An idea may change lives of Kerala’s engineering students ahead

Startup Village, IEEE ComSoc to spot and groom innovative ideas from engineering colleges in Kerala

Thiruvanananthapuram, July:  Startup Village, India’s first telecom hub that has already created a buzz for innovation and entrepreneurship among the youngsters in Kerala and beyond, is giving a unique bouquet of opportunities to engineering students to hatch their innovative ideas into realistic.

Startup Village has launched this initiative along with the Kerala chapter of IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc) to identify innovative projects in communication technologies and applications by the students and pitch them on the growth orbit.

A slew of perks like platform to incubate the idea and partial funding to the students will be given to the select projects, apart from a rare opportunity to get mentored by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan.

``The programme is to ignite the passion for technology among the students and also to transform the young talents of Kerala as entrepreneurs.  We are covering all the 164 engineering colleges in the State in this drive to spot the bright minds and novel ideas that can be the game changers tomorrow,’’ said Startup Village CEO Mr Sijo Kuruvilla George.

``The selected teams will be given partial funding, technical guidance, and access to Startup Village technologies including open BTS, Balloon Mapping, Twine etc for their project developments. They will also get an opportunity to showcase their innovation to Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co founder Infosys, who is also one of the Chief Mentors of Startup Village,’’ he said.

``We have been actively supporting the innovative spirit of students and the Kerala chapter last year provided technical and funding support to eight student projects in the area of communication. We are trying to scale up our efforts in collaboration with Startup Village to infuse innovation and entrepreneurial spirit in the young minds,’’  said Sasi PM, the spokesman of ComSoc.

Another feature of the programme is that the interested students will get access to the state-of-the-art Blackberry devices and services to test their project design and applications. Blackberry has recently opened recently opened an innovation zone called RUBUS Labs at Startup Village to promote application development in the BB10 platform.

Those ideas that have technological and commercial appeal will also get an opportunity to get incubated at Startup Village or Technopark,  Thiruvananthapuram.

The proposals from the students will be selected based on the write-ups and later the presentation of the shortlisted ones. The maximum duration for the project development will be 12 months.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE )is the world's largest technical professional association with more than 400,000 members from more than 180 countries.  IEEE Communications society (Comsoc) promotes advancement of technology in communications domain.

Those who are interested to apply for the program can do so on or before July 13, 2012 at ieee.startupvillage.in.  To know more about the programme, interested candidates can contact Startup Village representatives on 0484-2110799.