Venkanna Reddy Yamnur, a 10th class student, has made up his mind to be an entrepreneur. His idea is to use crowd sourcing to work to rescue street children and stop child labour.

He is one of the technology enthusiasts who pitched ideas at the Startup Weekend, an industry supported event to educate and empower individuals and teams on entrepreneurship.

Yamnur, who came from Dharwad in Karnataka for the weekend event pitched ‘Save a Child’ and this found a special mention by the jury. According to him, photos of street children or child labour can be uploaded to the government departments or the NGOs working for the cause of children for taking action. The photos will be geo-tagged for location identification.

Over 50 people grouped into team to come up with an idea, build a prototype and make a presentation to the jury and peers to refine them — in less than three days. Among others, a team has come up with an idea to combat diabetes but not with insulin or other medicines. Here it is about delivering lunch boxes that are made for diabetics by adopting an online model to reach out to corporate and institutions. It will also include grocery items and recipes that are useful for diabetics.

Another team, led by Nik­hil Kulkarni, an entreprene­ur, has presented Lebtop (L­earn English by talking on phone). According to this, a toll free number could connect callers to each other to learn or teach English th­r­ough conversations. It would be menu driven, like press 1 to teach and 2 to learn- kind.

Divya Sornaraja, already running a startup, packaged fitness and health habits into a game. One team also said farming operations can be made into an enterprise with crowd funding as the revenue source. “Having an idea is one thing but launching it to the next level is a different game. Redundancies will creep with higher levels,” said Ramesh Loganathan, centre head and vice-president (products) at Progress Software, which hosted the event. According to him, at least two or three ideas will be nurtured into businesses.

Chaitanya, one of the organisers, said select ideas would be showcased in the Global Startup Weekend event. “This might be the beginning of a new journey,” he said adding that some might even find angel investors or new team members.

krishnamohan@mydigitalfc.com