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Indian Bill Gates in the making
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 06 August 2008, 00:28 IST
Bangalore: Bill Gates is a person with a great track record of converting dreams to reality. An Innovation Accelerator program, which is being carried out under the aegis of his company, Microsoft, has seen the first Indian team clinching the title, called Imagine Cup 2008, which is designed as a means to help discover new talent and develop innovative ideas as a business, reported The Financial Express.
In the worldwide finals, held at Paris last month, SKAN, a team led by a bunch of students in Mumbai, has become the first Indian winner of the Interoperability award at the Imagine Cup 2008.
Microsoft is helping this team incubate its business idea into a commercial proposition. "The Microsoft Innovation Accelerator Program was recently launched in India and SKAN is the first team that has been chosen by the company for taking their idea to the market," Paul Murphy, director of Innovation, Microsoft India said.
He added, "When the Innovation Cup was started, we realized that the ideas of some finalists were so good that they could become viable businesses. This led to the Innovation Accelerator program."
One of the Imagine Cup 2006 finalist teams is on its way to entrepreneurship. Four students from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences whose company is called Trailblazers developed navigation software focused on the needs of physically disabled people. Russia's Team Inspiration, the winners of the Imagine Cup 2005 incorporated Musigy, enabling musicians to plug their instrument into a computer and be connected to other musicians globally, perform live in a distributed environment and share real-time performance via Internet protocol multicasting.
The SKAN team has developed a system that switches idle computers into the power-save mode. "Our application is targeted towards networks and assures savings of $25 to $75 on a single computer on an annual basis," said Amith George, team member of SKAN.
Wit an intent to make Indian team also as successful as its global counterpart, Microsoft will review the progress of this team on a quarterly basis and release the seed funding in a phased manner. The team is now heading for IIM Ahmedabad where they will spend two weeks to get into the entrepreneur mode. Murphy said. "We are looking at funding more such start-ups by pushing more local innovation accelerator efforts in India."
Apart from the Innovation Accelerator Program for students, Microsoft has the Start-Up Accelerator Program for start-ups. The company plans to incubate 100 start-ups globally and wants at least 10 of them to come from India. Four Indian start-ups are already on the rolls.
