It is Amazing What You Can Do In Less Than 50 Hours

In50hrs should really be called Under 50 hours 🙂 It is amazing to see what can be done in 50 hours or less. I was at the final presentations and was impressed by the type of projects, the quality of prototypes and how well each team articulated their vision. The feedback and enthusiastic questions from the audience was great as well.

The Startup Centre provides a place  where people can go and rub shoulders with others on a similar journey,  entrepreneurs and mentors. In this event called in50hrs, they  pitch their ideas, bring them to life through a simple functional prototype. Then they show, pitch and get feedback, questions and suggestions. Each item of feedback, or question increases their own knowledge. They can take these suggestions and go to the next step.  As an entrepreneur, I am proud to be part of this effort. It is nice to watch the community grow.

For many participants, it is the first time. A few mentors like Sid and Kausik dropped their mentor roles and jumped into prototyping their  ideas as well. It was a great event to be part of. Every year, it gets a little better. And this year is one of the best.

Here is a brief overview of each project demoed. There are no links here, but you can probably look for them to be published soon on in50hrs facebook page. This list is in the order in which the participants presented their work:

  • GiveLife – A knowledge base and social network of voluntary blood donors
  • XiDeals – A deals site – implemented on top of Facebook to leverage the social connections
  • SnapFactory – A site to help you improve your visual merchandizing
  • Synapz – A continual student assessment engine
  • OfficeHours – A kind of an expert exchange. You declare your expertise, specify how much time you can spend helping others, accept meetings/chats/hangouts and help out. This was an idea conceived a couple of weeks ago in Chennai Open Coffee Club by Ashwin.
  • WebTrails – a fascinating tool that lets you follow other people’s trails. You can create your own.
  • Sequence  – a tool to help you in marketing by understanding customer behavior on your site.
  • Card.li – a product that lets you communicate with short visual messages. May replace email for quick bursts of communication, notification.
  • A streaming media player built using Raspberry PI by three students from SSN college. They walked in with a different idea and had no knowledge of Raspberry PI but quickly changed and jumped on it.

The event ended with a couple of presentations from Silverstripe Software on their TourMyApp and Eventifier. Both made considerable progress since their prototype. It is nice to see prototypes turning into MVPs (minimum viable products) getting some traction and users and potential customers. Hope to see more of these in future events.

There is a lot of promise in these ideas. What, as a community can we do to help them?

One thought on “It is Amazing What You Can Do In Less Than 50 Hours

Comments are closed.