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fixcraft.in

Vivek Sharma : The Founder of Fixcraft.in who has Set the Indian Auto Sector on Fire

Talking about fancy expensive car companies, we can name hundreds of them, isn’t it? But what after you purchase the car? Do you get proper servicing at an affordable rate, or is it like spending your month’s half salary to fix the car? Indeed, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) workshops are not affordable for everyone, but currently, they are dominating the market. So do you have any names in mind that are up for the game, but at cheaper prices? Well, we have one. Fixcraft.in it is!

Yes, Fixcraft.in is a fresh start-up in the automobile industry, established to improve the Auto After Sales services in India. Vivek Sharma, the founder of Fixcraft.in, founded the company on 10th October 2018 to make significant growth in the automobile sector and especially, to remove the burden of expensive garage costs for all the car owners.

Education and Early Career of Vivek Sharma

Sharma went to Marine Engineering and Research Institute and graduated with a B.E. degree in 2006. After passing out as a marine engineer, in 2006 he joined Seaarland Shipping Management B.V. as an assistant to chief engineer. He worked there for three years, and during this period, he was also exposed to the work culture of foreign countries. He travelled across 26 different countries and trained a team on how to act at the time of various emergencies. His major works included managing, operating and maintaining the schedule of the engine room of the ship.

Vivek Sharma Fixcraft.in
Image Source: crunchbase.com

He left the company in 2009 and joined Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2010 and graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, Strategy and Marketing, in 2012. During his time in IIM, Bangalore he did a summer internship from the Philips Electronics India Ltd. He learned about the cluster analysis, competition analysis; develop a market strategy with information and data making and estimating market potential.

After graduating from IIM, Bangalore, he was again back to Philips Electronics as a Deputy Manager (Lighting) and worked there for a year. His main job there was to manage B2B sales in Delhi.

In May 2013, he joined the Hyderabad branch of the company as ASM, Andhra Pradesh (Lighting) and became the sales head for B2B Lighting Division of Andhra Pradesh.

In the next year, his career met huge success, as he joined Snapdeal as Associate Director. He was the founding member of the Account Management Team, and also, the Head for Sales and Strategy for key categories. He left Snapdeal in November 2016.

The last company he joined before founding his own was Droom Technology, a start-up by Sandeep Aggarwal. He joined the company as Senior Director of Business Development as was promoted to Associate Vice President of the same department after 9 months. He left Droom just one month before founding his own company.

Fixcraft.in

By the time Sharma founded Fixcraft.in, he had already gathered more than enough experience and knowledge in the automobile sector. The main motive of Sharma was to bridge the gap between local garages and OEM workshops for After Sales Services. Moreover, the market for After Sales Services was expected to reach a value of 20 billion in the next five years. And, this section of the industry includes both old and new customers, which means there will be possibly no drop-in rate of consuming services in this sector.

Fixcraft.in is the first Indian full-stack cloud-based garage which provides service starting from parts replacement to car painting at a very fair price.

Sharma’s biggest challenge while founding Fixcraft.in was to build a strong team and get it to work together. But with time, he has built a good core team and now working on expanding his business. Since Sharma’s main goal was to provide quality services at an affordable price, he is operating on the Cost Plus model of pricing.

In this very year, Sharma’s business received an undisclosed amount of money in seed funding, which included some significant angel investors, like Ranjan Kant, Former Director at the Furniture Republic and CBO at Ofbusiness; Rahul Taneja, ex CBO at Jabong, and from the other existing investors. The company also has Rishab Malik in the advisory team, who worked with Droom and GSF India.

Future Plans

With less than a year of its establishment, Fixcraft.in is doing well in the automobile sector. With its business running only in Delhi NCR, they are planning to expand it to Pune and Bangalore, within next few months. By the end of 2020, Fixcraft.in plans to establish a business in the top 15 cities of India.

Docker

Solomon Hykes : The Founder of Enterprise Container Platform, ‘Docker’

Open-source is one technology that has helped developers to improve their software and lead it to the next level with the help of other developers, without even knowing them. This technology not only helps the main developer but also the other developers to grow their skills. WordPress being one of the biggest examples of such successful startup that has emerged mostly because it is open source and the community behind it. Soloman Hykes, also known as a French founder in Silicon Valley, is another startup owner, who made use of the open-source technology and established one of the biggest open-source development and deployment container providers, Docker.

Solomon Hykes was born to an American father and a French-Canadian mother in New York. But his family flew to France when he was four years old. He was introduced to computers when he was seven and instantly, became interested in coding. Hykes joined the Epitech School in 2001, where he started learning to programme. Alongside his studies, he got a job at a nearby cyber cafe, where he practised coding and ran the cafe’s servers. During this time, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego, and even, worked for a French movie company in Los Angeles.

In 2006, he graduated as a computer engineer and bagged a job at a computer security company. But there was something else he wanted to do. Only two years after starting his first job, in 2008, Hykes resigned to start a company of his own, along with Sébastien Pahl, a fellow student from Epitech. The two named the company as dotCloud, with which the two started working on a software that would offer a platform for developers to code on Amazon’s cloud.

Solomon Hykes Docker
Image Source: techcrunch.com

The two co-founders took the startup to Y Combinator in summer 2010 but got rejected. They again applied for the startup program in the winter session of the same year. But yet again were not selected. But at the very last moment, Paul Graham from Y Combinator changed his mind and selected dotCloud on a condition. The condition was to make all the Y Combinator peers to signup for dotCloud’s software.

At the startup program, Hykes presented the idea of a common container for software development and deployment. He wanted to create a container that could be accessed from anywhere, such that many computers interconnected into a cluster. With the very idea, dotCloud raised a decent amount of seed funding and started developing the software.

In 2011, Hykes shifted the company to the Silicon Valley, and the company raised an $11 million in Series A in April in the same year, from names like Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. At that time, the company was the only PaaS provider, and even, AWS was providing better support for the software. The company started to grow rapidly, and in 2013, the company dotCloud became Docker.

Though the company was going through a good time, there was still something that it was lacking. During the same time, Hykes got a decent offer for selling the company, but he decided not to and was tinkering around to make things right for the company.

So in the same year, Hykes made the company’s software an open-source platform, and RedHat was the one big company to step in to use the very software for its PaaS platform, OpenShift. In 2014, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating the Docker products into its Windows Server version in 2016. The same year, Google, Amazon and IBM also came in a partnership with the company. In 2014, the company raised a $40 million in the Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company also acquired another startup named startup Orchard.

In 2015, the company became a unicorn company, after it valued $1 billion through a $95 million Series D fundraising led by Insight Venture Partners. By the end of the same year, the company again raised an $18 million in the Series D round. In the latest round of funding in 2018, the company has raised a $92 million.

In the beginning, Docker started with a single project, but now, it hosts projects like containers, LinuxKit, SwarmKit, and the Moby, etc, based on the Docker technology.

On 28 March 2018, Solomon Hykes stepped down as the CEO of the company, remaining on the board of the company valued $ 1.3 billion.

Apple event

Apple Event 2019: All Products that Apple Talked About

With Apple’s iPhone 11 being the biggest highlight, Apple finally hosted its annual Apple Event 2019, which started at 10 a.m. PT and 10:30 p.m. IST and took place at the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. Along with the iPhone, there were many other products that the company talked about during the event.

The products, other than the iPhone, mainly includes the new version of the Apple Watch, and the launch of Arcade, a subscription-based game for mobile, desktop and living room. Finally, the company has also launched its much anticipated Apple TV+, that will be up for a rivalry with Netflix through its original TV shows.

Apple, like every other year, took to the stage of its Apple Event to launch its new flagship smartphone iPhone 11. Like the previously launched Apple iPhone X, the company has brought three smartphones to the iPhone 11 lineup, which includes iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone Pro Max.

Apple event
Image Source: Apple YouTube

Each of these iPhones are in other three variants based on their storage capacities. The Apple iPhone 11 has got storages 64GB ($699), 128GB ($749), and 256GB ($849). The three variants of iPhone 11 Pro includes 64GB ($999), 256GB ($1,149) and 512GB ($1,349). And, the iPhone 11 Pro Max renders stoargae capacities of 64GB ($1099), 256GB ($1,249) and 512GB ($1,449).

This time, the company has brought the dual sim option to the iPhones through a Nano-SIM card slot and an eSIM. The iPhone 11 is said to be the successor of the iPhone XR launched last year and has been upgraded to a dual-camera setup, including a standard wide-angle lens and an ultra-wide-angle lens. And, on the other hand, the other two newly launched smartphones are packed with triple 12MP sensors rear cameras that include an ultra-wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens.

The iPhone 11 has got a 6.1 inches LCD display, and for the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max, the company has used 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch OLED screen, respectively. The processor used in all the iPhone 11 models is an A13 Bionic chipset, which according to the company is way faster than the processors used in its previously launched iPhones. iPhone 11 comes in six new colours, including purple, green, yellow, white, red and black. The colour choices for the iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone Pro Max are midnight green, space grey, silver and gold.

Talking about the Arcade, that the company launched with a partnership with gaming giants Konami, Capcom and Annapurna Interactive, is said to be the first subscription service for mobile and desktop. There will be more than 10,000 games that the users will have access through the subscription. The service will be available for $4.99 per month.

The company also launched the Apple TV+ for a $4.99 monthly subscription fees that will be streaming in over 100 countries. In fact, the company has announced a one-year free subscription with the purchase of any of its iPhone, iPad or Apple TV.

The company also introduced its new 7th generation iPad, empowered with the newly launched iPad OS, having a 10.2-inch display. According to Apple, the iPad has three times better pixels on its display, and for the first time, any of its iPad is having a 100% recycled aluminium body. The price of the new Apple iPad is set to be $329, and it will cost $299 for the educational institutions.

Last but not least, another highlight of Apple Event was the new Apple Watch Series 5, completely dedicated to human health. The watch will be looking after the health of the human heart, and the other women related health issues. The watch also includes a compass and decibel reader to monitor noise level. There are two types of models, one of which only includes the GPS ($399), and the other includes both GPS and the cellular service ($499). The users will also have an option for international emergency calling over the watch. The watch is available in five colours, i.e., silver, gold, aluminium, black and white.

Kobo

Michael Serbinis : A Significant Entrepreneur who Founded Kobo

There always doesn’t have to be a reason for reading. Reading has always been valuable as it only adds up to your knowledge. That is why the community of book lovers is expanding with every passing second. But, we do know that everyone can’t afford the highly expensive original editions of classic novels every time. So for such a crisis, the e-books become the true guardian angels in our life.

Kobo Inc. is a Canada-based platform that is famous for selling e-books and electronics. The company serves customers at a global level and has attracted more than 10 million readers by now. Its founder Michael Serbinis, who is an engineer, entrepreneur and an angel investor, is even more famous for founding more than just one company.

Where Michael Serbinis belongs?

Born on 28th October 1973, Michael Serbinis belongs to the land of maple syrup, i.e., Canada. His keen interest in science made him win gold at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, for which he designed a high-temperature superconductor propulsion system. So, his first big achievement happened when he was in high school, that led to big opportunities for working with NASA and Intel.

Michael Serbinis founder Kobo
Image Source: alejandrocremades.com

In 1996, Serbinis graduated from Queen’s University with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics, followed by graduating from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. While he was a student, he entered into the Ontario Engineering Competition, and his creation of motor, that ran on an advanced software coding, helped him fetch a summer job at Microsoft. He also conducted thorough research on neural networks and artificial intelligence.

The Journey in the Late 90s

Serbinis’s journey into the entrepreneurial world started while associating the Musk brothers. He received a call from the Musk brothers, who were his university classmates to help them build a business. And thus, Serbinis was one of the first ten employees of Zip2, the company that was established by Elon and Kimball Musk.

Since Serbinis was already a very efficient programmer, at the age of twenty-four, he built a cloud-based document storage service called DocSpace. After a couple of years, it was sold to a San-Francisco based company for $530 million.

In 2000, Michael Serbinis joined Critical Path as CTO and EVP Marketing. It was then one of the largest companies which ran one-third of the world’s emails through their software. After he moved back to Canada, Serbinis joined Indigo as CIO and EVP Online, and this is the point at the juncture, where Kobo spun out to become an independent business.

Founding Kobo

At first, a global e-reading platform called Shortcovers was released in February 2009, under the main company Indigo. But, once they gained board approval and funding, they cut out from Indigo and established as an independent company. In late 2009, the company was rebranded as Kobo, an e-reading platform for worldwide customers. This was just the beginning for Serbinis to do great things in his homeland.

The Success

Kobo received a very good response from all over the world, shortly after its release. Kobo, today, attracts over 18 million users from more than 190 countries. It has over more than 3 million magazines, eBooks, and even, newspapers. Thus, creating the largest e-readers catalogue in the history of the e-reading platform.

In January 2012, Kobo came under the acquisition of a Japanese e-commerce company called Rakuten for $315 million. The catalogue of Kobo has e-books on 77 different languages, helping readers connect to their native land.

After Kobo

Since it was only the beginning, Serbinis founded 3 Angels Capital in 2014, to invest in a disrupted market and create a better world. Serbinis has always been a determined and optimistic man for sure. He mostly invests in areas, like the internet of things, digital content, digital health, etc.

Michael Serbinis is also the board director of MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. He serves as a board director in another institute called Vector Institute, a non-profit research institution in Toronto.

In November 2014, Serbinis founded League Inc., an online platform that connects worldwide users to provide health benefits and much more.

After developing so much on his homeland and contributing to science, Serbinis still lives in Toronto with his family.

Paytm

Paytm Suffers Almost Tripled Losses in FY19 due to Additional Expenses on Promotions

Online banking and payment apps have made life a lot easier, and the rewards we get on the payments are a plus. Paytm being the earliest and the biggest player in the country has been the most used payment app. But with the arrival of other payment apps, the former has to face some good losses. Reportedly, Paytm’s parent company has suffered a 165% extended loss for the financial year that ended on 31st March.

The company reported a total of Rs 3959 crore ($549 million) loss which is triple times up its last year’s losses, i.e., 1490 crore ($206 million). Going further, collectively, One97 Communication, including its other business, had to suffer a loss of Rs 4217.20 crore ($584 million), which is way above its last year’s losses, and that is Rs 1604.34 crore ($222 million).

“The company has incurred huge capital expenditure in creating a brand and establishing its business activity. We have incurred a considerable amount in various capital & operational expenditures which resulted in losses during the financial year,” said the company in the annual report.

Paytm
Image Source: forbes.com

Despite the losses, even the revenue of the company is up from its last year’s, i.e., Rs 3232 crore ($448 million) from Rs 3052 crore ($423 million). And, the company is even planning to invest a $3 billion for the growth of its business. According to its previous announcement, the company is even looking forward to going public with the next two year. But seeing its past expenditures, the company had spent a lot in the promotion of its app than it earned from it. So amid the raised competition, it has to be careful about its spendings in the coming future.

“For the last two years, we have been investing $1 billion each year to expand the digital payments ecosystem in our country. We will further invest about $3 billion in the next two years to scale the same,” said a Paytm spokesperson.

There has been a tough competition for Paytm as there are not less than ten payments (national and international) apps that are offering people exclusive offers along with the easy payments. Most of the big companies have brought their payments app, Google Pay and PhonePe, being the ruling party among of all. In fact, UPI-based apps like PhonePe are backed by the government and are even more flexible for the payments than Paytm. So it has become quite difficult for the company to stay firm in the market.

But according to the company, it is safe and is already spending on expending and strengthening its business and has claimed that the next year, there won’t be such losses. For now, the company is entirely focusing on its payments bank, insurance and insurance broking, travel ticketing, hotel and mobile wallet services, etc.

logo vneda

Vneda : One-stop Solution for All Organizational Learning Needs

The market is evolving at a fast pace, and along with that, the need for skilled and well-educated employees is also increasing as everyone realizes the value of knowledge. Organizations are losing millions because they are unable to take care of their knowledge. According to a study published by the International Data Corporation (IDC), It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost the Fortune 500 companies a $31.5 billion annually. And therefore, organizations are looking for better options to enhance employees’ skills and knowledge, which eventually, helps them to increase their productivity. This Edu-tech startup named Vneda is one of resource providing company, which is on the mission to solve these problems by their services.

What is Vneda

Vneda is an Edu-tech startup that started on 8th March 2018. It provides a unified learning solution for skill development, knowledge management and knowledge sharing among organizations and their employees. It provides a hybrid approach for the corporate, NGOs and government organizations for the better utilization and administration of knowledge resources. Vneda allows users to manage their knowledge and enhance it through knowledge sharing with the use of smart tools.

Users can create and consume digital content such as podcasts, videos, articles, e-books, courses on the platform. They use Proprietary Algorithms for the curation and indexing of the content. Vneda helps users to manage and store their important data on a cloud-based server, and apart from this, it also provides doorstep delivery of physical books from approx 1.5 lac+ book library.

founders Vneda

Vneda works on employee recognition as well by rewarding the users for consuming and sharing knowledge, to cultivate a habit of knowledge-sharing in them.

Co-founders

Vneda is an idea of two colleagues, Aman Sharma, and Ritesh Kumar. Aman Sharma is a Computer Science graduate who had an interest in developing something new and innovative. He developed many B2B and B2C products in the last seven years. Ritesh Kumar is an IT graduate and is a technology expert (Full Stack Developer), who likes to work on both the front end as well as the back-end of the product’s website and application.

Founding Vneda

When Aman Sharma ventured into the corporate learning market, he researched and found this market, especially in India, was relatively new and yet to be explored. There was not much focus on knowledge management and knowledge sharing. And because of this lack of focus, they were losing big monies and resources. On the contrary, this market got its due importance and was flourishing in the developed nations. From this fact, he drew his assumption that the knowledge sharing and knowledge management market would find its due recognition in India as well.

What is unique about Vneda

There is no single platform that caters to all the learning needs of an organization. They have to manage and opt for different platforms for digital learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management, corporate library, knowledge repositories, etc. Having multiple platforms leads to increased costs for the organization, it becomes problematic for employees to manage and use so many platforms. On the contrary, Venda is a single corporate learning solution that caters to a wide range of learning needs such as corporate learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management and much more.

It also helps in uniting external knowledge to internal knowledge. Vneda is providing a platform where publishers can publish their content that can be consumed by the users.

Accomplishments

It’s never been an easy task for entrepreneurs from convincing investors to invest in their ideas to users for adopting their services. Vneda was started with the seed investment of its co-founders, and since then, they are bootstrapping. Yet the hard work pays, as the company is catering to 25,000+ users across 13 corporate, like Axis Bank, Honda 2 Wheelers, Volkswagen, Orient Electric are to name a few.

How it works

Vneda works on two pricing models; one is free where a user does not pay a single penny for using the knowledge sharing and management platform. And then the other where the organization is charged a subscription fee. Under this, the organization gets a subscription to the created and curated content, which includes third party premium content and physical book delivery.

The vision

Vneda was created with a vision to construct an ecosystem of shared knowledge. The team is working to achieve a larger goal to create the knowledge management & sharing culture in all communities. But at present, they are focusing on their ideal target audience and eyeing to close 100 corporate by the end of this year and become profitable. Vneda is now a team of 10 hard working fellows putting efforts to create a strong tech product that can be integrated with any other existing system to make the knowledge access experience easy and interesting.