3 projects selected in the Hyd edition of Startup Weekend

Progress Software India has as part of their endeavour to create and nurture a startup eco-system in the country, supported the 5th edition of Startup Weekend Hyderabad, the first in the new state of Telangana, from 18 to 20 July 2014, hosted at Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures.

It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 1800 past events in 120 countries around the world in 2014. The non-profit organisation is headquartered in Seattle, Washington but Startup Weekend organisers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.

This time, Startup Weekend Hyderabad has witnessed 130 participants including designers, programmers and hustlers. The event started on Friday evening 18 July, with people making over 50 elevator pitches. Finally, 18 ideas were selected by voting and the selected ideas formed their teams. During the course of the next two days, they interacted with mentors, targeted and acquired customers and tried to build a minimum viable product. Then finally on Sunday, all the teams made their final presentations to a distinguished team of entrepreneurs, VCs and Angels who selected the top three ideas.

Some of the notable ideas include Cloud Boost (collection of smart developer tools for next-gen platforms like parse, fire base, etc), Stamp (single digital wallet for storing your loyalty cards), LearnForSure (enhance retention and accessibility for delivering educational content to end-users from high schoolers to MBAs.) and Car Nama (online portal for buying car accessories).

“Startup Weekend has been totally sold out. We’ve had the highest registrants ever. We’ve had people come over from various places including cities like Chennai,Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mathura, and districts like Vizag, and Khammam and one participant from Singapore. Hyderabad has been at the center of Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem. I expect to see a bunch of startups to actually go on and create companies.

“We plan to organise a Startup Weekend soon and more focused events in future around Healthcare, and Education,” Rahul Sanghi, Lead Organizer of Startup Weekend Hyderabad, said.

Mr. Ramesh Loganathan, Vice President Products and ManagingDirector, Progress Software said: “Being a technology intensive innovation led Product Company; we at Progress have always valued the innovation ecosystem.

Nurturing ideas within Progress, enabling startup activities and academic incubators around the city has always been an endeavor to give back to the industry ecosystem.

“I personally believe that events like startup Weekend are critical in helping seed new product startups and are a catalyst for transformation in our engineers' mindset from being services led to tech-innovation led.” Mr. Ramesh Loganathan added. He was a mentor and also part of the jury for the Startup Weekend this year and has been in the past as well.

Apart from Mr. Ramesh Loganathan, the jury consisted of prominent entrepreneurs, mentors and VCs. Progress Software has also given access to parts of Progress Cloud platforms, that startups used to build their prototypes and gain hands on clouds exposure.

The company also hosted last year’s Startup Weekend edition in Hyderabad wherein 10 teams had participated with the winning team finishing in top 10 of the Global Startup Battle.

Progress Software India has been supporting various startup initiatives in the country and also mentoring various student startup teams through their ‘Progress University Program’ Initiative by setting up incubation centers in universities and institutions.

Progress Software Corporation is a global software company that simplifies the development, deployment and management of business applications on-premise or in the cloud, on any platform or device, to any data source, with enhanced performance, minimal IT complexity and low total cost of ownership.