In50Hrs gets 16 ideas to the prototype stage
For 50 hours, 56 people toiled, made friends, shared work, worked for each other, met mentors, and finally did come up with 16 prototypes out of the original 24 ideas that were pitched. Some are not yet complete, but the target is in place. Prasannan, who initially started with a book comparison site, finally ended up being saviour of other teams and got the rating of an awesome Android developer. Madura Raju also joined Mani Doraisamy’s 6Persona team, which needs “another 50 hours to complete” in Mani’s words.
Dinesh smoothly completed the expense tracker, which uses Twitter to update expenses of a business. Balaji Sowmyanarayanan showcased his voice-based feedback live. The voice feedback that is recorded is also trascribed into a text for a business owner to decide which one to prioritize and attend to. Sreekrishna, who has developed Facebook app tool builder, showed how friends can collaborate to write a program on Facebook. Steve Pereira, mentored by Siddharth Govindarajan, came up with customer care numbers search app. Sathyanarain showcased his band.vc program to connect with various bands in the city as well as the country. Skill miner was another successful prototype. Benchmate.in, which helps students gather notes from fellow students that comes handy especially during examinations, duly completed its work and came up with improvements.
Yuvi Panda’s Middle Bencher evaluates colleges using a peer network of students posting about their respective colleges whereas Jigar Doshi explained how his 3GSimplified can help you bring down your mobile bills by choosing an appropriate plan. Satish completed a program where you can use price-based search to find what kind of food is available in various restaurants in the city. Jagdish collected data from Facebook on what was the most liked url in a program called urlbuzz. Latha could not complete Folio43, a stocks based app but showed paper formulation of the scheme. Unlimitag by Poornadesh and spam SMS identification by crowdsourcing by Kailash and Russel were the other ideas that saw light of the day. Bragg Yourself by Magesh and team could not be completed but their mentor Senthil Nayagam showed a small demo of what he could manage with the program.In a swift 90-minute run, all presentations were done. The participants were upbeat about the initiative. Food, community feeling, and entertainment were some of the “likes” of the residential program. Balaji Sowmyanarayanan felt “at home” unlike many other places he had been to. Some more improvements such as Wi-Fi connectivity were pointed out. The participants were unanimous in the opinion that In5oHrs would be a once in three months affair. Krithika, a startup entrepreneur in the design domain, suggested that non-tech initiatives should also be encouraged. Theme-based event was also suggested. Dorai Thodla said the In50Hrs could be called the MVP of the Startup Centre as they gained possession of the space just on the morning of the event. The overall organization and mentor network presence were highly appreciated by all the participants. Students were in a sizeable number.
The final outcome was fabulous experience for the participants. The vibes were there about the event and the previous evening, I got curious enquiries about In50Hrs from many people who said they would turn up to watch what was happening. The Startup Centre would formally open in a month’s time and promises to fill a crucial gap in the startup ecosystem. The coming together of energetic and focused individuals for The Startup Centre is likely bring innovative ideas about how The Startup Centre would function.
See Vijay Anand’s photos of the presentations here.
–Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, chief evangelist, YourStory
