India

How Two School Kids Are Successfully Running a $1.5 Million Mobile App Company from India

Founder, India, start-up, Tech Story / By Harshal Pawar

Imagine a 12 and a 14 year old brother-pair standing before the crowd, numbering approximately 5,500 – talking about business. Sounds a bit fictional, doesn’t it? Well, it’s a true story of two youngsters from India. The age when majority of kids are busy playing video games, or preparing school projects, these youngsters from Chennai are achieving what thousands of start-ups are still dreaming of. They started their own app development unit back in 2011 and have reached milestones during the span of six years.

The founders of GoDimensions, an app development unit, Shravan Kumaran, now 16, is the President and his younger brother Sanjay Kumaran, now 15, is the CEO of the company. The app development idea sprouted out of their passion in coding and an encouraging attitude of their father, Kumaran Surendran who is the director of Symantec, an American security software company. The Kumaran brothers launched their first app Catch Me Cop after developing a whopping 150 test apps. Their dedication is definitely praise worthy.

Catch Me Cop grabbed attention of multiple internet giants including cnet.com and the result was their app displayed on world’s leading tech company Apple’s App Store, a grand success for the young entrepreneurs. Catch Me Cop is a mobile game in which a convict escapes the prison and runs through various difficult terrains like a desert, maze, forest, etc. and the citizens are in search of this convict. The game became a sensation among the young as well as the adults who enjoyed catching the convict.

GoDimensions has launched 7 applications available for iOS and 3 for Android platform. The company has recently launched an app for the Windows phone platform. Shravan, currently a class 12^th student and Sanjay, studying in class 10 in HUS, Chennai work from their bedroom occupied with Apple Macs, Galaxy Notes and every high-end digital platform.

The long list of apps developed under GoDimensions hood include Alphabet Board – with a 5 star rating on app store, Prayer Planet – an app for praying to the God, ETC, CarRacingHD, Emergencybooth, E15, ColourPallete, and goDonate – a platform to share excess food, clothes, etc. to the needy. These apps, in total, have already crossed the 70,000+ download mark in over 60 countries with an average rating of 4.5 stars.

The brothers’ interest is not limited to coding and app development. Sanjay, the youngest of two, loves to play football and is the goalkeeper for his school’s football team whereas Shravan loves to play cricket and keyboard. Their mother and former journalist, Jyothi Lakshmi, recalls that she got suggestions that her children would be more productive from home rather than in school. But they both aim to complete their formal education and grow the company parallelly.

The young brother-duo were spotted during a TEDx talk and at a SAP event in Bangalore where they talked about sketching a business plan. Sanjay Kumaran quotes, “I believe that great UI is key for a great Business.” The company’s recent turnover entered the Crore club and their increasing user base will see a massive growth in income too.

Harshal Pawar

Harshal Pawar is an avid reader, a TV show addict, and a writer. He has a personal blog brainwork.wordpress.com where he jots down his articles and poetry about love and life.
He is currently pursuing film-making and wishes to bring the words written on a paper to the screen. More of all he is a scorpio.

Truecaller adds support for video calling and e-payments

India, News, Tech News / By Anoop Singh

Truecaller, the Sweden-based startup, is quite popular among smartphone users as an alternative to their boring default dialer app. The ability to identify and filter out spam calls makes it the first choice for million of smartphone users worldwide. On Tuesday, at its first annual ‘Stay Ahead’ event in Delhi, Truecaller announced its intention of transforming the brand from a service oriented app to a platform by launching its completely redesigned Android App- Truecaller 8.

At the event, company representatives openly spoke about their future goals highlighting their partnership with Google and ICICI, an Indian Bank in order to integrate video calling and e-payment functionality into new Truecaller app. Alongside these tie-ins, Trucaller decided to integrate its True messenger app with their dialer to bring spam free messaging functionality to its customers.

According to Alan Mamedi, chief executive officer and co-founder, Truecaller: “Spam SMS account for 15% of all SMS messages sent globally, and represents 1.2 trillion spam messages each year. On average, every spam call is about 40 seconds long, so we will help save a lot of time.” On top of it, now users can send flash messages-from a pre-written text library-in just 2 steps. This will be extremely helpful in situations when you are busy or stuck somewhere; just in 2 seconds you can send a flash message to inform someone.

Truecaller Pay is an addition to the list of features as a result of their partnership with ICICI in India. This allows Truecaller India users to send and receive money electronically via their android smartphones. ICICI Bank is providing the technology required to for such services.

“This is based on the feedback received from the market that users wanted to be able to make a transaction straight from their Truecaller app”, said Nami Zarringhalam, CSO and co-founder Truecaller.

The company also tied up with Google to integrate Google Duo, a video calling service, with the app itself. This functionality will be available in next few months for both Android and iOS users. According to Google, the deal aligns with their aim to make video calling simpler, faster and available to everyone.

Truecaller has also launched extended the caller identification for Indian subscribers of telecom operator Airtel where even people with feature phones would be able to use caller ID feature some other features. Airtel’s non-data users will also be able to identify spam calls with this new feature informing them by a flash message prior to the call. This unique way of extending services allows users to get online experience without subscribing to a data pack or buying a smartphone.

Truecaller is not the only company attacking e-payment opportunity in India. In his last visit to India, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton revealed his plans to tap into commercial messaging and digital payment whenever it’s the right time. Hike is another major player in the game with a strong focus on improving quality messaging supplemented with support of regular news, games and stickers.

Anoop Singh

Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.

Rahul Sharma: Raising Micromax to 10th largest mobile company of the world

India, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Ikrant Kumar Bhatia

“It’s an Indian product, why don’t you look for a similar one from a renowned company like Samsung or HTC…”

A quote that could be easily heard in mobile stores whenever someone tried to buy a mobile phone of Indian brand few years back until Micromax made its debut in the mobile market. Since the entry of Micromax in the world of mobile phones, the perception of Indian products have changed globally.

Micromax an Indian mobile manufacturing company is world’s 10th largest company and India’s no. 2 mobile company after Samsung. Micromax was started by Rahul Sharma along with his friends. When smartphones emerged in India, the market was dominated by Samsung and few lesser known Chinese phones. Micromax has changed that to large extent. Today people proudly flaunt their Micromax smartphone.

The Beginning
Micromax Informatics was started by Rahul Sharma and his three friends, but the main driving force behind the success of company can be attributed to the dynamic nature of Rahul. Rahul Sharma is married to Indian Bollywood actress Asin. The company was started in 2000 as an eCommerce company. Since gadget industry was very lucrative at that time, Micromax pivoted to developing embedded systems. The company was providing best class products and services and hence got the attention of the world’s leading mobile company, Nokia. Micromax clinched a hardware deal with Nokia for their M2M (Machine-to-Machine) business which resulted in a huge success for the company.

The Unwavering Beliefs
But the road to success was not supposed to be easy. In 2013 their M2M business partner, Nokia sold their mobile business to Microsoft. Nokia, considering the excellent quality of products and services provided by Micromax Informatics, offered them a new collaboration in Nokia Networks. But the Micromax team decided to decline the offer to collaborate with Nokia and walked away. Now being separated from Nokia they continued their existing business believing in their own products and capabilities.

Working independently in India, Micromax decided to manufacture their own hardware. With their services already being top notch, they soon collaborated with the Indian network provider giant, Bharti Airtel. Micromax’s first project with Airtel was to install payphones in the remote areas of Jammu and Kashmir. With their dedication and hard-work the project was completed successfully despite the rough geographical terrain.

Inspiration is just a different perception
Things were going smooth with company but it was not enough for the founders. Being chased by their passion and dreams to achieve new heights continuously they were always trying to grow their company. When such ideals are being followed, a small spark is enough to light a dazzling flame to blind the world.

When Rahul Sharma was on a trip to an interior region of West Bengal, he met a payphone operator, who was operating his business in an area with no electricity and very low network coverage. That network operator was using truck battery to supply power to the payphone. Rahul was amused by this innovative solution to the problem of power shortage but this encounter also made him think about the most common problem faced by the customers of mobile phones, fast draining batteries that required charging after few hours.

Rahul came up with the idea of entering the mobile phone market with mobile phones with battery lasting one month on a single charge. But his partners were reluctant to accept his idea as there was heavy competition in the mobile market. Not willing to give up, Rahul managed to convince them about the huge possibilities in the mobile market.

Expect the Unexpected
Though everyone agreed to the idea, it was decided to manufacture only 10,000 units initially and then observe the market’s reaction to their product. Hence, Micromax’s first ‘Stamina Battery’ phone was launched in 2008. In just 10 days, all phones got sold. The thing that astonished everyone was that their product went out of stock in such a short time without any serious advertising. It was publicized only through word-of-mouth.

Motivated with this huge positive feedback, company invested more money and resources in mobile phone market and soon launched more models. Considering the end users in India, Micromax’s all phones are designed keeping in mind the daily usage of common Indian customer. One of the main qualities of their products is their reasonable pricing.

While rising through the Indian mobile market and considering various options to help their customers in their everyday life, Micromax came up with the idea of dual-sim mobile phones. Providing this extremely useful feature to their customers this revolutionary idea had an ever changing effect on the mobile industry and created new niche in the mobile sector. Micromax’s popularity rocketed to new heights. To keep up with the extreme challenge being posed by Micromax many other top companies had to follow in the footsteps of Micromax and hence also introduced dual-sim mobile phones.

Soon after Micromax challenged all major mobile phone players globally to became world’s 10th largest phone manufacturing company. The company believed that if the end user are benefited from the product in one way or the other, the product would definitely be a success. Which proved right for various devices that the company launched into the market worldwide.

Things fall but to rise up again
In 2014, Micromax was second largest mobile phone company in India, and was challenging the world’s top and the number 1 mobile phone maker in Indian market. Its founders decided to bring managers from outside to help the company go forward. In the fourth quarter of 2014, with full dedication towards the company’s betterment its executives and CEOs along with the innovative ideas outperformed, the Korean company, Samsung and took the No.1 spot in the Indian mobile market.

But soon after the appointment of new executives, problems arose. The creative and risk taking dynamic approach of Micromax founders like Rahul Sharma, was not easily comprehended by the new executives who used to rely more on the facts and figures. Thus, Alibaba (one of the huge investors of Micromax) left the client pool of Micromax and walked away from a $1.2 billion purchase of about 20% shares in Micromax.

Due to lack of funding some of the Micromax projects had to be shut down and by final quarter of 2015 its smartphone market fell to 13% from 22%. But with founders Rahul Sharma, Vikas Jain, Sumeet Arora and Rajesh Agarwal still controlling the about 80% of the company have kept the company in profit.

Facing tough competition now, Micromax plans to increase its production by 100% that is from about 1.5 million units every month to 3 million units per month. Micromax also plans to increase its business overseas. Already a top 10 brand in Russia, Micromax has been looking for a partner to help it expand outside India and to indulge more in the business of televisions and tablets.

The Battle Royale
With vendors from Dragon land and other beasts like Samsung, Lenovo and Sony now taking the Indian market more seriously and introducing better products at cheap prices, the legendary Indian warrior Micromax has taken the fight head on and has been continuously rolling out products with performance at par with products from any other competitor, giving all competitors a run for their money around the globe. Today Micromax is a popular name in LED TV industry in addition to Smartphones.

Ikrant Kumar Bhatia

Ikrant Kumar Bhatia is a Digital Marketing Enthusiast and is passionate about becoming an Entrepreneur. He is currently working as an Internet Marketer and planning to come up with his own Startup.

Rocket Internet: The failed rocket science behind Jabong, Foodpanda and many more startups

India, Story, Tech Story / By Dhaval Nagare

Rocket Internet is a German Internet company that replicates successful online startups in lesser explored markets. Opposite to the name there is no rocket science used by Samwer brothers in their company, the Rocket Internet. The business model is simple, they would build companies which already existed but with a new and hungry work force. They would spend a huge capital to make sure the company grows in the span of two years or so and then sell the company at an alluring price. People say that unoriginal and copied ideas never work for long time. But, against all odds Rocket Internet’s strategy worked for long. Oliver Samwer also made a statement to Financial Times that

“There are three e-commerce companies in the world – Amazon, Alibaba and us”.

The only trick they used was to create products which were successful in USA and China and then launch these so called “new companies or products” in the other European countries. Rocket Internet is pretty good at marketing and business plan.

Replicating and selling eBay’s business model to eBay itself

The start to such an idea was formulated when the three brothers spent their time studying about the emerging startups in the Silicon Valley, while staying in San Francisco in 1998. They observed that many people bought stuff online and also sold stuff online on eBay. The Samwer brothers after returning to Germany implemented eBay’s business model and forged a company in Berlin called “Alando” which was a replica of an online auction company. Alando was aquired by eBay for $43 million within 3 months of its launch.

Rocket Internet

Thre brothers Marc, Oliver, Alexander Samwer continued this strategy and in 2007 founded their company Rocket Internet. Oliver Samwer was the driving force behind the company. The company was mainly into food and groceries, fashion, travel, home and living, general merchandise and new business and investments.

In 2010 Samwer brothers started CityDeals which was acquired by Groupon for $170 million within five months of it’s launch. In 2008 Rocket Internet founded Zalando, an online shopping website inspired from Zappos.com. They even tried to create a copy of Airbnb but couldn’t succeed because of brand name and niche community.

Rocket Internet expanded in other markets including India. Rocket Internet started its Indian journey with the help of three Indians entrepreneurs- Ankur Warikoo, Praveen Sinha and Arun Chandra Mohan. They were to handle the Indian business of Rocket India. These three Indians were the front line of Asasa.com, Rocket Internet’s first business in India. All of the three were invited to a boot camp in Zalando’s warehouse in Berlin to know more about how things work in there since they had to replicate the operations and other procedure in India.

In 2011 the three Indians hired approximately 70 employees after returning from boot camp as they were ready to go live in India. These entrepreneurs were given the post of MD and co-founders and were on a monthly payroll. They were minority share holders of the company. In later years the co-founders started realizing that they were valued very less as compared to the revenues and profits made by these companies. This was one of the reasons for the failure of Rocket Internet in India and also the death of Asasa.com. Later in the years Jabong and Fabfurnish also could not capture the Indian market and failed to fight competitors like Myntra, Flipkart. Rocket Internet ended up in selling them as well.

According to many people the harsh nature of Rocket Internet with employees and founders lead to a failure in India. The co-founders had low equity in the companies and also there was a fear of job insecurity in their minds since more or less they were treated like employees and not founders. Owing to many such issues the Rocket India could not grow any further. Recently Foodpanda was also sold to Delivery Hero. Despite all these failures, HelloFresh, a Rocket Internet company recently raised $88 million. Answer only lies in future as to how far Rocket Internet goes in terms of growth and revenues.

Dhaval Nagare

Dhaval Nagare is an electrical engineer, a humourist, an impressionist and also likes writing. His writing include all sorts of topics and mostly he writes to inspire and motivate people. You can also catch him on facebook https://www.facebook.com/dhaval.nagare

Sridhar Vembu: How this man from India created a 500 million dollar company that competes with Google?

India, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Yogesh Pandey

Sridhar Vembu is living the dream of every entrepreneur. He is constantly chased by VCs and he is rejecting them! The company, who are the makers of online Zoho Office Suite and other similar products, has reached to an extent where Mac Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, is desperate to buy the company, due to nervousness of getting out-beaten. But Sridhar rejected his offer as well.

Beginning of an era

Sridhar Vembu belongs to a modest middle class family, situated in Chennai, India. He completed his schooling from a government aided school in Tamilnadu. He then went to IIT-Madras and obtained his undergraduate degree. At IIT, he met Tony Thomas, who was three years senior to him, and who is the co-founder of AdventNet, which later became Zoho Corporation. Later on, Sridhar moved to Princeton University, in 1989, and completed his Electrical Engineering.

In 1994, he completed his Ph.D. and joined Qualcomm, where he worked for two years. When his brother suggested the plan to start a company, he quit his job at Qualcomm and rushed back to India. The two brothers along with Tony Thomas founded Vembu Software.

All the business was bootstrapped, with the investment made only by family and friends. To this day, when the Zoho had become a multi-million dollar company, they still work without any external funding, rejecting the continuous offers they keep on receiving.

“On those fundamental principles, we are not budging,” says Raju Vegesna, 37, Zoho’s chief evangelist. “We keep getting calls from venture capitalists but Sridhar (CEO) has even blogged asking them not to bug us.”

The business started well and they sold their products to a lot of companies in Silicon Valley and in Japan too. By the end of the year 2000, they’d grown to 115 engineers in India, 7 employees in US, with a business of $10 Million USD.

The setback and the comeback

In the year 2001, during the Dot Com Bubble burst, the networking faced a huge setback. The company customers list reduced from 150 customers down to just three customers. This resulted into a lot of resources and engineers being idle.

What seemed like a setback was blessing in disguise. They took two mandatory decisions.

They took the management networking software which they sold as Order Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and converted it into an Enterprise model. This gave birth to ManageEngine.

On the other hand they had an on demand effort. They invested some man power and resources into that and this gave rise to Zoho!

The company changed its name to AdventNet in 2005, and later changed it to Zoho Corporation in 2009. The business started growing over the internet for the rented software rather than selling the licensed copy for expensive software. They started Zoho.com, offering internet based software for work. They also started three more divisions, Zoho.com, WebNMS and Manage Engine. The graph of company’s growth headed upwards rapidly. Sridhar and team so loved the name Zoho that the domain name was purchased for $5000 from a us based startup that was in liquidation process.

By the end of the year 2012, the total revenue of the Zoho Corporation was near to $120 million USD and that of 2006 was $500 million USD, with 18 million users worldwide!

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Company culture and competition

Zoho has its own way of recruiting. They had set up their own Zoho University where they hire college dropouts and underprivileged students from low income backgrounds and train them to code and develop software products in India.

“I hardly spoke any English at the time, but I was really good at math… maybe that’s why they hired me,” says Babu, who was one of six young people recruited into what would become the first batch of trainees at Zoho University. He is now 28 and is product manager at Chennai based Zoho corporation private limited. Unlike other big shots in software industry, Vembu believes in smartness of individuals and hence recruits in a very innovative fashion. On one hand, where all the toppers are the point of attractions for regular recruiters, Vembu, who is an alumni of an elite institute, invests in training dropouts.

Today Zoho has more than 30 products that compete with big companies like Google & Salesforce. Vembu believe that he makes his prime minister and country proud in their Make In India campaign. ‘I am a great fan of Modi,’ says Vembu.

Although their customer base is spread worldwide, their major man power source is in India, that too, otherwise neglected youth. Thus, the true objective of make in India is fulfilled by Vembu and company.

Yogesh Pandey

Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.

He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.

Steve Jobs: The tech visionary who created such a lasting legacy

India, Inspiration, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Team YTS

Success and struggle are just like two sides of the same coin. A man who used to return Coke bottles to earn 5¢ to buy food, and walk 7 miles every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple created a legacy which is flourishing even after his death.

Steve Jobs the man behind MAC, iPad, iPOD and iPhone was abandoned by his biological parent, fired from his own company and suffered from cancer. Despite all these ups and downs he never lost focus and love for technology. Coming generations would hardly believe that it was one man who revolutionized music, smartphone and computer industry.

Steve always loved technology and even in college days he preferred practical knowledge over bookish knowledge. Jobs’ interest in electronics began to smoke up as he extended a helping hand to his father’s garage and began to befriend many engineers living in his neighborhood.

Love what you do

In his high school Steve Jobs approached Hewlett Packard and asked for some parts for his school project. The boy’s boldness impressed him and he not only agreed to provide the parts but also offered him an internship at his office. This was indeed a great opportunity for Jobs to formally step into the techno world. While interning for Hewlett Packard he met Steve Wozniak who worked as an engineer there. Wozniak was very passionate about technology like Jobs and they both became friends to change the face of technology in the coming future.

Jobs then got entangled with his higher studies and finally admitted himself in Reed College. But it seemed he could not find his place there and therefore dropped out from the college after first semester. His inclination towards spirituality tempted him to visit India, yet the love for electronics never faded away.

Beginning the journey with Apple

After he returned from India, Steve Jobs contacted Wozniak who then was busy in building a small computer. The idea caught up Jobs’ far sighted eyes and he proposed to take this computer into the business world with him. After convincing Wozniak they arranged to set up a shop at his father’s garage and named their business ‘Apple’. We therefore see how this topmost company sprouted from a garage. But as is the way of life, nothing goes smooth and easy and the task to collect seed money to start the business stood like a gigantic monster in front of them. Jobs sold his micro bus and Wozniak his calculator to make an investment of $1350. And this is how they introduced Apple I in 1975.

Although the computer could only get attention of hobbyists yet the sales collected decent amount of cash which gave them a way to redesign the computer into a better model. After 2 years, Apple II was launched in the market with coloured graphics and keyboard. The computer hit the market making huge success and made $3 million in its first year while the sales went up to $200 million in the next year. The success of Apple II marked a benchmark in the career of Steve Jobs.

Facing a downfall

Undoubtedly Apple II was a great success for Jobs but he failed to retain it for long. However, he did not put a pause to his efforts in introducing new designs and techniques to his computers but his efforts failed every time. The sales started decreasing with Apple III and LISA as new companies like IBM began to take over the market. But he never backed out and in 1984 Jobs brought another design in the market and named it as Apple Macintosh which came with a new user-friendly hardware, a mouse. But even this enhancement could not save him.

Jobs’ troubles didn’t seem to end here as the clash with his company’s board of directors in 1983 resulted in his losing of control over Apple in 1985. And eventually he had no other option than to sell his shares and resign. The irony of life could be exemplified best with this situation as Jobs was kicked out of the very company he founded.

Stagnation was never meant for Steve Jobs and thus after resigning from Apple he launched another computer company named NeXT. But his aim to bring a revolution in the technical field did not come out as expected since the computers were highly expensive. Meanwhile, he also bought Pixar Animation Studios in 1986 which became the most important stepping stone in his career. With Pixar he made an animation film ‘Toy Story’ which was a smash hit. The great success of ‘Toy Story’ raised Pixar’s 80% shares to $1 billion.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

Just after Pixar was made public, Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and gave Jobs a position as an advisor to the company’s CEO. But the company faced a failure in keeping up its old position and dealt with a quarterly loss of $708 million. As a result of this, the then CEO of Apple resigned from his position and Steve Jobs got back hold of the company by seating himself as the new CEO of Apple. He raised the company value by signing deal with Microsoft and also brought in new technology fronts in the computers. In no time the company’s sales revived and reached to $5.9 billion. Jobs then expanded the company with new products like iPod, iPhone and iPad. However, struggling with ill health Jobs resigned from his position as CEO in 2011.

Steve Jobs’ journey could be summed up in his own words uttered at Stanford University in 2005. His success could be traced by “connecting the dots” of the events that took place. Every turn of his life proved to be of immense importance at some point later. From taking the risk to drop out from the college to resigning from his own company, his decisions led him to better prospects. And his mantra of life, “keep looking, don’t settle” unless you are truly satisfied with what you are doing is worth adopting. It was his relentless efforts and uncompromising attitude that made him the pioneer of techno world. The legacy still continues with latest iPhone 7 and AirPods.

Jobs historic Standford address about life, love and loss