Message from siliconindia.com about the event for startups:

Hi,

After the phenomenal success of the siliconindia Startup City 2008, wherein there were 4000 attendees and 50 Startups, it is back again!

Siliconindia Startup City 2009 is a technology showcase event wherein Startups' can demo the cool products you are building. This is a great opportunity for them to find investors, technology partners, resellers and potential customers.

BENEFITS:

1) Booth: 3x2 mtr

2) One page company profile in the Show Guide

3) 10 Minutes company presentation time (VCs, Corporate Investors and senior management of various technology companies will be present)

4) One invitation for round table breakfast and lunch with investors and leaders of technology giants.

5) One Special invite for the CEO Roundtable discussion

6) Visibility on the website for one month

7) Opportunity to meet 40 investors

8) All PR and Marketing activities related to event promotions will carry your Company name

CONFIRMED VCs: Accel Partners, Artiman Ventures, Axon Ventures, Battery Ventures, Bluerun Ventures, Canaan Partners, DFJ, Epiphany Ventures, Greylock, Helion Ventures, IDG, Indian Angel Network , Intel Capital, Inventus Capital, Jafco Asia Ventures, Lightspeed, Mercatus Capital, Mumbai Angels, NEA-Indo US Ventures, Nexus India Capital, Ojas Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Reliance Capital, Seeed Fund, Sequioa Capital, Singularity Ventures, UTI Ventures, Venture East, Walden International

CEO CONCLAVE: This is a close-door CEO discussion, which will be attended by CEOs and Managing Directors of over 500 startups. The roundtable will facilitate an informal discussion amongst the senior management about the best practices of building a technology company in India, what works, what doesn’t work, potential pitfalls and other challenges.

PARTNERSHIP: Leaders of technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Honeywell, Alcatel-Lucent, Philips, Siemens, SAP, Nokia, Adobe and many other will be present at the venue. You can explore opportunities of technology partnerships.

BRANDING: Siliconindia has put in place a brand campaign plan, which ensures greater visibility.

ATTENDEES: Last year we had 4000 qualified professionals. This year we will have close to 5000. The profile of attendees include:

1) Senior Management of multinational companies & established Indian companies

2) Senior management of Indian Startups

3) Senior management of US based startups with R&D center in India

4) Distributors & Resellers

5) Angel Investors

6) Venture Capitalists

7) Corporate Investors

8) To-be Entrepreneurs

9) Qualified technology professionals with product bent of mind.

For details & Participation enquiries please email to Suman Rammurthy [suman@siliconindia.com].

Tough experience with Bajaj Auto Finance:

Attracted to the advertisement about the 4 days’ Electronics exhibition being conducted by Vasanth & Co, I visited Rani Meyyammai Hall to buy an Air Conditioner for my sister as her marriage gift. The place was heavily crowded for three reasons –

- interesting cost-saving offers
- hall-entry is free
- it was the last day of the event

I swam in to the crowd and took a complete visit of the hall. Was able to enquire about the split air conditioner for 8 brands. I came out, then analysed the features and costs involved, had a con-call with my family members, then finally decided to buy Samsung air conditioner.

Again swam inside and landed at the Samsung stall. The person over there was happy to receive me again and after negotiating for few minutes, gave me a discount of INR 1,500. The price was fixed at 26,000 with free stabilizer and installation. All went fine till this moment.

He then offered me interest-free financing option. Being a finance professional, I felt that I should not ignore it. He introduced me to a useless staff of Bajaj Auto Finance. That guy did the calculation at a fast pace (I should mention that he was fast, only in calculation and rest were all dead slow). He insisted for the advance payment of two months’ EMI and certain documents like ID proof, address proof, couple of cheques and photocopy of the bill. He promised that the product will be delivered in two day’s time.

After making advance payment and furnishing the documents, I waited for two days and since I didn’t hear anything from them, I called him to know the status. He told that there were thousands of applications received during the exhibition and they were processing one by one, and hence my application was in queue. He repeated the same story whenever I called him. One fine day, he told me that my application was missing and they were searching for.

After a week’s time, he completely stopped attending my calls. I was a little bit irritated and tried to reach the top management guys online. When I searched online, I found that there are many complaints like this against Bajaj Auto Finance. Pls check www.consumercomplaints.in (this is a web site where people express the problems they face in buying/availing products/services - a must-check web site).

I spoke to the Branch Manager and he agreed that there are many internal problems. It looks like there are several complaints like this where customer pays advance but couldn’t get the products delivered because of the internal confusions in Bajaj Auto Finance and that’s the reason they don’t attend the customer calls. I thought of cancelling my order, but was informed that it will again take a long time for refund. Meanwhile, I got my credit card statement where I was charged the advance amount of 2 month’s EMI, but the product was not delivered yet.

Finally, I got someone from Bajaj who put his personal efforts to help me. It works like - only after the financier passes the order, the shop will deliver the product. Then, I also spoke to the person who processed my application, the shop keeper, the delivery-in-charge – all to ensure that the delivery happens at least before the summer season ends.

I got the machine delivered after 15 days of booking. But received another surprise that the installation needs to be done by Samsung guys and they were all busy. Then, I took care of it myself by talking to the concerned person and insisted to install it immediately.

You could understand that a customer’s job is over after he pays the advance money and submits the relevant documents. The financier / vendor should take care of the rest. But, the response from them gave mental agony and involved lots of our efforts to have the product delivered.