If you are looking for some inspiration to start your business, then look no further. These quotes detail Indian entrepreneurs’ stories of success, struggles, challenges and failures and how they made it.

As a company, you have to look at growth both vertically and horizontally.

- Rajesh Prasad, Innoviti

There is a rich heritage behind khadi, and it also contributes to the livelihoods of many.

- Siddharth Mohan Nair, DesiTude

Reputation is an ongoing process.

- Tamanna Mishra

Companies with paperless technology platforms are well-positioned to leverage the latest trends in consumer technology.

- Ben Elliott, Experian

Most people fall in the trap of solving problems all the time and not thinking enough about how to not have them at first place.

- Vasan Subramanian, Accel Partners

Consumers are juggling today with less time available for cooking, lack of healthy options, tasteless frozen foods — the joy of cooking is dying.

- Prayank Swaroop, Accel Partners

You constantly think about what next and build things that work. You must learn constantly.

- Amar Chokhawala, Reflektion

Collecting customer satisfaction score is an easy and cost-effective method to gauge consumer sentiments.

- JD Pawar, Wheelstreet

You need to have a good education. It serves as a fallback if things don’t work out. It opens up many doors and people take you more seriously.

- Ujval Nanavati

A lot of companies focus only on the new customers coming in and forget about their existing customer base.

- Prabhakar Reddy, Accel Partners

Art is both universal and personal at the same time.

- Giridhar Khasnis, Gallery Manora

We need bias free organisations with diverse and inclusive cultures to create happier workplaces.

- Viji Hari, KelpHR

The way to construct online learning content is to sequence learning much the same way as a TV soap.

- Abhijit Bhaduri, ‘The Digital Tsunami’

SMEs are vital for the economic growth and competitiveness of the country. But absence of digitised data has forced them to face a lot of challenges.

- Atul Banga

A composting revolution – no food waste to landfill – should become the mantra.

- Pink Chandran, Solid Waste Management Roundtable

We have till date created less than $35 billion market cap for all tech startups combined in India. In the next decade, this number can become $500 billion.

- Rahul Chowdhri, Stellaris Venture Partners

India’s service-centric and fragmented healthcare industry is plagued with a reactive care, curative mindset.

- Hari Thalapalli, CallHealth

The government should support startups that create solutions right from soil analysis to produce marketing. Such startups must look at farming in a holistic way.

- Sathya Raghu V. Mokkapati, Kheyti

Every third Indian still lacks access to amenities such as nutrition, education, healthcare, electricity, and safe drinking water.

-Raj Janagam, Surge Impact

Use of wetland for agriculture and fisheries would change the face of rural Bihar.

- Mangala Rai, ICAR

The biggest real estate available in the city was on rooftops.

- Sriram Aravamudan, My Sunny Balcony

The story of fintech in India will not be the story of David vs Goliath. It will be the story of Goliath vs Goliath. And the smarter Goliath will win.

- Pranay Bhardwaj, SlicePay

Scale is always a barrier to entry. Who can compete with an Ola or an Uber?

- Raja Lahiri, Grant Thornton

The barrier to enter consumer internet businesses doesn’t exist anymore.

- Rahul Chari, PhonePe

If you don’t bring different marketing channels together, competitors will take advantage of your silo approach.

- Deepak Kanakaraju, Razorpay

It is ultimately the market that proves everyone right or wrong.

- Sartaj Anand, egomonk

Consumers are increasingly looking for such quirky merchandise.

- Arvind Singhal, Technopak

It is not services that will make you money, it is software with Machine Learning and AI that makes money.

- Vishal Sikka, ex-Infosys

Co-working spaces are better than business centres.

- Shiv prasad Singh, RICSSBE

l Sikka, ex-Infosys

You might think you know where you want to and what you want to do when you travel, but new technology is seeking to tap into you subconscious to uncover where you want to go.

Thanks to a prototype created by UK travel company TUI - formerly Thomson - you don’t have to be torn two or three great destinations anymore. This prototype takes soul-searching out of the equation and uses emotionally intelligent technology to discover travellers‘ true holiday desires and develop a personalised travel itinerary based on subconscious thoughts.

It sounds like Minority Report, doesn’t it? You are probably wondering how this works as it sounds like an invention from the future but the idea is fairly simple. While viewers watch a rapid series of moving images of different travel destinations and experiences, the device measures their facial response and uses the data to create a perfect holiday based on their natural reaction to what they are viewing.

The prototype, named Destination U, is undergoing consumer testing with plans for public retail trials in the near future. According to the company, in just a matter of time, the prototype could be using facial coding and emotion measurement to help their customers choose a trip that matches their emotional needs.

The prototype, developed by the company Realeyes, directs cameras at 149 different points on the face to track subtle facial reactions while the person watches a two-minute video, showing a series of people engaged in different travel activities, such as skiing, relaxing on the beach, trekking through greenery, bungee jumping, surfing, and so on.

Destination U is founded on the notion that viewers will have subtle facial reactions to the videos that will uncover their true, subconscious thoughts and feelings about each destination. At the end of the video, Destination U will reveal which activity/destination your face responded to most positively.

Its founder, Mikhel Jaatma, explained that 90 percent of human decision-making is done subconsciously. He said that the current method many companies have to find out what customers want is through verbal or written questionnaires, which can be rather tedious.

He added: Emotion measure measurement technology captures and delivers unfiltered emotional responses in real-time, delving much deeper and detecting non-conscious signals to stimuli. People aren’t considering their responses, they are organically reacting, giving a far more intuitive and raw response.

According to the company, the prototype is now well into testing. UK managing director Nick Longman explained that the Destination U prototype enables holidaymakers to intuitively unlock different travel possibilities and think about options they may not have considered before.

He explained: After taking more than 100 million customers on holiday over the last six decades as Thomson we understand that one size no longer fits all when it comes to travel. People are looking beyond the traditional package holiday, they want a holiday that is handpicked just for them and the next evolution in mass market travel is personalisation and customisation.

He added: It is our ambition to create holidays so personalised that they ‘choose you’. Or to put it another way, take customers to their perfect ‘Destination U’.

The software is still in prototype and not widely available to customers, but once TUI launches the product on the market, it could be implemented on a webcam, allowing anyone where uncover the secret travel desires of their subconscious from the comfort of their homes.

If this software sounds familiar to you, that’s because this is not the first prototype that uses facial recognition and scanning for feelings to reveal your travel desires. Indeed, Expedia released in 2016 a web campaign called Discover Your Aloha which recognised facial reactions to different activities in Hawaii with a webcam and a series of videos.

Martin Salo, Co-Founder of Realeyes, said, what’s special about Destination U is that it really takes facial expression data and creates personalised experiences, so it learns whether you like beaches or city breaks and then creates a unique destination recommendation specially for you.

Nick Longman added, Thompson is a great heritage business, but TUI is much more modern, much more contemporary business. We’ve been introducing virtual reality into stores and that has had a great reception. This is now taking it to the next level. I think customers are definitely ready to come in and be inspired.

Behind every great invention, there’s a great mind working towards progress. From mobile technology medical inventions, these technology wizards have revolutionised the way we live.

Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield’s invention - magnetic resonance imaging - has transformed almost every area of surgery, enabling doctors to see inside a patient’s body without cutting it open first.

MRI has totally changed neurosurgery, says Nirit Weiss, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Mouth Sinai School of Medicine in New York. If you open the skull and look at the brain, it looks like a blob - you can’t just look at it and see the different cell groups. But MRI has allowed us to visualise the brain’s structures so we have a map in our head of where to go and where to avoid.

Some revolutionaries were neglected by the scientific establishments of their time. For instance, Rosalind Franklin was excluded from sharing in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, despite her great contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA. In fact, she gave her life to the cause by exposing herself to massive amounts of radiation just to try to get the best possible X-ray photograph of a strand of DNA, which led her to die of cancer at the early age of 37. Her contribution made through the double helix provided the crucial evidence James Watson and Francis Crick needed to complete their model, and even so, neither scientist acknowledged her work when they received the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Another tech inventor that has changed the world is Tim Berners-Lee, credited with investing the World Wide Web in 1989. Upon designing and building the first Web browser, editor and server, he changed the way information is created and consumed.

Bill Gates also revolutionised the world today. He had an early interest in software and began programming computers at the age of thirteen. Later on, he founded Microsoft which became famous for their computer operating systems and killer business deals.

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it, Bill Gates said, in reference to the popular belief that inventors are lazy people who find a way to make their lives easier. He also once said, I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft. He has also been quoted saying: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Still in the field of computers, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently invented the single integrated circuit - the microchip - in 1959. This invention powered through the greatest obstacle to fast and more powerful computers. The microchip sparked a revolution in technological miniaturisation. Although Kilby was the one awarded with the Nobel Price, it was Noyce’s silicon-based chips that became popular, founded Intel in 1968, which is today the largest manufacturer of semiconductors. That year, Kilby also invented the personal calculator.

Filmmaker George Lucas revolutionised special effects in the movies by pioneering motion control camera techniques and spearheading the computer-generated imaging revolution in the 1980s. This revolution had its roots in Lucas‘ ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), which he founded in 1975 to bring his vision of Star Wars to life.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story, Lucas said. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

He has also revealed that the secret to film is that it’s an illusion.

Many has wondered where he got the inspiration from to revolutionise the film industry, he has stated: As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction. But instead of reading technical, hard-science writers like Isaac Asimov, I was interested in Harry Harrison and a fantastic, surreal approach to the genre. I grew up on it. Star Wars is a sort of compilation of this stuff but it’s never been put in one story before, never put down on film. There is a lot taken from Westerns, mythology, and samurai movies. It’s all the things that are great put together. It’s not like one kind of ice cream but rather a very big sundae.

A new computer simulation of refugees' journeys when they flee major conflicts can correctly predict more than 75% of their destinations, and may become a vital tool for governments and NGOs to contribute to allocate humanitarian resources more effectively and at strategic points.

Researchers at Brunel University London - Diana Suleimenova, Dr David Bell and Dr Derek Groen - from the Department of Computer Science, used publicly available refugee, conflict and geospatial data to construct simulations of refugee movements and their potential destinations for African countries.

The data-driven simulation tool was able to predict at least 75 percent of refugee destinations correctly after the first 12 days for three different recent African conflicts. It also proved to be more accurate than established forecasting techniques (‘naïve predictions') to forecast where, when and how many refugees are likely to arrive, and which camps are likely to become full and need a higher number of resources and assistance. These results were published in Scientific Reports.

The research team created their simulations for Burundian crisis in 2015, which took place after Pierre Nkurunziza attempted to become president for a third term; the Central African Republic (CAR) crisis in 2013, triggered when the Muslim Seleka group overthrew the central government; and the Mali civil war in 2012, which was caused by insurgent groups campaigning for independence of the Azawad region.

The team relied on open data resources to both enable these simulations and validate their accuracy. These sources included refugee registration data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and geographic information from Microsoft Bing Maps.

While not all refugee movements are accurately predicted in these simulations, their approach emulated the key refugee destinations in each of the three conflicts, thus it can be re-applied to simulate other conflict situations reported on by the UNHCR.

For instance, in Burundi, the simulation correctly predicted the largest inflows in Nyarugusu, Mahama and Nakivale throughout the conflict's early stages. Meanwhile, the simulation correctly reproduced the growth pattern in East camp of Cameroon, as well as the stagnation of refugee influx into Chad's camps. In Mali, the simulation accurately predicted trends in the data for both Mbera and Abala, which put together account for around three-quarters of the refugee population.

The researchers used a new-agent based modelling programme named Free, which was revealed to the public with the publication of their paper. Although agent-based modelling has been used more widely to study population movements, and has become a prominent method to explain migration patters, this is the first time it has been used to predict the destinations of refugees fleeing conflicts in the African continent.

Suleimenova, Bell and Groen explain in Scientific Reports that their simulation is not directly tailored to these conflicts, but a ‘generalised simulation development approach' which can forecast the distribution of refugee arrivals across camps, given a particular conflict scenario and a total number of expected refugees.

This simulation development approach allow organisations to quickly develop simulations when a conflict occurs, and enables them to investigate the effect of border closures between countries and forced redirection of refugees across camps. It also serves of assistance to define procedures for collecting data and validating simulation results, aspects which are usually not covered when presenting a simulation model on its own.

According to the authors, Accurate predictions can help save refugees' lives, as they help governments and NGOs to correctly allocate humanitarian resources to refugee camps, before the (often malnourished or injured) refugees themselves have arrived. To our knowledge, we are the first to attempt such predictions across multiple major conflicts using a single simulation approach."

The authors also urge greater investment in the collection of data during conflicts and they explain what this is important and what it's hard to get. "Empirical data collection during these conflicts is very challenging, in part due to the nature of the environment and in part due to the severe and structural funding shortages of UNHCR emergency response missions. Both CAR and Burundi are among the most underfunded UNHCR refugee response operations, with funding shortages of respectively 76 and 62%".

With record levels of 22.5 million refugees on a global scale, "more funding for these operations is bound to save human lives, and will have the side benefit of providing more empirical data – enabling the validation of more detailed prediction models."

The research group aims at collaborating with humanitarian organisations, adapting their technology to help specific humanitarian efforts, and to further reduce the time of development by automating the creation of these simulations.

'A generalized simulation development approach for predicting refugee movements' by Diana Suleimenova, David Bell and Derek Groen (Department of Computer Science, Brunel University London) is published in Scientific Reports.