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Kerala reboots IT plan with ?Startup Village? in Kochi

Having fallen behind its southern counterparts in the IT race, Kerala has launched an ambitious project to tap students’ entrepreneurial and innovative skills.

Having fallen behind its southern counterparts in the IT race, Kerala has launched an ambitious project to tap students’ entrepreneurial and innovative skills.

Even as student entrepreneurs at the Kochi Startup Village notched tie-ups with Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry, the Kerala government rolled out the SV Square (Startup Village to Silicon Valley) initiative to attract technology students to business.

The SV Square (Startup Village to Silicon Valley) initiative is part of the UDF government’s ambitious programme to provide exposure to bright children, stimulating them to the path of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The process to select five students to tour the Silicon Valley in March and meet IT industry change-harbingers like the founders of Facebook and Google started this week, Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy told FE.

Besides catalysing the SV Square project, the government has lined up a system of grace marks and attendance for students opting for entrepreneurship.The Startup Village in Kochi is India’s first telecom business incubator.

The village, started by the state government to spot young brains on the Sillicon Valley trail, is already abuzz with assignments from BlackBerry.

The company’s smartphones will soon feature applications developed by the 57 companies in the Startup Village. The nearly 150 apps on the BlackBerry platform, ranging from algorithms for guessing the user?s mood to those that help start and accelerate a car, have been developed by the students employed by these companies.

?Innovation and business aptitude of young entrepreneurs call for more pats and incentivisation,? said Asha Jadeja of Rajeev Motwani Foundation from Silicon Valley, which is partnering with the Kochi Startup village in the SV Square initiative.

The students, belonging to schools, engineering and arts colleges, who wish to participate in the selection process will have to post their innovative ideas on Youtube.

Five of applicants will be selected for a trip to Silicon Valley, the cradle of tech revolution in the US.

The competition is open from February 1-10. Student-innovators need to upload a video spanning two to three minutes on their innovative projects/ideas on YouTube. A jury of distinguished technical and management experts, chaired by IIM-A professor Anil Gupta and former Nasscom president Kiran Karnik, will select the winners based on these videos.

The name of the winners will be announced on February 15.

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First published on: 02-02-2013 at 02:48 IST
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