India’s first Telecom based Incubator Startup Village will be inaugurated at Kochi by Ex-Infosys CEO Krish Gopalakrishnan tomorrow. Based on Public Private Partnership ,  Startup Village will is located near KINFRA park at Kalamassery.
Startup Village is India’s first Public Private Partnership model Technology Business Incubator. The promoters of Startup Village are Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Technopark Trivandrum and MobME Wireless. Kris, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Infosys and the most successful IT Entrepreneur from Kerala is the Chief Mentor for Startup Village.
It will focus primarily on student startups from college campuses and would be modeled on Technology Incubators in the Silicon Valley.
Envisaging an investment of Rs.100 crore, Startup Village aims to incubate 1000 product start ups over 10 years and start the search for a billion dollar company from a college campus by the turn of this decade.
The 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 in the incubator before it is released in the commercial markets.
Startup Village campus will have full 4G network in the park, advanced Telecom labs and also provide all services,including Legal, Intellectual Property, Accounting, Full furnished Office Space, Video Conference Rooms, Computers, Phone Lines, Internet, Server Space and virtual office services that are required for a student to start a company even while in college.
Kiran Karnik, former chief of NASSCOM; Sharad Sharma, former chief executive officer of Yahoo India R Ganesh Lakshminarayan, managing director, Dell India; and Arun Kumar, global board member of KPMG; are among those joining the project as mentors and investors.
“The next big wave in the telecom sector is in the growth of smart phones and 4G, and Startup Village will help young start-ups harness these global opportunities,†Rajan S. Mathews, director general of Cellular Operators’ Association of India, said.
“This will be followed by an incubator (idea nursery), accelerator (specific support to scale promising ideas), and angel fund (investment in breakthrough innovations), all under one umbrella for the first time in the country,†Sanjay Vijayakumar, Chairman (Board of Governors), Startup Village, said.