FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2024
Vikant Sahay
When there is an adversary, there is also an opportunity. It is all in the mindset and the go-getters always look for an opportunity. In Goa too as in the case of the country, the lockdown has brought in a new window of opportunity for the young and dynamic start-up community in the state. Aaron de Miranda Colaço who hails from Loutolim, where the biggest hindrance is the mobile network, is the Head of Blockchain at qiibee, which built up. Coronathon India, (https:www.coronathon.in) a completely online and remote hackathon with the goal of the Indian tech community coming together and collaborating to build projects that can help other Indians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worry for Colaco was that there has been a lot of fake news about the virus, government policies, supply chains, etc being forwarded over the past few weeks. From wrong stats and ineffective home remedies to false information that leads to hoarding and fear. There are a lot of elaborate dashboards out there but they remain largely inaccessible to the majority of the population that is coincidentally also the most susceptible to misinformation. Here was the opportunity for Colaco, an alumnus of Padre Conceicao College of Engineering (PCCE), Verna, who is doing very well in his specialised field internationally, to jump into. Since WhatsApp is very widely used and also allows for easy dissemination of information, a group came together to send subscribers verified updates and information straight to their mobile. “We decided to start off sending national, state, and district stats by allowing users to subscribe with their phone number and postal code. This will also allow us to provide hyperlocal support and updates via a chatbot. What we did not foresee was WhatsApp’s stringent laws for access to their business API. So while we wait for approval to start sending out WhatsApp messages we are currently sending updates via SMS to subscribers from all over the country. You can subscribe on our website, CoronaDailyUpdates.org, to start receiving updates,” he said A graduate in Business Management from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, Navin Prajapati who is in Goa since last one year floated SabkaMandi about seven months ago. This was an idea that was developed as a result of the frustration of salesmen, retailers, distributors and sales officers. The order taking process followed by one of the largest industries in India is a manual and decades-old process, which has resulted in a lot of inefficiency within the industry. “When the lockdown was extended for 21 days, we understood that the supply chain will be impacted in the ways no one can imagine and retailers will put under a lot of pressure. The company salesmen will call them multiple times to ask for the order, people will call them to give orders, the society will expect them to maintain the safety of their in-store customers, and they have to do this every day while managing inward and outward deliveries. We wanted to stand with the retailers during this time and so within 24 hours my tech team extended our B2B model into end to end supply chain solution for the retailers,” said Navin Prajapati, Co-founder of SabkaMandi. Through our solution, the retailers can receive orders and give orders to their authorized distributors, thus cutting down the calling time by almost 90 percent. “We got support from the Goa’s IT department right from the level of IT director, CEO of Goa Electronics Ltd to Goa’s IT Minister Ms. Jennifer Monserrate. We started operations four days ago and currently, we are operational in four panchayats, and are planning to cover the entire state of Goa in tie-up with respective panchayats so that people can stay at home and also, get grocery delivered without any hassle,” added Navin Prajapati. CopperCodes, a three-year young Start-up, founded by two IT engineers Chinmay Sanjiv Kamat and Rohan Naik, specialises in software and App development and are setting their footprints in the IT segment in Goa. Chinmay Sanjiv Kamat, Managing Partner of CopperCodes recalls that the lockdown them to “Work From Home”, a facility common among big sized IT companies and it was like a god sent opportunity to their nascent Start-up and they are now trying this out in true earnest, understanding its nuances, dos, and donts. “At CopperCodes we took it as an opportunity to ‘Give Back’ to our society and absolutely no commercials in mind, albeit in a small way. We have developed and integrated a system for “Home Delivery of Essentials” into an existing Nightclub Ticketing App – Tito’s, which we had developed for our client –Tito’s Club and the same is functional. We have also developed a comprehensive web portal that encompasses all aspects which the government may want to integrate, right from catering to essentials to building up reporting cum tracking mechanisms. We have already offered this web portal to the government - Our fingers crossed for their response. We are also keen to offer it to any other user, absolutely free of cost,” said Chinmay Sanjiv Kamat, Managing Partner of CopperCodes. Sujeet D. Shetty, Co-Founder, Web Development of Team Inertia Technologies believes that the extension of Janta Curfew came a bit unexpectedly for the Goans, and then the major lockdown, just pushed the panic button in terms of basic food essential availability at homes. “That’s when Team Inertia Technologies decided that we will do it and revived the portal ‘Done Delivery’ by Namit Chimulkar, for delivery of groceries. Idea is to get all the stores in your locality to manage their orders on this platform in a systematic and orderly fashion, thus helping maintain social distancing and delivering the items to your doorstep in a smoother fashion. The re-launch initiated with the Porvorim MLA, Rohan Khaunte, coming on board for their delivery of food essentials in its constituency. Going forward home delivery would be the future” said Sujeet Shetty, Co-founder at Team Inertia. They are our silent soldiers. Whose minds and sheer tech talent have helped circumnavigate roadblocks which would have increased the strain of living under lockdown manifold. These sentinels of our comfort too, need that clap, or the clanging of vessels or the glowing diyas for reducing our lockdown tribulations to just a click.
