The Pandemic has left us stranded in our small houses leaving us helpless with no ray of hope and room for innovations, right? Absolutely not! In fact this is the time where we have no external chores or problems bogging us down and people could work on all the types of skills and business ideas that every group of friends have decided to build once in their lifetime. Because the main reason being we have all the time in the world to work the things out.
You don’t believe me?
Let us take a trip down the road of year 2008 (“The one with The Great recession” not a great FRIENDS episode though). Below are some numbers to make sense of the situation back then.
But during this financial crunch period too there were one of the biggest Start-ups that still are going strong today and hopefully in the foreseeable future. HERE are names of few of them
1) WhatsApp
2) UBER
3) SLACK
4) GROUPON and many much more
Just like Winston Churchill once said “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Similarly the business tycoons are the one who worked the worst during bad times to see the best during the good times e.g:- WhatsApp is now in the acquisition of facebook with the value of $19 billion the biggest one till now.
So where am I getting at?
Amidst the black cloud of COVID-19 there is absolutely gonna be a lieu of sparks of innovativeness around the globe seeking to be the alleged “next big thing” . Entrepreneurs and innovators throughout India are swiftly getting accustomed to the challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. A swarm of new advancements, some emerging from start-ups that have been incubated by universities, have appeared in recent weeks.
It is a bit obvious that it being a pandemic virus the most viable and important findings were In the case of Health and service industries let us look at the new companies making their boom during these dark times.
1) QURE.AI
This is matrix level programming right there.QURE.AI provides automated results or interpretation of the online uploaded test results , MRI , X-rays and our favorite CT-Scans for the time and resource paucity of medical professionals. The brainchild of Prashant warrier and Pooja rao it has it’s headquarters in Mumbai and functioning in San Francisco and New York too. In the light of the new coronavirus it has tapped into new potentials with the growth of detection finding methods that help to segregate patients into 3 different threat levels HIGH / MEDIUM AND LOW. This has proved very effective In observing the progressions levels of patients health as well as helped in effective allocation of health-kits where there is a shoratage.
2) AL HIGHWAY
Dr satish , Dr radhakrishna and Mr Anuj pandit can be called as the innovaters of this new bengaluru based startup in late 2019. As per date it is one of the biggest and leading Deep tech/Deep science incubator in the Society of innovation and development(SID) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC). They have also started doing a phenomenal job in risk assessments for the COVID-19, linked to clinical symptoms , comorbidities , cyclical history of physical touch, and much more. It has also started the work for COVID-19 pre screening and triage tools on its own webiste
And some other famous names include DOCTURNAL and BIODESIGN INNOVATION LABS.
Apart from these health tech startups there are many AI based robotics companies who are developing by funding methods of government funding or crowd funding. Everybody saw the drone video surveillancing over the state of kerala were developed by a start-up called ASIMOV ROBOTICS in Kerala.
Robots developed by Asimov Robotics are also being deployed in hospital isolation wards to carry food and medicines, which eases the pressure on medical staff.
Our Indian government has also suddenly become productive and released an APP a time ago called ‘AAROGYA SETU’ which uses GPS and BLUETOOTH to inform people when they are at risk of exposure to COVID-19.
And last but not the least firms such as the Aqoza technologies and Persapien ltd has also gained the popularity due to their working towards the increasing methods of chemical formulation that helps in disinfecting the public places.
MY UNEXPERT OPINION
I know that these are some hard times unemployment rates may reach levels that they have never reached. But my point is that after the lockdown there is gonna be a lotta revolution in ways of job working too. Work from home possible apps like ZOOM and DUO are gonna be more prevalent and lets hope we get a new slack/uber type startup but this time from India. But to be completely honest the level of dedication drinkers have shown last few days have really set up a bar (Tax greed aside) mind my words we all just need ½ the dedication of them to overcome the crisis.
Written by: DEVANSH GANDHI
SOURCES:- STARTUPS:- http://www.qure.ai/ http://www.docturnal.com/
https://yourstory.com/ ,
https://theconversation.com/
GREAT RECESSION :- https://www.thebalance.com/2008-financial-crisis-3305679