Economic Times Power of Ideas: Statistics of Winners & Submissions

Economic Times “Power Of Ideas” has announced the first round winners. Here are some fun statistics which I extracted. The figures are not exact since i had to discard some data because of non standard ways of representing the data which would have required either a manual analysis or heavy modification of the program used to extract the information. The statistics are based on roughly 970 selections for places and 945 selections for years.

• Bangalore reigns supreme with 202 selections with Mumbai and Delhi following at 138 and 115 respectively.
• The top 10 places have 738 selections. Next 88 places have only 230 selections which is quite close to the number of selections from the first place (Bangalore 202 selections).
• People in their 30’s have received the maximum amount of selection (357), followed by those in 20’s (315), followed by those in 40’s(180), 50’s(64), 60’s(23) and 70’s (3) followed by a sole 18 year old.
• People in their 40’s and above have received 270 selections. People in their 20s and 30s have received 672 selections.
• Those who are less than 25 years of age have received only 126 selections i.e less than 15% of total selections.
• The top 10 years have 441 selections. The rest 45 years have 504 selections. The long tail effect is absent in places but is present in the years data.

Official Statistics of Submissions
From the official twitter channel of Power of Ideas

• Of 12,000 submissions received only 25% of submissions related to the IT and IT-enabled sectors.
• Only 25% of submissions received related to the IT and IT-enabled sectors.
• Over 68% of ideators who submitted business summaries are in jobs.
• 42% of all submissions came from Post-graduates and professionals. Degrees in Engineering, Architecture, and Management formed the bulk
• 21% of the total submissions came from participants <= 25 years.
• Of the 12,000 business summaries received 56% were from participants <= 35 years. 10% from >= 50 years.

The surprising fact is that the number of people in their early twenties who got selected is not very high. These are the people who can put in more amount of time into a startup as their risk downside is limited. Looks like they do not agree with Paul Graham and gave a huge premium to experience. Here is the data I have extracted from the original shortlist.

The csv files: Places By Count, Year By Order, Year By Count

And the program used to extract the data from the result page

 
require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
doc = open("initiative_shortlist.html") {|f| Hpricot(f) }
counter = 0
names = []
places = []
years = []
(doc/"#table1/tr").each do |tr|
  if counter > 0
    tds = tr.search("td")
    #names << tds[0].search("font").first.inner_html.gsub(/[^\w ]/,"")
    original_place = tds[1].search("font").first.inner_html.gsub(/[^\w]/,"").gsub("nbsp","").downcase.capitalize
    places <<  original_place if original_place.length > 0
    original_year =  tds[2].search("font").first.inner_html.gsub(/[^\w\/]/,"").gsub("nbsp","")
    year = original_year.split("/").last
    if !year
      #puts "Invalid year #{original_year}"
    else
      if year.length == 4
        years << year
      elsif year.length == 2 && year != "NA" && year.to_i < 10 # 20xx xx < 10
        years << "20" + year
      elsif year.length == 2 && year != "NA" && year.to_i > 30 # 19xx xx > 30
        years << "19" + year
      else 
        #puts "Invalid year #{original_year}"
      end
    end
  end
  counter = counter + 1
end
 
 
sorted_places = {}
counter = 0
place = places.first
places.sort.each do |p|
  if p == place
    counter = counter + 1
  else
    sorted_places[place] = counter
    counter = 1
  end
  place = p
end
sorted_places.sort{|a,b| a[1]<=>b[1]}.reverse.each { |elem|
    puts "#{elem[0]}, #{elem[1]}"
}
 
puts "***********"
sorted_years = {}
counter = 0
year = years.first
years.sort.each do |p|
  if p == year
    counter = counter + 1
  else
    sorted_years[year] = counter
    counter = 1
  end
  year = p
end
sorted_years.sort{|a,b| a[1]<=>b[1]}.reverse.each { |elem|
    puts "#{elem[0]}, #{elem[1]}"
}
 
puts "***********"
sorted_years.sort.each { |elem|
    puts "#{elem[0]}, #{elem[1]}"
}

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March 30, 2009 | Share:                      | Tags:India, ruby, startup

About The Author

Manu is a Ruby on Rails developer,blogger, amateur entrepreneur, Mac and Linux enthusiast and a technophile. Read more ››

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