Mumbai, India’s trade capital is preparing for one of the biggest tech event of the year: TEDxGateway.
TED stands for Technology Entertainment & Design and it is all about ‘ideas worth spreading’.
The speakers in the conference are from diverse walks of life who share ideas they feel most passionately about. Whether it is a nascent idea that needs a public platform, a fascinating success story that needs to be told or a strong inspiring message that needs to conveyed, TEDxGateway is the platform for showcasing it.
Says Vineet Venugopal, Head – Operations, TEDxGateway
“We had our first conference on 30th October last year at ITC Grand Central, Mumbai. The buzz that it created was truly mind boggling: 1,316 attendee applications received for 200 attendee seats. Then, a massive 6,400+ live tweets went on air on the day of the conference. Over 25 active bloggers wrote about the event.”
The speakers list of the event had a number of bigwigs from the tech world. It included Ralph Simon (Known as the father of the ringtone), Seymour Stein(Co-founder of Sire Records, known to have found artists like Madonna), Richard Gottehrer (Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer of The Orchard) and Rahul Panicker (Co-founder, Rural Products at Embrace)
The event saw unfolding of several innovative ideas, which, if applied, can do wonders to the society. Take for example, a low-cost infant warmer that works without electricity.
Presented by Rahul Panicker, the low-cost infant warmer is custom designed to help parents in rural India who have no access to modern incubators. The device is basically a sleeping bag with a heating unit placed inside to make sure the baby is in an environment of of 37 degrees Celsius. The heating unit and the sleeping bag are made of phase change material. The heating unit has to be warmed in an electrical warmer (it looks like a panini press) that comes with the sleeping bag but in areas of no electricity, the unit can be warmed even on a choola (gas burner used to cook food). In short, it is a device that can help bring down infant mortality in rural sector manifold.
Among other impressive ideas presented in the event were MozziQuit – a mosquito magnet which attracts mosquitoes to kill them using a hazardous chemical called Octenol, and an interactive video where consumers have the ability to interact, giving comments on the product/program they view.
This year’s TEDxGateway is also expected to be a big attraction, especially among the country’s young techies, ideators and social entrepreneurs.
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