Paytm held another Mentor Day event at its ‘F1’ Noida office on Saturday. Several professionals from the tech industry were called at the event to impart knowledge to budding startups. Paytm commenced the journey of the 'Open Source Incubator' programme under its Build for India Initiative in January and is mentoring several startups that aim to make a mark on the tech landscape. At the event, Paytm organised mentoring sessions on the use of premium Twitter APIs, how to implement 'Design for Usability', ‘A Salesman's Advice to App Developers' and 'Best practices of Git for organising your Open Source Project'.
Getting a startup up and running isn't child's play and one usually needs all the information, resources and guidance they can get for pulling off a startup successfully. Keeping this in mind, Saurabh Jain, Head of Paytm – Build For India initiative, quickly moved on from introductions to an in-depth explanation of premium Twitter APIs. Jain explained how, alongside free-to-use APIs, premium Twitter APIs can be helpful for solving control problems for a growing organisation.
Next up was a session on ‘Design for Usability’ by the co-founder of UX Gorilla, Jagritii Pande. In an illuminating session, Pande highlighted various aspects of design elements which should be taken into consideration while working on a project. She offered insight into some out-of-the-box use cases, which one should keep in mind while testing their ideas and also emphasised on the fact that as more than ever first time internet and smartphone users step into the digital age, responsibility of making their experience seamless will fall onto the shoulders of app developers, designers and their entire team.
As we know, challenges don’t disappear with a project’s deployment and keeping this in mind, an interactive session ensued with Ankit Anand, Manager (Business Development, Recharges) at Paytm. The presentation was aptly titled, “A Salesman's Advice to App Developers'” as Anand described how a salesman in the tech industry who directly interacts with a customer needs to have foresight into a customer’s requirement, even before they themselves reveal it. He says that in many organisations, there is a large communication gap between various teams, which lead to delayed projects, unmatched requirements delivery and other problems. Anand says (quote edited for clarity), “The product developers take up the onus of delivering a product, but I believe that app developers need to do the same as well. This will enable developers to better understand the scope of a product, what similar offerings they can create and the experience they gain from it will also help them venture into entrepreneurship, if they decide to do so.”
Mukul Jain, mentor at Paytm – Build for India Initiative, then took the stage to briefly explain what Github is and how one can use it for organising an open source project. Jain also shared his experiences while working on his own projects with Github and provided an overview of how repositories work, and what commands one needs to use for managing their project on the website. The interactive segment concluded with a Q&A session with the attendees and was followed by a demo by one of the startups called ‘Project Pehchaan’.
The project is the brainchild of Mausam Sharma, which focuses on making it easier to mark attendance in schools, colleges and offices. Project Pehchaan is a facial recognition based attendance system that makes use of Amazon’s AWS Rekognition API to mark attendance of recognised faces, which have already been seeded to the database. Sharma says that a professor could simply capture and upload a photograph of the entire class for marking attendance and the same could be implemented for offices where a camera on the entry would automatically mark attendance for an employee. In conclusion, the event was received well by the startups, who had a chance to learn more about various aspects of managing their project.