Startup Village, Facebook team up to help budding Indian entrepreneurs

Kochi’s Startup Village had launched its first digital incubator for students known as SV.CO, which has now partnered with Facebook to offer a broader exposure to students. Facebook will give the budding entrepreneurs access to its developer teams. The SV.CO Startup programme will ensure a six-day trip to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. At the headquarters, these students will be able to present their ideas to the Facebook team and get feedback. The aim is to ensure students learn how technology companies work across the world and also take lessons on building successful startups. This piece of news comes on the heels of reports around how Facebook has begun testing Wi-Fi hotspots in India. It was just a few months ago that the startup community was irked with the social giant for pushing its Free Basics into India and taking away the fair play chances that startups have to compete in the fierce tech industry. In fact, Facebook that started at the Harvard dorm room should have known it better. Looks like, it is now trying to make all the wrongs right by helping with infrastructure for Internet, Wi-Fi hotspots and now working with students. SV.CO is the first to follow the PPP model and its six months program will be conducted for up to 50 engineering students startups from across India. Each one of these startups will have 2-3 students. The Kochi Startup Village had also disclosed its plans to support 10,000 campus startup teams across India in the next five years as part of its second phase . For this, it plans to align with the PM’s Startup India programme. “In Phase I, we succeeded in creating a seed entrepreneurial ecosystem in Kerala. In the next five years, we plan to support 10,000 campus startup teams across the country, completely digitise the incubation process and launch a new business model,” said startup village chairman Sanjay Vijayakumar had said. Lately, Facebook has been finding unique ways of working with open source and startup communities. Remember the Facebook Incubator. It is believed to be the company’s new way for releasing open source projects and the first project under it being Create React App that helps React developers get started with their new projects. “The create-react-app repo already has over 6,000 stars and 300 forks, so Incubator is off to a good start,” points out TheNextWeb. Facebook has been taking some keen interest in Indian startups. Remember Tookitaki, and Indian startup and its first Facebook Marketing Partner from the country. It was a part of Facebook’s Marketing Partners Program. Meanwhile, SV.CO is believed to be looking for more similar collaborations to build an optimum startup ecosystem in India. Now, it is to be seen if Google and Apple will follow suit.