ICFOSS Pre-Incubation to Support Young Entrepreneurs

>>Taking its services to a new level, International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) in Technoparkhas now taken up the initiative to support Pre-Incubation programs that have the passion to build up their own entrepreneurial space indulging with technology in Open Source domain.

The first company to be pre-incubated by ICFOSS is Cedar Info Solutions, started by three 12^th Standard students Varghese Mathew George, Arjun S and Jones Kurian. The trio had approached ICFOSS around June 2012 with a proposal to start a company specializing in Open Source platforms such as Android. ICFOSS on reviewing their proposal decided to provide them pre-incubation support providing technical training, handholding, product visualization and preliminary business modeling. Cedar Info Solutions have developed an Android and Web applications to help ordinary citizens locate doctors around them called keralamedinfo.com.   Varghese George and Arjun S are presently pursuing their first year of engineering at Sree Chithra College of Engineering in Trivandrum and Jones Kurian is pursuing his under graduation degree for Chartered Accountancy.

Keralamedinfo.com is a platform where one can get a comprehensive listing of all the medical service providers in a district, from Doctors & Hospitals to Blood Banks & Medical shops. The pilot project has been developed for the Trivandrum district. Keralamedinfo.com is designed to be a user-centric platform with almost any information one would need, from telephone numbers and addresses to even route maps in a user-friendly manner. Apart from the website, the trio have also developed an Android based app. They decided to choose Android because of the kind of penetration it has achieved and because it will be easier for many people to use this technology.

“The students have shown remarkable perspicacity and acumen in creating a dual web-smartphone application, both from a technical perspective as well as from a entrepreneurship perspective. ICFOSS would like to provide similar support and handholding to other groups of motivated youngsters who possess the passion for such enterprise.” Said Mr Satish Babu.

Satish Babu, Director, ICFOSS said “Technically, ICFOSS is not doing incubation, but ‘pre-incubation’, whereby we provide the initial impetus including technical training and once the start-up is ready, move them to TBIC. Of course, the differentiating factor is the use of FOSS in the handholding that ICFOSS provides. We are willing to provide such support to any FOSS-based technology companies.”