Innovation and start-ups are the buzzwords today. If these get fueled in a similar way like today for the next two to three years, the world will be a completely different place to live.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has placed his bets on skyTran, a pathbreaking transportation company, which is cofounded by an Indian engineer Ankur Bhatnagar. The company has developed a ‘third-generation’ Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) technology that hopes to change the face of public transport across the world. It is expected to be operational in India in the next two years. He said skyTran can transport passengers above surface traffic, cutting the journey between Mulund and Colaba in Mumbai or Bengaluru airport to Electronic City to 25 minutes. The skyTran system can help alleviate deteriorating issues like congestion and pollution in India, and can help India build high-speed rail systems at one third of estimated costs. skyTran routes traffic in small packets, or small vehicles, at high speed just as internet routes data.
An airport in the south of India is the world's first to run completely on solar energy following commissioning of a 12 megawatt project overseen by Bosch. The undertaking at Cochin International Airport is estimated to generate more than 50,000 units of electricity daily and will make CIAL grid-power neutral. Built on land covering 50 acres (20 hectares), the project is the largest of its kind to be constructed at an airport in India, according to the release. India has 4 gigawatts of solar capacity currently, with an aim to reach 100 gigawatts by 2022.
A California start-up Stower co-founded by Andrew Burns, has developed a device that can charge smartphones with candles. Its simplistic design is based on the principles of thermo-electrics: light a candle, fill the device with water, and you have a charger, i.e. you have a hot side or a hot plate and a cold plate and you smash these generators together and it's that temperature difference, which creates a diffusion of energy from the hot side to the cold side. Burns says a tiny fire can make a huge difference when the lights go out.
A few Indian companies have been listed in the top 10 most innovative companies: Goonj has been included for being a company that channels excess resources from urban households to impoverished, rural, and disaster-struck areas. In exchange for clothes, furniture, household goods, and medical supplies, village and slum communities self-organise and build schools, roads and toilet facilities. The company has thus turned used clothes and other second-hand material into currency, successfully leading more than 1,500 such projects in the past three years alone. In a large country, Goonj is a game-changer, teaching urban Indians when, what, and how to give. Next is Eram Scientific Solutions, which makes the Gates Foundation–backed Delight public toilet system, has built e-toilets that flush automatically — when people enter, after they leave, and every two hours — to keep tidy, and also saves energy with motion-sensor lights and fans. Four hundred of them have been installed across the country so far, with a reported 6,000 in the pipeline. Another company in this list is the one founded by Harvard and MIT researchers, Mitra Biotech's CANScript technology re-creates an artificial environment for a patient's tumor sample and tests various drugs on it directly, allowing the company to arrive at a personalized treatment in less than a week. Their innovation is by rethinking conventional cancer drug therapies through application of data analytics. (Courtesy: fastcompany.com)
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