’s list of the five most important lessons he has learned as an entrepreneur. Please check out the entire posting here.

The five points are

1. Focus on cash flow.
2. Make a little progress every day.
3. Try stuff.
4. Ignore schmexperts.
5. Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do.

Please check out the entire posting here.

From The Indian Economy Blog

Sramana Mitra, entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley for nearly 25 years, has a very interesting series of essays on future of multiple entrepreneurship in India. It is currently on to its seventeenth running segment and one can do no better than introduce it by quoting from Sramana’s preface to his Vision India 2020 Series:

I invite readers to take a journey with me into the future through the minds of multiple entrepreneurs, who by addressing the opportunities I see today, will perhaps shape the future of India.

But in this series, we will close our eyes, and exist in this future, and BE each entrepreneur.

Check it out!

Here’s the basic formula for entrepreneurship: Understand a problem, grasp its full context, connect previously unconnected dots, and have the vision, courage, resourcefulness, and persistence to see the solution through to fruition.

Case in point…( http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/~r/harvardbusiness/~3/364928472/visionary-entrepreneur.html)

Today, over 400 million people worldwide live in poverty. Most depend on the use of their hands and their eyesight to provide for themselves and their families. As they age, near-sightedness threatens their livelihoods. For more than 40% of these people, a pair of over-the-counter glasses sold in any Western drugstore would substantially increase their productivity and quality of life. But many people don’t have access to these eyeglasses.

During dozens of medical missions to the developing world, Dr. Jordan Kassalow, a practicing optometrist and public health expert, saw the problem firsthand. It was obvious that scores of near-sighted people languishing in poverty needed glasses. But Dr. Kassalow also realized that if a member of a community had the right tools and skills as well as access to inexpensive glasses in a range of standard prescriptions, he or she could become that community’s optometrist.

That’s a classic “win-win”: motivated workers gain access to a promising entrepreneurial opportunity (paying twice the wages of typical local jobs), and their customers get inexpensive, yet potentially life-transforming eyeglasses. Dr. Kassalow saw the problem, understood the context, and connected the dots. He founded the Scojo Foundation, now called VisionSpring; its mission is to “reduce poverty and generate opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses.”

They are:

Snigdha Sengupta

Pluggdin by Ashish Sinha

Startup Dunia

Venture Woods

VC Circle

This space will be my own clipboard on startups that amaze me. They will not be as comprehensive as the one’s mentioned above. My own lil’ notepad on startups.