In the recently concluded BizSpark startup challenge, Microsoft had provided a total grant of $97, 000 including a $30,000 grant to the winners NowFloats Technologies and Aurus Networks, $15,000 grant to runners-up VDime Innovative Works and CipherGraphs Networks and $1000 grant each to four runners-up in the cloud category and three runners-up in the mobile category. There were a total of 16 finalists across two categories – Cloud and Mobile. Yesterday, we had covered eight startups that presented in the event, here is the remaining eight startups that presented at the challenge:
Shoonya: Pune-based Shoonya develops immersive audio and visual experiences, interactive 3D experiences and interactive 3D architectural visualization services across various platforms like the Web, iOS, Android and PCs. The company launched its first product Virtualworship.in, which is based on Unity game engine and offers a 3D virtual temple experience. The company claimed to have recorded more than 65,000 visitors since April 2012. Among the experiences currently offered include a 3D Krishna temple and a 3D Ganesha temple (Video Demo) which are currently available on iOS for $1.99 and on Chrome Webstore for free.
Shoonya is currently working on a creating a framework for interactive 3D space visualization and design for the web, mobile devices and kiosks. The company’s future plans include extending its offerings to multiple app store, introducing micro transactions to its web offerings, developing onsite solutions for kiosks and temples and a possible Kinect offering by the end of this year. It added that the company is currently in talks with ISKCON, Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC) and OnlinePrasad.com for strategic partnerships and plans to offer its solutions for at least five temples across various platforms like the web, iOS, Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 8. The company’s targets also include 500 paying customers and and 25 lakh revenues by the end of the year. As an interesting aside, Citrix’s Ravi Gururaj, one of the judges of the startup challenge, suggested an integration of a Virtual Hundi through which users can make donations to the company.
RedBytes Software: A Pune-based mobile app development company which develops mobile educational apps for kids from 2-6 years through ‘Tinytapps‘ brand. The company has developed more than 28 educational apps across iOS and Android platforms and claims to have recorded more than 80000 downloads till now. Among the titles offered include Color Carnival, Swim with Numbers, Animal Adventure, Community Helpers among others.
Started in 2011, the company claimed that 40% of its revenues come from app store sales while the rest of its revenues comes from developing content packs for device OEMs, creating niche content like Islamic and Sufi comics for its partners and its iKids program, in which it partners with schools to create customized, curriculum centric set of mobile apps. The company claims to have a three year partnership with various schools in the Middle East, Dubai and Sharjah.
Reverie Technologies: Reverie Technologies is an Indic language solutions company we’ve covered in detail before. It develops an Indic language framework for digital platforms including mobile phones, Digital TV and PCs and had recently tied up with Datawind to enable the new Ubislate tablets support over a dozen Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Punjabi/Gurmukhi among others. The company informed that it has also partnered with Qualcomm, Indieon and MapMyIndia over the years to provide its language solutions. Reverie currently claims to support 32 global languages and plans to increase it to 50 languages in the next year and a half. It also intends to launch its translation solutions as a product by the end of 2012.
HeyMaya: HeyMaya is a virtual assistant which automates various company tasks like filing expense reports, scheduling and answer miscellaneous queries like weather updates, however what’s interesting about the service is that it completely works over email and there is no specific user interface. In other words, the functionality of HeyMaya is quite similar to how Apple’s Siri works or Dexetra’s Iris works except for the fact that it works over email. Consumer tasks are free of cost while enterprise tasks are charged $0.25 for each tasks. The company intends to add chat support (GTalk, Windows Live Messenger) and provide APIs for integration to enterprise apps, although it noted that they currently have no plans to add voice support. Launched in February 2012, Bangalore-based HeyMaya claims to have beta customers like SAP, Google, Salesforce and Ericsson.
ShepHertz Technologies: ShepHertz provides a platform called App42 as a service for developers to develop, host, run and manage their applications on the cloud. Through this platform, the company claims to offer more than 180 Cloud APIs to developers to build applications for mobile, television, HTML5, social and web apps. The platform currently supports 10 programming languages including C, C++, Java among others and offers SDKs for iOS, Android, REST, Ruby with SDK’s for Python and Javascript available shortly. The platform works on a freemium model offering its complete suite of services for an initial 3 months free trial period following which a scaled down version will be available for free with paid upgrades.
Twelve77 Software Studios: Twelve77 offers a cloud based self-service business application platform, Planobot, for small businesses (SMEs). This platform will offer website building tools and allow business to manage its customers, billing, scheduling, inventory, staff, and revenue reports across various platforms. The company charges a monthly subscription fee starting at $25 per business location going up to $40 per business location and is currently targeting Doctors, Clinics, wellness centers, and Spas as its customers. Planobot is currently in pilot phase with 10-15 customers and it intends to enter the Group events and the Field Force segment in 2013 and plans to integrate payments to its portal in the future.
CropIn Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd: Previously known as Cropex, CropIn provides technology solutions to various agricultural businesses along a range of products in farm management segment. CropIn currently offers a cloud based platform, ShopMyFarm, as a service to contract farming companies, food processors, exporters and retailers which offers advice on irrigation/nutrient requirement, market and new crop trends and weather updates as well as allow companies to remotely keep track of their contract farms. The company currently charges Rs 500 per acre per crop per season and claims to currently manage around 10,000 acres from customers like PepsiCo, Field Fresh, Bharti-Walmart, Olive Life Sciences, Omnikan among others.
Niqotin: An Enterprise Application service provider which is developing a Cloud/SAAS Enterprise resource planning application called Rural ERP targeting the MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) segment in India. This application offers solutions for day-to-day business functional activities like customer relationship management, product lifecycle management, human resource management, supply chain management, point-of-sale, quality management system, and business intelligence. Whats worth noting is that this application supports nine Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam among others. The company claims that this is the world’s first Indian language cloud ERP. The company currently offers various plans starting from Rs 9000 for the micro enterprises going up to Rs 39,000 for the large enterprises along with chargeable add ons.
Also read: BizSpark 2012 Finalists: Aurus Networks, NowFloats, VDime, CipherGraphs & More
