Telecom business incubator to come up at Kinfra

The National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, Department of Science and Technology, Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram , and MobME Wireless have joined hands to set up the country's first public private partnership telecom business incubator at Kinfra Park in Kalamassery near here.

Called Startup Village - Indian Telecom Innovation Hub, it would focus primarily on student startups from college campuses and would be modeled on technology incubators in the Silicon Valley. It aims to incubate 1,000 product startups over 10 years and start the search for a billion dollar company from a college campus by turn of this decade.

The agreement on taking 15,000 sft space at the park was signed between MobME CEO Sanjay Vijayakumar and Kinfra managing director S Ramanath on Tuesday.

 

“Startup Village will create a vibrant ecosystem for start-ups to create breakthrough technologies for the global telecommunications industry. This would be made possible in association with leading companies in the telecom sector by setting up telecom innovation zones that bring the latest technology platforms and products to the startups before it is released in the commercial markets,” said Ramanath.

The first phase of the project is expected to be inaugurated by next month and the first batch would be inducted by April 2012. The campus will have full 4G network, advanced telecom labs and also provide all services including legal, intellectual property, accounting, full furnished office space, video conference rooms and virtual office services that are required for a student to start a company even while in college, said Sijo Kuruvilla, CEO – Startup Village.

Vijayakumar said the new initiative aimed to create a platform for the next generation entrepreneurs to create enterprises and be job creators than job seekers. The Startup Village would be aggressively within the NRK community and high networth individuals for their support to the startup eco-system in Kerala. Infosys co-founder and co-chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan is chief mentor of the Telecom Innovation Hub.