Stake-holders Emphasise on Hardware Sector at Startup Conclave

KOCHI:
Kerala’s first ever National level hardware startup conclave, organised by India’s largest hardware electronic incubator Maker Village here, concluded on a positive note with a wide array of speakers and stake-holders emphasising the need to tap the great potential in the hardware domain.
Around thousand participants, including hardware startups, officials representing the Centre and state governments, industries, technology firms, funding agencies, accelerators, hardware incubators, branding gurus and academic institutions from across the country attended the event held at the Gokulam Convention Centre.
Major companies including Lockheed Martin, Siemens, Dassault Systems, Qualcomm India, Intel, ARM, Imec, Bosch, Tejas Networks, Invecas, Rambus and Texas Instruments India also participated in the event.
In his presidential address, M. Madhavan Nambiar, Chairman, IIITM-K said, the state is giving a new focus on to hardware and semiconductor manufacturing keeping in mind the rising demand for electronic hardware.
“In 2004, we were looking only at software development and exports. Suddenly, we found that we are missing the hardware bus completely. We also found that by 2020 the demand for electronic hardware will be 200 billion and our domestic production is going to be only 50 billion. So we decided to give a new focus to hardware manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing. We changed the name of the Ministry of IT to Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.”
Phil Shaw, Chief Executive, Lockheed Martin India; M. Sivasankar, IT Secretary; Dr Saji Gopinath, Director, IITM-K; Prasad Balakrishnan Nair, CEO, Maker Village; and M.P. Pillai, Director, NIELT, Calicut were present at the inaugural function.
Acclaimed national and international speakers and business leaders made presentations and interacted with the participants at different sessions of the conclave.
R.K. Shenoy, Senior Vice-President, Robert Bosch Engineering; Heriberto Saldivar, Head Robotics, Accelerate and Director, Brinc; B.V. Naidu, Chairman and CEO Sagitaur Ventures Pvt. Ltd; Uday Dodla, Director, Product Marketing, Qualcomm India; Simon Zhang, Managing Director, Make Brinc.io; Raghu Panicker, Country Sales Director, Mentor Graphics; Arnob Roy, Co-Founder, Tejas Networks Ltd; K. Krishnamoorthy, VP and MD, Rambus Chip Technologies; Dr. Prahlad Vadakkepat, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore; and Rajeev Khushu, Texas Instruments attended the meet.
Exhibitions by industries, technology firms, service providers and startups, design for manufacturing workshop by BRINC accelerator China and Barcelona, One-to-One Pitching with Fund Managers for the startups also held. In the ‘Pitch Perfect’ competition, in which participants presented their ideas, Praveen from IIT Madras won Rs 24,000.