Bangalore, January 7, 2015:  The first ever Internet of Things Ideathon  ended here today with 25 innovative ideas  offered to address challenges Vaccine Monitoring, Haptic Feedback for Physically Challenged and Smart Street Lighting. It was held  concurrently with the  28th International Conference on VLSI Design & the 14th International Conference on Embedded Systems.
Said Dr. Satya Gupta, Co General Chair, of the  VLSI Conference: “The first IoT Ideathon was a tremendous success. There was an overwhelming response. The event has proved the ability of young Indian engineering talent to not just innovate, but also ensure the robustness of engineering and thereby create products of the highest quality for India and the world. Industry and academia must work closely to nurture such talent”  Speaking to IndiaTechOnline, Dr Gupta who wears another hat  as CEO of Concept2Silicon  said it was planned to scale up the Ideathon to a national scale in coming years.
The theme of the main conference was “IoT: Building a Smart Connected World.” Dr Gupta  added: “IoT is on the verge of transforming every aspect of life with solutions that can accelerate  India  in domains like smart cities, agriculture, security, healthcare, energy, education to name a few. IoT in combination with sensors and wearables herald enormous opportunities for fundamental research in chip design, system engineering, new materials, sensors, communication, embedded software and various allied fields.”

The winners were of the IoT Ideathon :
1st Place : Mosquito Density Sensing & Alarm (Yogesh Singh , Vinay Joshi , Praveen Rathee - All from IIT Bombay)
2nd Place : Automation for Physically Challenged (Prajwal Prabhat , Arun PC , Bharathwaj M - All from CVC Pvt Ltd)
3rd Place :  Fall Detection  (Tarang Shah , Kaustubh Nawade - From BITS Pilani)
The prize for the Best IoT Start-Up went to Cardiac Design Labs. ( Do see our separate story on this startup in our e-healthcare section.)
The VLSI 2015 Conference hosted over 1,000 delegates from around the world consisting of policy and decision makers, business leaders, technology professionals, academia and students. Over a hundred research papers and 17 tutorials werepresented, besides 15 keynote presentations and panel discussions by senior leaders of industry and academia.