Announcing the first batch of 10 companies shortlisted for @InTech50

InTech50 is a flagship event of iSPIRT & Terenne Global. It is a showcase of some of the most promising software products created by entrepreneurs from India.

The top 50 companies that will make it to InTech50 are selected by an eminent panel comprising of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of marquee companies, VCs, and senior executives from Product companies.

These chosen 50 companies will receive advice, on-going mentoring, product marketing support, and funding to scale their offering to the global markets.

We received over 228 applications (As expected, we had a slew of applications that came in on the last day). Thanks to the efforts of our core team and jury members we have now closed the first leg of InTech50 2015 selection process.

Our eminent jury had a wonderful, but tough time in shortlisting from among the applicants the top 100 that will make it to the next round. According to a jury member – “We were thrilled with the quality of applications we saw. It was an exhilarating experience to see so many good ideas that are tryignt o shape the world for a smarter future.”

The criteria for the first phase of shortlisting were as follows:

  • Products that were already operating in the market were preferred to those at a concept / POC stage
  • Products that addressed horizontal opportunities were preferred over those that focused very deep on a vertical
  • Products that were easy to implement & use were preferred over products that needed deeper integration with enterprise systems (like ERP)
  • Solutions that could be an “add-on”/”bolt-on” to the existing eco-system

Here are the ten shortlist of our first batch(in alphabetical order)

  • Germin8′ Social Intelligence stakeholder insights and engagement platform that collects and analyses conversations in real time from public sources and private sources, and converts them into industry-specific actionable insights and leads.
  • Framebench is the easiest way to view, annotate, discuss and collaborate over any file online. Be it an presentation, a high res image or even a video.
  • Freshdesk is a full-fledged cloud based support software that lets businesses support their customers across email, phone, chat and social media.
  • Indix App and Indix API – They collect, organize, structure and analyze a huge amount of product and product related info so that businesses can use their apps and APIs to improve product search, optimize offers, better target product ads, enrich their catalog and do ad hoc analysis.
  • Qubole Data Service is a self-service platform for big data analytics that runs on the three major public clouds: Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. QDS provides platorms like Hadoop, Hive. Spark and Presto as a service along with programming interfaces like SQL, Pig, Cascading, Scala and Python – all through an intuitive user interface that encourages collaboration.
  • Sapience is a patent pending software product that catalyzes a Mindful Enterprise. By combining self-quantification at work for individuals and enterprise effort analytics, Sapience enables data driven decision-making in empowering employees and management towards productivity and wellness.
  • Seclore FileSecure helps enterprise define, control and audit the use of information as it flows within and outside of the enterprise. It allows enterprises to embed security, privacy and compliance policies within information itself.
  • Talview Video Interview platform is reinventing the way screening and selection happens in the industry. They are the second largest player globally in video-mobile recruitment tools augmented with talent engagement and state of the art Hiring Analytic Technology.
  • ToneTag is a patent pending proximity tech that allows easy, frictionless and secure proximity payments using sound (Tone) or NFC (Tag). Depending upon user device and retail pos hardware, mobile application can toggle to initiate in-store purchases using sound or NFC. It works on any mobile device and no internet is required on user device at time of initiating payment.
  • Tydy – The documents we use today were built for the desktop world. Microsoft Office was launched in 1990 and not much has changed since then! PDF, PPT, XLS and others were not built for mobile consumption. Tydy is a new mobile document format. The Tydy doc harnesses the interactivity & sensors of mobile devices to create a completely new document consumption experience.”

According to Piyush Singh, co-host, InTech50, “The shortlisting process was an intellectually stimulating exercise. Am happy to see the escalation in not just the number of applications from last year, but also the quality. Jury members unanimously concurred that the software product eco-system seems to be evolving very well”

We are delighted that InTech50 has emerged as a platform that connects high-potential products to CIOs, investors, Executives from product companies and other stakeholders of the co-system from across the globe. That individuals and organizations from across the world consider InTech50 as the annual event that showcases a well curated and end-user driven platform for “Innovation for a Smarter Future” is encouraging. iSPIRT is committed to work with each of the selected companies to make a difference in their entrepreneurial journey, with support/advise/mentoring/guidance and giving their ventures a thrust as they scale up.

Do follow this space, as we will soon announce the next batch of 10 InTech50 companies. 

Collaborating Framebench way!

As cloud based platform for online collaboration, communication & feedback platform Pune based startup Framebench is driven to hold your central workplace where you can store & share your creative assets. The objective is to help all your remote team members and clients to review, mark changes required on the assets and even host discussions on them in real time. All of this is automatically documented for viewing later.

Online collaboration is a method that gives the ease of access to work together with your team online simultaneously. Over the last few years, online collaboration has got a few adjustments done and all we can say, yes, it is better than ever. The World Wide Web has exploded with information, there are new ideas created, implemented, and trashed every day. Restricting yourself to one idea at one location is not doing justice to the race of technology. This is where online collaboration tool comes into play. If you have the right tools, using the technology to your advantage becomes even easier. Co-founded by BITS Pilani alumni Rohit Agarwal and Vineet Markan, Framebench is a promising venture in an exciting space. Framebench is built as a HTML5 web application with some of the latest technologies in the backend. The team depends on web sockets and low latency media streaming in order to achieve near real time collaboration among browser clients. The server side is built with a clear objective to serve thousands of concurrent connections which in turn allows them to scale effortlessly using the amazon web services. It helps teams to quickly annotate and collaborate on images, documents and videos and review them online. Teams can suggest edits and approve files in a single place which substantially reduces their time to market. The best part being able to achieve this workflow completely in real-time and can also be executed in an online conference environment.

According to the Co-founder Rohit Agarwal they already have over 1000 companies using the platform. These include the likes of Unilever, Prime Focus, HBO etc. However as Rohit shares the challenge post product launch in Feb 2013 was to acquire users. They spoke to college users and about 800 designers within the first two months of the launch. This was to get feedback and user experience reports. This helps them to build a business around the product that users enjoyed using.

Frambench is currently focused on expanding their paid user base and making it popular amongst lawyers, architects, consultants and other professional groups with attractive pricing structure and options. This they believe can be achieved via strategic partnership with various large players across the globe. The team is also exploring series of fund raising with well-known venture capitalists in India and the United States.