when sunil vallath needs driving directions he just needs to look at a sixinch transparent device on his dash displaying maps messages music fuel level mileage and more its in his line of sight but is transparent and doesnt obstruct his view vallath 27 who founded exploride last year in kerala is all set to start marketing the device which can be activated by voice or gesture the device can talk back and comes with a 2gb ram quad core processor infrared camera bluetooth and lte vallath who works out of the startup village in kochi expects to start selling on crowdfunding platform kickstarter next month as his first target is the us hes opened an office in maryland and has appointed a usbased public relations agency to conduct a campaign the us is the best for customer validation and funds if the product is successful there it is easy to market in other countries says vallath who has a degree in computer science started working in 2009 as a technical engineer in wipro and after three short stints in large companies founded exploride kerala is seeing a rise in electronic hardwarebased startups thanks to the proclivity of engineering students in the state to opt for the elect ro n i c s a n d e l e c t r i c a l streams add to that the early success of rohildev ns fin fin is a ringlike object worn on the thumb that can be used to control smart phones laptops or car stereos using finger gestures in march last year it raised over 200000 from 1600 people globally through the usbased crowdfunding platform indiegogo within months of that campaign rohildevs rhl vision attracted 2 million in funding from kalaari capital money that was used to establish an office in the us and hire former apple employees to make fin compatible with apple ios rohildevs success motivated a number of other entrepreneurs here they all suddenly developed the confidence that they could sell a hardware product successfully also we had created an open ecosystem at startup village which resulted in crosspollination of ideas students particularly were able to go through many ideas before finally coming up with a practical one says sanjay vijayakumar chairman of startup village he adds that typical startup accelerators like the ones in bengaluru have three to sixmonth programmes which are insufficient for developing a hardware product on the other hand the ventures that joined startup vil lage in its initial days have been getting free space internet and electricity for the past three years this helped them think longterm and develop hardware prod ucts says vijayakumar who dropped out of college to cofound mobme in 2005 in thiruvananthapuram a mobile valueadded services venture that has won several nasscom innovation awards and which in many ways pioneered the startup culture in kerala a host of hardware startups are charting a path similar to fin mindhelixs rico allows you to insert an