At eChai Ventures, we along with MICA Incubator are hosting the July 2015 edition of our flagship program — eChai Demo Day in association with MICA Incubator-  on 5th July, Sunday from 1.30 pm to 6.30 pm.  

eChai Demo Day is the quarterly showcase of innovative products & ventures in front of the large entrepreneurial community. eChai Demo Day provides an opportunity to entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, professionals, and students to share, connect and collaborate with each other.

Venue : MICA Campus, Near Shela Village.
Date : 5th July 2015, Sunday Time : 1.30 pm to 6.30 pm

Demo Companies :

  • MYBYK is a bike share programme aimed at encouraging the use of bikes by enhancing the ownership experience and making it hassle free and more convenient. It is also a bike that you can ‘Drop Anywhere & Pick from Anywhere’.
  • MyWedStory is a social wedding application that helps you showcase your love story, family, events and the extravagance, simply by creating a custom wedding code and invite all your guests to be a part of all these
  • DialogueMakers focuses on Edutrainment : Education-Training-Entertainment. We have partnered with Dialogue in the Dark, a globally acclaimed experiential learning program present in 20+ nations since 25 years and the Participants attending the program face the experience of temporarily losing their most dominant sense - their sight, which creates a dramatic slowdown of everyday routines.
  • TheIndia.co.in is India's first of its kind tourism community portal helps tourist to find best places to visit in India. You can explore places & travelogues about Indian tourist destination and can share your own stories with fellow travelers.
  • Converza is a personalized conversation network where content discovery and discussion are seamlessly integrated to create a network of like-minded users and enable topic based conversations.
  • HashChat.me creates a virtual Chatroom out of tweets, hashtags and people talking about an Event or Conference. Quickly introduce yourself to people you meet during Events and get back to them later with HashChat's "QuickIntro". HashChat is also a fully featured twitter app with a design and user interface that touches simplicity with beauty.
  • Bhukkads is a food discovery application. First of it's kind in India which serves you with what to eat? along with where to eat? Find Good Food. Eat, Snap & Share.
  • tradohub.com is an exclusive e-commerce portal of Industrial Raw Materials for Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
  • NX Smart Solutions create user friendly smart mobile applications for m-Governance. Some of their apps include - Smart City, Smart Police and Swachh Vadodara Abhiyan
  • Foodsome (Food + awesome) is online restaurant portal in your city for the crazy food lovers. Right now FoodSome is only in Surat. People of Surat always look for better place & variety of food. With the help of web & latest technology we are representing the best possible solution to search for restaurants based on your need, taste, budget & of course location.
  • Saathipads aims to develop a small scale manufacturing process to make affordable, biodegradable sanitary pads from waste banana tree fiber for girls throughout India.
  • One Way Cab is Gujarat's Favorite One Way Taxi Service Provider. We provide one-way AC Taxi Service for inter-city travel.
  • Matrubharti is an app for Mother Tongue loving individuals and families. Matrubharti aims to promote content written in Mother Tongue (Regional Languages ).Currently Matrubharti is serving ebooks in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and eBooks.

Also we will have special eChai sessions with upcoming startup accelerators :

  • Ahmdad Faraz , Senior Manager Marketing, eSpark Viridian Accelerator.- Entrepreneurial Spark – Powered by Viridian is a Joint Venture between Viridian Group & Entrepreneurial Spark. “WE BUILD PEOPLE WHO BUILD BUSINESSES” is what Espark-Viridian believes in, So the focus is on developing Entrepreneur with a #GoDo attitude to create value and make them investable. We provide a platform for aspiring & early stage entrepreneurs through a world class business accelerator program providing an entrepreneurship support system & opportunities to grow.

Apart from the Demo Companies, Keynote speakers, we will recognize some of the entrepreneurs from the community who've shown the remarkable progress in their startups and are making us proud with - The Rising Sun - awards.

Previously Gridbots, Menstrupedia, AllEvents.in, Chai Wai and Space-O Technologies have been awarded as The Rising Sun.

  • Abhishek Desai, Co-Founder, Digicorp - helps entrepreneurs and companies build large-scale software products. Focused on design and speed, our solutions outsmart the competition.

The Pioneer Award :

Nagarajan M ( IAS) , DDO of Sabarkantha District will be  given 'The Pioneer' award by eChai Ventures and MICA Incubator for his remarkable contribution to use technology for social good and rural empowerment. He will also be showcasing his work to set up India's first digital village. As a District Development Officer in Sabarkantha District of Gujarat he is working on various issues related to education and health. He has made major interventions in health, education and rural development. He believes that technology can be a game changer in rural development. He has created India's first 100% WiFi tribal taluka. He created India's first Digital Village at Akodara in association with ICICI Bank. His projects have won major awards that include SKOCH Award of Excellence, CSI Nihilent Award, Manthan Award, Financial Inclusion Payment Systems award . He has been chosen as District Collector Digital Champion 2014 by Digital Empowerment Foundation He is an avid blogger and loves WordPress and open source. He runs a blog for Govpreneurs (those who innovate for social change within or along with Government). He evangelizes Government 2.0 and change through collaboration.

Earlier Bhagyesh Soneji, MD, Elegant India & Chairperson, Assocham Gujarat State Council also received 'The Pioneer' award for her pioneering work in the filed of healthcare and women empowerment.

Prof. U T  Rao, MD, MICA Incubator will be inaugurating program and it will be hosted by Jatin Chaudhary, Co-Founder & Salesman, eChai Ventures.

The most amazing part about eChai programs is the kind of conversations that happens among presenters and participants and these smiley balls :-)

Join us for eChai Demo Day in association with MICA Incubator to connect, share and collaborate with fellow enterprising people.

eChai Demo Day is open for all. All are welcome!

You can also join eChai.in - online social network of entrepreneurs to get connected with fellow entrepreneurs from all over the world.

Feel free to ask any specific question to any of the above entrepreneurs here in the comment section. Do checkout the QnA in comments, this is on of the most interesting part of the eChai programs.

For example, checkout this detailed post about #CoRise @ VentureStudio : Week 3. June 2015.

You can checkout this Storify about the previous eChai Demo Day in association with MICA Incubator which gives pretty good idea about what happens at eChai Demo Days. 

https://storify.com/jatin10/echai-demo-day-in-association-with-mica-incubator

Checkout some of the earlier talks at eChai Demo Days :

You can watch all the awesome talks at eChaiTV :

About MICA Incubator :

MICA counted among the best bSchools in India has set up the first-of-its-kind incubation center, solely devoted to incubating communications technology and services related initiatives with the support of the Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India. The main objective of setting up a incubator is to develop, nurture, promote and successfully commercialize ventures, based on innovative products, models, tools, techniques, and technologies and/or render services in the area of communications; ventures which would conceptualize, develop and manufacture innovative – processes, formats, mediums of communications for reaching out to individuals or masses; by providing training, mentoring, the requisite infrastructure and intellectual support services to incubatees.

About eChai Ventures :

eChai is an offline-online social network of entrepreneurs who believe in Co.Rise. — Collaboratively rising together.

Offline Social Network part :

- We host quarterly eChai Demo Days - which is the quarterly showcase of innovative products & ventures in front of the large entrepreneurial community. eChai Demo Day provides an opportunity to entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, professionals, and students to share, connect and collaborate with each other. We also host eChai Women In Business n eChai Business For Good programs. All these programs do 3 things well - they provide an opportunity to young entrepreneurs to showcase what are they upto, platform for experienced/successful entrepreneurs share their experiences and insights and it gives a feel of being part of the community.

- Theme-based knowledge/insights sharing sessions - Team Building, Growth Hacking, UI/UX, Sales, Communications, Digital Media, Legal & IP & many others.

- Skill-based challenges/hackathons - eChai App Challenge, Marketing Challenge, Content Challenge, UI/UX Challenge, Business Model Challenge, Business Case Challenge etc.

- Sector specific eChai RoundTables - Agriculture, Cleantech, Healthcare, Internet of Things, Food & Beverages, Sports, Media & Entertainment, Education, Arts & Culture, SMAC & many others.

- eChai After Hours aims to engage entrepreneurs, professionals and students to find solutions for other's businesses challenges in a collaborative way. At eChai After Hours entrepreneurs present their business model, their work culture and couple of significant challenges they are facing / struggling with or want to have people come up with better solutions for that. It can be anything – design challenge, business challenge, tech challenge, people challenge.

eChai After Hours is an amazing way to foster the collaboration among entrepreneurs, as they would be spending significant time and energy to help the fellow entrepreneurs.

Online social network part :

- Explore the sector wise list of entrepreneurs from the community

- Find people with same interest areas and skills set. Now that we will be hosting offline eChai programs across 100 Cities and all over the world - it will be interesting to get connected with people from the community across the world.

- Write insightful posts on eChai.in & your recommendations i.e. from where I get my business card printed, from where I get travel service provider for our group travel for eChai Diaries, our preferred hosting provider, our preferred CA and many others.

- eChai Interviews where you can ask a public question to any entrepreneur just like the QnA at eChai programs.

- Talent and Offers section where you can post your talent requirement and offers for the community.

- Featuring entrepreneurs daily with their detailed interview and what kind of support they seek from the community.

- You can follow particular entrepreneurs and get regular updates.

- We are working on a #CoRiseWall where once in a week you can post a significant update from your side which you really want to share with large number of people from the community i.e. Product Update, Hiring Requirement, Company Culture etc. - #CoRiseWall will be prominently displayed in eChai.in and showcased at eChai programs for more visibility.

- Online eChai Skills Challenges - App Challenge, Marketing Challenge, Business Model Challenge, Content Challenge etc.

- An online eChai Demo Day - where we will have 10 entrepreneurs building interesting and innovative businesses from 10 different cities/countries presenting their ventures in front of the community. We will select these 10 demo companies who will present about their ventures online ( 5 mins ) which will be followed by an interactive dialogue ( 10 Mins ) and also each of these company will will have other 20+ people from their city who'll be physically participating the program along with the demo company of the respective city. Basically they can have the good conversations after the online demos get over. This one will be broadcasted online at http://YouTube.com/eChaiTV and we'll build an interesting thing for Co.Rise. at http://eChai.in/ for better engagement among participants.

- Better integration with online-offline eChai programs.

Along with the Online social network part and offline social network part we have 3 initiatives as part of eChai Ventures.

Sweetly - where we enable 50+ rural women living in Dangs District, Gujarat to make hand-made jewelry and market these products in US & Canada. These 50+ Rural women get some sort of economic benefits from this venture and we run it as full fledged for-profit venture.

Design You City/Village - aims to to bring together Entrepreneurs, developers , designers, professionals, academicians and concerned citizens to build solutions for the society. There can be wide ranging solutions for various problems existing in the society - education, civic issues, healthcare, employment, sanitation and many others. The city has several issues that need immediate intervention. And there are budding entrepreneurs and concerned citizens with ideas that can solve these problems.With Design Your City/Village programs n online platform we aim to share and collaborate with communities to come up with ideas and sustainable solutions for the problems faced by different communities.

The Loo Project - helps you find clean loo around you by creating digital public toilet map. It Includes public toilets and shops, cafes, institutions which can let anyone use their facilities. The Information is gathered by Municipal Corporations, Village Councils, Open Government Data, Partner organizations, and citizens.

Mapping of data is just the beginning and there are many amazing things can be done once we have that data. 'Design Your Loo' initiative to bring people together to build affordable toilets and coming up with actionable data insights to build solutions for public toilets and sanitation.

eChaiTV : A web television featuring inspiring entrepreneurs.

Initially when we started up six years back, we used to eChai meetups at roadside Tea Stalls. When we started getting momentum we started hosting eChai programs at friends' office premises. They were pretty generous to extend their resources for our programs. After some time we started collaborating with educational institutions, industry associations and incubators to host our programs. earlier collaborated with some of India’s most prestigious educational institutions ( MICA, IIM Ahmedabad, S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Vivekanand Education Society, Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Ahmedabad ( EDI ), CEPT University, icreate, Nirma University, NID and many others ) and industry associations & accelerators ( Assocham, CII, GCCI, FICCI, Startup Oasis, TLabs, IAMAI, Sankalp Forum, and many others ) for various entrepreneurial programs.

If we count the number of cities where we have a presence ( 30+) and the cities where we will be launching eChai chapters in upcoming couple of months ( 20+) - we'll have presence in 50 Cities in India.

In last 6 months we've also led a delegation of entrepreneurs to Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bhutan to explore the possible collaboration opportunities and connect with the entrepreneurs from all over the world.

We are pretty hopeful to have #eChai100Cities by the end of the year 2015 to spread the idea of doing good things.

eChai more like a gSchool - A School of Doing Good Things which has #CoRise - Collaboratively Rising Together in it's DNA.

As we move forward we are introducing the new series of eChai program - which is like more of how we started 6 years back and combination of some of the most interesting things from other eChai formats. Introducing the #CoRise format which we will host on every friday in Ahmedabad at different offices of entrepreneurs from the community. Going forward we will take #CoRise in other cities as well.