Top 3 Winners Unveiled at Techsparks 2012 Alongwith the Tech30 Report

Registering more than 800 applications to become a TechSpark, the response was overwhelming and the jury comprising of investors, successful entrepreneurs, industry experts and the Yourstory team had a tough time shortlisting the top 30. Applications were received from all over the country and the diversity was immense. From education to healthcare to cleantech, there were companies in every sector with a common motive - leveraging technology to build great businesses.

The Techsparks 2012 Grand Finale had the theme “The Smartest Way to Scale Up” and the entire day was organized around that. Starting with an introduction from Shradha Sharma, founder of Yourstory.in, the high-on-adrenaline event was given a huge pump by RJ Sriram and DJ Dhruva maintaining the tempo. Shradha’s introduction was followed by an in-depth keynote by Shailendra Singh, MD of Sequoia Capital, who outlined some of the most important factors for ‘Building a Business’. The ensuing Panel Discussion was a highly engaging one with audience actively participating in the discussion. The Panel consisted of Narendra Bhandari (Director, Intel Software and Services Group – Developer Relations (Asia-Pacific)); Shailendra Singh (MD, Sequoia Capital); Gautam Gandhi (Head – New Business Development Emerging Markets, Google); Joe Ziegler (AWS Evangelist for Australia and New Zealand); M. Maheshwar Rao, IAS (Commissioner for Industrial Development and Director of Industries and Commerce, Govt. of Karnataka); Dr. Wido Menhardt (Vice President, Head, Philips Innovation Campus) and was moderated by Ravi Gururaj (Vice President, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix).

The main attraction of the event was the unveiling of the Tech30 Report; the top 30 tech product startups. JustUnFollow took the first place, HarnessTouch was second and Diabeto and DataWeave shared a combined 3^rd. Here is a brief description about each of them:

1)      JustUnfollow  helps users clean their twitter. Think of them as TweetDeck for friend management. Their goal is to build the perfect dashboard to help everyone manage their social graph. JustUnfollow is currently has a million users make unfollow decisions on Twitter. JustUnfollow also helps business users keep track of the various twitter accounts they manage. The unique ‘Copy Followers’ feature helps businesses follow their competitor’s followers on twitter thus providing them with the right target audience. Twitter users follow a lot of people when they join twitter. Over a period of time their timeline gets clogged with unwanted updates. It’s hard to make unfollow decisions in order to clear up the timeline. JustUnfollow helps by making unfollow decisions easy.

2)      Harness Handitouch Private Limited (Harness) is an education technology start-up with their product, Touch-on-Cloud. It is a tablet and cloud based learning “operating” system which disrupts the idea of classrooms, ICT and learning management systems as we think of them today by bridging the digital-physical divide. Touch-on-Cloud effectively addresses problems faced in current conventional and ICT classrooms such as teacher control and lack of student engagement as it enables user generated content creation, real-time classroom collaboration, evaluation and feedback and content management on the cloud. Developed on HTML5, this learning operating system is platform neutral and embraces the bring-your-own-device trend that has equal efficacy for schools, colleges and coaching institutes.

3)      Diabeto and Dataweave

Diabeto is a healthcare- technology company that aims to leverage web and mobile technologies for disease/disorder management and to improve health and well-being. Their first product is a tool for diabetes management which addresses the issues of tracking, managing and processing data from various diabetes tests. It is a hardware device that plugs into a glucometer and wirelessly transmits sugar reading to a diabetes mobile application for easy tracking and manageability. They currently have a hardware product that works with most glucometers and an android app that supports the device.

DataWeave provides actionable data in an easy-to-use format that can be used by businesses in their decision making, application building activities. Data is served to users through data APIs, dashboards and visualizations. Businesses and developers can now rest assured that they will get the data they want and focus on building applications and deriving insights. Some examples of datasets provided by DataWeave are: eCommerce price intelligence, hourly commodity prices, and open government data.

30 TechSparks were unveiled and the T30 report will be distributed across the startup ecosystem and also the corporate world. Along with the T30 report, the App4India Winners were announced out of which Mangoreader won the Education category, Minewhat the Entertainment and intouchid the productivity category. Each of the 3 winners were given a prize money of $2,500.

All the startups selected and also those who applied will receive continuous support from Yourstory.in terms of visibility, investor relations and resources. With the resounding success of the 3^rd edition of TechSparks, Yourstory.in will continue to be aggressive on content and will also present more events; the next in line being Sociopreneurship.

Download the complete Report and visit Amazon if you're outside India.