old smartphone into a plastic toylike device and use it as a cheap alternative to expensive home security systems it detects smoke temperature and movements inside a room mindhelix raised 119000 through a successful campaign on kickstarter late last year sectorqubes smart microwave oven maid make all incredible dishes raised 124000 on kickstarter in december last year maid connects to a recipe store on the web reads out instructions and suggests the optimal settings based on the number of servings cochin university of science and technology graduate nijil ys mashinga has developed a touchtable for corporates that can be used for marketing products or for creative brainstorming its clients ifb federal bank two delhi hotels and a school in chennai then theres rethin sylvesters iret guitar enhancements a student startup that makes affordable music gear like stompboxes and amplifiers all these were mostly imported earlier says sylvester aronin p and his friends have developed industrial robotic manipulators to physically touch and test the responsiveness of touchscreens their sastra robotics has an enviable list of clients bosch hcl infosystems and iits in bhubaneswar and kharagpur bosch uses it to test the front panels of car infotainment systems while hcl uses it to test printers we had requirements coming from malaysia but as our team is fully engaged with existing clients we have postponed our expansion overseas for six months aronin says kallidil kalidasan founder ceo of mindhelix admits its not easy designing for western markets you tend to be driven by indian aesthetics so you need to hire designers who understand western culture design methodology and the thought process it is not an engineering challenge but a design one he says most are clear that the us has to be the initial target market when it comes to early adopters of consumer technology us customers top the list says rohildev sectorqube cofounder sabarish prakash agrees only those products which have been adopted in the west are being accepted by indians despite the difficulty and expense involved vijayakumar expects many more hardware product startups to emerge in kerala we have just established a fab lab at startup village with the help of the massachusetts institute of technologythis will make hardware prototyping and circuit board designing and printing a lot easier we have also procured two 3d printers that can produce complicated moving parts he says that could significantly reduce costs for startups kickstart for startups for the last three years the kerala government has been giving startups a hand and is especially encouraging of student entrepreneurship its technology startup policy 2014 aims at incubating 10000 technology product startups by 2020 and becoming one of the top five startup ecosystems in the world we did startup boot camps in engineering colleges and introduced incubators at the technology innovation zone in kochistartup village is one of them says p h kurian principal secretaryit kerala government it has introduced a gap year for student entrepreneurs as well as grace marks