A team of professionals from Google held a conference in Panaji, which was attended by 30 tech professionals from the state.
Panaji
The idea of the conference was to mentor Goan developers so that they can reach out to wider mass market of consumers across India and help them in finding solutions for grassroot issues.
This conference was held in collaboration with the IT Committee of Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and Goa Android User's Group.
Explaining the purpose of the conference, Karthik Padmanabhan, developer relations lead, Google, said, "The idea behind this event is to engage with start-ups, who are building solutions for real Indian issues. There are lot of people out there, who may not be literate, but are using smart-phones. You can't make an app in English language for them. You will have to create solutions for such consumers in their language."
Padmanabhan continued, "For example, a farmer would like to have an app, which helps him in managing his farm yield better. We are working with start-ups, who can come out with solutions for such problems."
Prajyot Mainkar, chairman, IT Committee of GCCI said, "Today's conference was attended by 45 individuals. Of that, around 30 were tech professional and remaining were students. Goa is a small market. For a developer in Goa, it makes a lot of sense to interact with Google's developer relations team, which can help them in knowing how markets in other states of India are."
It was also informed that 9 start-ups were shortlisted to be mentored by Google's developer relations team.
Mridula Mallya, social media and community manager with developer relations team of Google, said, "We give mentorship to start-ups on open source tech, Google Firebase and Google cloud platform."
