SLASSCOM’s grand finale of ‘Future X’ mobilises new talent and innovative ventures

Organised by Sri Lanka Association of Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) in collaboration with Zebra Technologies, the yearly event of Future X, the inter-university innovation championship, recently concluded on a successful note and saw many innovative ideas being turned into successful ventures.

FutureX was organised to encourage tech innovations which will address socio economic issues in Sri Lanka and to develop and promote innovation and technopreneurship among the university students. The event saw 12 teams that had won their way to the finals, competing for the grand prize of half a million rupees in cash at the Trace City premises in Maradana.

Selected from amongst 92 applicants, the institutes and universities reaching the finals included the Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT) Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT) University of Peradeniya, NSBM, University of Kelaniya, University of Moratuwa and Kotelawala Defence University.

Trending enterprising ideas and presenting an impressive line-up of projects, the competitors wowed the audience and the judges with their creative marketable ideas. Each of the teams showcased their drive and spirit of innovation and the zest of entrepreneurship. 

These projects ranged from Braille Band Blind Support through an IoT wearable devise for blind people, solution for minimising energy and electricity wastage in homes, a GPS based mobile application which tracks the location of buses and gives the commuters an exact indication of the arrival of a particular bus to a particular bus stop, a community-based on the way delivery network where travellers are to perform the delivery, a comprehensive search engine for all education options in Sri Lanka after O/Ls and after A/Ls, an online live tutoring platform, a B2B kiosk platform, a human motion analysis for cricket analytics, and formalism for cyber foraging in smart phones. 

Bagging the winning title was the team behind Project Kairos hailing from the University of Moratuwa. Kairos revolves around human motion analysis, where they aimed to provide a solution to issues in the world of cricket such as chucking and inability to analyse bowlers’ performance effectively. According to the team, this would be Sri Lanka’s first-ever 3D motion capturing system that would be powered by wearables.

Following suit was SpecBuddy and BrailleBand, coming in second place and place place respectively.

Proving to be an ideal business start-up accelerator for entrepreneurship, FutureX remains as one of the valuable initiatives launched by SLASSCOM in developing and bringing in partners to chart their way towards strengthening and meeting Sri Lanka’s IT/BPM goal for 2022, of having a $ 5 billion revenue, 200,000 direct jobs and 1000 start-ups. This in turn is an important part of the equation in making the IT sector a prime foreign revenue generator for the country.