MIT GSL Sri Lanka: Gearing Up for Demo Day

MIT GSL’s been brewing at the University of Colombo since June. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most groundbreaking universities in the world, hosts something called the  GSL – short for Global Startup Labs. It’s a program that promotes startups in universities across the world, sending in teams of MIT students and lecturers to mentor potential student entrepreneurs through a series of courses, competitions and networking events.

Sri Lanka’s been on the receiving end of the program this year – Champika Fernando, Darshini Thiagrajan, Sarah Edris and Tiffany Yeh of MIT have been working with quite a number of startups from Colombo University. We’ve heard some interesting stories – including how Tiffany demoed a true elevator pitch (inside an actual elevator) and how candidates, int eh style of the Apprentice, were asked to pitch a USB speaker system to king coconut sellers. Great stuff.

Now we’ve got seven startups on the list, and their projects look quite promising. All of whom are expected to have their products out before the jury by the end of this month – that’s Demo Day. Her’es what you can expect:

Organic Hug – A physical and social platform that connects consumers and farmers for buying and selling organic foods.

TopNotch – A social rewards platform for retail customers that seems to be quite proactive

ShopIn –  A behavioral and location based data analytics solution for fashion retailers

Dolawa – A system for finding, on-demand, the nearest taxis – with user ratings

D-Care – A mobile-based solution to aid the therapy of dyslexic children

Boarding.lk – a platform that connects university students seeking housing with owners of housing, trying to solve the age-old problem of living near your university

EagleEye – an intruder detection system that accurately identifies human-movement in real-time using existing security cameras.

We’ll be dropping in on Demo Day to check out all these ideas. Until then, Track #mitgslSL on Twitter