Crafting a Smarter India by Keenly Building an IoT Friendly Ecosystem Date:   Friday , June 05, 2015 Being world\'s largest semiconductor chip maker, Intel is focused on all computing levels from simplest sensor device to super computer. The California headquartered company endeavouring to provide end-to-end solutions to enhance IT computing capabilities of industry has a current market cap of $157.83 billion. IoT is not merely a luxurious lifestyle technology but a dire necessity for a vastly diversified, giant country like India that has complicated infrastructure. As the country is grappling with resource challenges, IoT is becoming more and more crucial for the basic functioning of India and to make cities cleaner and efficient. For instance, by building flow sensors in hundreds of sewage pipes, we can enable better sewage flow. Likewise, if every industrial building can save 30 percent of power using sensors and analytics, we can easily overcome our power shortage problem. Albeit India can boast of being enriched with proficient software writers, to build a wonderful nation we need a significant set of people who excel in software, hardware, network & cloud and marry them all to solve a real world problem. With the fundamental objective of getting the ecosystem ready to implement IoT based solutions, Intel has been conducting IoT conventions in Hackathon style. This intensive talent building workshop is much more efficient than a typical seminar, training programs or even hands-on developer\'s lab. We invited over thousand IoT enthusiasts and filtered 170 people among them based on their ideas and individual talent. These individuals formed 44 teams and have been sharing their knowledge to creatively build solutions for real world usages. We just assist in cases of technical roadblocks and provide toolkits comprising of devices like sensor, cables, displays & computer device and access to industry standard development environment akin to Yocto – an opensource embedded OS and IoT cloud agent. These devices come from various companies and the whole industry (software, analytics, cloud & real-time intelligence solution providers and network system integrators) is coming together to construct these solutions . Paving the Way for New Industries Albeit IoT will be in every aspect of our lives eventually, some industries like automotives, healthcare and energy will adopt it slightly faster. Billion dollar industries will be created and individual productivity and safety will be improved with the commoditization of sensors and networks. The amalgamation of telecom, automotive and payment industry brought us several billion dollar companies like OLA and ever since the cab industry has been in the media for all the good reasons. While integrating cameras to mobile phones helped memory card sales, being able to pose instantly and sharing pictures gave birth to Facebook and WhatsApp. Our role is to continue to excite, activate and build the ecosystem, provide computing solutions and most importantly to drive standards. It is imperative to adhere to certain standards to build systems that can communicate with each other at the same level. The numerous benefits we relish from USB standards serves as an excellent example. Materializing Digital India Although a few things in IoT might require large bandwidth connection, we can always innovate creative ways to manage it. For instance, instead of sending 300 unwanted messages a day, an intelligent device can aggregate all the messages and just alert us when the rules are being violated. India is closer to mature countries by just a few years. Our personal data usage has probably gone up thousandfold vis-a-vis five years ago. India already contributes to one third of the traffic that learns about IoT. To build IoT devices, be inline with \'Make-in-India\' vision, we need right talents and ecosystem. We have worked with various state and central government at advisory, participatory and contribution level to materialize digital India mission. We strive to grow developer\'s expertise, build their capabilities and bring them closer to business by conducting hundreds of startup programs, matchmaking sessions between developers & customers and by partnering with many accelerators and incubators across the regions. Caring & Guiding Startups Startups are like an infant in nursery. They need care and guidance on regular basis and not just money. Intel works with startups across various fields such as gamification, business analytics solutions and language recognition applications among others. We provide them access to our technologies, expertise, workshops, training sessions and connection to other startups, customers or other mentors to get them almost self-sustainable. We are also doing several digital literacy campaigns across the country to increase consumer\'s literacy. Although we don\'t give a degree or anything fancy, countless motivated people are investing their personal time in IoT conventions for a reason and they will spread the word through various media. This might be a drop in the ocean, but it is the little drops that make the mighty ocean. (As told to Anamika Sahu & Susila Govindaraj)