Have you got that killer app that can take the world by storm? Got great ideas but need funds/help in executing them? Here’s an opportunity for you.

IAMAI is organising 2nd edition of Mobile Application Developers’ Meet on 23 November 2010 at Vel Tech University at Chennai.

As part of the seminar, IAMAI has scheduled for a session to promote application developers in the country. Each developer shall get 10 minutes to make a presentation. There shall be no fee charged to the presenting developer and his team to make the presentation or attend the seminar.

In addition to making the presentation, IAMAI is also providing an opportunity to display your applications at the App room at the venue. Selected developers’ shall get to either make the presentation or display their apps at the app room.

Mobile Application Developers may send in their entries to Mr Gaurav Chopra or Mr Kalyan Biswas at gaurav@iamai.in or kalyan@iamai.in respectively. Developers need to send a brief note (not more than 100 words) about their applications, video link/ website about the apps, Number of downloads/customer base, revenue model and current partners. Entries of only those applications must be sent which are live and running. The last date for submission is 19 November 2010.

All the best…

Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd, a social media consultancy. He is also the founder Director of F5ive Technologies, a firm specializing in Web Development. He is a co-founder of The Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit body that believes in the spirit of sharing knowledge. He is one of the guys behind Proto.in (Entrepreneruship event), BlogCamp, PodWorks, WikiCamp, BarCampChennai, MobileMonday Chennai, OpenCoffeeClub Chennai and the CC Salon. (Woww!! Kiruba did you leave something for us too??)

Now what has this man got to do with guest lecture at IIMB, you may ask? Well he is not restricted to just the above mentioned stuff. He currently teaches New Media at the Asian College of Journalism, Madras Advertising Club, SRM University and the International Institute of Journalism, Berlin. He is also into writing on technology. He currently authors a tech column at the New Indian Express and co-authors the NASSCOM Emerge blog. Phew!!

So, he has been invited to IIMB to share his passion for Social Media. Kiruba is going to throw wisdom nuggets on Social Media for Entrepreneurs for the IIM Bangalore crowd. More specifics later! As of now, the Business Blogging team cheers him for his talk (he has been claiming butterflies in his stomach since the invite appeared). But sorry Kribs, we do not have cheer girls for you

TEDxGateway was held on 30th October at ITC Grand Central, Mumbai. It was a great show and it was attended by Mr. Kiruba Shankar. The speaker line up was great!

Ralph Simon- regarded as one of the founders of the modern mobile entertainment industry and heads the London-based Mobilium International Advisory Group.

Anand Gandhi- an independent filmmaker, artist, screenwriter and songwriter

Professor Nandini Vaidyanathan- Passionate teacher who teaches entrepreneurship in several ivy -league business schools around the world. She is the founder of Startups (forstartups.blogspot.com)mentoring entrepreneurs across the world.

Seymour Stein- co-founder & chairman of Sire Records

Ritu Kamal- a 2010 Stanford India Biodesign Fellow

Srini Swaminathan- Teach For India Fellow

Devita Saraf- Executive Director of Zenith Computers, online columnist for the Wall Street Journal at india.wsj.com

Santosh Desai- MD & CEO of Futurebrands India Ltd

Yugratna Srivastava- representative of Asia Pacific for United Nations Environmental Programme in the Junior Board

Richard Gottehrer- musician, song writer & an artist. Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer of The Orchard

Satish Krishnamurthy-One of the first employees at Finalmile

Rahul Panicker- Co-founder and President of Rural Products of Embrace

Shweta Chari- Founder / CEO of Toybank

Arvind Gangaram Talekar- represented the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust of Mumbai, better known as the Dabbawalas of Mumbai

G.J. Siddharth- Received NCPEDP – Shell – Helen Keller awards in December 2009 for being a positive role model,A recipient of National award in 2008 by Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment as “best employee with Cerebral palsy”

Here are some of the pictures from the event.

The audience were thrilled with the speakers and their ideas. Business Blogging wishes TEDxGateway congratulations for organizing such a great event!

Mr.Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging was recently inducted into IBM’s MasterMind program which gives easy access to IBM’s top brass as well as their latest technologies. He attended the Moblize Conference in Mumbai which showed IBM’s latest innovations in the mobile space.Here is a small case excerpt of how IBM’s innovation helped the Asian Paints.

Asian Paints Limited, India’s largest paint company and is Asia’s third largest paint company, operating in 65 countries. It has been used on over thousands of houses, factories and automobiles since its inception in 1942. Owing to its large distribution network, 600 sales personnel and 25,000 dealers, it faced challenges in keeping track of customer expectations such as registering, checking complaint status and filing reports. Lack of an automated system led Asian Paints to manage these operations manually that further resulted in time delays. Asian Paints also had a need to provide its call center agents a software that integrates productivity tools based on open source technology with traditional Microsoft Office applications. The software needed to be pocket and user friendly.

IBM India Software Lab (ISL) helped Asian Paints implement automated sales force software called MPower on palmtop computers using IBM Lotus Expeditor infrastructure. It helped the sales force to connect to data at the headquarters and execute tasks such as process sales order, check order status, check inventory in warehouse, take customer feedback and comments. It even made possible for sales managers to provide coaching online since information right from the start to the end of the deal is fed into the system. The software also let the salesperson to access and analyze the information on the move.  To cater to the call center solutions, Asian Paints rolled out IBM Lotus Symphony software that integrated productivity tools based on open source technology with Microsoft Office applications at minimal cost.

The benefits of these methods were immense. The implemented automated process accelerated the sales process, increased customer satisfaction due to the ability to process feedback in real time, coach employees, monitor employees progress, easy work environment for call center agents, minimized training demands on new call center employees and lowered total cost of ownership.

In his weekly column at Financial Express, Kiruba writes about his experience on using Amazon Kindle…

It’s been over three months that I’ve been living with an Amazon Kindle. For those of you contemplating investing in an Amazon Kindle, this review would come in mighty handy.

Amazon was one who practically created a market for eBook readers when they launched Kindle, very successfully way back in 2007. The first model was clunky but the technology was path breaking. The success of Kindle spawned an entire generation of rival products. In keeping with competition, the Kindle2 is a far improved product.

The biggest advantage for ebooks like Kindle is that they use the E-Ink technology that closely mimics the printed paper. You are almost tempted to touch the screen and feel the roughness of the paper!

Read full article

Kiruba Shankar will be writing Regular columns for Financial Express.

Excerpts from his latest article:

When Twitter made announcement of its Promoted Tweets concept, it had a semblance of a revenue model. Its earlier revenue model was based on selling its content to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! to display real-time search results. Thankfully, Twitter stayed away from plain vanilla banner advertising or installing Google Adwords.

Now, let us get back to Promoted Tweets. What is it? It’s a new advertising programme that will show contextually-relevant tweets based on the search keywords in Twitter’s search page. Twitter will test run this new advertising programme in its search page and based on the response, will move this to user’s regular tweet streams. As an extension, it will also start syndicating Promoted Tweets to Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and TwitterBerry.

Read complete article here

BusinessBlogging is proud to be associated with Marg ProperTies in providing social media Services. We manage their Corporate Blog & social media presence in general, conduct custom trainings, give extensive online coverage for various activities undertaken by Marg.

As Marg ProperTies is gearing up to launch their new Project, Savithanjali, off OMR, Businessblogging team is all geared up to perform its share of the role. Take care of online part of the launch initiative.

I went early this morning to Tidel Park where Marg’s Savithanjali Project’s soft launch is being planned. The set up and promos are being executed by event management company, Brandworkx.

I reached the venue ahead of others and met Dheeraj Jain of Brandworkx. He and his team had bought the materials for the setup in two Tata Ace mini trucks, which were allowed inside the tidel park after detailed security check and documentation.

The components were brought to the promotional area I and were assembled there… here’re some photos of the making…

The boards that made the stage:

What made the core of background banner:

Stage crew tool box:

when opened:

Giving a finish to the stage floor

The Savithanjali banner

Back of the banner being covered with black cloth

Erecting the stand and keeping it steady

Its all set now;

Read more on Marg Blog

News: BusinessBlogging CEO Kiruba Shankar will be writing weekly column for The Financial Express…

The first article was dispatched yesterday and is expected to get published this week. The articles would give insights into better use of social media…

Keep watching this space for more details

Rajesh, Solution Advisor at SAP, gave an interesting Demo of Business By Design (B By D) concept…

SAP Business By Design is designed specifically for midsize companies that wish to grow profitably…

Rajesh Demonstrated how BByD can help a CEO, waiting in an airport with an internet connected laptop, who has to prepare a presentation for the board meeting, can identify a deviation and quickly seek explanation on it from his subordinates.

The demo happened live, supported by SAP servers in Germany. When one of the KPIs, the liquidity limit, went below the pre set limit, CEO gets an alert and he could connect to his CFO and seek an explanation. Making presentations from KPIs was even easier- All happened within 10 minutes.

During the lunch time I had an opportunity to have a brief interaction with Mr Debdeep Sengupta, VP, SME and Chennels, SAP Indian Subcontinent…

From SAP Talkshow-SME legend 2010

A casual chat we had for a few mins is presented as Q&A below for an easy comprehension:

Me: If I am an SME and if I have to decide between the two options: Going for SAP as SaaS (as facilitated by SAP’s partner Wipro technologies), paying a monthly rental, vs opting the traditional way of buying complete license, what will be the break even period beyond with the later will be sensible?

Debdeep: It could be anywhere between 2 to 5 years

Me: In your partnership with Wipro to offer SAP as SaaS, am I correct in understanding that Wipro will take care of both hosting and implementation?

Debdeep: That’s correct

Me: One of the primary concern for me, as a student or professional is that SAP courses are highly unaffordable. Any decent SAP module will cost a few lakhs at any SAP’s official training centers. What is being done to undo this and make SAP more accessible and affordable?

Debdeep: We have started offering SAP as eLearning course, wherein candidates can learn from home or at our eLearning centres. This saves the cost heavily and increases reach