This is what happened at Delhi Startup Weekend

17 startup ideas on social innovation and green technologies, put together over a period of two and half days, find rejection and favour from a strict jury

Sourabh Gupta, TechGig.com

From pitching ideas to strangers, picking teammates among them, getting mentored and presenting polished business plans participants of the Delhi Startup Weekend did it all. In the end, a hard-to-please jury picked three ideas from 17, hoping these would last beyond the weekend and probably be worth investor money.

It was a tie for the top spot one idea (Shield Up) was to organise the unorganised private security service market, like the budget hotel aggregators. The other idea (Happy Turtle) banked on providing paid recreational and engagement services to lonely elderly people, in another effort to tap the lucrative 'assisted living' market. The runner up idea (DigImpact) relied on a product: creating low-cost customised biometric-cum-fingerprinting devices to digitise citizen profiles, much like Aadhaar.

The event, powered by Google for Entrepreneurs and held at American Center in New Delhi from Feb 5-7, saw participation from more than 130 people from college students to seasoned professionals who worked with speed and passion to give shape to their startup ideas with market validation and developing minimum viable products on social innovation and green technologies.

At the grand finale, when one team after another took to the stage for their five minutes of pitch and faced a few more minutes of hard jury grilling, one could see how ideas rose and fell.

On the jury were Jonathan Kessler, director north India office, US Embassy; Brett Stevens, vice president, Jaarvis Accelerator, Parul Soni, managing partner, Thinkthrough Consulting, and Anurag Batra, chairman and editor-in-chief, Businessworld.

The other ideas that generated jury interest included Kheytse that saw an opportunity in cutting out middlemen in the sale of farm produce and connecting bulk buyers directly to farmers, Greeno -- a marketplace for low-cost solar lights and other green products and We Found It a crowd-sourced platform for finding missing people and things.

One idea (Aadhar) saw a business opportunity in ferrying patients in villages to medical labs in towns in free buses and providing them subsidised medical tests that would then be home-delivered. Another (Tiffin Bells) wanted to organise tiffin vendors online for ease of customers.

Yatin K Thakur, founder and CEO at CoworkIn and a facilitator at Startup Weekend said that the shortlisted ideas were given mentoring by 17 entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers and policymakers.

"It takes only 54 hours to make a change and we at Startup Weekend are doing that all across India," he said.

The Startup Weekend partners were State Department of US, CoworkIn, Jaarvis Accelerator, AIM Smart City Accelerator and Human Circle.

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This article first appeared in techgig.com