Qualcomm announces ten finalists of Qualcomm Design in India Challenge

NEW DELHI:US global semiconductor company Qualcomm Incorporated has announced the 10 finalists of the first edition of the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge, that was launched in December 2015.

In association with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge aims to catalyze the creation of a product and hardware design ecosystem in India in the domains of smartphones, tablets and Internet of Things (IoT) for agriculture, automotive, banking, education, healthcare, smart cities and wearables.

“We are delighted to see an industry leader like Qualcomm, join forces and contribute to the government’s Make in India vision,” said J S Deepak, secretary, of the Department of Telecom (DoT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India.

“The Qualcomm Design in India Challenge will have a positive impact towards making India a global hub for hardware design," he added.

“At DeitY it is our endeavor to promote Electronics System Design & Manufacturing industry with a recent focus on mobile manufacturing,” said Dr. Aruna Sharma, Secretary, Department of industry Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India.

“We appreciate the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge that has the potential to foster game-changing product innovation, design and development of mobile technologies and IoT, and support the Government’s Make in India vision," she added.

“Inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India vision, Qualcomm is excited to support the possibility of making India a hub for design capabilities that would drive the value chain from a service focused to product capable industry ,” said Sunil Lalvani, vice president and president of Qualcomm India & South Asia.

“We are thrilled at the overwhelming response to the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge and look forward to incubating the top 10 finalists in the Qualcomm Innovation Lab to transform their ideas from concept to product stage," he added.

“We are happy to be associated with Qualcomm in this progressive effort, to actualize the Make in India vision,” said R. Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM.

“This initiative, closely aligned with NASSCOM’s own vision to 'Connect, Collaborate and Co-create', is a great platform to drive innovation," he said.

This next stage of the challenge builds on the commitment made by Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, executive chairman of Qualcomm Incorporated, when he met with Prime Minister Modi at the Digital Economy event held in September, 2015 in San Jose, USA. Dr. Jacobs announced Qualcomm’s support for the Government of India’s Digital India and Make in India vision, to introduce a Design in India Initiative to encourage the creation of a local product design ecosystem.

Following this, Qualcomm announced the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge in December 2015 and set up the Qualcomm® Innovation Lab in Bangalore, to provide technical and engineering support to the 10 finalists in their endeavour to develop innovative ideas into products and hardware designs.

The ten shortlisted companies for the first edition of the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge are:

Aarav Unmanned Systems - Nayan, a high performance quadrotor for researchers and developers
Artificial Machines - HAZE Platform, an End-to-End IoT platform to make your products smarter
Carnot Technologies - A smart bike platform that makes any conventional two wheeler smarter - get towing/security alerts, engine/battery health and performance insights on you phone
Green Robot Machinery - Developing smart and compact precision farm machinery for small farms
iFuture Robotics - Building Ark Robot, an Army of autonomous Robots for Smart Logistics
Lensbricks Technology - Bringing you Kiba, a camera to automatically capture and share joy through videos
Myelin - Hybrid Octo-copter with inter changeable modules for different sectoral applications
Treepie Computing - High Performance Computing (HPC) framework using Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC for IoT applications
Uncanny Vision - Next generation surveillance solution to bring intelligent security to smart cities
Watchy Technology - Innovations that enable our customers to broadcast reliably

These 10 companies will now be incubated in the Qualcomm Innovation Lab and the top three winners will each receive a funding of $100,000 at the end of the incubation period expected around November 2016.