My post from TiEcon 2009

Friday, May 15 2009 -> Got to attend TieCon 2009 held in Santa Clara, CA. Here are some interesting tidbits from the conference.

The morning session started off with a talk by Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit. One of the insights into how Intuit interacts with customers is to have a roundtable session on their campus where they let customers be the CEO for a day and ask them to suggest what they would do. Intuit has also embraced the model where they allow employees to propose new products and innovate a certain percentage of the time they spend at work. Check out http://intuitlabs.com/ for more information.

The next speaker was Hans Morris, President of VISA. He was specifically talking services that VISA is looking at such as pension payment in India using mobile phones. Visa alert, offer and locator are other services they are working on. Prepaid visa cards is in its infancy which is used in certain geographies as a form of payment. Three things to consider when people are looking at innovation – Cash flow, Control and Convenience.

There were 5 parallel track sessions covering these areas – Internet Infrastructure, Wireless, Cleantech, Software and Consumer Web. I attended the Wireless session with the following panel members – Bernard Gershon from Gershon Media, Atif Hussein from Nokia, Yves Maitre from Orange and Dilip Venkatachari from NEA. One can think of two kinds of wireless applications – Information rich and Entertaiment rich. Typically, the entertainment rich ones have shorter shelf life. The key to looking at applications is to identify if there is anything sustainable. A few questions from the audience were – What about sensors in user interface, Voice based input. An example of Location Based Service (LBS) was fishermen finding out from their wireless phones the place that gave them the best price for the catch of the day and landing their boats in that area. If we consider 1B phones sold, 100M of these were smarphones and the majority are plain vanilla phones. When thinking of a market, consider this key fact.

Next panel I attended was called “Building your Sales Organization”. Check out www.startup-advisor.com – 7 steps to a successful startup. The sales process consists of Suspects -> Prospects - > Qualified customers -> Closing customers. The key is to measure the ratio of conversion as one proceeds from suspects to eventually closing customers.

The afternoon keynote was by Vivek Ranadive, CEO of TIBCO. He spoke about his entrepreneurial journey. Key takeaways – Things can always be done better; Surround yourself with smart people; Persevere, no matter the pain. Never give up.

Afternoon panel was called Rules for Renegades. This panel had Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Danae Ringelmann, Heidi Roizen, and Robin Kelly Tomb. Useful website www.helpareporter.com.

I attended presentations of a few TiE top 50 companies. They were BuzzinTown, Jajah, Kiva, Kosmix, Like.com, Mochimedia, and Playspan.