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Alok Kejriwal- From making socks to leading online game company

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

The thinker + Doer = Rodinhood says his Quora profile; Alok Kejriwal is the man who changed the pace of India’s online gaming industry. Rodinhood is inspired from Rodin – who sculpted ‘The Thinker’ and Robin Hood who ‘got things done’.Alok Kejriwal

Born on 25th December, 1968, the renowned CEO and co-founder of Games2win is known to the world as Rodinhood. Alok Kejriwal is an entrepreneur who knows how to utilize a problem as an opportunity to build business around it. He started his journey by joining his family business of socks manufacturing at the age of 18, while he was still in college. After 10 years, he moved out of the family business and started something of his own which was not into manufacturing. He went on to venture in mobile and then online games.

Making of the Rodinhood

As they say, leader is  one who knows the way, shows the way and goes the way. Alok Kejriwal is a true leader and has proved his leadership, honesty and truthfulness in every walk of life. He started his socks business around 1989. Once when his socks factory was preparing Argyle socks order for a leading retailer he noticed an issue with packaging. He picked up one bundle of socks and opened it like a consumer for final inspection. As he ripped the adhesive sticker from the socks, he was thunderstruck as the thread of the small ‘criss cross’ lines that make the Argyle pattern so famous began ripping out of the socks. The shipment was ready to be shipped in 3 hours and the socks had PASSED inspection from Europe and India. Without worrying about extra cost of building top pair of socks and losing credibility or business he decided to be truthful and informed the buyer. This critical decision earned him a lot of respect in the eyes of buyer. The buyer was so delighted and grateful that he not only paid for extra cost but also gave many more orders in future.

In 1998, Kejriwal founded an online contests portal company named Contests2win.com (C2W) with a borrowed laptop and only Rs 5,000. He realized the power of internet while working in the family business. During this time, he used the internet for information on spare parts on company websites. “I got fascinated with the power of Internet to distribute knowledge and thought of building business around it.”, Alok once said.

Later, he launched a venture entitled “Mobile2win” in china in 2001. Mobile2Win organized mobile competitions and promotions on mobile interactive platforms. In 2003 mobile2win operations were also started in India. He got the VAS Business of Sony Channels’ singing show Indian Idol. Alok was one of the pioneers of ringtone business. He did create a lot of value and money before mobile companies and tv channels themselves started doing this business to maximize their profits.

Mobile2win was doing fantastic but due to funding, scale and other issues, Alok was  asked to leave mobile2win. However, this sad exit turned out to be good for him in long turn. He got million dollars on exit from mobile2win which he invested in conetst2win. Later the Indian arm of mobile2win went to Chandigarh (India) based company for no cash deal while Chinese mobile2win got acquired by Disney.

Taking the legacy forward, he came up with a new venture Games2win in the year 2007. Today, Games2win is ranked among top gaming site across the world. The most popular game at Games2win is Parking Frenzy and has about 20-25 million downloads. Besides Parking Frenzy, another 15 of their games have 1 million downloads now.

As the popularity increased, Games2win discovered that thousands of other websites and blogs were embedding Games2win games on their sites. Instead of blocking games on other websites or sending them copyright infringement notices, Alok and his team used an innovative idea. They started displaying Ads within the game whenever it was played on a website other than Games2win. Suddenly their success metric changed to the number of websites illegally embedding their games. More the embeds, more display ads, more revenue.

Although not being a great supporter of mobile only approach, he moved Games2win from a top game company to a mobile games company while struggling with static traffic in 2010. Games2win started focusing on mobile games and stopped making web games in 2014. New games are only available for smartphones. However, you can still play old games on their website.

Tough calls and work life balance

Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns. Being a successful entrepreneur and a successful father, husband at the same time is not that easy. You are always occupied with business deals, meetings, and dinner with clients and what not. Alok Kejriwal is married to Chhavi Kejriwal and has two daughters. In his blog “would you marry an entrepreneur? “, he jotted the pros and cons of marrying an entrepreneur. Topping it with his own story, he recalled a real life incident.

Can you imagine where was he when his second daughter was born? Hospital? No, you got it wrong! Well he wrote,” I skipped visiting the hospital and escorting my wife and my newborn daughter (my second child) home, because that evening I was signing some term sheets of my first venture contests2win.com in the lobby of The Oberoi in Mumbai.”

Startup mentor, critic and attention grabber

Alok never shies from going public with his views on different startups and their business ideas and many times he has been proved right. Alok criticized the app only approach of Myntra and Flipkart which turned out to be true after these companies rolled back their decision.

The the blue eyed gaming champ also criticized then Housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav for two Housing.com hoardings that were barely visible behind trees which attracted a sharp reaction form Rahul Yadav.

Alok kejriwal

Alok kejriwal rahul yadav

Amidst all the criticism, chaos and challenges, Alok kept pushing himself and continued to grow as an entrepreneur. He knows the art of being in news and use the right opportunity at right point of time.

Alok belongs to that rare breed of successful entrepreneurs who go extra mile to help budding entrepreneurs achieve success. This “Crazy Internet Entrepreneur” of India is playing the role of a startup mentor and motivator. Alok runs Rodinhood.com where he and fellow Rodinhoods share their experiences related to startups, products, teams, marketing & business. Nothing can beat such startup stories and experiences in helping budding entrepreneurs run their show successfully. He and his team of volunteers organize The Rodinhoods Open House(TRH) in different cities of the country for free. TRH helps startups meet industry leaders, pitch their product to investors and network with fellow entrepreneurs.

A TRH workshop in progress

His favorite advice to entrepreneurs is

“To go where no man has gone before…” (from Star Trek).

Who invented email? Shiva Ayyadurai or Ray Tomlinson

India, Story, Tech Story / By

A google search for “Who invented email” returns the name of an India-born scientist Shiva Ayyadurai who allegedly invented email at the age of fourteen.

Shiva

Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai was born in Mumbai (Bombay), India. He along with his family left to US at the age of 7. He studied computer programming at New York University and later joined MIT to get four undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in addition to PHD in biological engineering. Shiva as he is popularly known, also founded a company worth $200 million called Echo Mail.

According to various internet sources including Shiva’s own website, at the age of 14 he wrote a software program to automate the conventional paper-based interoffice communication system of University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). While computer to computer communication was already in use, Shiva claims that he was the first to introduce essential email features that we use today in the year 1978. He introduces the email terms like From, To, CC, BCC, Forward, Reply etc in his program.

In the absence of patent laws Shiva applied for copyright for the program called “Email” in 1982. V.A. Shiva still holds the copyright for the program and the term “Email”.

Copyright Email

He has been seeking public support for quite some time to strengthen his claim after there has been a controversy on who invented email. He has also published a book called “The Boy Who Invented Email & His 7 Secrets of Innovation” which talks more about his invention.

The controversy: Is Shiva Ayyadurai the man who invented email?

Critics say that in 1982 Shiva just copyrighted the term ’email’ and a program he wrote and that such digital communication between computers existed long before 1978.

In 2011 Time published an interview with Shiva titled “The man who invented Email” crediting him as the inventor of email. Major controversy started when posts related to email invention on The Washington Post and Huffington post were trolled with nasty comments and facts that refuted Shiva’s claim. The Washington Post updated the post and clarified that Dr. V. A. Shiva was not the inventor of email.

Many people credit Ray Tomlinson of Cambridge-based BBN Technologies as the first person who used @ symbol in 1971 to send messages between computer terminals. Later many others built upon Tomlinson’s work and devised their own methods to share information over the network. Shiva claims that those earlier systems and other ARPANET programs were merely a way of simply sending and receiving text messages. His Email program, on the other hand, was invented specifically to replicate paper based mail system used in office electronically and comprised of elements & features which a standard email system today have.

Noam Chomsky professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at MIT supports Shiva’s claim and was quoted by Wired as-

“Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable”

Chomsky’s argument is that Ayyadurai received a formal copyright registration on his email program in 1982, and that in 1977, David Crocker — who worked on the ARPAnet and has criticized Ayyadurai’s claims — wrote that “no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system.”

“Given the term email was not used prior to 1978, and there was no intention to emulate ‘…a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system,” as late as December 1977, there is no controversy here, except the one created by industry insiders, who have a vested interest,”

Whether or not “Dr. E-Mail”, VA Shiva Ayyadurai invented the email, he is an authority on Email technology, e-marketing and biotechnology.

Right now Shiva is busy with his bio-tech startup CytoSolve. CytoSolve has developed the world’s first computational platform for scalable integration of molecular pathway models. You can read more about Shiva on his website, inventor of email, history of email, Wikipedia and make your own judgement. Shiva’s website is full of documents, web references and scanned newspaper clippings that talk about his side of story.


Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Interviewed on CBS TV

Image credit- http://www.inventorofemail.com/

InMobi, a company that ran out of money to $2bn acquisition speculations

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

Every startup goes through ups and downs. It’s the critical business decisions, tough calls, hard work, persistence that makes startups survive and successful in long run.  InMobi was started  in 2006 as SMS based search platform, mKhoj, that later pivoted to become a mobile advertising platform. Founded by  Naveen Tiwari, Abhay Singhal, Mohit Saxena, and Amit Gupta, InMobi which today clocks  138 Billion monthly ad impressions and has 17 offices worldwide once barely had enough money to survive and was on the verge of possible shutdown.

Since than InMobi has come a long way. Today, company competes with Google’s AdMob, Apples’ iAd and there are speculations that Microsoft is going to acquire InMobi for $2 billion.

How team that built InMobi hopped in together
Four friends came together to build next-gen mobile ad platform. They built the first version mKhoj working out from a rented apartment in Mumbai.  In 2007 when company ran out of money, management ran the company for two months on 14 credit cards without paying bills before they hit a funding of $7 million.

Big leap & the funding
In initial days Mohit and Abhay were themselves doing cold calls to get the business. In 2007 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures invested $7M in InMobi. In 2008 company took a call to go global but decided not to go in a crowded market like US but  in markets like southeast Asia & Africa.

Company growth and culture
From the initials days itself company believed in long term strategy to invest in technology and people. InMobi has built a great culture. Most people in the company has stock options since the founders believe that when company tastes the success, employees too should get rewarded enough for the risk, passion and commitment to stand together in every thick and thin of the company. Unlike conventional HR standards, the company has no standard performance monitoring system, no raking and ratings and believes in employee growth and empowerment.

InMobi’s is a story of passion, a story of commitment, a story of  an Indian company that dared to go global.

Video credit: InMobi YouTube, Nasscom