There was no shortage for energy and enthusiasm at the HeadStart & Compute event. Not just because it brought together some of the brightest and brilliant ideas at the heart of the start-up companies, but also because it offered a chance for investors and large corporations to discover a potential Microsoft amongst Indian technology companies.

Like in the previous years, the event – organised by the not-for-profit HeadStart Foundation – became the honey pot for hot ideas, which, according to industry experts, have the potential to change the way computing is done.

There were companies like Wolf and others, who offer an online platform that allows users to build software applications over a browser.

“Small businesses, for instance, can use our platform to build applications that can be of use to them in their day-to-day activities,” says Sunny Ghosh, Director, Wolf. “The best thing about our platform is that they can use it without writing a line of code. Our intelligent platform can understand the software (such as java) on which the user is trying to build the application and can help him adapt to it seamlessly.”

Wolf targets individuals, consultants, SMBs and – with several complex features – even the enterprises. It currently has about 800 people building applications and has 250 completed applications. Sunny says the applications, which vary from enterprise solutions to manufacturing ones, are bundled with other products and are taken to market.

“Right now, we are operating on a smart cloud computing infrastructure in the US, which gives us the ability to add bandwidth and space. We therefore are able to provide users a significant cost benefit by letting them pay just for the usage and not separately for hosting or software,” he says.

If services like Wolf cater to business users, others such as Zimesh, the intelligent knowledge management platform offered by Mesh Lab, will be a treat to those who soak themselves in the large and unending stream of information. Zimesh is an intelligent personal knowledge manager with social networking attributes. Users collaborate to add content, semantics, models, and behaviors. The system learns and gets better with use.

“An intelligent platform is vitally important in situations where users continue to deal with a large amount of information, much of which they feel like sharing with like minded individuals across the web,” said Mesh Lab’s spokesperson, as he demoed the platform to audience at the event.

Zimesh enables users to keep a track on documents and contents they go through and retain those that are of interest to them. The user can register with the website and can create an interest profile which he can constantly keep updating as he goes through different kinds of content. Besides reading it in brief, he can search and share it with other users who have similar interest.

“The platform sits on documents and other kinds of contents the user goes through,” Mesh Lab spokesperson said. “Every key word or phrase suggesting the interest of a user is gleaned from such contents. It uses NLP to understand associations between words. Software as a Service, for instance, will be understood as SaaS and java will be understood as the programming language (based on semantics).”

There was no dearth of knowledge platforms in this year's event, as IndusGeeks – a start up by young entrepreneurs – demonstrated even entertainment tools like virtual worlds can be transformed into vital ingredients of learning management. “In fact, we are the first Indian company to work in virtual world,” says Siddharth Banerjee, founder of IndusGeeks. “We have created virtual world platform for education which has enabled teachers and students to experience a live classroom while learning.”

Started as a virtual world development company that used existing virtual world platforms like SecondLife, IndusGeeks grew in the last 20 months to create a platform of their own called Metamersive Learning Solution (MLS) for the education sector.

“Rather than playing and having fun with the virtual world (which people normally do in secondlife), we built services around MLS,” Siddharth says. “The primary one is education and training, which we are able to sell successfully to the corporate. We have also been working closely with leading e-learning service providers in India like Excelsoft to introduce the concept in education.”

IndusGeek’s expertise is to develop the virtual environments, which they own. Their services are offered either as SaaS or for license.