These are the minutes of the Meeting. Among the attendees were Kiruba, Sukumar, Rajesh, Aswin, Narain, Ganesh, Syed, Vicky. On the best practices of writing on Napkins, we managed to keep track of the discussions.
Date:
December is too short of a notice and we talked about it. First week of January would be too close to the holiday season and not enough time for the people to have recovered from the festivities. Second week is the long weekend for pongal here in South India, so the dates are set at the third week of January on the 20th and 21st
Venue:
We are going to look into IIT. There are some very good conference halls for this nature and might suit it well. Also the name of IIT would help us leverage and give us a better credibility for an event as such.
Cost Estimation:
Has to be done.
Pricing:
We are going to charge people for entry. For entrepreneurs the price is 5000 Rs. For the VCs, its going to be 10,000 Rs. We are very well aware that the VCs and Entrepreneurs are the heroes of the show, but unless there is a registration and some cost attached to it, we will never know who is going to show up, till the moment that the actually do. There will be Rs. 200 door fee for the rest of the attendees, so that we can have some count on the people attending. In short, a registration means some viable head count and manageability.
Selection Criteria: There will be 30 companies presenting in 10 minute slots. That will be the final list. Three questions will have to be answered: Who are they? What are they doing? And what funding can help them achieve. There will be stalls for all the 30 companies around the place, so that after the demonstration, interested parties can be in touch with them.
The best news we can deliver to the VCs is the quality of the selection process. There will be no compromise on that front, for any matter.
Sponsors:
we will have to start the activity at the earliest. Syed is meeting with TIE tomorrow. We will be a little careful on what companies we approach for sponsors. I think we should also avoid cluttering the stage with too many names, as it would be confusing to focus on the company being presented.
Journalists: All are welcome, in my opinion. But we need to get in touch with the best and get them to focus on the event, and sell the idea of what this event is about, rather than "just another story" to fill the space.
Team allocation: There should be a gradual process as to teams slowly falling in place. I think it will help in a lot of ways. There are people in the group who are inactive. I highly urge them to get involved and be a part of this, as you could kinda feel left out otherwise. One the teams are in place, there will be some discretion on some issues, and wont be discussed openly. Things such as the names of the 30 companies, will not be released to the public or the VCs before the morning of the event.
Technorati and Del.ici.ous Tags: Please tag your posts, all of them using "Proto" and "Proto.in". Good thing about tags is that they are free. We could settle with just Proto, but that is also a widely used tag for prototype related posts, and Proto.in has a small issue with Technorati, cause of the "dot" and it takes an extra step to search for it, with the "tags" option. Let’s use them both. Delicious shouldnt have a problem with both.
There will be a business networking session after the event.
There will be a team that will create a checklist of things to watch out for, before the demo – such as making sure they have offline data, and can work without the internet (in case o f problems) and such. and… we are going to look into rear projection methods for the stage. It will be a huge backdrop (like the one used in Steve Job’s keynote speeches), so that there is enough clarity and focus on what is being presented and no way to easily ignore it.
Also, Syed is going to look into the option of renting a billboard, somewhere on a visible space.After that we had quite an interesting talk on where India is heading and such. Send me an email for info on that, or try to be there next time 
Next meeting will be next week. Same Place, same time. Good night Guys.
Tags: PROTO, proto.in, TKF, Syed, nazir, razik, knowledge, foundation, DEMO
Powered by Qumana
Today the entire family of The Knowledge Foundation takes to congratulating our young designer of PROTO and Blogcamp tech team member Hitesh on having conformed to the holy matrimony with his better half . Way to go hitesha ! Marraige is due on cards soon and we will be informed of the same very soon. As of now happy moonlighting for the rest of you. Good Day !
