"Hey, I’m Abijith, I run a startup, how about you…"—Warm exchanges like this echoed in the lush green Delhi IIT campus, which witnessed a vibrancy of its own kind as the fourth edition of Proto.in, a two-day startup event, unveiled on second week of July. The sultry summer might have made attendees wipe their sweat the whole day but it could not deter the passion, enthusiasm, and exuberance exhibited by these young and bright folks bit by entrepreneurial bug.

Influx of inspirational waves made over 300 attendees stick to the Gyan sessions held on the first day. When opportunity knocks your door, it’s your responsibility to recognize it to pursue your dreams. It’s the time to take your call, said Kiran Karnik, former Chairman of NASSCOM, during his inaugural keynote. "Developed markets like Japan and Europe have needs for highly specialist products and services which can be a good prospectus for a tiny organization. Certainly it’s the time to witness the transformation of tiny niche firms contributing to the growth of the ecosystem," he added.

Though it was a usual ‘Believe in yourself…’ kind of session, first day’s ‘Startup School’ comprised numerous motivating classes including the closed-door mentorship session meant exclusively for showcasing startups. Many victorious and bombed entrepreneurs and VCs shared cerebrations on startup challenges. Murugavel Janakiram of BharatMatrimony spoke on the art of pricing, while Bhavi Takia of Directi talked on challenges of fast growing business. Sameer Guglani of Morpheus Partners, Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm, Kiruba Shankar of F5ive, Amith Rajan of Slideshare, Sanjay Anandaram of Jumpstartup, and Gaurav Bhatnagar of Tekriti aired thoughts to spring up the quality of entrepreneurship among the attendees. The ‘Innovation BrainJam’ held during the second day was pretty successful in involving the young minds to pour in ideas to excel in what we do.

This time around ‘Startup Showcase’, the most exciting session in Proto events, was fairly impressive as many startup ideas had little differentiation and were hovering around similar existing concepts. “All startups had good ideas. But they really didn’t have the imperative focus on execution,” opined Tejus M Sati, Co-founder, Axon Ventures, who was present at the event.

This edition of Proto had 16 startups showcasing from diverse genres. It had hardware manufacturing firms like Soliton, a maker of machine vision cameras, Blink, a maker of intelligent shopping cart, and NextBit Computing, maker of gCoSign that enables centralized Web interface to control the out-of-home installations remotely.