In50hrs : India's Premier Idea-to-Prototype Platform

We are hosting In50hrs in Bangalore - for the second time - at the same ThoughtWorks Office. The ambience and the hospitality of that bunch is hard to bunch.

So in the same serene environment as last time, we are back and this time, this is the line up of Mentors who will spend two days at the event - working with the teams and prepping them up and the Jurors who will give feedbacks on Demo Evening on Sunday.

Mentors:

1. Deepak Shenoy (Entrepreneur, Financial Whiz)

2. Hitesh Gupta (UI / UX)

3. Pratyush Prasanna (Technologist - Founder of a Health Startup)

4. Arvind Devaraj (Android Expert)

5. Atif Haider (Technologist, LaunchYard)

6. Surendran Mahendran (Co-Founder, MarkupWand, YCombinator Startup)

7. Joylita Saldanha (Product Guru)

Jury:

1. Prateek Dayal of SupportBee

2. Shivkumar of Exotel

3. Rutvik Doshi of Inventus Capital

4. Rahul Chowdri of Helion Ventures

5. Nagarjun Kandukuru, Thoughtworks

... Along with the Team of In50hrs - Vijay Anand and Shayon Mukherjee of The Startup Centre

We will be adding a few more in the next few days. But if you are looking for a start for your venture, this seems to be an apt way to go for the launch of that Idea.

Registrations for the last few slots here.

We get this question a lot. What happens to the teams and Prototypes after In50hrs. Thought we'd answer:

There are three key things to achieve in event like In50hrs:

1. Form the Pitch and prove the capability to attract a team

2. Test Drive the team

3. Build a prototype that encapsulates the essence of the idea and allows you to validate it with people without necessarily having to be there in person.

The next step after In50hrs would be to take the time to build that prototype into a product - and that is a longer process. You have to get the userflows right, setup the landing page, the login screens etc etc, and flesh out the MVP that one will pay for, and sign up a paying customer.

The Startup Centre has a programme named The Resident Programme which works closely with teams to do this - including taking them to customers to market validate it. (http://www.thestartupcentre.com/...)

There are a few things you should do, no matter what, just right after In50hrs:

1. Setup your landing page

2. Give it a name and get the url

3. Host the Prototype online under a subdomain (http://prototype.xyz.com)

4. Make a video of that one key feature of the product - as built in In50hrs, and 
use that to get signups for your beta.

5. Apply for the TSC Resident Programme - or start working on building the Product.

In50hrs is now a growing baby, a really really fast growing baby. We have been around for close to 2 years now, and close to 14 events down across four different cities - and we are making plans to expand.

Before that however, we wanted to do a few tweaks.

We started In50hrs with a rather straightforward agenda - bring people together and let them prototype. Over time, we thought it made life simpler by segregating ideasmiths, developers and the designers and incentivizing folks seperately. While that has been interesting, we are evolving In50hrs in a slightly different tangent.

While the 500+ ideas we've heard are all interesting and the 180 Prototypes that have come out are meritorius, the 25 startups is the number we are trying to improve.  When we looked at all that we can do, one thing came out to us - to dig up more solid problems to solve. At The Startup Centre, we have been noticing the same thing, that startups that solve a real problem swing by most of the issues that most entrepreneurs crib about - with a solid problem and a persuasive plan/prototype/product to solve it, it looked like most of the battle is won. 

In50hrs Bangalore will be the last of its old edition. Starting from the Pune Edition, In50hrs will be about solving some real world problems. Towards that end, we are collating the meanest, and the tougest problems from entrepreneurs all cross to bring them to you - this will be across healthcare, education, retail, enterprise et all (17 sectors identified so far)  and even some nifty prizes behind some of the promising Ideas/Prototypes to solve them.

You are still welcome to bring your own problems - that you see, and the idea, pitch, form teams and prototype. In50hrs as a platform just will offering a bit more than what it has so far. 

We are excited about the journey ahead. Hope you are too.

The hotcake idea of the event was iVolunteer.

iVolunteer - Ask any event organizer about having volunteers at their event, they'd get back to you with what a pain is. Volunteering is fun to a lot of folks but to dig out interesting events that goes good with their line of interest is just left to oblivion. iVolunteer aims at solving the problem staring with getting folks up for volunteering for NGOs is a gamified model.

• Heisenberg - Platform for marketers in both offline and online segment - Most successfully running companies look forward to run ads in the offline and online segment and as a result to that, leads start to generate. The  problem kickstarts right there. The marketing team is stranded clueless about where the conversion is happening from and how they'd manage all the leads that get generated. So, Heisenberg comes to a rescue as a system to manage all the leads in effective way by letting the companies track online conversions and take voicemails for companies to get back to the leads generated in a more structured and easy format. 

• bazaarSquare - Searching for the product availability and the best price in the stores in a location is a daunting task. Local Search aims at Social-sourcing the data from the brick and mortar store and lets you search in real-time to find the best prices and availability for the products you want to buy by having detailed product information and user reviews from the real users around the area, so that you can be confident you're getting a product that fits your needs. 

We had around 12 Participants during the event and 28 for the demo evening with 3 Jurors at the venue.

The Developers who won Rs. 25000 worth of  VPS Credits from E2E Networks are:

• Gurteshwar Singh
• Neetesh Gupta
• Amit Singh Sethi

A Big Thank You to the Jury who helped shape Ideas to Interesting Prototypes with their valuable Inputs and Feedbacks. 

Jurors - Deepinder Goyal from Zomato, Amit Somani from Make My Trip, Dhruv Kapoor from Helion Venture Capital  

Some great words about the event:

"The event really helped us get a sense of direction, mostly because of various interactions and the awesome feedback we got." - Gurteshwar Singh

Facebook Album of the event -> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.550863048280553.125458.427343437299182&type=1&l=06f443591c

In50hrs Chennai, the first event this year ended with a bang! A variegated set of ideas got prototyped. 

The hotcake idea of the event was Toungez.

Toungez - In couchsurfing style, that allows people find local (language) support, when travelling. We often travel to places of a different dialect and get stumped at various places not knowing how to respond when people speak to you in a different language altogether. Toungez comes to a rescue as a mobile app with a repository of native language speakers, by letting you call them who can help you out, bridging the communication gap. 

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