While I definitely enjoyed the discussions on designing and development, I was most thrilled to see ‘testing’ get the attention and importance it deserves. Whether you have designed a website or coded a fabulous new application, the testers ensure that there are no crippling bugs and errors that will bring down the whole system and cause you immense loss of reputation and business.

This eco-system has to be carefully nurtured so that the young and energetic people can contribute meaningfully to their companies and enhance their personal careers in the process. I will be happy to help them in any way I can.

• Your need to hire an A-team to get on to a good start.
• You cannot do everything yourself; get people who are smart, will add value and may even be knowing more than you.
• Attitude with raw talent can outperform experience.
• Try to encourage a ‘no-sir’ culture. Encourage people who dare to say no-sir to your hypothesis based on their domain knowledge and will not meekly accept anything you say.
• Your consultants, partners and co-founders should always be debating and challenging you. This churning brings out the best ideas to the top.
• The right people can help you scale up much faster and higher.
• Maintaining the values of your organisation is an important challenge when scaling up. Trying to motivate 800 people is much harder than motivating 80-100 people. It is an entirely different HR challenge.
• In your organisation, while most of the people look at maintaining the momentum and doing routine things, there must be at least people who are willing to push the envelope.
• Experience has much lesser importance in the IT / Internet business. We need high IQ, raw talent and a burning desire to achieve results.
• Hire people for attitude and not experience.

I hope you enjoyed reading these takeaways. Please post a comment here if you have a rejoinder. I am sure there are other great notes that you have taken and I have missed. You are also welcome to post those. Thanks!

• With good innovation, brand and size limitations can be tackled.
• Intel has an app centre for Netbooks (www.appup.com).
• We are at crossroads – need to combine mobile usage with computing.
• Location based services are very important.

Here are some more notes from different sessions focussing on entrepreneurial spirit:

• Entrepreneurs need to have ability to do things in parallel (don’t spread yourself too thin though).
• 80/20 does work – don’t look for perfection – improve things gradually.
• Focus on the broad plan – all detailed business plans get haywire on the first contact with consumers.
• It is very important to have a good understanding of the consumer/customer psyche and needs/problems.
• A local contact in the geography you are serving, can be very important in understand the customers and improve the speed at which you succeed.
• Try to validate your key assumptions with customers. Fail fast, if you must.

Hope you will be able to employ some of these and improve your results with the implementation.

I have jotted down some important takeaways for the benefit of those who were not there and as a reminder to you if you were there.

Most of these come from the keynote session by Vinay Goel of Google.

• Mobile phone is your connection to your personal and professional world.
• There are 4.6 billion mobile phones, 3/4th in the developing world.
• Consumer innovation is going to lead the way as compared to the enterprises.
• Speed matters – the apps have to work fast.
• Google says Siterank considers site speed and uses it in ranking just like Pagerank.
• Google’s vision – the web is mobile. They follow the policy of Mobile first and some ofthe innovations for mobile may not ever make it to the desktop.
• Mobiles have reached volumes where these have become iconic.
• Web apps are cheaper and faste to build as compared to the native apps. (My note: I totally agree, that’s why we have started building mobile websites before building native apps).
• It is lot safer to have the data on the cloud rather than local storage.
• HTML 5 is big – lots of new stuff will be built with HTML 5.
• India has 30 million mobile Internet users as of now.

I will be posting more notes in another post. Keep watching this space.

Lucky for me, the audience was highly interactive and responsive.

Here is the presentation if you want to have a peek. This is just the presentation (minus the audio but you will get the idea):

I look forward to your comments below.