Software Products, Data on Cloud, Apps on mobile, Interactive Web – Do these excite you?

TechSparks 2011 will give thrust to your business in these domains

ZOHO, OrangeScape – what comes to your mind when you think of these companies? They are doing what Google, the most innovative company on earth, is not able to do. What gives the Chennai boys Sridhar Vembu (founder, ZOHO) and Suresh Sambandam (founder, OrangeScape) the confidence and guts to bet big? They are new-age Indians, no longer willing to be circumscribed by how the world looks at India. You should have heard of a foreigner calling an Indian in an European airport to repair his laptop. Indians have cultivated the image of being geeky and techie. ZOHO is in the software product space and Sridhar Vembu is gung-ho about ZOHO for another twenty years. He vibrates with energy. OrangeScape is a level above products – their PaaS platform helps you build business applications. All that Suresh Sambandam, from a little-known town called Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu, did was to tweak his business model a bit in 2005. Now OrangeScape is among the top ten in the PaaS space in the world. What makes Sridhar and Suresh special is that they were ordinary people to begin with. They have now gone on to build world-class companies. Why not you?

In the virtual world, software products give thrust to businesses. They make your business life easier. For example, Skype is part of our toolkit now and it has taken a prominent place in our personal and professional lives to connect with people in any part of the world. Sahil Parikh’s DeskAway is a cloud-based project management software product and Sahil took to Cloud before anyone did perhaps. Five years before. Are you a trendsetter like Sahil? Or looking to define your own terrain in software products?

Cloud – until sometime ago, it meant the sky. An entrepreneur told a journalist about being in the Cloud space. The journo replied, “I don’t know anything about the cloud.” The entrepreneur gave a tongue-in-cheek, “then you know only the cloud and the sky.” For those of you still debating on the Cloud, it is better you take a plunge. Business models are slowly changing. Like e-books are overtaking print books in revenue and sales volume, in future, Cloud-based offerings will hold a prominent share than in-premise software. The opportunity is only as big as you can imagine. Are you betting on Cloud?

Mobile VAS. The tiny handset that only helped you call from anywhere is slowly becoming a computing behemouth. Value-added services (VAS) and apps are making this transformation possible. D. Shivkumar, head of Nokia India, predicted not long ago that mobile apps will become as big an industry as the software services. So sky is the limit. Are you game for it?

Web 2.0 – the interactive Web – has already changed the Internet space and the way we use the Web. Instant connect, democratization of content, changing media landscapes, the “social” Web that helps you connect in newer ways, and content management stuff – all these are making the world accessible, say, from the corner of your bedroom. You can wear pyjamas and still stay connected with the world. Are you gung-ho about Web 2.o thingy?

If your answer is affirmative to all the questions, TechSparks is your ultimate destination. Come, join fellow entrepreneurs in an exclusive club that are blazing the trails in trendy technology. If we are going to write technology history, these trends will have a handsome share and for an entrepreneur it is an opportunity of sorts. YourStory has roped in Sequoia Capital (the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur), Google (the coolest company on earth), and CNBC-TV18 Young Turks (the longest on-air entrepreneurial program and our partner) to help you entrepreneurs get those investor connect, exposure on media, and networking with the big names in this space.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity. Please register @ www.techsparks.in. TechSparks 2011 starts with the Regional Roundtable in New Delhi on May 7, 2011.