Hemamalini Venkatraman, Chennai
The Economic Times (Delhi edition)
It will be eight diverse ideas that will trigger the mother of all battles at Eureka! 08.
Conceptualised by IIT-Bombay, the b-plan contest is held as part of the upcoming e-summit. The jury of the tenth edition of the annual contest has short-listed eight teams that are vying for a total prize-money of $50,000.
At the entrepreneurship summit, to be held in Mumbai on February 7, 2009, Eureka!08 is pitched as Asia’s largest b-plan competition. The summit, which is perceived as a confluence of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and academicians, aims to nurture the entrepreneurial wealth of India. The b-plan contest received 2,000 registrations, including those from overseas.
The finalists—Phoenix, Jimmy & Jessy (J&J) Professional Pet Services, Empower, Vertosys, Delta Climate, The Acceptor, Parichay and GoCars—are from institutions such as BITS-Pilani, IIT-B, IIM-Bangalore, NID, XLRI and ISB.
Says finalist Deepesh Agarwal of ISB, who received the intimation from the organiser two days ago: “GoCars is a mobile-based platform software to connect people in real-time and is meant to improve the capacity utilisation in transport categories such as personal cars, taxis and cargo.” After successfully implementing it on a pilot-basis at the ISB campus in June, the trio—Deepesh, co-partner Akash Maheshwari (part-timer at Microsoft) and b-plan partner Amit Gupta (ISB)—is looking to roll it out on a larger scale. They need Rs 2 crore for this, Deepesh said.
Incidentally, five of the eight ideas that have made the cut are in the clean technology space, which constitute 24 percent of the overall entries received from sectors such as retail, IT, manufacturing and bio-tech. “The trend show clean tech as the enterprise of the near future and a prospective business for the youth of today,” said IIT-Bombay’s entrepreneurship cell media manager Cyrus Vesvikar.
Cash awards of Rs 1 lakh and Rs 70,000 will be given for the top two entries (return airfare travel to Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh), and the winners will be chosen to compete in the sustainable technology track of the McGinnis Venture Competition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US for additional prizes.
The path-breaking ideas that have made the final cut include regenerating spent acid used for pickling in the iron and steel industry, novel vertical-axiswind-turbine designs to generate up to 6,000 kWh of energy, and also an invention to remove the fear and trauma associated with a medical syringe.
PSUs new stars of campus placement
With the objective of reducing the effects of the economic slowdown at their campus, the placement coordinators at IIT Bombay are pinning their hopes on the navratna companies—or the public sector units—to bail them out of this crisis, reports Abhijit Deb from Mumbai. Following the poor response by traditional recruiters in the first twenty days of placement, public sector majors such as IOC, ONGC, GAIL, BPCL and HPCL among others have been approached by the cell to visit the campus for recruitment. A student placement coordinator told ET, “We are betting on the PSUs coming to campus. Many of them have still not come and we are hoping that our students will be absorbed by these companies.” The placement process at the institute was done in 2-3 days in the past years. Now, the placement dates have been extended till April.
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