innovation |

Here is an article written by Mr Aravind M S, Fellow, Kerala Startup Mission on his experience during the event Mobile Sparks 2017 held at Bengaluru.

Date:12-12-2017 to 16-12-2017,Bangalore

Workshop: Deep Programming in Mobile Technology-By Sriram Iyer, Head Innovation Labs, MYNTRA

The session was led by Sriram Iyer of Myntra.It was an enlightening and deeply technical session on the advancements in the Programming domain of Mobile technology.The focus was on moving from the sync methodology of programming to async methodology.The session shed light on making the app work even on low signal connectivity.The solution that the speaker put forward was by shifting from the conventional protocols like TCP/IP to technology like async and zeroMq methodology.Another insight was on moving towards Serverless system and IoT based services and products.On the conclusion, the session introduced the latest developments and architectures like SPLIT ARCHITECTURE/Function as Services/GPU and FPGA.

USC Viterbi-Axilor Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lecture Series

About Axilor: Axilor Ventures is a new generation platform for supporting early-stage entrepreneurs. Founded by S.D. Shibulal, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Srinath Batni, Professor Tarun Khanna and Ganapathy Venugopal. Through its programs which include Accelerator, Scale-up, and Early Stage Funding, Axilor aims to support early-stage entrepreneurs and improve their odds of success. It is currently based out of India with its headquarters in Bangalore.

About USC: The Viterbi School of Engineering (formerly the USC School of Engineering) is located at the University of Southern California in the United States. It was renamed following a $52 million donation by Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm Inc. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering celebrated its 100th birthday in conjunction with the university’s 125th birthday.

Usc Viterbi-Axilor Entrepreneurship and innovation lecture is a joint initiative by the above-mentioned organization.The session had three talks by prominent speakers.

Talk#1: Mathematics of Happiness

The session was led by Shoaib Ahmed, Chief, Catalystor and Former President of Tally.It was indeed an excellent session on his personal journey from his own product Shopper which later got merged with Tally.Later it went on to become the leading Financial ERP ever built.He focussed on the importance of customer oriented product building.He also shed light on keeping the simplicity and integrity of building a product.

Talk#2: Commercialising Technology Innovations

Followed by the above session came a journey of Techpreneur-Dr.Krishna Nayak, Founder of Lively Sensors who is Professor in USC Viterbi School of Engineering.The main focus of this talk was on commercializing the innovation done in academic level.The speaker itself had 8 patents in his name and commercialized 4 of them through licensing to global players like Siemens, GE, Philips, etc.He elaborated the works he had done at the academic level and the way it turns out to a commercially marketable solution or product.His works are mainly in the Magnetic Resonance Imaging,currently, he is running a startup which is trying to develop an imaging device which can identify Fatty Liver through the noninvasive method and accurately.

Talk#3: The Crazy World of BlockChain, CryptoCurrencies and ICO’s

The speaker for this session was Nitin Sharma, Partner, Investor Lightbox, Alumni USC.This session focussed on expanding the BlockChain Technology to more domains like real estate and Health.This session broke some misconceptions regarding the bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.He also shared the transition the startup ecosystem from VC funds to ICO’s.On the concluding note, it was stated that the blockchain technology is going to revolutionaries numerous fields like Health and Real Estate.

On the whole, the Lecture Series was very informative, vibrant and enriching.

MobileSparks 2017

MobileSparks is India’s premier conference for all things mobile. For the past five years, MobileSparks has led the charge to bring leading innovators, top startup operators, and policymakers under one roof.

In its sixth edition, MobileSparks 2017 focuses is on The New Billion. It was a gathering of thought leaders from across the mobile ecosystem under one roof to discuss, explore and learn about the needs, expectations and possible solutions for The New Billion to be able to cater to their requirements as they begin coming online.

From the entrepreneur community, we have Kunal Shah – Founder of Freecharge, Lizzie Chapman – Co-founder & CEO of ZestMoney, Arvind Pani – Co-founder & CEO of Reverie Technologies, and Jonathan Bill – Co-founder & CEO of CreditMate. From the technology ecosystem, we have Pramod Jajoo – CTO of BigBasket.com and Arun Babu – Senior Android Engineer at Uber.

A stellar set of industry experts, entrepreneurs, developers and mobile experts will debate and explore mobile-first solutions for The New Billion users who, by all indications

Consume content as video or images (and not text)

Use voice-activation, and communicate using images/video (that don’t guzzle data)

Are ready to leverage the feature phone in its newer, smarter avatar

Are set to scale on the back of Indian-language internet and hyper-local consumption

Prefer apps that work offline too

As a market, India is large enough to support solutions that cater to problems specific to a diverse, emerging economy. And many of these solutions, whether frugal-first or not, have a place in other similar economies. The world beckons and India’s mobile entrepreneurs are set to respond.

This years theme for Mobile Sparks was “The New Billion”.The Next Billion is a metaphor for the future of the internet—both the exponential growth in connectivity in emerging markets and the growth of next-level technology in mature markets and reaching to the next billion customers who are not inducted to the tech/mobile world at present. These are the people, who represent the next wave of mobile adoption. Their needs, expectations, and behavior will be completely different from previous generations.

One of the most interesting and eye opener session was done by Mr.J A Chowdary IT advisor to CM of Andhra Pradesh.The roadmap that they had laid out for the entrepreneurship of the state is stellar.They had set up Centre of Excellence for various frontier technology and Indian Institute of Digital Technologies. If Kerala as a state is not doing such kind of initiative, we will miss out the next generation of entrepreneurship also.On an ending note, AP’s vision is to become a blockchain enabled state by 2019.