UnPluggd Third Edition was a huge success. Huge, as in really huge. We ran out of capacity and had to say NO to a lot of people who came after 12:00 (sorry for that, but hope you understand our constraints). We have been getting a lot of compliments from startups/VCs across the globe and I’d like to thank the following for their support:

UnPluggd Sponsors

On behalf of the entire UnPluggd team, I’d like to thank:

Sponsors: Navteq, Google India.

Mentors: Nexus Venture Partners.

Associate Sponsors: Netmagic, Snapdeal.

Supporting Companies: WebMunky, Interactive Media and Nasscom  Emerge.

UnPluggd Speakers

We had a last minute change (Christian Lanng had to cancel his UnPluggd trip owing to medical reasons) and we deeply thank S. Srikrishna for lending his support. He has been a huge help for UnPluggd and shared great insights at the event.

We’d also like to thank event speakers – Sharad Sanghi, Saumil Majumdar and Deap Ubhi for their UnPluggd talk! All of the talks were super amazing and were delivered straight from the heart.  Most importantly, we were humbled by Dr. Naren Gupta’s talk who shared some of his startup stories and a few advice to startups in cracking the sales/marketing part. In spite of his busy schedule, he met a lot of entrepreneurs and surely inspired a lot of them.
 

UnPluggd Panelists

We received around 250 nominations and thanks to our panelists (Catmaran Fund, Nexus Venture Partners and Sanjay Anandaram) who spent time in evaluating companies. Coming up with the final list was quite difficult, but panelists evaluated the startups (independently) on several parameters and that really helped us with the objective.

The UnPluggd Team

A truly entrepreneurial team, I must say. The entire team came together and created the magic. In no particular order, here are a few people who made the entire event super successful:

– Kunalkant Sen: Kunal managed the entire operations and took care of pretty much everything – right from printing of brochures to following up with vendors/partners. He actually played the role of a COO!

– Pratyush Prasanna: In spite of his busy schedule (his startups’ product launch is scheduled within the next few days), PP helped anchoring the show and managing the audience interactions.

– Sanket : He managed the meetup with Nexus Venture Partners team and ensured smooth operation.

– Naman Sarawagi: Naman ensured that all posts (of startup demos) are timed properly and got the tweets flowing.

– Ankit Govil: He managed the tweeting part plus several activities during the event, ensuring a flawless operation.
Both Naman and Ankit managed the entire presentation flow and it’s amazing to have such a dependable team.

– Vivek Gupta: Vivek is our design dude + handled the registration desk smoothly.

– Amit Sharma: He runs GoUntucked (a Bangalore based startup) and apart from being the tee vendor, he also helped (i.e. as a team member) in design modifications which were needed at the last moment.

– Ankit Pal: a bioinformatics entrepreneur who donned the official photographer hat @UnPluggd!

– Our partners,  including E.I.Green team who were managing the event. They are themselves a startup and while they manage big clients (like Vodafone/Pulsar etc), they took care of the operations/vendor partnerships at the event ensuring that we focus on the ‘main thing’, i.e. content.

– and a whole lot of well wishers who just called up and said ‘All the best’.

UnPluggd is a team effort and like I said, each and every team member brings an entrepreneurial background which just shows up during the event.

Answering A Few Questions

A lot of people have asked us why we don’t have wifi at UnPluggd? And let me tell you that UnPluggd team seriously hates me for this ‘adamant’ decision of mine.

And if you think it’s about cost, well you are wrong. We almost pay 1.5X for the venue (as compared to comfortable venue like hotels) to create that ‘raw’ experience (or rather, our own creation of ‘UnPluggd experience’ etc),  as we prefer not to go with standard venues like hotels (which, in my opinion have an un-startuppish experience). So cost isn’t an important criteria.
As far as wi-fi is concerned, I believe it leads to a lot of distraction.  Checking emails/chatting with friends/tweeting suddenly becomes an emergency and while this can get the event ‘trending’ on Twitter, it leads to value erosion and takes away the focus from content, which is the core USP of UnPluggd.

The choice is between being cool and being super useful – and we have decided to take the ‘uncool’ route.

What Next?

– Unpluggd Pictures will be shared by this week and video as soon as it’s available (hopefully by July 16th).

– As far as next edition of UnPluggd is concerned, we will announce it in advance so that startups can plan their launch accordingly.

Till then, stay Pluggd.in!

And again, a BIG thank you for making UnPluggd such a grand success.

– Ashish Sinha/On behalf of Team UnPluggd.