Meet the 5 startups from India chosen to be incubated in Canada

With countless startups sprouting in every nook and cranny of India, it is tough to find the most innovative ones of all. One way of spotting them is through contests.

Global accelerator program Zone Startups, a joint venture of Toronto-based Ryerson Futures Inc. and the Bombay Stock Exchange Institute, just announced the winners of the second edition of its Next BIG Idea contest. This was held in collaboration with the Government of Ontario, Canada and IBM Global Entrepreneurship Program. The contest aimed to find the five most innovative technology companies that want to expand to the North America via a presence in Ontario, Canada.

“This contest is an opportunity for best-in-class Indian startups to get an introduction to the North American market, and valuable new business connections,” said Jens-Michael Schaal, senior economic officer of Ontario International Marketing Centre in a statement.

AdSparx

This Pune-based startup is an ad technology platform for streaming internet video. It uses patented server-side technology to serve video ads for linear TV, live events, and videos on demand. AdSparx works with existing content delivery systems like Wowza, Adobe Flash Media Server, Apache, and CDNs. It allows the publisher to work with multiple advertisers and networks, also acting as a mediator.

Flip Technologies

This startup based in Kochi focuses on building connected consumer electronics to enhance sporting experiences, such as tracking devices for skateboards and action sports. It provides hardware as well as the enabling software to work in tandem to produce the best result. Less than a year-old, Flip was picked as the best emerging startup in Kerala of 2014 by the Startup Village, a not-for-profit business incubator.

Konotor

This Chennai-based startup has built a two-way communication channel that allows users to interact with an app’s developers. Konotor integrates with an app, giving users a channel through which they can reach out to the app developers, who then get feedback and interact with the users. Konotor was one of the five startups Target Accelerator in Bangalore picked early this year. This accelerator by retail giant Target gives US$30,000, access to mentors, other resources, and operational support to the startups it picks.

Shield Square

This Bangalore-based startup protects online businesses against web scraping – a common form of content theft that is often overlooked – and bot attacks, thereby increasing revenues and improving site performance. Shield Square cloud service can be seamlessly integrated into any web application by inserting a REST API and Javascript.

Vidooly

This Noida-based startup is a YouTube video marketing and analytics product suite for media and marketing agencies, brands, indie artists, movie studios, and internet marketers that helps them grow, optimize, and build their audience base organically. It is India’s first self-serve Youtube Video advertising network. On Vidooly, anyone can start a campaign at any budget.

These five startups will head to Toronto in early November. They will be incubated at the Digital Media Zone (DMZ) at Ryerson University, in Toronto, for two weeks. The incubator program offers mentorship, business development support, industry contacts, funding and investor access, and a gateway to North America to the startups.

See: 5 bootstrapped tech startups that do India proud