CISCO to Collaborate with Maker Village

KOCHI:
CISCO will collaborate with Maker Village to acquaint India’s largest hardware electronic incubator with its ecosystem and would also provide some equipments worth Rs one crore for the same.
CISCO, the global leader in IT and networking, collaborating with Kerala system would give a big boost to the large number of hardware start-ups and the 150 odd SMEs in Kerala working in the hardware sector, said M Sivasankar, IT Secretary, Govt of Kerala. He was speaking on the sidelines of Kerala’s first ever two-day Global Digital Summit, #FUTURE, which began here today.
“The collaboration will help small networking hardware firms as well,” he added. The decision came after Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s meeting with the CISCO’s Managing Director Harish Krishnan, said Sivasankar.
In connection with #FUTURE, the chief minister also held talks with the elites of the knowledge industry, including Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani. The primary focus of the talks was to use their expertise in the state, in view of the substantial investment being made in IT infrastructure by the Government including K Fon, public Wifi hotspots.
The first meeting was with Jim Chabir, President US-based Advance Image Society (AIS) and Jake Black, Director , AR/VR, Sony who pointed out that the Kerala’s creative sector can flourish if there is an amalgamation of Kerala’s rich creative streak and technology. “For that, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have to be made use of in the creative sector,” he said.
Besides, the company is ready to mentor and give exposure to those startups which contribute immensely to the new technologies in their American firms through exchange programmes.
The second meeting was with the experts in the healthcare sector — Anu Acharya, Founder and CEO, Mapmygenome, and Prashanth Warier, CEO, Qure.ai. They discussed on topics like how technology can be effectively used in the health sector and what are the explicit changes that can happen because of technology.
Sivasankar said the chief minister would also hold talks with Byju Raveendran, Founder of BYJU’s app, early April to explore the latter’s expertise in the education sector. In addition, he also met Arun Kumar, CEO, KPMG.