Calcutta, Dec. 5: Life started at 60 for a trio of entrepreneurs who pitched their ideas at Infocom 2016, a leading business, technology and leadership conference of ABP Group in Calcutta.

Pradeep Kumar Mukherjee has devised a mobile app for forex remittance; Amitava Choudhury has come up with a security app for apartment blocks and Dipankar Ghosh seeks to simplify admission to educational institutions.

Mukherjee worked in various firms such as Tata Group and Ernst and Young for over 25 years before starting own business post retirement.

"The existing banking channels for remittance are expensive and there is a fixed fee for sending money irrespective of the amount. We are planning to be the aggregator of small remittance and will charge only 2-3 per cent for each transaction," he said. The company is in the ideation stage and aims to launch its ForexTM app on the Android and IOS platforms next year. It is also developing a website.

The second golden ager, Choudhury has named his product Smart Elec. "We keep hearing about crimes in large housing complexes, especially in metro cities. Our non-contact quick response biometric recognition system won't allow any guest access to the premises without fingerprint authentication by a host," he said.

Smart Elec, according to Choudhury, will have eight seamlessly integrated modules that include visitor management, ownership and tenancy data management, emergency and disaster management.

Fellow IITian Ghosh is developing a portal where one can compare details of multiple educational institutions in a city and apply for admission to several of them by filling in a single form online. "Anyone who submits the application form on youradmissions.com no longer needs to keep track of the availability of seats. We will notify them as and when schools begin the procedure," he said.

Two startups - Mukherjee's ForexTM and Astrea Solutions, which offers an app-based, self-driven, zero-emission electric-scooter rental service that requires no licence or registration, won the Infocom Future Leadership Awards (IFLA), powered by mevero.com on Saturday. They received Rs 2 lakh each.

Anyone aged 18 or above who clears a two-minute ride test can avail themselves of Astrea's award-winning product, Dadabigo, at Rs 300 a day or Rs 55 an hour. The rider needs to submit at least one valid ID proof.

"We already have a fleet of 50 scooters with Hero Electric as our primary partner. We provide multiple pick-up and drop-off locations across Calcutta along with GPS tracking for customer safety as well as asset protection," said Reshmi Nath, co-founder of Astrea Solutions.

In the student category of IFLA, three ideas from a total of 27 were announced winners and awarded Rs 50,000 each.

Anupam Kumar Singh, a third-year student at Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology, intends to design a device to detect whether a person is safe by using a pulse sensor. In case of an accident, the mobile app, with which the device would be linked, would ring an alarm. If it remains deactivated at the time, an SOS message will be sent to the emergency numbers saved on the app along with the location, contact information of the nearest police station and hospitals.

Rohit Jain, a student of Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai is building a product named Hriday, which allows one to explore various musical instruments through experience pods. These are retail outlets of around 300 square feet with interactive display, virtual reality headsets and several local and global musical instruments. "As soon as one enters an experience pod, he can pick up a guitar and switch on the interactive display. It can also teach him the basics of playing a guitar. Moreover, he can wear the virtual reality headset and simulate how it feels like to play in front of a huge audience," Jain said.

A graduate from IIM Shillong, Sumit Mittal, presented the idea of a Smart Cart, which can offer a better shopping experience in crowded supermarkets or multi-brand retail stores.

"By integrating a simple shopping cart or trolley with a display screen, a camera and a billing machine, it can be used to search for the required products, scan them and make purchase hassle-free. In fact, each cart would be a point of sale as well," he explained.