IT city Bengaluru — which has hosted hackathons sponsored by Google, Microsoft, GE and others — will witness the country’s first non-stop, 60-hour Internet of Things (IoT) Ideathon between January 3 and 5.
A part of the 28th International Conference on VLSI Design (January 3-7, 2015), held after four years, the IoT Ideathon will take place in PES University, Bengaluru. IoT is the connection of people, processes, data and things which is enabled by intelligent networks.
“The IoT Ideathon is a unique design competition for both students and technology professionals to seed ideas around the theme of ‘Smart Connected Devices’. It aims at combining creative ideas and engineering skills with support from industry to bring out new products and applications on cross industry platforms,” Satya Gupta, co-chair of the VLSI Conference 2015 and Chairman ISA told
Applications for the Ideathon were invited a month ago through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Thirty ideas and teams will be shortlisted by the end of the month. They will be provided with reference platforms, such as Intel Edison, ARM mbed and Raspberry Pi, as well as sensors, accessories and accommodation support to come up with workable prototypes.
The winner will receive a cash prize of ₹1 lakh, and the second- and third-prize winners will receive ₹50,000 and ₹25,000 respectively. Keynote addresses at the VLSI conference will be delivered by Walden C Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics; Baher Haroun, Senior Fellow, Texas Instruments; Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov; Sunit Rikhi, VP Technology and GM, Intel Custom Foundry. At the technical programme 80 Masters and PhD holders from IITs and NITs will present their research papers.
A forum to bring together IoT start-ups with venture capitalists has been organised along the lines of TED Talks wherein, 15-20 start-ups will present a pitch to the VCs in 15 minutes. Some of the start-ups that are a part of the forum are Getactive, Cardiac Tech Labs, Fubeus, Smartcardia, Makeystreet and Wizn Systems. The VC partners are Helion Venture Partners and Inventus Capital Partners.