IDC gave the platform to sharpen my skills, and now it was time to put them into effect. I rightly chose a start-up company (VEPL) because it gave me all the opportunities to explore and experiment in a short period of 6 weeks as a summer intern. My main project was to understand and improve the first-time user’s experience of the company’s software named Learning Tracker and at the same time explain the service model to the user. Apart from this, I also explored website design, advertising, mobile-based applications, etc. I was exposed to how all the teams in their organization function and interact with one another. Valued Epestemics is a new generation technology company based in Chennai. It specialises in mobile systems and application technologies. It is a start-up founded and managed by technology professionals from top institutes like IIT, IISC, IIM, Purdue, and Stanford, along with experience in R&D and business development from top mobile companies like Nokia and Motorola.

The aim of this project is to design a security device for elderly people which would trigger a warning system and alert nearby neighbours and security guards for timely help. The purpose of the research is to find out the easiest way to communicate with the elderly in case they need help. To understand the problems faced by the elderly regarding security, the author has conducted several user studies and reviewed many newspaper articles and other literature surveys. Design ideas were developed for individual problems faced and later collated and analysed to develop final concepts. The author puts forward a concept of Ubiquitous computing in the form of a wearable technology that provides him with invisible security everywhere within the house at all times. This was proposed after conducting qualitative and quantitative experiments on the elderly using the wearable device. The early results show that this design proves to be useful and usable for the elderly.

India is a cricket-crazy nation, and the IPL has glued millions of users to television sets for the excitement it provides. The widely followed existing medium for watching cricket is TV, and whatever is shown is purely based on the editor’s choice, from statistics to advertisements. The widely reachable medium in urban India, like the Internet, majorly displays only static information, although it can easily exploit the wide possibilities of computing power. Usually, cricket matches take place when people go to work and there is a high probability that they are not near their television sets. Hence, the research is targeted towards mediums that are always a part of them anywhere, anytime. The project started off with choosing the right medium, by understanding the people’s requirements by doing user studies along with in-depth analysis of the vital components of a cricket match, especially a Twenty2o game. The author has proposed the idea of using the media richness of a 3G mobile phone combined with the simplicity and elegance of the designed cricket application’s visual interface to bring about a rich cricket viewing experience overall.