Hello Ladies!

It’s high time we leave behind pepper sprays, safety pins and high heels. Let’s go for the new era of  “iFOLLOW”. Not following yet? “iFOLLOW” is a new  android app which ensures safety for women. It has been developed by two smart ‘ladies’ (obviously!) who are into computer research. This app can be downloaded from google play and all you have to do is set upto a maximum of three emergency numbers. While in threat, shake your mobile thrice within a span of 5 seconds. This will enable an automatic voice call to the number of high priority and you can inform your situation to the concerned person. In case the call is unattended, “iFOLLOW”  sends an SMS to all the emergency contacts, indicating the real time latitude and longitude values of your geo position ( for every 10 meters shift). The SMS can be stopped from being sent if you keep the app in hide mode.

Guess what! This app is absolutely free and very simple to use. Start using it now and free your mind from fear!

For more details, contact ‘ifollow@aucupa.com’.  You can also follow them on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/iFollowApp

Lions always loved to be in their habitat. It was the same for developers and hackers to hangout in Startup Village (SV). The place where I and my team learned coding is not about sitting in lab and struggling on PCs with codes with loved to hate. SV had been a great place for me kindling the spirit of entrepreneurship in me. SV currently holds the highest GPSM in India, something I always admire about SV.

I would like to note down 3+1 memories that SV gifted to me for finding love of my life – entrepreneurship. As one of the SV blogs by Dipin Prakash says

“I am an entrepreneur and I am slave to my IDEA”.

FINDING STARTUP VILLAGE

I was invited by Arjun R Pillai, Co – Founder of Profoundis around June 2012 for my first encounter with a start-up and Startup Village. We worked from 11 AM to 11 PM every day and I started making friends (these bunches of people influenced me more than anything). SV was always happening with lot of high profile visits. I had always have this feeling, the most important and happening visit at SV every day is our tea vendor at 4 o’ clock in the evening, creating lot of buzz and activities in SV.

We never thought we will be one among ‘Top 5 Campus Startup’ list of Kris Gopalakrishnan.

MY FIRST HACKATHON @ INNOZ

On one fine morning, I was still snoozing on my bed and I got a call from Sijo Kuruvilla George, CEO of Startup Village. He asked me, if I could get 20 students to travel to Banglore, the next day from SV. I gathered 23 students who responded to my Facebook status and set out to B’lore. On our way to B’lore tyres got punctured twice amidst some deserted area, still managed to reach there by the time of lunch J  To our surprise we won all the prizes, in which my team won the most popular app. Thank you Innoz for providing us with a BB phone.

#bbjam – THE DAY WE STOLE LIME LIGHT

Learning from we went back to B’lore again to hangout at Forum Mall (thanks to Deepak Raveendran for choosing your Development Centre too close to the mall). Our main attraction was playing free Kinect for hours till fatigue and night life of B’lore. Also, Innoz DC provided first hand learning from Deepak, Nikhil Velpanur, Lakshmi Praturi etc.

Even though we had all the fun, our app StoryBoard won the BB Jam Banglore session. Our team of 4 including my co-founders at QEdge – Anoop K Nayak, Jibin Jose and Bijin Abraham found ourselves on cloud-9. Already being pounded with BlackBerry devices we were also given an opportunity to travel to Bangkok, Thailand.

3+1. ??

I’m leaving this space to be filled sometime in future when it’s time for next memoir. SV will bring the next one very soon, as it always did J

For every startup at Startup Village, there are two phases, called ‘Before SV’ and ‘After SV’. It was in some blog about Wowmakers, I came to know about this for the first time.  The second phase begins when your world starts to shrink into a blue crystal mansion. What does that second phase means like? That is what every single entrepreneur out there would boast off to the world. I have done it many times. It’s the story which nocturnal student startups at SV, have to say to their classmates. The story which Profoundis must have told to the 12 other startups at MS Accelerator. I am done with the intro, let me take the plunge into the story.

Story? No! I think I am bad at it. Instead, I would take you through the roles which Startup Village plays. You might get the story through the roles!

Home
Yes. Home. People live here. They code till early morning, sleep on the bean bags, wake, bath(some days), code, and again the cycle continues until something is out! I mean some product.

University
From web to mobile or design to development, someone is there to give you the insights. You won’t have to wait for a reply in Stack overflow/Quora anymore. Today you learn and the next day you share it. That is how it works.

Mentor
You learn through mistakes. But it’s not mandatory that every startup out there have to repeat the whole cycle of mistakes before they stand up. Because you get to sleep(no offence) with people who have been hanging around with mistakes for some 2+ years, and they will let you know what to do and how to do. Because coding is not business!

Client
Startup village itself is the client or testing ground for most startups out there. Some day visiting startup village would be like entering a sci-fi movie for a newbie. Not just Startup Village, but startups there are clients for other startups. Some times, it happens like a barter system. I do your website and you do my animation. It doesn’t end here, the networking which happens everyday is just amazing that, startups get clients whom they haven’t even dreamt of.

Fitness centre
I would have used the term playground, as I am going to speak about those basketball and football which starts every evening and continues till late night some days. But it would be called as ‘Fitness centre’ because people here don’t have to visit one. Why wake up early in the morning and do some boring stuffs by paying someone?

Still there are a lot of other roles which SV plays for startups. Some hangout here,some get a co-founder, some people even get a chance to change their relationship status(It happens both ways. Like from ‘relationship’ to ‘single’ also.). So just come and spend a week in here and you will know it all.

We were a bunch of students who were passionate about technology and the way it can make the  life of people better and we always wanted to do something on our own and contribute to the world more in an entrepreneurial fashion than joining some corporate.But being students and that too doing engineering we did not have any kind of exposure to the entrepreneurial or the business side of it.We didn’t had any know how how to start a company or run it and that is when Startup village or our SV came to our lives.

We came to know about SV from the news paper that there is this place called Startup village in kochi where students like us can go and start our own companies.And at that time we had no idea its going to be this cool.And one fine morning I applied for incubation at SV and got a call from SV within 3 hours!!!  I talked with them and they welcomed us to SV anytime to talk about our ideas.

And then came the 55444 hackathon  which was just awesome ,usually we participated in online hackathons and doing it offline was a completely different experience we connected with lots of geeks and talk about our ideas with different people and moreover we had great fun and from then on we fell in love with SV and we will be at SV whenever there is any program.

After the hackathons we started to participate in Startup Saturdays held on every second Saturday at SV which i would say is the ultimate resource and exposure any aspiring entrepreneur can get where we get to talk and interact with real successful entrepreneurs.And hence we started a habit to be at SV whenever we can for hackathons,Startup Saturdays,BlackBerry Developer meetups and it was all fun and productive.And for us it was most informative to meet other founders and to share experiences and information and meet some great people and founders like Dhanan Sekhar Edathara of DhaneW Research , Rohil Dev of RHL Vision , Saran Sivarajan of Tenderwoods

By the time we got enough motivation and courage to start on our own and we applied for virtual incubation and are currently incubated at SV as Nubicz-Tech making GPS based vehicle tracking systems and building applications for the cloud.

The amount of experience and exposure SV gives to student entrepreneurs like us is priceless.Like one day we will be at college and d next day we will be pitching to some of the top most executives of some corporate.The initiative of Startup village and the student entrepreneur policy is the most revolutionary and far sighted decision that any government has taken.Thanks a lot to Sijo the CEO of SV and his crew for giving us the biggest opportunity and experience of life  And we are so happy,confident and excited on this journey of entrepreneurship with SV

I’m a student.

Now, I did the latter half of my schooling here in Cochin, sailed through 11th and 12th with the holy 90%, wrote the Kerala Entrance like lakhs of other students here, got a good enough rank and in 2009 found myself sitting in a civil engineering classroom in the College of Engineering Trivandrum.

The first year was a jumbled flash of assignments, meaningless shear diagrams, record work with very less value added. At the end of that year, a group of us, friends, we got together. You can coast along for a while, doing nothing, watching the world go by, but there comes a point when you really want to use your head for something, do something.

The few of us that day, sitting in a restaurant, having ‘vadas’ and hot tea, decided to try and do something about it. We’d done a couple of small ventures like a football tournament which gave us some nice pocket money for all the things an 18 year old likes to do. We’d had a couple of ideas as well, and that was how the Entrepreneurship Development Cell was born in mid 2011 with 9 members. Today, it has 62 active members. We’ve organized everything from business plan events to a speech by the ex-president of Mexico, tech workshops by companies like Blackberry to TEDx Events. This culminated with the historic 30 days to freedom campaign which gave the Cell publicity across the state of Kerala.

The Cell also resulted in creating a team of people, startup enthusiasts across branches, some developers, some good speakers. We call ourselves HedCET as in Hed C E T, a technology product company spread over 2 verticals, the first campus startup to be incubated at Startup Village.

All of this requires two things, smart people and an ecosystem. That very ecosystem is what Startup Village has been successful so far in building over the last year, an atmosphere in which young people are free to be creative, free to imagine. This freedom of thought and expression is what led to something like Sillicon valley, and if SV gets its right, it could very well do the same here.

The slogan of Kerala’s potential of being the Sillicon Coast of the East has been used and misused often. It is indeed possible to do much beyond that. But it all begins with an idea. And Startup Village is the best idea we have at the moment.

Its begun to work. Its helped me in my dream as it undoubtedly will for several other people. That’s what good ideas do.