Bangalore Express:Networking at 35,000 feet

San Jose, California: Harish Abbott will do just about anything to get a spot on Lufthansa's popular San Francisco-to-Bangalore flight — even endure an economy middle seat.
The German airline is renowned for having the most direct flights to the Indian tech hub, whose short-runway airport has not kept up with Bangalore's boom. The flight, dubbed "The Bangalore Express," has another advantage: networking in the clouds.
"I make sure I have all my business cards ready for that flight," said Abbott, president and co-founder of Ugenie, a start-up shopping engine with offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Bangalore.
In the 1990s, the "Nerd Birds" — flights from San Jose to Boston or Austin — were the common trips of Silicon Valley's engineers and executives. Then business plans went global. Now, flying across double-digit time zones is just another job requirement for many in the valley — venture capitalists sniffing for start-up riches in India and China, supply-chain executives keeping tabs on Asian counterparts and valley-based start-up executives such as Abbott, who visits his Bangalore team every three or four weeks.
The 9,000-mile journey to Bangalore is one of the most grueling treks for Silicon Valley's global commuters. There are no direct flights from the United States to India's capital of tech, whose gleaming new office buildings are packed with thousands of engineers. In some cases, the journey requires two stops and layovers of eight hours or more.
In comparison, the Bangalore Express — Flight 455, San Francisco to Frankfurt, and Flight 754, Frankfurt to Bangalore — is a mere 21 1/2-hour, including a two-hour-or-less layover. For business travelers making the trip on a regular basis, avoiding a camp-out in Singapore's mall-like Changi Airport is worth the pricier Lufthansa ticket. A business-class ticket on the Bangalore Express can be about $2,000 more than a similar seat on Singapore Airlines's San Francisco-Bangalore flight; Lufthansa's coach seats can cost several hundred dollars more.
The Lufthansa flight won the title Bangalore Express because it was the first to cash in on the Silicon Valley-Bangalore tech connection with the most direct route. And it remains the most popular among many in the tech industry
"I've seen people being interviewed for jobs on the plane," said Ramesh Dimba, a manager at Sunnyvale data management company Network Appliance.
He figures 80 percent of the passengers on board the Bangalore Express are tech professionals, and he spends a lot of his flight time making contacts and trading industry gossip. Dimba also likes to do a little data mining.
02/04/07 John Boudreau/Austin American-Statesman, US

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Categories: Foreign Apr 2007