Catching up

Hi all! Its been a while but unfortunately there was little time to use my laptop in our hotelroom because past week we had a very tight schedule. So I’ll go through past days real quick and show you some photos!

Thursday November 6
We drove for one hour to get to the Biological Zoo which is situated at the border of Bangalore. For €2 we had a ticket for the zoo and a safari ride! The safari ride was pretty boring, the captive animals were ofcourse just like humans very dull at 40 degrees Celsius.

Cow & garbage

Friday November 7
Friday we had our first appointment at the R&D centre of HUL (Hindustan Unilever Limited). We had a brief introduction about the core business and afterwards about the development cycle of their new products. Each year a dozen of patents are claimed by this company, extreme!

Currently HUL is working on a waterpurifier which runs without any powersource. Since a lot of the Indian population does not have direct access to clean drinkingwater this is one heck of a great product! This device will approximitly cost $30 without filters. The filters have to be replaced every 1500 litres and will cost about $5. Affordable drinkingwater for all!

HUL interior, got to love this

At the end of the day we had an appointment with Rutger from Nexus Novus at a luxurious hotel. Two years ago he moved from the Netherlands to India to set up a business based in Bangalore. He told us a variety of things about entrepreneurship in foreign countries: helpful tips&tricks! Afterwards we went to a club called Kosmo where we drank a couple of beers and moved our hips from right to left!

Chat&drinks

Buddha at Kosmo

Saturday November 8
This day we got out of bed pretty early because we had to make a long bus drive, at least that’s what they said. ;-) We arrived 40 minutes to early at Wipro, a company which has its corebusiness primarily in IT. This company is a big player on the global IT market. Today Wipro has 93.000 employees!

Wipro Technologies is the No 1 provider of integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform.

The campus is a great place to work and relax. In terms of work Wipro has many intern trainingcourses in the different fields of expertises. Relaxing can be achieved by practicing tennis, basketball, cricket or having a dip in the swimming pool.

By night we went to a James Bond party at a bar in one of the most luxurious hotels in the region. There we were with 6 of us having a drink next to the swimming pool. :-P

Sunday November 9
OCC (Open Coffee Club) is a session where fresh entrepreneurs (starters) come and have a chat with each other: solving problems, having feedback on their products, networking etc. In my opinion this was one of the most interesting sessions we had so far because this showed us how people are starting their businesses in Bangalore.

At OCC I met with Pranav Bhasin, who has set up a social networking website called Lifeblob. Lifeblob plots your life on a horizontal timescale by using third party data from other social networking websites. See my Lifeblob timescale:

In the evening there was a small surprise for us: … Karaokebar!!!