I had been to CII through Yi Interactive for attending an interactive session with Mr. Kumar Iyer, British Deputy High Commissioner to India & Director General, UK Trade & Industry.

Along with Mr. Iyer we had Mr. Milind Godbole, Sr. Trade & Investment Adviser, British Deputy High Commission Mumbai.

The objective of the interactive is to facilitate trade relationship between UK and India based Small and Medium sized businesses. Mr. Sukbir hosted the event and  began with asking questions. He asked questions about visa, taxations and so on.

It was an informative Questions and Answer session and the insights we got are valuable.

I got a chance to chance to interact with Mr. Iyer who is responsible for UK & India relations with commercial background and prior experience into Management Consulting.

Mr. Godbole heads office in Gujarat and had been key person for collaboration between Gujarat based companies and UK for sectors like Energy, Environment, Construction and Education. He said,  “Out of 1250+ projects that where looking to expand in Europe, 900+ landed in UK.”

It was pretty interesting to learn about Mr. Godbole’s background. He has helped several Gujarat based companies to setup there office and operations in UK, so if any small and startup company like us is wanting to expand there marketed in UK he is the person to contact.

Mr. Iyer addressed all new young entrepreneurs as “TATA’s and BIRLA’s of tomorrow!” and that brought a lot of energy on floor.

Mr. Iyer talked over several topics:

• Current challenges in terms of need of growth of Infrastructure
• Openness of policy
• Stability
• Current Taxation System
• UK continues to focus on Financial & Retail
• UK look forward exploring opportunities in field of Life Science and Reusable Energy

For me, take home point was how the UK thinks about products and services, which was “If you need to grow your business in UK you need to focus on Quality, Relationship and Trust” and for getting those in place they are okay to pay and charge a premium price.

Yes, it was indeed a marathon but for coding – coding continuously for 24 hours to create and complete an app in a day, requiring a lot of diligence and pre-planning.

Over 50 Teams of 250 Developers from all over India including Coimbatore, Chennai, Surat and Rajkot participated in Hackathon.

We were also attending AppFest2013 with 20 Space-O Team Members divided in 2 Groups – KickAss iPhone Developers and Ninja Android Developers. And this was the first time we were participating in any such event and we won it.

Here is what we did:

• App Feasibility – To ascertain the feasibility of our idea, we conducted a survey of 106 users and discovered the fact that there are over 6200 books available for Barter Exchange (which was the core idea of our app) in the IIM itself right now! Commercial value of those books is more than 18 lakhs.
• Branding – Believe it or not but this is how audiences connect with the organization. It was not a requirement or rule though we were wearing our brand “Space-O” with our company logo imprinted on our Tee Shirts. People acknowledged brand “Space-O”.
• Teamwork – This is the prerequisite for any team’s success. And we worked as a team without assuming responsibilities by our titles of CEO, Project Manager or Developer. Our aim was to execute for which we were never hesitant to undertake anything beyond our individual roles.
  For example, when our mobile app developers and designers were working on applications, we (CEO and managers) provided them with everything they needed from refreshments to resources.
• Sportsmanship – We believe in true sportsmanship and put it in our practice. We volunteered during the event and offered our technical and administrative help to participants other than our team as well as to event organizers wherever they needed our aid.

Result:
Among 40 different apps which were developed overnight “Book Barter” by Space-O was pronounced and chosen as a winner at Hackathon. Read more about Book Barter and Space-O Developers who won Hackathon.

The competition was tough though I guess we already hacked the show. One of the jury members considered Space-O as the IBM and Microsoft of the AppFest2013.

Hackathon Victory covered by Times of India and BuddyBits.