Day 3: hovering highlights, much better food and intense pitch prep

It was 8:00 a.m., we still had 10 more minutes until we had to leave for the university, hence my friends and I decided to check out a souvenir shop at the lobby.

There were many articles such as egg-shaped magnets, Chinese chessboard, beautiful lamps, comb set and so much more and they all had the air of simplicity.

When we headed off to the university we weren't prepared to handle the oodles of excitement that we were going to have at the very first session!

All hail! the Hover camera by a Beijing-based company Zero Zero Robotics.

Safe, portable, foldable and easy to use, this camera is the one thing we all need when we want to capture ultimate moments without having to lose a hand to the phone or a selfie stick or honor passers-by with the privilege to capture our personal moments!

Mr. Mengqiu Wang and his colleagues came up with the concept of a hovering camera which works like a drone but is a lot safer and simpler to use and it has a battery life of eight minutes.

With a computation rate of about 60fps, this personal photographer and camera can be configured to recognize its owner. One can also connect it to the phone and manually control it. This camera is a testimony to the adage " Result that looks simple takes a lot of effort!". With a 30 MP front camera, a 5mm accuracy without the wind and a 120fps rate of viewing and analysis, this camera safely dodges obstacles and follows its owner! 

With two cameras and a 720p live preview to the phone using WiFi connection, the camera prepares a pseudo-3D mapping to navigate. He carefully explained to us the structural importance of the camera; the camera employs a bottom to upward airflow which avoids the use of fans for cooling which decreased the total weight of the camera by 5 %, and every gram counts.

This camera identifies gestures and then times for 3 seconds to click that perfect picture! Unfortunately, flying hover camera is forbidden in Beijing but they are available at all Apple stores.

As we witnessed credible technology spread its wings of amazement, MrWang left us with a rather profound note: "In the process of giving machines access to everything, we let the machines give us access to some things".

Come to think of it, it is actually true!

Our next session was by the investment director of Plug n Play, Mr. Jay Zhang

He gave us an insight into the challenges of being a Venture Capitalist and being an investor and having to say no to startups which might be based on really good ideas but fail to develop a sustainable business model. Plug n Play provided the first office space for Google during its initial days and since then has supported many startups since then.

Our next session was on Club Factory, a cross-border e-commerce platform for developing countries. Most clients are from India, Israel, and China and this application taps the widespread demand for Chinese products and forms a platform where the manufacturers in China and the buyers are directly linked and hence the products are available at a consistently lower price as opposed to portals like Walmart.

While most of the sessions dealt with using technology for e-commerce with a very general target group, the next talk on a startup, NicoMama was interesting, necessary and clearly defined!

When I saw this particular slide, it drew me in completely because there stood a person who is a successful entrepreneur and as usual the crowd was cheering when he came on stage.

NicoMama is a content based E-commerce which uses WeChat accounts as an effective medium of communication and networking with all its customers. most of which are new parents or expectant couples who spend a lot of money on baby products and services and a lot of time in researching and consulting people who advise and sometimes scare them about some products. There is also a problem of creche services for children who are less than two years old which results in working mothers quitting their work to take care of their children.

NicoMama addresses this very issue of too much or too little information.  The session started off with a questionnaire where we were asked about basic child nutrition and abstract questions like how do you explain the concept of the water cycle to a one-year-old and turns out that most of us didn't have an inkling about it and truth be told most of the new parents were highly unequipped as well!

NicoMama introduces scientific parenting so that new moms do not have to sacrifice their career and time and can just use legit WeChat channels which are free from the clutches of manipulative search results of Baidu. 

The talk was rather inspiring and reassuring to see that technology that spans all aspects of a society is encouraged!

Finally, we had a talk from the CEO of Showjoy, Li Wei a successful beauty brand chain. A former developer at Alibaba, Mr. Wei learned a lot during his tenure there and along with four of his colleagues started Showjoy aiming at building the largest make-up selling website. He says that his beautiful wife is his inspiration and wanted to give everyone the opportunity to choose their palette and have the best quality of makeup. His fruitful endeavor is a testimony to the fact that one always succeeds in the path less trodden if he treads it carefully and with appropriate planning and collaboration, Mr. Wei made it big in the cosmetic world.

We then had a scheduled visit to the history museum on campus and all of us were really excited and we all headed out of the most beautiful library I have ever seen and I had to capture a few photographs on my way out.

                               A chair which had some beautiful inscriptions in multiple languages

A father-son duo sharing a gasp while on the phone.

The museum welcomed us with an antique wall with ancient scriptures and a gramophone which played some good old music. We could not stop admiring the attention to detail with respect to the information and how well the whole area was laid out.

There was an adequate mixture of ancient history and modern technology that was employed to give the visitor the information about the background and history of the university and although most of it was in Chinese, we got help from quite a few translators who tried their best to convey the information.

After a quick tour of the museum, we all headed towards the new canteen and I was mainly excited for this because there was a confectionary segment where I was sure all of it was going to be vegetarian.

Looks delicious, right? This was the best meal I had had in days and I was already missing the Pulav prepared by my mom, the pickle and the curd and the spicy food back home, but it was a new experience and the french fries were worth totally worth it!

After our dinner we were we all had, our team had a very important task at hand; interviews! As a part of our pitch, we wanted to do a survey to find out how better or worse students on campus thought it would be to use VR-based education at the school level and if it would have a positive impact and help them understand better.

Hence, we set out to interview the people on campus and since I could not converse in Chinese, I remained a photographer while my teammates asked, answered, translated and in the process learnt the psyche and thought process of people.

We then compiled all the interviews and it was time for us to compile them and the end results were pretty reassuring as quite a few students supported the idea of VR-based education. We then started towards our hotel for a quick summary and discussion session and I noticed something really amusing.

A large group of women with beautiful pink fans dancing right in the middle of the road to a euphonious tune and this, as my friends loosely translated, is called the square dance.

When old people do not have work to do at home and everything is taken care of, they usually form large groups to conduct entertaining activities such as singing, dancing to keep themselves occupied. While some people support this idea, a lot of people condemn it by calling it a menace.

That day I was left with this open-ended question, is it right for us youngsters to restrict the freedom of these people by branding their hobbies and activities as a nuisance? Is it right on their part to block free passage on streets and play areas instead of going to parks, just because they are bored?

This is quite a hard question to answer until you have been on both sides of the argument, something to ponder upon I thought, maybe few decades down the line, I would know!