Indian Government invites startups to develop a Video Conferencing solution platform

Why Video Conferencing!

Video Conferencing has become the new norm, personally and professionally. To enhance the usage of technology better at this time of crisis, the Government has announced an innovation challenge for startups. This requires innovators to develop a solution for video conferencing that matches international standards. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology announced the challenge under the Digital India Programme.

"During these unprecedented times brought about by the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 affecting all nations across the globe and everybody stuck at home, working remotely. It is getting evident that in the coming days' businesses are going to become more reliant than ever on the digital platforms to connect and communicate. In many cases switching to digital alternatives will be the deciding factor whether we are able to make it through the tough times ahead or not," the ministry said.

Video Conferencing tool development

The 3 stages of the challenge:

Stage 1 is the Ideation stage from which the selected entries will receive a funding of INR 5 Lakhs.

Stage 2 is the Prototyping stage. The Top 3 teams will be shortlisted for the final stage. Each team will be granted INR 20 Lakhs to build the solution.

Stage 3 is building a solution. The winning team gets INR 1 Crore and additional support of INR 10 Lakhs per year towards Operations & Maintenance, for a period of 3 years. Startups and innovators that develop software products can take part in the challenge.

Requirements

The application must-have features not limited to the indicated below:

 Should support all video resolutions and audio quality, should work in low and
high network scenarios
 Should be low on the usage of power/ processor
 Should not have any external hardware dependency
 Should work on any device
 Should have chat option during the conference, even the multi people conference
 Should have sign-in and non-sign-in options to join a conference
 Can be browser and/or app-based interface
 Should have encrypted network communication
 Should have audio/ video recording feature
 Should have screen/file sharing capabilities
 Should allow audio to close captioning during chat (multilingual)
 Should have capabilities to host multiple concurrent conferences having
multiple participants in each conference

Evaluation 

The parameters under which we can evaluate is as follows:

• Approach towards problem solving
• Business Use Case
• Technical Feasibility
• Product Roadmap
• Team ability and culture
• Addressable market

Initial market

“In order to provide initial market, the winning team with the best-judged solution will get a contract to deploy their solution for use by Government of India and State Government entities for a period of 4 years,” MyGov’s statement read. The government has clarified that the participants can market their product to other organizations and non-govt customers. However, this should be done on a seperate platform.