Co-innovation key to Digital India - IBM

IBM emphasized the significance of ‘Co-innovation’ in building a Digital India, at IBM India Labs Engage 2016, the two day annual innovation summit hosted by IBM in Bangalore. Out of many Indian startups who have leveraged IBM’s cloud platform and/or cognitive solutions, five select start-ups demonstrated their innovative, industry specific offerings at the event. In addition to adopting IBM technology, these start-ups have benefitted by getting access to various IBM initiatives including IBM GEP/ SmartCamp India – programs that allow them to build, launch and scale their business.

Speaking at the event, Kaushik Bhaskar, Vice President, IBM India Software Labs said, ‘With Cognitive technologies becoming a key differentiator in the global technology landscape, India need cognitive business models to leapfrog into the lead innovator ranks. There is also a fundamental shift required from ‘siloed’ innovation to ‘co-innovation’ to rapidly drive this transformation. IBM is increasingly focused on nurturing the ecosystem to drive this change. By providing start-ups with access to technical expertise, executive mentoring, software infrastructure credits, co-marketing programs, sales and VC leads – IBM is committed to working with new age, born-on-the cloud companiesto drive innovation that will build a Digital India.’’

The event provided an opportunity for start-ups, ecosystem leaders, enterprises and investors to discover ideas that would breach technology frontiers and build disruptive applications for the Cloud and Cognitive Era. By participating in an immersive Design Thinking and Garage experience, participants also had a unique opportunity to unearth emerging client needs and rapidly create market- focused solutions.

The IBM India Labs Engage 2016 is part of IBM’s continuing commitment to support the Indian startup ecosystem by orchestrating the collaboration between enterprises, investors and start-up companies through various digital and physical platforms through the year. IBM engages with startups across sectors including fin-tech, health-tech and retail and provides access to key IBM programs and investments including IBM Global Entrepreneurship program; IBM physical and virtual Garages; IBM Labs; Digital Communities (Watson, Bluemix, IoT, Cloud etc.) to fuel ecosystem innovation.

The top five Start-ups who demonstrated their solutions at the event included:

1. AllizHealth: This Pune based preventive health start-up, has built a consumer focused health and wellness platform for early identification, tracking and management of health risk and conditions. It leverages IBM cloud platform to enable users to track various health risks and parameters, store digitized medical documents and also connect with doctors, caregivers etc.

Gaurav Vij, Founder and Chief Architect: "There is an increasing challenge of non -communicable and lifestyle related diseases in India. At AllizHealth, we are trying to address this problem by working on an innovative Health Management Platform. The goal of this platform is to make people aware of their health risks early and help them with various resources to track and manage such risks. Through our efforts, we are now managing the health of over 500,000 users and working with some of the leading insurance and healthcare groups in India. In this journey, we are fortunate to have a partner in IBM cloud. Harnessing the power of cloud is central to our plans and the support, help and guidance we have received from IBM team, has been quite remarkable. We hope to continue with this association and make it a win-win."

2. Tagalys : This Chennai based start-up has developed an e-commerce personalization engine on IBM cloud to help online retailers improve visitor-product engagement and revenues. The platform studies visitor and segment shopping behavior, to deliver products most relevant to that visitor(s) across product discovery channels like Site Search, Merchandising, and Recommendations within the online retailer.

Antony Kattukaran, Co-founder and CEO: ‘Personalization of the complete visitor experience across category pages, recommendations widgets and search results is a requirement in today's digital commerce experience. IBM’s cloud infrastructure is a secure, scalable, and helps us meet the most rigorous demands for our online business. Our partnership with IBM has helped a team like ours focus on product innovation instead of infrastructure and compete on merit with the best in the world.’’

3. Signzy : Recently awarded as the most innovative solution by RBI, this Bangalore –based start-up, uses IBM’s cognitive and cloud solutions to make the digital regulatory processes simpler, secure and more compliant. Their unique online contracting solution uses the latest technology like biometric signature and blockchain to complete the entire online digital trust system.

Ankit Ratan, Co-founder and CEO: "Digital On-boarding is a painful problem for the financial sector and the broader industry. Signzy is using a Cloud API based approach to make this simple, yet secure and compliant. Using IBM Watson’s cognitive capabilities we have ensured that our AI technology is enterprise-ready from day one, accelerating our go to market and delighting clients."

4. Artifacia: Erstwhile called Snapshopr, this Silicon Valley and Bangalore based start-up provides an AI based visua discovery platform designed for retailers that helps them improve engagement and conversions on their apps and websites. Using IBM cloud technology, the platform helps their partners provide unique product discovery and personalization experiences to their customers.

Navneet Sharma, Co-founder and CEO: ‘Artifacia is a visual discovery platform powered by Artificial Intelligence. We enable developers and retailers to build and deliver unique product discovery and personalization experiences for their customers in India and the US. We have relied on IBM cloud technology to build a deep learning technology infrastructure. As the winners of IBM’s SmartCamp program in 2015, we garnered a lot of visibility and look forward to the IBM partnership to their support as we expand globally.’

5. Talview : This Bangalore-based start-up is a leading HR technology solution provider which leverages cutting-edge tech like neuro-linguistic programming, machine learning, and psycho-linguistics built leveraging IBM’s cognitive and cloud solutions. The solution provides mobile-video hiring and helps companies to accept applications, conduct automated and live interviews, video supervised written & code tests and complete on boarding formalities remotely on mobile/tablet and PC.

Jobin Jose, Cofounder and COO: ‘Talview is in pursuit of disrupting the USD 500 billion global recruitment industry and had identified a strong market need for a cognitive solution. Talview Talent Insights which leverages multiple IBM Watson APIs and IBM Cloud Service is the world’s first hiring solution that harnesses the power of advanced data science and machine learning algorithms, video-audio analysis, social media analytics, psycholinguistics and speech recognition to help companies build better teams and gain competitive advantage. Using IBM services helped us to go to market faster with a secure, scalable solution.