Back after a long hiatus! I attended the OpenCoffeeClub edition in Chennai at IIT-M today. As stated in the website, the informal event started at 3 PM sharp. By the time I reached there, I was surprised that there were already 30-40 guys present – a good response! People started off chatting in small groups, when the organizer came forward to organize the event!

It began with a short introduction of each one of us. The profiles of people varied from students to S/W developers to entrepreneurs and freelance programmers. People came from diverse backgrounds which proved to be a perfect base for networking. Since there wasn’t any fixed agenda for the meeting, everybody was clueless as to what to start off with! A small question from one of the members on Patents in India formed the crux of the discussion – in fact the discussion itself!

From the discussion, it seemed that filing a patent in India seemed to be an incredibly herculean task! I never knew you could get a particular thing patented for different amounts! , isn’t that silly ? A patent can be filed for a meagre 15K to a whooping 8L! – difference being that the loopholes might be more in the former. Somehow, this entire concept of greater the money, stronger the patent seems ridiculous!

Greater the money, Stronger the patent!

The most important thing before you file a patent is to prove that the work done is indeed yours and doesn’t violate any other patents. Proving this would mean going through a 1000 other patents and deducing that your work is original. You could have well built a new product by then!

The rest of the people were mostly beating around the same point when finally a gentleman who had come from Silicon valley (yes!) summarized the entire situation.

1. Before you file a patent, analyze at which stage your startup is in and whether patenting at that stage really makes sense
2. Understand the industry before you patent a product. The patenting rule for a S/W industry is totally different from a Pharmaceutical industry
3. Build a solid technology before you even think of patenting! By solid, I mean something like a Facebook architecture. If facebook really needs to make money, all it needs to do is patent it’s back-end framework. On an average they handle 2TB of photos everyday! – now you know what solid means

I was surprised that the discussion ended here and the entire session got over! However, I think the main aim of these kind of meetings is to build your network. After the session, I got in touch with people from PearsCapital.com – pretty neat concept. However, I spent close to an hour interacting with Balraju – CEO of Btechguru.com. I really got some awesome tips as to how to take forward a dot-com website to end-users.I need a separate post to write about it

Altogether, it was a nice experience meeting people from a variety of backgrounds and getting to know different aspects of entrepreneurship. Kudos to coffee club! organize more meetings !