As part of the E-week by NEN, SSN College of Engineering in Chennai organized a 32hourstartup, a residential idea-to-execution mini-entrepreneurship (geeks call it "hack") program, at the SSN College campus. Starting at 10 am on Saturday, the presentations were made at 5 pm on Sunday. In the intervening 32 hours, ideas were converted into apps, services, or products. OrangeScape supported this initiative and Dorai Thodla, CEO, iMorph, helped put together this program along with student volunteers led by Yuvi Panda. As the presentations were on, Syed Suffian was star of the day, with "hack" entrepreneurs invariably thanking him for his help. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook were born out of such garage "hacks", albeit on a larger scale lasting years and not hours.–Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, chief evangelist, YourStory
One of the students Madhu Vishy who also "hacked" shares her take on the 32hourstartup
What do you get when you get some of the most innovative young minds, put them in a room big brother style for 32 hours and make them to go crazy? Awesome things happen, as the SSN Lakshya found out, in their new and novel endeavour the 32 hour startup. Armed with an endless supply of food, cheer and pure ideation power, the participants arrived at SSNCE on 5/2/11 at 9 pm ready to innovate and change the way we perceive the world. With a little help from Dorai Thodla, Mani Doraiswamy, Srikrishna Shrin, Suresh Sambandham and Balaji Sowmyanarayanan, the people who were total strangers on arrival quickly establishing social order out of impending chaos and formed teams, delving into a torrent of innovation. Coffee flowed freely so did thought as young new, minds made their mark, a certain Feroze from Vellamal college, hacked away on his ‘arduino’. Vignesh and Brinda had a Fordian way of revolutionising the world of fashion by giving people an online makeover on their personalities. Raw thoughts gained shape and the sessions went on well into the night, pausing not for sleep or fatigue. People talked, worked, played, ideated and just when about having a jolly god time, networking and making valuable connections they otherwise would not have had an opportunity to make. By evening, presentations were ready and one by one the ideas saw the light of day, ready to plant their seed and take root in the world. Ideas were pitched, opinions were voiced and suggestions were made. At the end of the day everyone left having caught the most resilient parasite of all – an idea.
The projects that came up from the various teams were:
1. Video Discovery on FB (Indradip Kumar/Ganesh)
An FB app that analyses your friends' video ratings and lists the top ten.
2. 1800-P.I.M.P (Brinda/Vignesh/Sai Aditya)
Make Over Consultancy Firm
3. Mobile Tariff (Ratna Prashanth)
Mobile Android app to calculate auto-rickshaw and taxi fares using a location-based service.
4. Book Builder Tool (Magesh)
Helps authors build electronic books in any format easily.
5. Field Log (Mani Doraisamy)
An OrangeScape Studio App that helps managers track sales and other field people and their progress for the day.
6. Train Track (Surya)
An Android mobile app that provides timing information about MRTS trains in Chennai.
7. Twitter Tag Cloud (Kishore)
A twitter app based on grease-monkey that creates a tag-cloud between users to analyse what their common interests are.
8. Locube (Kailash)
A mobile app that will generate location based information along with social networking.
9. Perception (Srikrishna/Dorai)
An FB app that asks people what comes to their mind when a concept surfaces.
10. Help Your Neighbor (Latha Annur Subramanian)
Information we come across on a day to day basis might be of great use to our friends. This FB app helps you do so.
11. Gold Calculator (Sarang)
Android app to calculate gold rates based on the day’s gold price, tax, and weight in grams.
12. Kreate Double OptIn FB App (Karthick and Madhu)
This idea was sponsored by Krea. It creates a double layer opt in registration using FaceBook to fill marketing research survey forms.
13. Text Mobile Billing (K. V. Singh)
A business model for a mobile billing application that helps one do any transaction through the talktime balance on mobile, thus reaching out to rural areas without much connectivity.
