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Vijay Yalamanchili : The Founder of the Best Payroll and HR Software in India, ‘Keka’

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We are often ambushed by many software companies in the market while searching for the best. Be it a tool for project management, your digital assistance, or an HR software, we often find ourselves in a huge dilemma. So, to reduce one of your conundrums, YourTechStory brings to you the flabbergasting story of Keka, the best HR software in India till date.

Vijay Yalamanchili, the founder of Keka, solely founded the company out of sheer disappointment and frustration from working with HR software not up to the mark. He found that the HR software available in the market have a very poor user interface, which leads to a substandard experience for both the HR and the employees. So, to contribute to the HR community of India, Yalamanchili built the software, Keka HR in 2015. Apart from HR software, Keka also has payroll software, applicant tracking software and much more.

Early Life and Career of Yalamanchili

Yalamanchili is mainly a product designer and architect by profession. He pursued his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from JNTUH College of Engineering, followed by an MS from the University of Delaware.

Vijay Yalamanchili keka
Image Source: iamwire.com

After completing his MS, Yalamanchili started working with Microsoft in 2003 as a Software Development Engineer. He worked there only for three months.

In August 2006, he co-founded Fotolink Media, a visual image search platform used for product marketing by brands using mobile devices like mediums. It was one of the first mobile start-ups in India. He left the company after 4.5 years and founded Ramp India in 2006. The company was developed to provide solutions and build products for start-ups in India. After working in Ramp with a strong architectural team and delivering over 30+ products, Yalamanchili founded Technovert in July 2012. The zeal for excelling in the world of technology made Yalamanchili establish software solution companies one after the other. He co-founded Technovert with Sashi Pagadala. The company provides services in India, USA and Dallas.

By this time, Yalamanchili suffered enough with the HR software and founded Keka HR in 2015. It’s a Hyderabad based start-up which put a significant impact on the market when it got released, as it provided a better user experience to people.

Strategies to Outdo the Competitors

By the time Yalamanchili founded Keka, he was experienced enough to understand the major flaws in the other HR software. So, his main focus was on improving quality.

Yalamanchili’s first target was to make the user experience better because if the user experience degrades, after a point of time, it would ultimately ruin the brand name, which had already happened to all the other HR software out there.

Another major fault that Yalamanchili noticed in other HR software was the tracking of attendance. No existing software before Keka directly synced biometric devices to attendance log. Hence, it was very tiresome for the HRs to update it manually in the web browser. Keka got a very big bonus point by adding this feature. Though it took almost 1.5 years to build a software like this, it paid off well.

Keka also implemented well-designed security and privacy features that allowed the customer to get notified even if a Keka Customer representative is accessing their account. So, Keka itself also cannot sign in to customer’s account without their consent.

Instead of running behind more customers, Keka invested more time with its existing customers to improve their products until and unless it gave a smooth performance. It is very important to make the customers feel worthy and important because if they feel so, the scale will rise up automatically.

Success of Keka

It is nearly unbelievable that a company which acquired around 450 clients in less than a year is self-funded, given that Keka includes reputed clients like Godrej, Honda, Saavn and ClearTax. Keka is the recipient of the Hottest Start-up of Hyderabad Award and is in Top 3 in terms of bagging new customers with a comparatively smaller team with respect to its competitors.

Keka wanted to go old school, and hence, it tried becoming self-independent which turned out to be surprisingly successful. The company wanted to develop software with a touch of Indian style, and hence, they named it ‘Keka’ which means awesome in a native South Indian dialect. And, guess what? It just proved to be worthy of the name since the very first day.

OnePlus TV

The 55-inch QLED OnePlus TV Coming to India in September

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OnePlus has proven its worth with its outstanding range of smartphones, specifically known for its cameras. Now the company is up to releasing the series of its LED TVs, that according to the company will be having a QLED panel. For the past couple of days, the company has been giving information about its new TV in bits, and now it has finally revealed the name of the TV, i.e. OnePlus TV.

The OnePlus CEO Pete Lau, revealed the name of the TV last week. The company had hosted a contest for the name of its new smart TV last year. But it seems that the company went simply with its trade name. There were also a few revelations about the features as well as the release date of the OnePlus TV.

Along with a blog post, the company took it to Twitter to announce the release month for the TV, i.e. September. The company also tweeted about the size of the TV and a few other features as well. Previously, the leaks suggested that the TV will be available in four different sizes, i.e. 43-inches, 55-inches, 65-inches, and 75-inches. And according to one of the tweets from OnePlus, the TV that the company will be releasing in India will be a 55 inches, that too with a QLED screen. The U.S. and China will be receiving the biggest edition of the TV, i.e. the 75 inches panel TV.

OnePlus TV
Image Source: gadgetsnow.com

QLED display seems to be like the OLED display but is quite different from the latter. Q-LED stands for quantum-dot light-emitting diode. Basically, in OLED, every pixel emits their own light, whereas, QLED still works on the backlighting. QLED TVs have been the most significant part of the Samsung TV series, and now, we will see how the OnePlus TVs perform in the market for the company. The rumours also suggest that the TV may have 4K as well as 8K resolution with HDR.

For the sale of the TV, the company has partnered with Amazon and has included a ‘Notify Me’ button on Amazon’s OnePlus TV page. So the users need to login and click on the button, to stay updated with the new updates about the TV.

The TV will also render support for Bluetooth 5.0, and the company claims that the users will get the “unique Android TV experience” with the new OnePlus TV. Since there is a mention about Android, the smart TV from OnePlus may run on the Android Pie and include some of the Android apps in it. It is also expected that the TV may support a 3GB RAM.

“I am confident that there are many things that you can expect from OnePlus TV. Image and sound quality are fundamental that we must get right. Alongside these key essentials, I believe the TV’s remarkable design and smart interconnectivity make this product even more exciting,” Lau said.

Baidu

Robin Li : The Founder of Baidu, the “Google of China”

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The emergence of the Internet opened new ways for everyone, especially for them who were innovative and wanted to create something big. It also helped those who had no resources as a child, but later, reached the heights of success. The rags to riches stories are interesting and inspire people to fight with their situations and face the struggle. One such person who presents the most appropriate rags to riches story is Robin Li, an internet entrepreneur from China, who once faced the worst financial conditions and now is one of the richest men in China. He is the founder of the multinational company Baidu, which is the owner of China’s biggest search engine, with the same name.

Early Life

Robin Li was born on 17 November 1968 in Yangquan, Shanxi, China in a labour family. He was a single boy among the five children of his parents. The Shanxi province was an underdeveloped area, and there were no good resources of education. But still, Li tried his best and on the advice of his mother, worked hard to get a better education. Ultimately, he was able to crack the entrance exam for Peking University, Beijing, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in library information management.

After completing his bachelor’s degree, the next step was to get a job. He worked in a company in Beijing for one and a half year, but fortunately got admission to a Fellowship program at the State University of New York. He moved to New York and completed a master’s degree in science from the university in 1994. He was enrolled in the PhD program in computer science but did not complete his doctorate.

Career

Robin Li
Image Source: buffalo.edu

As soon Robin Li completed his master’s he joined Dow Jones and Company’s IDD Information Services as a software engineer. At IDD, he became the part of the development team, which was working on software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. Here he also got the chance to work on the search engine algorithms as well.

While working at IDD, he started working on page-ranking algorithms, and ultimately developed Rankdex, the first web search engine with page-ranking and site-scoring algorithms that means, it used hyperlinks to check the quality of a website. Rankdex later became the inspiration for Google’s PageRank algorithm.

After Li successfully developed Rankdex and got the U.S. patent for its ranking algorithm, he left his job at IDD, in 1997. He then, joined Infoseek, another internet company that was working on search engine algorithms. During his time at Infoseek, he developed a new function for Go.com, through which it could do image-based searches. Here he worked for two years and left the job in 1999.

Founding Baidu

Robin Li moved back to China, to work on his own product and in 2000, he developed Baidu with the help of his friend Eric Xu. The two used the same algorithm as of Rankdex to develop Baidu. Li did not have a permanent apartment in China at that time and did all the coding work and the launch of Baidu from a hotel room near Peking University. Li became the Chairman of the company and Xu was appointed as the CEO.

In 2001, Baidu offered people to bid for putting ads on the search engine. This led to the monetization as well as the growth of the company. Baidu was an instant hit, and Li was named among the “Chinese Top Ten Innovative Pioneers” in the same year. In 2003, the company introduced image-based searches as well as a news search engine.

In 2004, Xu resigned from his post as CEO, and Li held the position. The next year, Li took Baidu to NASDAQ, and the value of its every share raised by 350 per cent, i.e., from $27 to $122. In December 2007, Baidu was listed in the NASDAQ-100, becoming the first Chinese company to do so. In the same year, Li was named in CNN Money’s annual list of “50 people who matter now”.

By 2010, Baidu was the most used search engine in China, and it also got the title of “Google of China”. The company has partnered with big names like Qualcomm, Continental and Bosch. It has also started working in the field of AI. The company has also launched a self-driving vehicle platform under its Apollo project (Apolong).

Along with hosting the biggest search engine in China, Baidu offers over fifty internet-related services as well as artificial intelligence-based products to its users.

Baidu is one innovative product that helped Li to fight with his circumstances. Today, Li is one of the richest men in China and ranks at number eight with $16.5 billion’s net worth. He has been awarded great accolades, including “15 Asian Scientists To Watch” by Asian Scientist Magazine in 2011, “Most Influential Business Leader in China” by Fortune, and “World’s Best Business Leader” by the American Business Weekly in 2006.

shazam app

Chris Barton : The Founder of Shazam, A Product of Pure Innovation

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The past few decades have been the luckiest for new ideas and startups. There have been many such cases, where the budding entrepreneurs have got overnight success. But this ain’t true for all of them out there. As, for some of the ideas, it took a lot of persistence and patience of the founders, to become a successful one. One of such ideas is Shazam, a music identifying service, that took a decade to be under the limelight and get the success that it deserved. It was the endurance and willingness for the successe of the founder of Shazam, Chris Barton, that brought the service at the place, where it is today.

Early Life

Chris Barton’s parents were the biggest influence on him. His father was a nuclear physics professor, and his mother worked as a computer science professor. His mother introduced him with computers when she brought a Sinclair computer to their home. Chris loved working on the computer and taught himself the basics of programming. He loved experimenting with things, from where BSMSarton also grew an interest in inventions and creating new things.

After completing his school education, Chris went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he first opted for a double major in computer science. But eventually, he went to graduate in business studies, economics being the major subject of his course.

Chris Barton
Image Source: haas.berkeley.edu

Chris met Philip Inghelbrecht, the future co-founder of Shazam, at the university, where both were in the same class and later became project-teammate. On the other hand, he was already friends with Dhiraj Mukherjee, the other co-founder of the company, when he lived in San Francisco.

Beginning of Entrepreneurship

It was just in 1998 when Chris got his first mobile phone. The time was about the internet and the new mobile devices coming into the market. Though most of the people were looking forward to developing internet-related things, Chris was brainstorming about what he can build based on the tiny handset, that people carried with them 24/7.

When Chris Barton was interning at Microsoft’s internet search portal group MSN, in London, he again met with Mukherjee there, who was working on establishing the first international office of his startup company, Viant, in London. Chris introduced Mukherjee with Inghelbrecht, and all three coincided on a similar topic, starting up a new business.

All the three started looking for an idea that would transform their lives and the world. In the summer of 1999, during the height of the dot-com bubble, Chris saw an opportunity in identifying and providing people with the song they want to know about. Though at that time, many people had tried the same concept for their business, all of them were relying upon the radio for music identification.

Origin of the Idea

Chris Barton came up with the idea of a software that will help people identify a song playing on the radio using the sound of the music itself, and that too, using a mobile phone. But as simple the idea was, its implementation was equally difficult. There was no such technology existed at that time, that would make this very idea possible.

To implement the idea, they developed an algorithm with the help of a PhD scholar Avery Wang (the fourth co-founder of Shazam), that was based on the recorded sound identification technology. So in the year 2000, they launched the demo of Shazam, a mobile service, through which the users could record the piece of music (from radio, club, or any other place) and send it to Shazam, and in return, Shazam would reply the name of the artist and album of the song.

This innovative idea was way ahead of its time. Even before Apple launched its iPod and iPhones. In the beginning, Chris established its office in London and focussed on the European countries, as these countries were more drawn to music.

Founding Shazam

To bring the product out in the market, the co-founders took the help of their family members and friends. After three months of pitching the idea in front of the investors, they raised a one million dollar investment from HSBC. To make the service work properly, in the beginning, the co-founders decided to partner with the people who are related to the key technology that will be used in the service. They partnered with the IVR provider, the SMS aggregator for premium SMS integration, and with the four leading mobile operators in the United Kingdom, i.e. Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, and O2.

After getting everything in place, Chris Barton along with the other co-founders launched Shazam on 19 August 2002. Now, people could use the service by dialling a four-digit number, i.e. 2580, on their mobile phone, record the music, and receive the details about it, through an SMS, for just 50 pence.

A few years later, with the emergence of better Symbian mobile phones, the company offered the option to buy ringtones of the identified songs. The users could also get access to an unlimited use subscription pack for around $3 per month. And after the iPhone got launched in 2007, in 2008 the new Shazam app reached the heights of success. It had 11 million downloads in the year of 2010. According to a report from CNET, Shazam was the 4th most downloaded app of 2011. By 2012, Shazam had over 225 million users in more than 200 countries.

Today, all four co-founders sit on the board of the company, and Chris now works for Google. Shazam is one of the most popular apps today that allow the users to buy the music, watch music videos, as well as see the lyrics of a particular song.

IN 2016, Snapchat included the Shazam feature to its app, and in 2018, Apple acquired the company for $400 million.

shareit

The Success Story of Michael Qiu, the Co-founder of SHAREit

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When a software or a product is launched in the market, within a span of one or two years, a handful of the modified versions of the same are also released. This means we get technically outdated before we can explore every aspect of a product properly. So, in this era of digital phase, it becomes important for everyone to get smarter and use smarter tools to keep up with the fast-moving world.

For example, in the beginning, when smartphones just started heating up the market, we used Bluetooth to share files, such as the pictures, audios, videos, etc. But with time, Bluetooth was replaced by applications like SHAREit. SHAREit is an offline file transferring tool that works with speed 200 times more than the Bluetooth and Near-field communications.

SHAREit was founded in April 2015 with Michael Qiu as the co-founder and CEO of the company, SHAREit Technologies Co. Ltd. Whether it is an image, an audio file, contacts or even an app, one can send anything with the help of this amazing tool.

Lenovo and SHAREit

Michael Qiu
Image Source: iamwire.com

SHAREit was a product developed under Lenovo apps and at first, got introduced in the markets of China, before any other country. After its launch in India in 2013, it became one of the most efficient wireless file transfer tools. Within a year of its launch, SHAREit bagged 150 million Indian users and 500 million users around the globe. Within one year, SHAREit was already available in 30 different languages, and today, it supports over 45 languages. Apart from android, the SHAREit app is also available for both Windows and iOS.

After receiving a huge number of users from India, Qiu wanted to invest more in the Indian market rather than the Chinese market. Since India is a developing country, he saw a lot of scope for the future in India, rather than in China or any other nation. So, after a year of the launch of SHAREit in India, Qiu announced the opening of a new SHAREit office in Gurgaon in 2017.

At the same time, the company also focused on launching the series of ‘it’ products, which included LOCKit, CLONEit, CLEANit, WRITEit, etc.

Strategies of Qiu to deal with Indian start-up ecosystem

Qiu mentioned in an interview that after China and the U.S, it is India that is leading in the start-up community of the world. But, belonging from the start-up culture of China, initially, it was a bit tough for the SHAREit team to understand the business environment of India, as India is so diverse ethnically.

So, the first strategy of Qiu to grow firm roots on the ground of India was to create a simple tool that would bind the entire country’s smartphone users to a single thread. And, the second strategy was to invest more in India as technology here is developing at a remarkably fast rate.

Since India is a developing country, companies from developed nations try desperately to expand their business in India, which makes it a place of demand and also increases competition among different nations. But, Qiu being enough confident about his strategies, and how to deal with the business ecosystem of India, succeeded both on establishing a firm grip on our market and bridging the gap between two different cultures.

The team also focused on building a very simple and easy-going user interface, with no learning cost. And, when it comes down to publicity, they shared about their products on websites, like Quora and Facebook, the ones mostly used by the Indians.

Success of SHAREit

Today, SHAREit has reached beyond just India and China, with its wings spread over in more than 200 countries. In India, apart from Gurgaon, it also has its office in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of Asia. According to recent statistics, SHAREit has more than 1.8 billion global users, among which, 33% of the users are from India and Indonesia.

Currently, it is the leading platform for digital content throughout the world and is considered as the ‘Nationally Favored App’ in many countries.

Future Plans of Qiu

Qui learned that Indian start-ups lacked infrastructure, so he, and his team, planned to build a foundation for investing in the Indian start-ups. His plans are more than just expanding the user base of SHAREit, thus, building a strong relationship with the Indian start-up community. He is willing to offer everything which is lacking in Indian start-up society, and the government is unable to provide. And, above everything, he is keeping his product simple and efficient.

magento

Roy Rubin : The Founder of Magento, the Open-Source E-Commerce Platform

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With the advent of new technologies and rapid development in our world, especially in terms of science and technology, tech-savvies are crawling all over the surface. And, this rapid growth in technology and the development through it, can mostly be witnessed amongst the school and college students.

The most obvious evidence of scientific and technical development in our society is the innumerable establishment of tech-related start-ups, like e-commerce platforms, digital payment platform, Open-source community, online market place, etc., taking place currently.

Magento is one such gigantic open source e-commerce platform that was created in 2008 by a student, Roy Rubin. It all dates back to 2004 when Varien, the company that owned Magento overtook one of its competitors and changed the status of the business forever.

Varien-From Where It All Started

Roy Rubin
Image Source: powerretail.com

Since childhood, Rubin had a great interest in the development and technical stuff, and he was completely engrossed in the idea of the subject. He made his mind to pursue engineering, and alongside, he also grew an interest in starting a business of his own.

He didn’t have greater plans when he was working on this business plan of his, as he only saw it as an opportunity to gain more knowledge, more professionalism and enough money to maintain a sober lifestyle of a student.

Initially, he started making small progress with web development, web applications, e-commerce, and content management, as he wasn’t selective about picking a single domain. But soon, he felt like everything was going topsy-turvy in his business, and eventually, he realized that it’s important to be focused on one single thing to achieve success.

While Roy Rubin was making step-wise progress, a major breakthrough took place in 2004, when he started his own company named Varien and also got a job at OsCommerce. With a few weeks of studies related to OsCommerce, he concluded that the company shared mutual goals with Varien, but the former lacked better quality of services and enough employees. He saw it as a golden opportunity to stream down customers to Varien, which was better than OsCommerce in every aspect. Thus, he invested some of his own money in Google AdWords, and the result was unexpected.

This decision of Roy Rubin changed the future of Varien forever and gave him a better scope to expand his business.

Releasing Magento

After releasing an advertisement in Google AdWords, Varien landed its one of his biggest clients. Rubin, in one of his interviews, said that if it hadn’t been for the advertisement, the company could have never managed to launch a product like Magento. Because, that specific company was entirely responsible for the funding of this e-commerce platform, now known as Magento.

The first public beta version of Magento was released on 31 August 2007. Varien launched Magento, an open-source e-commerce platform, as its product. It was written in PHP, and the first general availability of this software was released on 31st March 2008.

Ownership, Growth and Success of Magento

In February 2011, eBay bought a 49% share of Magento, followed by the entire acquisition of the company on 6th June 2011. But, Rubin continued to work as the CEO of Magento. But, in 2013 he stepped down and left the company.

On 3rd November 2015, Permira acquired the company, and finally, on 19th June 2018, Adobe took the ownership of Magento for $1.68 billion.

On 17th November 2015, the company released the second version of Magento, i.e. Magento 2.0. Since then, Magento is considered as the top digital e-commerce platform around the world.

On 19th October 2016, Rubin joined Magento Board of Directors, and he said that the pace at which Magento was growing was really commendable.

Rubin and Akeneo

Rubin joined Akeneo, a French company for open source product as an advisor in 2016. Since, Akeneo was also a company related to open source, the CEO of Akeneo mentioned that they were grateful to have a person like Rubin in their team. In Akeneo, Rubin is responsible for making the strategic decisions for the short-term goals of the company.

Roy Rubin is a true businessman, and a visionary, who keeps inspiring every start-up related to open-source platform out there. His role in Magento followed by his strategies in Akeneo is incredible.