Last weekend bore witness to a fascinating stage for budding entrepreneurs in Hyderabad.
Startup Weekend is a international initiative of dynamic and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the ropes of entrepreneurship and letting their dreams take flight. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies. As elucidated by the organizers, all Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model : anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.
LEBTOP – The Indian Startup At The Global Startup Battle 2012!
The Hyderabad edition of the Startup Weekend was no different, with several refreshingly innovative ideas driving promising startups to vie for the top honours. Three teams were selected to compete at the Global Startup Battle in Brazil and among them is one of our very own Indian startups which finished runner-up on the day : LEBTOP, an acronym for Learning English By Talking Over Phone, is a novel startup that has embraced a disarmingly simple idea of improving communication in English by creating a system of facilitating telephone conversations in English. The system runs on an elementary algorithm which creates a hierarchy of its users based on their language fluency and facilitates conversations accordingly, to improve one’s communication.
The fundamental idea of using a cell-phone as an instrument of education is noteworthy and commendable. It aims to be a worldwide toll free number to which people can make calls and either receive or give coaching in English and basic communication skills.
The head of the project Nikhil Kulkarni is a 23 year old engineer working at the Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Limited in Mumbai. His team mates include Devi Prasad, Bhargava and Sameer.
Inc42 wholly endorses LEBTOP at the Global Startup Battle and urges its readers to chip in and do their bit in helping this wonderful startup get its due recognition. Please vote for it here and give this excellent initiative the support it deserves.
