October 14, 2010
School of Engineering, Bengaluru
 

Businessworld magazine named it one of the most exciting startups in India in 2009. The previous year, livemint.com, had placed it among the top ten startups to watch out for.
 

Mango Technologies attracted all this attention mainly for its flagship product targeted to people at the bottom of the pyramid.
 

“Bangalore-based Mango Technologies, brainchild of techies Lekh Joshi and Sunil Maheshwari, has set out to provide the features of an iPhone in humble handsets at the bottom-of-the-pyramid, where lies — Joshi and Maheshwari believe — the future of telecommunication,” stated the article published in the Businessworld magazine.
 

Mango Technologies was incubated on the IIM Bangalore campus. Now engineering students from Amrita will also have a chance to partner with this dynamic, young firm.
 

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) for collaborative initiatives in higher education and research was recently signed between the Amrita School of Engineering and Mango Technologies.
 

This industry-academia collaborative initiative subsequently gave birth to an Innovation Cell on campus.
 

“The primary objective of the Cell is to help inculcate innovative and entrepreneurial thinking in engineering students on campus,” stated Dr. Pukhraj Vaya, Chairperson, ECE Department, who is guiding the activities of the Cell.
 

“The Cell will help students develop their original and innovative ideas to solve real-world problems in a very simple way. It will be monitored by a group that will include technical guides from Amrita as well as Mango Technologies.”
 

“We will start with the areas of mobile applications and allied solutions.”
 

Amrita offers M.Tech. programs in Embedded Systems and VLSI Design on this campus and these students will participate also, along with B.Tech. students of ECE and EIE.
 

Subsequently, the CEO of Mango Technologies, Mr. Sunil Maheshwari, was on campus on August 4, 2010 to interact with the students and talk about the innovations at his young firm.
 

“We have developed mobile platforms to enhance user experience on low-end handsets,” Mr. Maheshwari told the students and faculty, who listened with rapt attention. “The platform works with handset and chipset manufacturers to allow rich media applications on a light framework.”
 

Subsequently, Mr. Maheshwari offered the Amrita students another opportunity to collaborate with his team. He announced a competition titled ‘Innovative Mobile Application Idea’ open to students as well as interested members of faculty.
 

We wish the participants all the best, hoping that they sow the seeds for several innovative products, that the world benefits from, in the future.