Attending Design Day and roaming around Microsoft Accelerator

So we start yesterday by (the Three Musketeers) attending the Design Day. There was Kshitij Anand and Poonam Bir. Though the talk was more directed towards non-designers, I liked the way Poonam explained her design experience from an educator to the founder of Daily Dump.
Design education system in India seems to be an elitist idea. And though we might be using design processes some way or the other in many more disciplines than acknowledged, its full potential has been under used due to various reservations one has with the very concept of hiring a designer. Poonam was one of the founder of Srishti, so from the role of an educator to that of a entrepreneur, it was interesting to see the reflection of her thoughts in her work. She mentions somewhere something interesting, that though daily dump could have been a high tech kind of a service, but it is not. Because often designers are not just creating but collaborating between different agents.
Poonam's talk as good, but then I deviated towards the Microsoft Accelerator. I had heard a lot about it, the the amount of work each companies put in, the 3-4 months compact incubation with mentors etc.
So I met Avinash, the tech guy from Supportbee. Our conversation started from the logo of the company. I initially googled the wrong company, supportb. Supportb has a honeybee for a logo, and the form is very regular. so it is quite difficult to recognize from the user's point of view.

The one below belongs to supportbee. The thing that works is a unique perspective of the bee and the typeface  What goes against it is the absence of colour in the web format, thus making it quite difficult to recognize if kept alongside other logos. From the design aspect, the conversation moved towards the kind of apps that are built today and how the entire funding system works. It was heartening to hear that places like silicon valleys move with trends. So if today the latest trend is education, all resources will be put mainly on that leaving at times other ideas high and dry. Then the fact that places like India make it quite difficult for start-ups to do cash transactions often lead then to the USA to set up their companies. The other features of most of these start-ups are the lack of design participations  In fact the conversation made me realize that people generally tend to believe designers to do just bright colourful  graphics. It's cringing to learn that there are hardly any product development company in India that leds designers explore the entire product process. Most of the investors end up pursuing only the mobile apps.

Though these were not regular conversations, but it helped me develop a better understanding on how the industry works first hand.