Techspark sojourn at Taj Yeshwantpur Bangalore organised by Yourstory on 11th and 12th October 2019

Your story is an annual event which creates a platform for startups to meet and greet. Taj Yeshwantpur Bangalore India had devoted two halls for speaker events and a big backyard for companies to set up their stalls along with two training halls. I was there to get exposed to myriad developments that are happening in the product development space.

Stalls

A quick rundown of some companies that I encountered in the stalls arena.

1. Lightwing

They have a dashboard where you could input your budget and you could decide to kill the computing resources that have exceeded your budget. They recommend that you should not do it for production but only for development. One can configure the rules at the dashboard. I could not see the demo due to bad internet connectivity but I will have an offline discussion with them and update you once I see the demo.

2. Cloudsek

They help companies in auditing and reporting accidental code or sensitive information out of the intranet accidentally.

They claim to have capabilities to read threat signatures from the dark web too. (I was curious about what was dark web and how to access it. They say that that you take a VM with Ubuntu and download Tor Browser – I think the detrimental elements of the society tend to use it)

They study spurious apps as well as false domains that hackers have procured to malign the company image to pretend to be some other company to gullible customers.

Did not see a demo – above was their founders marketing pitch.

Use case: imagine a company like Capital One had given a contract work to a contractor and that contractor had subcontracted out to someone else however the sub-contractor had managed to put the source code on the public internet and capital one was not aware of it. Could lead to IP theft and data leakage

3. Securely-share

They had showcased a mobile application called Vault.Direct which takes the pain out of sharing files outside your company and inside too.

We tend to exchange sensitive information like form 16 statements and identity proofs having no control of the file Once it leaves outbox,

We control the expiry of the file. The encryption of the file becomes invalid once the expiry limit has reached.

Demonstrated that PDF passwords and zip passwords are crackable.

Using this software you could grant access and a link will be given to someone for the file sharing purpose.

4. Senseforth.ai

A popular customer they serve – HDFC evo chat bot.

They have an interface for entities training as well as intent recognition. Did not demonstrate that as it was proprietary.

The claimed to have integrations with WhatsApp, Skype,

The web chat platform was demonstrated to us

 

5. Razor pay

A preferred payment gateway. It handles credit card and internet banking for applications that need payments.

Two other products are route and razorpayx.

Route is good if you are trying to create an Uber like micro economy type of platform. Where your payouts are processed. For example if you have a cab and a cab driver the cab driver charges the customer $500 and you get $100 ( because we are the platform enablers) out of it then raise up a route will charge for 0.25% of the $400  that is given to the driver. And X is similar type of product but with one modification where you get the money and after a certain duration the payout is given to the cab driver.

 

6. Deepscore

Deep score depicted screenshots of an application that take photos of individuals and record voice to detect fraudulent behaviour, ability to cheat lie it also has connectivity to some Central repository of blacklisted individuals

They claim that they offer a mobile SDK as well as API, replying that can beat Facebook prophet using its ai based fraud detection

The current fraud detection business are only using mechanism like recaptcha captcha IP whitelisting and mouse movements

They are offering to increase solutions to look at the eyes swim face pulls it does emotional analysis detects lies it gives stressful questions to the participants on things like address, income and check for the stress level

7. Innodi:

This company specialises in water purification. They proclaim that their wastage is extremely minimal due to use of electrolysis instead of reverse osmosis to filter water. Only source of water wastage is cleaning of electrodes.

8. whmcs

Or web host management control system.

They take $15 per month for hosting dashboard.

If you have spare computing resources to spare you can converted to web hosting service with the help of this company.

9. Townscript

It is very similar to Eventbrite. They have organiser application as well as attending application. Support replies within 24 hours and help you with bulk upload. Well defined API is one hallmark that they highlighted. It is free as well as paid ticketing platform
10.Grp talk

Showcased an application which can initiate conferences,

The other party did not have the application installed – you could create teams.

Application charges 1 Rupee per minute per person. Also offer SMS service for 12 Paisa per SMS.

Multi way phone call could be established in one click Google Hangout like experience could be started without internet connection without video.

Also have an add-on application that supports video.

11.Server wala:

Grants you a VPN for 1500 Indian national Rupees per month for a Linux instance 4 core 4GB ram 500gb hard disc within India USA HK Germany.

You could ssh into those boxes.

They setup servers for different kinds of requirements

12. Neosoft

It is a contracting company they have close to 1500 developers that specialises in angular Android iOS dotnet Java and much more.

13. Mahindra glide

Commenced offering electric ride sharing service for selected locations in Mumbai.

The concept is that a shared business class seat will be reserved. They give you access to Wi-Fi and an iPod like console is placed in front of you where you can play your favourite movies and music.

They do not take diversion only people along the selected part will travel. Cost is 300 Indian National Rupee per trip.

14. Ok credit:

It is a free application that keeps track of bookkeeping for kiranas and small stores. It enables the shopkeeper to also offer a product on credit,  it has WhatsApp like interface for reminding the customer by sms or some other application when credit due date has approached. Can also keep track of your account books  how much is pending how much is outstanding. Keeps track of who has defaulted and on-board new a new customer from your contacts too

15. Walmart

Walmart had showcased a virtual reality product which allowed the customer to pick items from typical shop shelf to the Shopping Cart and drop them and perform checkout. Utilized Unity game engine as well as HTC Vive.

16.Kaleyra

They offer a customer support experience that integrates SMS WhatsApp with verified WhatsApp business account pricing is around 11 paise per SMS. Cockpit UI is offered to you as a control panel.

17. Neuro specialist

Neuro specialist had launched a product call Minion which can detect electrical Spikes in your system by installing a small device at the electrical metre less than the size of a fist. they specialise in hospitals as well as hotels, the claim that no existing appliances needs to be modified to find out what is the root cause of electric bill.

 

18. Sunblaze

there is a Tokyo based company.

Offers $35 Android smartphones for the ground staff and employees. It does not allow installation of apps like Instagram Facebook and WhatsApp which can take away the valuable time of employees. However they will be allowed to install those apps that the management has whitelisted as enterprise or work applications. We need to purchase minimum 10 devices.

19. Sagri :

They facilitate micro credit for the farmers.  The farmers will have to share the soil samples. The company will estimate the productivity and can let the banks know about their future potential. And enabling the farmers to get a fair loan at standard bank rates of 1. 5 to 2%.  They have a machine learning algorithm. It is estimated that 263 million farmers have no access to credit and or not very sustainable, 43 farmers per day commit suicide. They specialised in micro data via soil analysis and macro data through satellite analysis

They just connect banks to farmers along with granting academic background so that they increase the yield and work on the increasing yield of the hummus,

They want distribution partners in India specially who have access to large farm lands.

20. Mobilicious

It is a Tokyo based firm that can compare handwriting signatures and text extractions.

Voice recognition as well.

For the demo they had a pad where Japanese characters was written and the system was able to get most of the text right both Digital as well as handwritten. It was poor in English and he said that it needed training.

They charge 35 cents per sheet.

Verifiers correct the bad judgements with an interface. They possess a digitiser as well as bi Alay clipboard which also 10 offline and online recognition. With the combination of stroke recognition image recognition and cross validation.

Acquisition of my script by Microsoft is also telling story that handwriting recognition is extremely important today with the potential of at least 120 million Dollars per year only from the Japanese government. And a large capability to grow beyond Japan too. Success story lies in the Japanese voice alert system that is there in the metro which has 100% accuracy. They are projecting 15 Million Dollar revenue in 3 years.

21. Salesforce

Salesforce was demonstrating their customer relationship platform. Depending on the number of module I think it would cost around 150 Dollars per month. Thank you for that lovely water bottle.

 

Please note that even though I am mentioning the approximate cost none of the startup had committed to the cost. Most are available’ for flexibility and negotiations.

 

22. Go jek

They had a stall to showcase the features of their application. They differentiate themselves from Tapzo by themselves becoming the platform instead of allowing other platforms like swiggy, Zomato, uber to operate on them .they list numerous services like food handyman bookings.

23. Digio

D I G I O is an Indian startup that helps you with Aadhaar authentication as well as docusign.

Zerodha is using the smart KYC feature to onboard people to create new Demat account without visiting any office of filling any physical form.

24. Nimble vision

Nimble vision is a start-up that provides you with an application to manage water close leaks impurities for residents of buildings and their package is starting at 10000 INR per residence

25. Happy Adda

Happy Adda has released an application called kettle mind which is useful for cognitive assessment before the placements of freshers or even the kids could use it within their schools.

26. NLP Bot

Start-up by the name NLP bot had explained how we could revolutionize hr system by just uploading a policy document and that became the starting point for auto training of a chatbot.

It could also connect to Api as well as be context sensitive emotional sensitive and can also showcase how to download other documents related to the same.

It automated the entire onboarding process for a new comer and kept the newcomer engaged for the next 30 days by constantly reminding about submitting some relevant documents for getting a laptop or getting access to a specific system.

It could be connected to Skype slack or any other chat based framework.

 

 

 

JETRO startup

27. Polar star space

The pain: Reduce the damage caused by diseases on banana plantation.

How: With the combination of satellite drones and LCFT camera with the capability to control the satellite to around 0.1 degree accuracy.

The satellites monitor the plantation from a high level view then the problem area is visited by the drone because the commercial drones have a 20 minute flights and can only cover one hectare.

In Philippines there lies a banana plantation which is 30,000 hectare.

That’s why the satellites for used

They are looking for a joint venture with India for partners

 

28. Dreamgp

It measures parameters of foot via Foot Bank software and Designs custom soles within 30 minutes.

They claim to fix pains corns and operations of the food due to bad footwear.

Fix spine issues and foot pains.

 

 Masterclasses

The Google masterclass entitled –  zero coding machine learning by Mr KC Ayyagiri

The internet is 200 terabyte per second however the Google Cloud capacity is 1300 terabyte per second.

Google space sealing deep sea Atlantic and Pacific cables and the Google Cloud PDF to the final user is much faster because Google itself owns many of the DNS

One can take a look at the suite of products that Google Cloud offers by going to cloud dot google.com / products

He had touched upon spanner database, tensorflow auto ml, ml engine and perception services

 

Google has introduced a new product called Google data set search

https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch

In a demo session he had demonstrated auto ml.

The use case was to predict whether the flights would be turbulent or whether the Rains would be very devastating or useful for the crops

For example if you upload the picture of a sky  to the vision API it will only say sky, blue, azure, atmosphere and daytime however if you upload the same to a further trained data set with the help of auto ml then it can do to much better like saying the flight turbulence probability for the likeliness of suitability of rain for a particular kind of crop by training it with the specific data set via just few clicks in auto ml and even deployed the solution

Witness the confusion Matrix as well as test and use the deployed model. Auto ml can output both Python API as well as rest API.

If you wanted to find tune the process like for example retraining the model based on feedback then auto ml is not the right tool however we could use the ML engine which requires some degree of coding unlike auto ml which requires no coding

He had also introduced google-cloud-bigquery JavaScript query which can be a very good Data warehousing Solution . stack Driver could be used for logging and Google 360 could be used for Analytics

And he said for most of the solutions you don’t need a TPU because that is an extremely high end version of multiple GPU. A Pod is known as 64 T Pus.
Google is trying to promote that startup ecosystem by exposing 1000k worth products via cloud dot google.com / developer/startup

In general 300 USD is given to most people who not startups. Link is cloud dot google.com / free

Google is also good with architectural reviews and is open to SsAS partnership,

He had also demonstrated the object detection part of auto ml and one use case of code lab as well as quick Labs.

For more information one can visit bit.ly / learn gcp

Another useful resource is cloud dot google.com / natural-language

 

Mr Xavier Kulkarni from Dell business solutions

He had given an insightful presentation on thinking about security and infrastructure for your startup

 

–  PF sense is a good distributed firewall

– CRM portal is available for open source on GitHub

– quagga is a good open source Load Balancer

 

He had explained how Dell had monetized on data to plan for better inventory size with the help of of the machine failure rates prevention statistics that Dell had access .

Good paid Firewall could be nuck for your residence. Reason: most public facing IPs are vulnerable to brute force attack

He had explained how Tesla is also benefiting a lot from the data the collect from the cars to improve its automatic parking feature

Some key points he had touched was planning for work force, security, planning to scale and how to monetize on data

Mr Prashant from At&t

He is principal data science and he had explain how he had become a data science engineer and explain the difference between data engineer data analyst and deep learning as well as strategy roles alongside with roles related to Analytics,

He had stressed a lot on data collection, data engineering, data visualisation, how to perform scientific analysis and then at the end how AI could be used,

He had completed PG BA Bi course from Great Lakes in person and Mr Sharansh Sharma from great learning had also explained the course.

Other Speakers

Bollywood celebrity Tapse Pannu, Startup celebrity Vijay from Paytm and Nithin from Zerodha had explained their story and had given an insight on how they took up unconventional roles in their lives to rise to stardom.