latin american market advantage of networks similarly at another startup weekend gathering in delhi bhavesh dhupar 28 an engineer from meerut university met sameer guglani cofounder of the morpheus a chandigarhbased accelerator who decided to mentor the team dhupars team developed a product kinesisio at the event which allows users to operate consumer devices with body gestures for instance during a surgery doctors can use gestures to operate imaging devices without having to waste a lot of precious time sanitising their hands other applications include allowing kids to use gestures to interact with cartoon characters in a virtual world guglani of morpheus says regular networking events do not add much value for entrepreneurs events like startup weekend and in 50 hrs are more practical and resultoriented the regular networking events are more about giving lectures says guglani whose firm is backing 56 startups funding boost deobrat singh 28 who attended a startup weekend session last year met a host of investors such as paul singh partner at 500 startups a usbased seed fund and startup accelerator deobrat singhs venture gazemetrix which was built at the event has received a total funding of around 140000 from 500 startups and other angel investors an engineer from the university of mumbai singh earlier worked at technology majors hcl and microsoft but always wanted to do something on his own at the startup weekend singh and his team of cofounderssaurabh paruthi and debayan banerjeedabbled with building a mobile payment product but did not receive much attention they persevered by attending a second event in the next month where paul singh was assigned as a mentor we did not sleep for three days as we had to change the product at the last moment before the demo says singh using proprietary computer vision and machine learning algorithms gazemetrix now analyses 12 million pictures per day from social media to identify brand metrics for over 20 advertising agencies regular business plan competitions make no sense for technology product firms as technology keeps changing every six months says vijay anand founder the startup centre equal opportunity sachin gupta was 22 when he graduated in computer science from iitroorkee and was hired by google but within three months the young engineer quit his job to pursue his dream of entrepreneurship along with another iitian vivek prakash he launched his own venture hackerearth after building a product at startupweekend in august i could not even dream of building my own product while working in a large company says gupta whose parents were initially sceptical about his decision but later supported him guptas startup hackerearth enables companies to hire programmers by putting up online programming tests across several programming languages and platforms the firm has been selected by gsf accelerator which has invested around 30000 in the venture next step for other mature entrepreneurs these technology contests can also serve as a testing ground to finetune existing ventures sudeep dsouza chief technology officer at information technology services company inforica is