A Cinderella story: this startup plays fairy godmother to discarded smartphones

On average, we change our smartphones every 18 months. This means hundreds of millions of used smartphones are put away in closets or buried in landfills each year.

Kallidil Kalidasan, a young entrepreneur from the backwaters of Kerala in India, feels discarded smartphones deserve better. They’re not useless, after all. They do have cameras and microphones, processors, touchscreens, and wifi connectivity.

Last year, his startup Mindhelix waved a magic wand and turned old smartphones into smart home security devices – like a fairy godmother turning a Cinderella in rags to a princess in glass slippers.

It’s a device called Rico, which has a placeholder for your discarded smartphone. Once you put that in, Rico transforms into a motion and noise sensor that can send you security alerts. It also detects smoke and carbon monoxide.

Mindhelix raised US$119,000 on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for Rico, which is expected to reach buyers by November this year.

The Kerala connection

I met Kalidasan at Startup Village, an incubator for student entrepreneurs. Kalidasan had been involved with the program right from its inception four years ago, and Mindhelix was one of the first to move into the facility. His “office” is the number one room at Startup Village, which he shares with a few other teams.

Kalidasan stepped out of that room to chat with me in a long, curved corridor that runs like a ribbon around the building. It’s a hangout space for entrepreneurs, strewn with electronic gear, including body parts of robots.

The robot parts did not shock me as much as hearing Kalidasan talk of growing up in Payyanur, which happens to be my hometown too in Kerala. He studied at Kendriya Vidyalaya, a school behind my home, where I had also spent my kindergarten years. Like my father, Kalidasan’s father was in the army, which took him to different parts of India.

And now, here we were, both involved with startups, albeit on opposite ends of the table. While I meandered into a career in writing about entrepreneurs, Kalidasan became an entrepreneur – although he started out wanting to be a pilot. Unlike most boys who dream of becoming a pilot, he was serious enough about it to clear the tough entrance examination and enroll in the flying branch of the National Defence Academy right after school.

The broiler chicken that flew away