The Hindu : National : Let’s salute these ‘product prodigies’

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 30, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

National

National

Let’s salute these ‘product prodigies’

Anand Parthasarathy

Google contest spurs innovation among engineering college students

— Photo: By Special Arrangement

(From left) Google executives Deep Nishar and Sameer Sood with ‘product prodigies’ from IIT-Bombay.

Bangalore: You are never too young to innovate — and when it comes to software products, learning and doing can go nicely together. Which is why Google decided that any quest to unearth cool, new ideas in India must begin with college students.

A nationwide contest among computer science students drew entries from nearly 100 teams of between 2 and 5 members each. After assessment, 12 were supported by Google with a grant of Rs. 50,000 each, so that they could buy any software or tools required to execute their ideas.

“We wanted to encourage and celebrate the innovative talents of young Indians — but we have no agenda beyond that ... there is no Google tool or product they are obliged to use. The seed money gave them the freedom to use whatever software they wanted,” explained Dr. Prasad Ram, Head of Google India R&D.

The Hindu was enabled to interact with all eight teams, soon after the judges went round, evaluating them.

The top prize of Rs. 5 lakh went to the team from IIT-Bombay consisting of Aman Parnami, Prekshu Ajmera, Sanchit Garg and Vipul Shingde, for “Collaborate-Draw,” a web tool that allowed multiple users to jointly work on drawings, charts and blueprints. Trying out the tool, this correspondent found the palette of draw and paint options easy to use and as good as the best of the commercial offering out there.

The first-runner up team, which took a Rs. 2.5 lakh prize, was also from IIT-Bombay: Ankit Gupta, Chinmay Jain and Raghuvar Nadig, created “Polls,” a tool which helps set up your own online opinion poll, quiz your friends or your community of the like minded and, most usefully, analyse the results at lightning speed in multiple ways.

Watch out guys, TV channels that conduct all those SMS polls are going to be very interested!

The judges decided to also honour the team from BITS Pilani (Amit Roy, Rahul Mohan Gupta and Mayank Kamthan) that developed an innovative tool to share chunks of data in the form of ‘cards’ even between mobile phones. If your business address changed, for example, all your associates and friends would automatically have the new details.

There were two more teams from IIT-Bombay — they created an online travel resource and a barter portal where one could trade one item for another. A husband and wife team from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore — Rupesh and Meghana Nasre — created a ‘profile builder’ which went far beyond what conventional ‘people searches’ on the Net threw up.

And the team from the Vellore Institute of Technology put together a useful system to acquire and analyse traffic data.

Would any of these ‘desi’ bright ideas end up as real offerings to the public.

Why not? Some of technology’s biggest offerings from Google and Yahoo to Microsoft and Linux were born when their creators were still students!

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National