[TechSparks Mumbai] Highlights from the Tech Bazaar

This year, at TechSparks 2014 we are trying to give startups a platform to showcase their products/services to the attendees of TechSparks to gain few beta users and also some valuable feedback.

This has been a good experiment for startups to demo their products to attendees and have transactional talks with other startups.

At Bombay Stock Exchange, Mumbai we experienced the same enthusiasm that we have been witnessing throughout the country. Marketplace or the Tech Bazaar as we call it is definitely the best feedback and early traction mechanism for early stage startups.

Here are few startups that caught the most attention -

Sosio

What is it: Community management software for Non profits and social organizations

Why it’s hot: Most non-profit organizations lack technology support that hinders their fund raising campaigns a lot of times. Sosio is trying to help NGOs with technological support. As of today they are providing solutions to more than 30 NGOs and are also helping these NGOs understand the new mediums of digital marketing. They teach and help NGOs with technology solutions, organize their donor and volunteer records and also help in spreading about their campaigns via various digital media channels. Sosio has also built a platform to help NGOs to analyse their performance reports and provide quality charts to their stakeholders. Currently, this one-man team startup is part of the Zone Startup Incubator in BSE, Mumbai.

Ambitionme.com

What is it: DIY contest platform for brands to actively engage with desired audience

Why it's hot: Engaging with the relevant audience and building a community is becoming one of the most important tasks for marketers globally. Social media is definitely the way to go forward but then it also needs to be addressed in a quirky and intelligent form. This engagement also serves vital feedbacks to the team from one of their loyal customers. This Mumbai based startup, AmbitionMe started by IIM Calcutta alumnus is trying to provide a DIY campaign management platform to help brands leverage its community for branding, market research, engagement and even hiring at times. For the audience, it's a great way to know more about various brands, convey their feedback to the brands directly and in return have to the opportunity to earn cash prizes, discount coupons or other goodies. Their assignments with Lonely Planet, Mint, Naukri.com, Nielson, ICICI Bank, foodpanda, healthkart speaks for the potential of their platform. Their platform has more than 10k registered users who actively engage with these campaigns.

Loginext

What is it: Real time shipment tracking hardware + platform

Why it’s hot: If today Flipkart is valued for more than $5-7 billions, then we surely need companies that would help such e-commerce giants in their logistics. Real time tracking of deliveries with end-to-end solutions is the pain point for most e-commerce and other courier services in India. Loginext is giving very simplified hardware solution coupled with a dashboard for real time tracking of couriers, parcels and other goods. The best part of this solution is – there is no hardware installation. One just needs to keep their GPS dongle with the parcel and its ready to use as against most of the other solutions in the market. Their dashboard gives network analysis, last mile delivery optimization and Salesforce optimization. A predictive analytics dashboard coupled with their real time tracking data would be a great solution for courier and express cargo providers.

Super Resume

What is it: Mobile app to make and share resumes

Why it’s hot: We have been hearing this ‘mobile first’ focus across sectors from almost every company with the ultimate motive of acquiring users. While we can now order food or book a cab via mobile apps, we couldn't or rather we aren’t accustomed to making resumes on mobile and share with recruiters. This prompted Faizal to make a very simple and user-friendly app to make and share resumes swiftly. The recently released mobile app has got more than 1 lac downloads in the span of the past 6-7 months. The two-member team is working to further add features to the app in the next few months. We wrote about the founding story behind this startup few weeks back.

tlkn

What is it: Mobile VOIP affordable product for international calls

Why it’s hot: VOIP is becoming a fast growing market globally with the likes of Viber being acquired by Rakuten and Facebook giving feature update to its messanger to give users the facility to call. Whatsapp is also working on giving the voice call feature update soon to its users globally. The team at tlkn is also working on a very simplistic mobile app to let users call others internationally comfortably. They have also installed VOIP paycall kiosks at various airports to facilitate international travelers including Mumbai International Airport, Boston Airport to name a few. The team has vast experience working on VOIP and it would provide beneficial in their mobile app. Their app would be launched in a couple of month’s time.

GridAnt

What is it: Device agnostic OS for IoT

Why it’s hot: We as humans are growing lazy and have that craving for connected world. Why shouldn't you smartphone have the same playlist as your iPad? Why can’t two smartphones sync seamlessly without Internet? These questions got this young team at GRidAnt to ponder and come together to build a device agnostic solution for machine-to-machine interactions without the need of Internet. There are various use-cases for this product; the list keeps increasing with every new alpha user. The team has been working on this product for the past 14 months and believes that they have cracked the solution. The product would be available for consumers and developers soon by year-end.

Did you attend TechSparks Mumbai? Which startup did you like the most? Did we miss something that caught your eye?

A big thanks to all the sponsors and partners for supporting TechSparks 2014 – Sequoia Capital, AWS, Intel, DSOA, Verisign, Stanford Ignite, Target, Intuit, Brand Capital and Ola.