5 mobile start-ups from joint Moratuwa Uni MIT project in 2013
A two-month University of Moratuwa mobile software start-up incubator programme, aided by world-renown Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Global Startup Labs, will be unveiling five projects which were initiated by its most recent class of 22 students, according to the programme’s Entrepreneurial Lead Akanksha Midha.
She revealed that these projects will encompass areas such as “creating a renting market, helping track lost or misplaced phones, job and internship marketplace for youth, fashion discovery and a web presence and analytics service for SMEs”.
This initiative is part of a global effort by MIT students, both “techies and MBAs, [to] run a two month incubator style entrepreneurial course at top technology universities in developing countries”, stated Ms. Midha. She also added; “We teach entrepreneurship and mobile coding to the undergrad cohort and help them build mobile apps that they eventually launch at a demo day attended by investors. This is a Google funded programme intended to encourage technology innovation in emerging markets. This is our third year at [University of Moratuwa]“. This programme, over 2011 and 2012, has had 64 students graduating from it, beside this year’s 22 who will collectively present five projects at its August 1 demo (demonstration) day.
Further, Ms. Midha also commented that the programme also features a few, smaller showcases for student projects, such as an alumni day at the University of Moratuwa, an event at Stax Consulting, one with anything.lk, and a hackathon. The latter is a hacking marathon, where programmers come together and help find and fix problems with software.
It also emerged that, since 2011, the programme has had several successes, including GlassCUBE which has “amassed nearly 10,000 downloads of its first product, DriveMODE, and launched its second application, MoviesLK, which has since reached between 10,000 and 50,000 downloads on the Google Play store”. In addition, it was also noted that another alumnus of this programme was Dhanika Perera, the founder of Bhasha, who founded his company just after “GSL 2011 and initially started by commercialising an individual university project he had created, the SETT Browser”. SETT is the first Sinhala language web browser available online and at the Google Play store. At the same time, it has also won a number of awards for digital inclusion potential, including the mBillionth South Asian Mobile Award (2011), the e-Swabhimani National Award (2011 and 2012) and the National Best Quality Software Award (NBQSA 2012).
Meanwhile, Ms. Midha also indicated that the programme had also previously resulted in the launch of the following start-ups companies; “AroundU: Delivers maps to non-smartphones via MMS; iComute: Real time traffic maps of Colombo; Favatars: Personalised fitness app; Maatha: SMS based health tips for pre- and post-natal mothers; TeleRide: Connect riders with the nearest tuk-tuk; TheaHari: Location-based alarms to help bus and train commuters from missing their stops”.
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