India Innovation Pioneers Challenge 2008

Department of Science and Technology (DST), Indo-US Science andTechnology Forum and Intel have partnered to bring this program IIPC 2008. Winners of the competition get an opportunity to showcase their plan at Intel + UC-Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge at University of California, Berkeley, USA.
Last date 30th April 2008.

IndAc'08 at IIT Kharagpur

On 5th and 6th April 2008, Technology Transfer Group, a student initiative of IIT Kharagpur is organising this exposition IndA'08.
On display will be 59 technologies ready for transfer. Foods & Beverages (13), Agricultural engineering & Farm machinery (5), Chemical (3), Medical devices & Biotechnology (23), CSE, Electronics & IT (7), Metallurgy & Materials (8).

Stanford-India Biodesign program

Stanford-India Biodesign program is aimed at training, mentoring and funding innovators in medical technology. Fellowship is for one year and second year is for developing technology invested in first year. Application dead line is May 8 2008.
Indian innovators can avail TePP grants for prototype development in 2nd year.
For details of program see: http://biodesign.stanford.edu/bdn/india/aboutbiodesign.jsp
For details of TePP see: www.dsir.gov.in

5th Asialics International Conference 2008

A major event organised by IIM, Bangalore from 2nd to 4th April 2008, this conference will discuss changing role of innovation system from manufacturing to services. For decades innovation was confined to manufacturing, from innovation models to disruptive innovation, from fuzzy front end to JIT and cases from Xerox to Toshiba. This conference will herald a fresh thinking, reinventing innovation system for service. Contact person;
Prof Rishikesh T Krishnan, rishi@ERNET@IIMB.IN

Threatening technlogy- turning food into biofuel

Indian Finance Minsiter, Chidambaram, takes on countries like USA for turning food into biofuel. Many analysts fear that this technology converting food crops like Corn, maize, Soya, into biofuel to run cars can cause more harm to humanity than Atomic bomb and the poor here are as hapless as the Japanese at the receiving end several decades back.
Read story at BBC...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7315308.stm

Doshion- water management services

Ashit Doshi, Managing Director of Doshion, the water management company, was awarded `The Bharti Entrepreneur of the year (2007)' by EDI. The firm is setting up a 20 MLD brackish water desalination plant at Kasnau-Matsukh lignite mines in Rajastan. Another notable sucess was setting up sea water RO plant at Ramanthapuram in Tamilnadu.

Challengers from RDE( Rapidly Developing Economies)

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) listed 5o local dynamos giving a run for more established MNCs. The list includes 11 from India. Rapidly Developing Economies, India, China, Russia and Brazil are now perceived as incubators of business dynamism. The consultants identified 6 key success factors as:

• customizing to local needs
• devising innovative business models
• leveraging latest technologies
• benefiting from lost cost/ skilled labor
• scaling up fast
• sustaining long term hyper growth.

Read on....http://www.bcg.com/publications/files/The_BCG_50_Local_Dynamos_March2008.pdf

Open Source in Drug Discovery (OSDD)

Spicy IP carried an interview with Prof Samir Brahmachari, DG, CSIR, on OPDD, which throws light on many aspects of this revolutionary concept.... Read on

Innovation for India awards 2008

Marico Innovation foundation presented awards on 19th, the winners are:
MICO- Bosch India , confined to most of the period, for local adaptation of products developed in Germany, got a new lease of life when they took up the challenge of developing single cylinder PF pump to deliver fuel at 1600 bar pressure. What was originally conceived as low cost option to Indian firms required to migrate to Common Rail system to meet Euro 4 norm was actually adopted by Deutz group , sold over 160000 units in 2007 and transformed the Indian team from adopters to developers.
Kirolskar brothers got the award for designing pumping system for Sardar Saovar project involving pumping 70000 cu.m per hour to a height of 72 mt. They achieved this engineering feat by successfully redesigning concrete volute pumps .
Titan proved they are smarter than Swiss in watch design by developing the slimmest water resistant watch in the world, as thin as floppy disc edge 3.5mm.
Maharani paints converted waste into wealth by developing process to convert paint sludge into primer.
A historically old innovation, treadle pump , generally made of wood or metal has been redesigned by Bhinge Brothers with plastic for pumping both irrigation and drinking water.

Light Logics-Holography people

Innovator P.T.Ajith has set up this high technology start-up Light Logics in Technopark, Trivendrum. In a short period, he managed to roll out a series of products: Security holograms, display holograms, hologram materials,readers , systems etc. He is now working on developing Holography Portrait Studio. A path to technology intensive ventures lighted by a researcher.

Technopreneur 2008, Kozikode

The workshop on ‘Promoting Technology Business Incubation and Building Enterprises’ was jointly organised by Technopark TBI, Technopark TePP Outreach Centre (TUC), NIT TBI, STED and VHSE on 10th March at Calicut. Innovators, Faculty members of Engineering Colleges and Teachers of Vocational Higher Secondary Schools and ITIs in the Northern Kerala comprising of the Districts Kozhikode, Kannoor, Kasargode, Palakkad and Malappuram attended this workshop.This is the first such event held in Calicut and next workshop is planned at Cochin.

IAITO Infotech

IAITO Infotech Pvt Ltd is a start-up company incubated SIIC, IIT, Kanpur, promoted by Anand Shenoy. Starting with desktop UHF reader and UHF evaluation kit, the firm now moved up the technology chain with RFID UHF external antenna and now RFID UHF 4 port and 8 port reader.

Contact person:

Anand Shenoy,IAITO INFOTECH,SIIC, IIT Kanpur,U.P-208016

ashenoy.iaito@gmail.com

Beans TradeEngine

Losses suffered by Indian corporations and banks due to trade in derivatives, hedging is in the news. There are many players but few (local) technology providers. One of the technology provider for finance market is Beans & Intellect Financial Technology Pvt Ltd , a derivatives pricing and risk management start-up promoted by two graduates of IIT, Mumbai, Anshuman and Dilli Babu. Beans TradeEngine and its extensions offer a complete package of solutions covering derivatives pricing, sensitivity analysis, credit& market risk analytics, hedging analysis etc. The product is priced right with a 2 months free trial.
Contact person: anshumaan@beansindia.com

Indygenius Technologies

Fight against piracy of movies by unauthorized copying goes high tech with Indygenious Technologies a start -up from Calicut, Kerala, offering a series of products and turnkey solutions. Clients include Aditya music, Eagle Videos,Shemroo videos etc. Contact person:
Sangeet Menon, sangeet@indygenius.com
Dileep Kumar, dileep@indygenius.com

Grammteller- low cost rural ATM

This low cost ATM was developed at IIT Chennai by TeNet group of Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala. It is low cost by design- this ATM plugs into a Kiosk PC connected to a bank server. Unlike PIN numbers for log in, customers finger prints are used. The mechanism was designed by Vortex , the licensee, promoted by innovator L.Kannan, who earlier developed low cost spinning equipment with support under TePP. For this no frills ATM, funding came from Aavishkaar. Initial testing was done by ICICI and now adopted by SBI.

Microscopes made from bamboo

Nature carried an article on Science on shoe string budget- the highlight was microscope made of bamboo costing four US dollars. It is a product of creative minds at Jodo Gyan, founded by Usha menon, scientist at National Institute for Science, Technology and Development Studies. Detailed coverage also appeared in Mail Today on 6th March 2007.

Fourth Generation Biofuels

Confused with hype and controversies on bio-fuel, read this article by Graig Rubens in earth2tech.
First-generation biofuels rely on food crops as their feedstock. Corn, soy, palm and sugarcane all have readily accessible sugars, starches and oils. So brewing them into biofeuls simply involves either fermenting the sugars or chopping up the fatty oils through transesterfication. Second-generation biofuels use lignocellulosic biomass as feedstock, among them dedicated biofuel crops like switchgrass and agricultural residue such as corn stalks. Rather than improving the fuel-making process, third-generation biofuels seek to improve the feedstock. Designing oilier crops, for example, could greatly boost yield.Fourth-generation technology combines genetically optimized feedstocks, which are designed to capture large amounts of carbon, with genomically synthesized microbes, which are made to efficiently make fuels.

read ...http://earth2tech.com/2008/03/04/wtf-are-fourth-generation-biofuels/

Model educational institute for tribal children

Achutananda Samanta, born in a poor family raised to an institutional builder with KIIT and an agent of change with KISS. KIIT started with ITI , now offers engineering, medicine and a host of other advanced programs in Bhubaneswar. KISS is different from the popular trajectory of private educational institutes, it provides free residential education to about 5000 tribal children.

Indian team consisting of all the players from KISS, Bhubaneswar won Under-14 Rugby World championship by defeating South Africa in the final match held at London in Sept 2007. To quote the tribal boy` people made fun of us when we wore shorts, now in London, we wear suit'. Empowerment of people by people.

Prof Girish creating waves with WiLCOM

Wilcom Pvt Ltd is a start-up promoted by Professors of IIT Mumbai. Leading the charge is Prof Girish Kumar, who has more than two decades experience in designing antennas and microwave circuits. His book Broadband Microchip Antennas is a standard text book. Mobile phone jammer, radiation shield are some of consumer products.

R&D India news on web

ASCI, Hyderabad is manging this site with news & views on Indian R&D. Access with free subscription. Visit: http://www.rndindia.info/.
Also see list of top 100 R&D spenders on R&D in India in the section on analysis.

YehiSahi at SPJIMR

Arpit Agrawal is incubating his concept to help parents create stimulating home environment to their children at the incubator in SPJIMR, Mumbai. See his web site http://yehisahi.com/

"There are hundreds of items available in the market that claim to be beneficial to the child. Not all of them are well designed. Also parents, sometimes, tend to focus on just one aspect of the development (example intellectual) and may miss out on the others like social and emotional.
Hence we help parents purchase items keeping in mind age appropriateness, different skills required, fun and safety".

scratch for creative kids

A new programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab turns kids from media consumers into media producers, enabling them to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and animation for the Web.With this new software, called Scratch, kids can program interactive creations by simply snapping together graphical blocks, much like LEGO® bricks, without any of the obscure punctuation and syntax of traditional programming languages. Children can then share their interactive stories and games on the Web, the same way they share videos on YouTube, engaging with other kids in an online community that provides inspiration and feedback.
Developed by Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, Designed for ages 8 and up, Scratch is available by free download from the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu). The software runs on both PCs and Macs.