Indian Startup Uses Live Traffic Heatmaps To Provide Cabs

Getting a cab in Indian metro cities is a tough task. It’s even harder in India’s financial capital – Mumbai, Maharashtra, because there are fewer of them plying the streets. For Mumbai’s 15 million populace, there are just 60,000 taxis available.

A Mumbai-based startup Olacabs has devised a clever technology in hope of closing the gap between India’s infrastructure issues and providing a cab more reliably than its peers. It gives each of its drivers an Android phone to take bookings. And each phone is enabled with an Olacabs application that helps to form a live heatmap of traffic in the cities, and notify the driver of the jams.

The booking information is also crunched by Olacabs to help predict taxi demand ahead of time, and sends more drivers out to areas expecting bookings so that they can respond to online bookings sooner. The company has also built its own mapping layer over Google Maps that has been translated to local dialects for drivers. Founded in January 2011, Olacabs currently operates in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune. Read more

An App To Test Diabetes

India has about 60 million diabetics and for this group, life is an unending struggle, fraught with frequent complications such as cardiovascular diseases and renal failures. Therefore, monitoring the disease becomes an exhausting, daily ritual.

Now, a Mumbai-based company called BioSense has devised an application that can be downloaded to your smartphone. A simple cuboid plastic box houses the phone with the camera facing downwards. A strip, after being placed in a urine stream and then affixed to a holder, is then placed on top of the box.

Once Biosense’s app is launched, the camera takes repeated photographs of the strip as it changes colour, and feeds it to the app. Almost instantaneously, a thorough report tabulating 10 vital biochemicals in your body – from glucose to bilirubinW is generated. The total cost: about Rs. 2,000 versus endless sorties to the lab. The same test also keeps tabs on pregnancy issues and urinary tract infections. Read more to get a glimpse of a few other Indian innovations in health care.

Plustxt: Low-Cost App For Users to Communicate in Regional Languages

Bangalore-based startup Plustxt has designed a messaging application that not only offers an alternative to standard text messaging, but also allows users to do so in regional language.

Pratyush Prasanna, co-founder of Plustxt Mobile Solutions, is of the view that conventional messaging will soon be redundant. “For the amount of data used for sending an sms, the charges are exorbitant,” says the 32-year-old IIT-Kharagpur and IIM-Calcutta graduate who earlier worked with Microsoft, startup venture Gupshup and Xerox. “With increased penetration of smart phones and data there are other ways to communicate.”

In January, the company launched two apps on the Android platform: Plustxt, an English-language messaging app similar to the globally popular Whatsapp, and Plustxt India, which allows users to communicate in eight regional languages. Within months, the apps have recorded 60,000 downloads encouraging Prasanna and his team to work on versions for other platforms like Apple’s iOS and Nokia’s Symbian.

The regional language app, which the company is focusing on, allows users to combine English with a vernacular language. The user can type out with the regular mobile keyboard and the app transliterates the word to the chosen local language and English. The app is integrated with SMS so an app to app message will be sent over data, but a sms will be sent if the recipient has not downloaded the app. Read more in this report by Radhika P Nair.

LinkCycle Aims to Cut Energy Waste Among Manufacturers

Co-founded by Sahil Sahni, an engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology with a doctorate from MIT, LinkCycle is a startup aimed at helping manufacturers reduce energy waste. The company has five customers, including Rubbermaid, which found $1 million in savings using LinkCycle’s software.

LinkCycle’s software allows plant managers the ability to walk through their facility with an iPad and identify how energy is flowing through machines. At the same time, customers can also view opportunities to reduce production costs. The software, which can cut costs in scheduling, machine utilization, process control and equipment upgrades, also has tabs for historical costs and future costs. Read more

ATM To Give Cash for Old Mobile Phones

Californian company ecoATM has rolled out a recycling ATM that offers people the option to trade in their discarded mobile phones for cash, rather than dumping them when they go in for the latest model. The machine is sophisticated enough to evaluate unwanted goods for resale and recycling,  hoping to inspire people to go green.

The ecoATM finds second homes for three-fourths of the phones it collects, sending the remaining ones to environmentally responsible recycling channels to reclaim any rare earth elements and keep toxic components from landfills. 

Using artificial intelligence (AI) ecoATM kiosks can differentiate varied consumer electronics products and determine a market value. If the value is acceptable, users have the option of receiving cash or store credit for their trade or donating all or part of the compensation to one of several charities. Read more