TechSparks 2012 Unveils the Top 30 Emerging Tech Startups from India
BANGALORE, India, September 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --
TechSparks, the flagship event of YourStory.in, the biggest tech startup showcase event in India, was held in Bangalore on September 8th where a packed audience of over 1,200 entrepreneurs, investors, mentors and industry leaders witnessed the unveiling of YourStory.in's TechSparks 2012 TECH30 startups - the 30 best emerging tech product startups from across India, selected from a pool of over 800 applicants who applied for this year's TechSparks campaign. Prior to this Grand Finale, five TechSparks Regional Round Tables were held in Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Hyderabad in a span of four months, bringing together over 2,200 entrepreneurs across all cities with access to VCs, Angels and corporate. TechSparks 2012 was presented by Intel in association with Amazon Web Services, Qualcomm, Sequoia Capital, CNBC TV 18 Young Turks, VentureBeat and supported by Longhouse Consulting, Inolyst, Paytm and PR Newswire.
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 clean-tech, there were companies in every sector with a common motive: leveraging technology to build scalable businesses.
This year's 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 and CEO of YourStory.in, the high-on-adrenaline event was given a huge pump by RJ Sriram and DJ Dhruva maintaining the tempo. The event kick-started with a brief introduction to TechSparks and YourStory by Shradha Sharma, 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 the 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). Joe Ziegler and Peter Keimps of AWS gave a presentation on how the Cloud has impacted the VCs and entrepreneurs, alumni of TechSparks 2011. Sriram Iyer of United Mobile Apps and Mukund Mudras of Heckyl Technologies launched new products on data security and price analytics respectively, and Mr. Krishnakumar Natarajan, MD and CEO, MindTree, provided valuable lessons on building your company, taking a leaf from his experiences of building a company.
The main attraction of the event was the unveiling of the TechSparks 2012 TECH30 Report - the 30 best emerging tech product startups from across India. Here is a brief description of the best four presenting startups at TechSparks 2012:
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 currently has a million users making 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 competitors' 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.
The YourStory.in 2012 TECH30 report is now available for download here: Instamojo (India only), Amazon Kindle Store (Worldwide). Find out more about the winners of TechSparks 2012 - the top 30 product startups to emerge from India in 2012. This report contains the details of the TECH30 startups, including their business and revenue model, details about the entrepreneurs and YourStory's take on all the TECH30.
Along with the TECH30 startups, TechSparks also showcased the 10 best apps which were chosen as winners of the Intel App4India contest, selected from over 900 applications. MangoReader won the Education category, 3forz Innovations (Minewhat) the Entertainment and IntouchId the productivity category. The three winners were given prize money of $2,500 each.
The official Twitter hashtag of TechSparks 2012 - #tsparks - was trending globally, providing great visibility to the startups and apps being showcased at the event.
All the startups shortlisted for TECH30, as well as those who applied, will continue to receive support from Yourstory.in post the event in terms of visibility, investor relations and resources. With the resounding success of the 3rd edition of TechSparks, Yourstory.in will continue to be aggressive on content and will also present more such engaging and meaningful events for the Indian startup eco-system.
About TechSparks
TechSparks was conceived and executed for the very first time in 2010 by YourStory.in in association with Microsoft BizSpark and Canaan Partners and keeps growing. Techsparks 2011 went to four cities and the T30 report of 2011 has some stellar companies. 14 of those 30 companies got funded, one got acquired and one went on to acquire a global company!
Look at the phenomenal success of the first two years; Techsparks 2012 got more than 800 entries and in itself scaled massively by travelling to five cities and creating enormous buzz.
The 2012 edition of TechSparks, as the previous editions, has generated a lot of buzz in social media, with the hashtag "#tsparks" trending nationally on Twitter during the regional rounds in New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, reiterating the presence of a massive virtual audience of technology enthusiasts for TechSparks across India. Check out http://techsparks.in
About YourStory
YourStory.in is India's biggest and most comprehensive online platform for entrepreneurs. Launched in 2008, it has emerged as the most followed web platform for entrepreneurs and startups, having cemented robust partnerships with leading institutions like Intel, Amazon, CNBC TV18, Qualcomm, National Instruments, British Council, NASSCOM, the Government of India and Microsoft Bizpark, to name a few.
Widely trusted, YourStory.in connects with over 400,000 entrepreneurs and allied industry professionals on a monthly basis. YourStory.in has built focussed engagement opportunities with the community through initiatives like TechSparks (for product tech entrepreneurs) and the recently launched Yourstory Pages. Yourstory.in has also branched out and created two separate entities, CloudStory.in and StudentStory.in, with an aim to become the go-to place for cloud enthusiasts and foster the spirit of entrepreneurship in students respectively. Yourstory.in aims to carry these successes forward along with other innovations like Sociopreneurship (for social enterprises). Check out our website here: http://yourstory.in/
Contact
Samridhi Sharma / samridhi@yourstory.in / +91-9769004430
Chandan Raj / chandan@yourstory.in / +91-9986198806
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