Recipe Book: the 'shake and make' way to Google

Shake it up! Shake it up! That’s it. And like Aladdin’s magic lamp, Recipe Book, an innovative cookery app, brings before you never-thought-of recipes. This explains why it’s raining incentives galore on Agrima Infotech, the only Malayali startup from India, to make it to Google’s global mentoring initiative, the Launchpad Accelerator Program for its unusual app. Apart from the Kochi-based firm, five other Indian startups have found a niche for themselves on the Google hotspot.

The startup app, Recipe Book, is at present riding the crest of a huge Google wave. For, it has won for itself a prominent place on the prestigious search engine’s training, Google Launchpad Accelerator program.

Wonder what to cook on a rainy, lazy Saturday morning with only three carrots, one potato and a handful of beans on you? Just shake it up. Shake your smartphone and hey presto, your screen lights up with umpteen recipes.

Recipe Book marked its entry into cyber world in 2015. Anybody with a smartphone could access it. By now, over 30 lakh netizens have downloaded the app, which works on Android and IOS platforms. Agrima Infotech was set up by Anoop Balakrishnan (CEO), Nikhil Dharman (CTO) and Arun Ravi (CMO), all of whom graduated from Sree Narayana Gurukulam Engineering College, Kadyirippu.

The trio, initially drawn to Artificial Intelligence, concentrated on research into robotics. Things took a turn when one fine day, they were stuck over what to cook for a meal. So from matters cerebral, they came down to matters mundane. Thus was born Recipe Book. Though the basics of the app, built on Artificial Intelligence and Image Recognition, is as good as Greek and Latin to a lay person, it’s easily maneuverable.

No matter what the ingredients, Recipe Book will cook up a way to show you how to go about things. All you need to do is click a picture of all the stuff you have and post it on the app. You will soon be inundated by a barrage of recipes. Or you can go for the “shake and make” option. Pre-loaded on the app are images of countless ingredients. Touch the ingredients you have and shake your phone! The possibilities are immense. Onto your screen will come dishes you can try out with whatever you have.

As for the three whizkids, it’s a load of incentives, cash benefits and  once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that await them. Here goes the list: 50,000 US dollars ( Rs 32.4 lakh) free funding, hands-on-training for six months at Google, two-week free training at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, opportunities for interacting with Google engineers and mentors, opportunities to use for free Google’s cloud services worth 10,000 dollars (Rs 6.48 lakh) and avenues for finding new markets. These are Google’s gifts to those startups, which make it to the Accelerator program.

Google, through its Launchpad, has been providing incentives and popularizing startups, which come out with brilliant apps, thereby transforming development and global innovation concepts.

IndiaLends, SigTuple, EdGE Network, RailYatri and FastFilmz are the other apps from India to join Recipe Book on Launchpad.