Category Archives: events

Delhi Tweetup 2018: A Trip Down The Memory Lane

The last time I met folks from Twitter was around 8-9 years ago. After a long gap the so called “Tweetup” happened again when a bunch of Twitter users met at a quaint restro-bar ‘Chateau De Pondicherry’, in Delhi on Saturday, 8th September.

The idea behind having a ‘Tweetup – Twitter User Meetup’ was to meet and get to know people in real that you interact with on Twitter and also to meet some new folks who are also Twitter users.

Tweetups were a rage globally in 2007-08 and continued to be popular for a few more years. Back then, power users (and later by companies & social media agencies) used to organise the events and promote them heavily online. Since Twitter was also gaining attention among media folks , such events also used to get coverage in Print media which further helped spread the word on Twitter.

Image result for delhi tweetup
A Tweetup I attended while at Slideshare


It’s always great to meet folks you’ve only interacted with online, in person and make friends. The fact that such events are organised organically by the community is fascinating.

User Communities are a powerful force. In case of Twitter, one can argue that it’s because of users love for the platform and the powerful connections/networks that user built on it that Twitter could survive the 2007-2008 ‘fail whale’ days.

Twitter’s Error Message (Now Discontinued)


For the unfamiliar, Twitter was having massive issues in scaling their service between the end of 2007 and 2008. The service used to be give a lot of errors frequently and the error message (show above) was a common sight. Apparently a user ‘Nick Quaranto’ coined a term for this error message ‘Fail Whale’ that quickly caught on. You can read more about the history of ‘Fail Whale’ here 

Among a few others, we also tried to leverage this situation to promote a product called Kwippy that we were building. A remarkable thing (Growth-Hack?) that we did to quickly gather attention was let Kwippy users send a Direct Message to their Twitter contacts inviting them to Kwippy. This worked beautifully well and we acquired thousands of users in a month 

Kwippy Invite sent as a DM to Twitter Users


Here’s a short Tweetstorm I did on How Twitter used to Look in 2007 and how it has evolved since

On a closing note, Twitter has been one of my favourite products on the web. I’ve met some really nice people via Twitter, made great friends and have learned a lot of interesting stuff. 

How Twitter Looked In 2007


Some Pics from Yesterday’s Tweetup

‘The Early Comers’ Lot
‘The Mid-Time’ Lot
‘The Last To Leave’ Lot


PS: If you attended the tweet-up and maintain a blog, ping me and I’ll link to it

5th Annual Small Business Summit 2010 Highlights

About 8 months ago I complied a presentation containing best tweets from Social Gaming Summit 2009 which got a good response and appreciation so I thought of doing the same for #smallbizsummit.

Here’s a crowdsourced summary(in form of tweets) of the 5th Annual Small Business Summit 2010 held at NYC on 16th March. Hope you like it

Small Business Summit 2010

View more presentations from Mayank Dhingra.

Startup Saturday Kolkata Talk

Here’s the presentation from a talk I gave yesterday at Startup Saturday Kolkata. The talk was around the blog post ‘Why Web Startups Need To Think small‘ I wrote a few days back.

It was great interacting with the attendees most of them are already working on their startups. If you happened to attend the talk, please drop a comment here.

TiE-SmashUP: Networking and More

Yesterday’s TiE-SmashUP at IIT Delhi Seminar Hall was the third TiE event I attended in the last 4-5 months and like all the previous events I was happy for being there.

For those of you who might not know, TiE is the world’s biggest formal network of Entrepreneurs and Professionals. The thing I love most about TiE events is the wonderful opportunity they offer of meeting loads of interesting people from various profiles spread across different industries and hailing from different parts of the country and world.

It took me some time to realize and appreciate that the kind of audience TiE events attract is a lot different from what similar events(Startup etc) attract and that’s what sets them apart from other events in the same category. Also, as mentioned previously I strongly feel that TiE events are especially designed to make networking more easy and often, for example this time around(for SmashUP) there was a “Power Breakfast” in which you were asked to choose 3 out of 5 established VC’s/Successful Entrepreneurs and the orgaziners would try to arrange you(and 8-9 other folks) to have breakfast with one of them on a separate table. Having attended a Power Breakfast yesterday I can say it was a simple yet very effective thing. To discuss and network with 8-9 attendees and a VC/Successful Entrepreneur in just an hour couldn’t have been easier and better.

Having said all that I’d like to conclude this post by saying that if you are one of those who like professional networking with people and you haven’t yet attended a TiE event, you should give it a try.

SmashUP

TiE Delhi is organizing its first StartUP event titled “SmashUP!” at IIT Delhi on Jan 23rd. So if you are a startup looking for a platform to showcase your product/service “SmashUP” is just for you. Given the scale at which TiE operates it would be a great opportunity to network and spread the word.
I’ll be attending “SmashUP”, would you?

smashup