Your Tech Story

start-up

Robot Tutor Musio is here replace your language teacher

start-up / By

Education & training industry is making use of technology in many ways. While many youngsters and teachers are acquainted with online learning and eLearning, the next revolution is coming in the form of robots. An adorable robot named Musio is here to help you with your language skills. After successfully completing its Crowdfunding campaign recently, it was launched officially at a price tag of JPY 98,000 in Japan last week. One can buy Muiso easily via Amazon Japan, Softbank’s marketplace and through some offline retail stores.

As of now Musio’s capabilities include small talks, answering simple logical questions, admitting it’s fault or lack of knowledge and most important one is correcting language flaws. It can detect and notify wrong pronunciations and wrong grammar usage etc. This robot’s face and heart is made of interactive touch screens meant to show a range of emotions to connect on a deeper level with users. Moreover, one can even read books, play games; developed by an educational publisher Gakken, and go through menu using these touchscreens.

But, what’s all this fuss about? It looks and functions like a high-tech talking doll with some grammar sense. No, comparing Musio to a toy is simply underrating its capabilities. Musio’s parent company is an AI venture, AKA Study. That said, Artificial Intelligence is going to play a major role in further development of this robot. Although API’s are available free of cost from major players in AI industry like Google, Baidu, Apple and Amazon for development purpose, but AKA decided to build its own proprietary engine specifically for Musio robot.  Now that brings ability to recognize a particular user, referring back to his older conversations to analyze his growth rate and potential.  Musio robot might be able to find out the weak areas while learning language together and then design further conversations to help in advancing altogether.

On asking Jung, co-founder AKA, why he considers Musio a robot as it does not have any moving parts, he said “We put a motor system in there. If you need a dynamic part, you can add it in the future,” the CEO explained. The brand is planning to add movable components to the robot afterwards as future updates increasing its functionality even further. One of his visions for Musio is of a “companion” that’s always there for elderly people to keep them connected socially with rest of the worldand helping them in living a healthy independent life. He said there is a huge demand for social robots in Japan justifying their focus on the market.

AKA study has already raised 10.7 million in seed and series A funding. That’s a lot of money going straight into development. Moreover, brands like Gakken, LG UPlus and Nexon, a gaming company, are backing AKA with Musio’s project. Just to inform you, the first batch of Musio robots is already sold out! You have to wait for the restock to get one in your hands.

Electric scooters startup from India secures $1.6 million in funding

News, start-up, Tech News / By

Twenty-two motors, never heard of it before? Probably because they were busy developing more affordable and smarter electric vehicles tailored specifically for the young India. This Gurgaon based EV startup recently came out in limelight announcing a successful fund raise of $1.6 million in its first pre-series, a funding led by Haryana Industries CEO Ishwar Singh. The company plans to launch its first smart scooter at next Auto-Expo in February 2018.

The company was incorporated in August 2016 by Parveen Kharb, an automation engineer with an experience of 15 years in the sector and Vijay Chandrawat, an IIT Delhi graduate with 14 years of experience spanning across strategy, technology and operation domain. Taking inspiration from challenges involved and accomplishments of Tesla in USA, the duo took the decision to enter electric vehicle sector. Farhaan Shabbir, former director of Harley-Davidson was also one of the founding members and is currently a part of their 15-member team.

Talking about how the funding will be used, Vijay elaborated “The investment will be used meticulously to build and prove the product apart from strengthening the startup’s human resource capabilities. Broadly, the investment will be channeled for, testing, strengthening the team, prototype vehicle development, component development, and factory setup. The investment certifies our potential and is expected to provide exponential growth to the company.”

Twenty-two motors believe that electric vehicle technology in India is neither affordable nor progressing fast enough to catch up with the major players in the league. With a year of development and testing they claim to have successfully developed the basic tech-prototype and battery management system (BSM). As per their claims, they have tackled the key challenges in electric mobility- short life span of batteries and recharge-ability.

Their Li-ion batteries are light weight, removable and can be easily charged using any five-pinned socket eliminating the need of charging stations. If there is a power socket around (not much of a problem in urban India), you are good to go. Only time will tell if they can pull it off without compromising the power or charging time.

“The battery can be taken out of the scooter and charged anywhere. You don’t need a special plug to charge it,” said Kharb.

Moreover, the scooter will remain connected to rider via mobile app allowing remote access and control from anywhere. AI assistance, utilizing electronic sensors, will also be there to guide you through different routes depending upon elevation and co-ordinates of the road. “It will include information regarding bridges, roads and flyovers which the rider can take or must avoid depending on the battery condition and target location,” added Kharb.

The scooter will be launched in two variants with the top model ranging between Rs. 55-65k. Initially, around Rs. 50,000 scooters are going to be available in Delhi, Pune and Bengaluru region in first quarter of 2018.

BookMyShow Story: Rise, fall and comeback

start-up / By

No idea is big or small; rather one’s success depends upon the amount of efforts and dedication one puts in to it. But this is not it, as only after you firmly determine to achieve something and start putting in your hard work, the real journey begins. You might find your path paved with numerous challenges and hurdles but you must always remember that, difficult times are life’s way to test your patience and determination. The story of Ashish Hemrajani, the founder of BookMyShow would definitely inspire you to leave your comfort zone.

Advent of the idea
Like many, Ashish Hemrajani too took up a job after completing his professional degree. He started working in J. Walter Thompson, an advertising firm right after getting a master’s degree in business administration. In 1999, while he was on a trip to South Africa, Hemrajani came across the idea that changed his life for good. Sitting under a tree and listening to a radio advertisement which promoted tickets of a rugby match, triggered in him, an itch to do something alike. With this business idea and with the intention of quitting his job, he came back to India and began working on the idea.

The Initial Phase
Without much dallying, Hemrajani launched his online venture under the name of “Big Entertainment Pvt. Ltd.” with all its office work done from his bedroom. As some time passed, the company got it two other co-founders, Parikshit Dar and Rajesh Balpande, who looked into the matters of technology and finance respectively. The next big step was to get investors for the company. Although things didn’t turn out to be as easy as Hemrajani expected but he was well prepared for the battle. Internet facilities were not rampant in those days and thus, they sent their proposal to their first investors, JP Morgan, through fax. That one-page fax gave them a good push as the idea convinced the investors and they agreed to fund them sum of $380000.

Their problems didn’t end with this, as the gigantic task of running the business was still to be done. The market conditions were not favorable for their business idea due to the lack of proper banking facilities like debit cards, credit cards, internet banking etc. Also poor connectivity of broadband and lack of e-ticketing software in the theaters made their task even more difficult. In the initial phase, they hired hundreds of people to deliver movie tickets to people at their doorstep after buying them in bulk. Many-a-times, they had to face huge losses because of their non scaleable business model.  However, they still managed to keep up their work and expanded their company by establishing 12 call-centers in 12 different cities. Since, internet facilities were still not widespread, most of the work was carried out offline.

bookmyshow
The Dot Com bust
Around 2001, the dot com market began blooming as well and this led their investors to sell their stake to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. However, in the year 2002, the dot com market was smashed and with its breaking down, the entire industry experienced a big jolt. Ashish Hemrajani’s company also faced severe impacts of this bust as all the investors refused to give them funds. They even had to break their deal with News Corp.. The situation grew worse as their whole business was almost shut. They reduced their employees from 150 to 6 as they couldn’t afford their salaries. They had to shut down all their call centers except the ones in Delhi and Mumbai.

The company was back to its initial phase and it worked without investors for a period of four years, from 2002 to 2006. Yet Ashish Hemrajani didn’t lose hope and confidence in his company and made sure that every penny made out from the business goes back to it. He was left with two options; either to shut down the company or head back to the point he started by taking a job in some company or stick to his passion and continue with the business. And the decision, Hemrajani took proved him a real fighter.

This time he became more firm in his determination to reach to the topmost ladder of success and invested all his energy to tie up the loose threads and mend the broken pieces. He moved further with a different outlook this time and made small changes to his business techniques.

Comeback and Rise
By the end of 2006, the market got over the effects of the dot com bust and it started blooming again. Within the span of the gone four years, there were innumerable changes observed like the coming of debit cards and credit cards, enhanced internet facilities and the establishment of multiplexes all over the country. Their company began installing e-ticketing software in the cinema halls and also began charging for the same. Call centers were opened up for clients so as to get in direct touch with the public. This time they had a proper business model which was executed smoothly and within a year, the company was doing decent business to get attention of investors.

In March 2007, Network 18 invested a sum of  $2.2 million in their business. The company name was then changed to BookMyShow which became quite popular within no time. The company began tying up with almost all the multiplexes and cinema’s which contributed a major portion in their never ending growth. In 2012, BookMyShow got a whooping investment of  $18 million from Accel Partners followed by $25 million from SAIF Partners in 2013.

After that Bookmyshow has never looked back. In India it is immensely popular for movie tickets. Today, BookmyShow is available in UAE, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh.

 

SlideShare Story: How a barcamp idea turned into 119 million dollar business

start-up, Tech Story / By

In 2003 Rashmi Sinha a Lecturer at university of Berkeley quit her job to start the entrepreneurial journey. She was later joined by her husband Jonathan Boutelle and brother Amit Ranjan do something together. These are the people who later co-founded presentation sharing platform, SlideShare.

They started a “user experience and usability research tool” called “mind canvas” in 2004. Later they thought of developing it as an online product. Mind Canvas was started from a 240 square feet small office in Delhi, India. After two years of product development the B2B  software was launched in 2005. Though the product got good traction, the only problem was  scale. Product was such that it could not scale with technology. It required more and more people to scale.

In 2006 mind canvas organized first “barcamp” in Delhi. After barcamp event speakers wanted to share the videos, pictures and presentation with audience. While  the problem to share event videos and pictures was taken care by YouTube and Flickr, there was no other option than email to share presentations. This is when Jon, Rashmi and Amit thought about a platform to share presentations.

SlideShare

They started working on the project and after 6 months of development,  “Slideshare” was launched in Oct 2006. It was a platform for the professionals to share their presentation online that included PowerPoint & Pdf files. It attracted people the moment it went online. Within first few weeks of launching they could see many people uploading their slides.

People wanted to share their presentation with world and Slideshare provided them with the platform to do so. Many big companies and organizations like IBM, White House also started using the platform to share their presentations online. They kept innovating and upgrading feature like sharing videos, podcasts etc.

SlideShare Team

With features like commenting, tagging and rating SlideShare turned into rich community of people sharing and discussing presentations. Site soon grew to 30 million  monthly visitors and  7.4 million presentations. After 2 years SlideShare got $3 million in first round of funding from Angel investors and Venrock. SlideShare never lost focus  and vision to make it an easy to use presentation sharing tool. SlideShare always focused and listened to end user feedback. They engaged with presentation professionals and offered them tools like Analytics, Lead capturing. Though many other products like authorSTREAM, Scribd & DocStoc with more features were introduced, yet SideShare backed by solid engineering team and presentation professionals continued to grow. SlideShare also created a great culture inside the organization. Employees were given stock options and other perks to make them part of SlideShare’s growth story.

When LinkedIn launched their Apps platform, SlideShare was among few companies like Google, WordPress, Amazon to build and integrate their app in LinkedIn. This relationship grew stronger and in 2012 SlideShare was acquired by the biggest professional network LinkedIn for $119 million. Along with founders many employees got rewarded for their hard work and fruitful efforts. Post acquisition, SlideShare is integral part of LinkedIn.

More and more people and companies use LinkedIn Slideshare to get more branding and business leads. As per one study the presentation sharing website generates 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook & Twitter. SlideShare is today part of every marketing or SEO strategy.

Video Credit:NextBigWhat

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

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

“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.micromax

 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.

rahul-sharma-micromax-quote

Snapdeal Story: How a deals website became top eCommerce platform of India

start-up, Tech Story / By

Two best friends having common interest in food and maths from Delhi Public School started an offline coupons business which later turned into one of the biggest eCommerce companies of India. The CEO Kunal Bahl (alumni Wharton School, US) and COO Rohit Bansal (IIT Delhi alumni) joined hands to create Snapdeal.

Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal
Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal, Image Credit: Wikimedia.

Back in 2007 when Kunak Bahl’s US visa got rejected and was asked to return to India, he along with Rohit Bansal who was working for CapitalOne in India, decided to work together and do something different.  Kunal while studying in US did 3 different jobs to make up for his monthly expenditures. It is there where he started using food coupons so that he could get a discount and mitigate his expenses with only two jobs. This is what he along with Rohit planned to start in India.

Moneysaver to Snapdeal
They started their entrepreneurial journey in December 2006 from MoneySaver. The business model had no technology involved and was pretty simple. Snapdeal (then MoneySaver) would  get attractive deals from the restaurants, hotels, saloons etc. on the promise of getting them more customers. These coupons were printed in a discount book which they would sell to  customers.

It was a simple business model but they had a hard time getting those deals and coupons. It wasn’t easy to convince businesses to offer coupons as well as customers to buy those booklets. Not many people were aware of this coupon model in India.

As soon as a they started this business they were at a stage where they had only 20,000 Indian Rupees ($300) in their company bank account with current liabilities to the tune of 500,000 Rupees ($7000). They had to pay salaries and other dues from their personal savings and ended up only in Rs. 50,000 ($700) in their personal bank accounts in total.

They did many experiments including community coupon mailing where they would get attractive deals from the hotels, restaurants, spas, saloons etc and mail those to the community around. “It was a total waste”, says Kunal Bahl as the mailing infrastructure in India was very bad. Slowly things picked up and Snapdeal went online in 2010 with initial investment from Vani Kola’s venture capital firm.

Pivoting from deals to eCommerce 
The company was generating  good revenues and was on right track. They acquired Grabbon in 2011. On suggestion of some of the merchants involved in deal business with Snapdeal, Kunal and Rohit checked out Alibaba.com. Inspired by the success of Alibaba, Kunal Bahl took a firm decision to pivot from deals business to eCommerce. This was a tough and risky decision. However, this decision turned out to be so good that today Snapdeal is among top 3 eCommerce websites in India.

They created a marketplace for small merchants and industries so that they could directly connect with the millions of customers online. This eCommerce model was not applied by Flipkart (at that time) as it used its own huge inventory to sell and deliver products. However, later Flipkart too joined the marketplace bandwagon.

snapdeal-2011
Snapdeal in 2011

To sustain growth and compete with companies like Flipkart they raised further investments of $45 million from Nexus ventures and Bessemer venture partners. They also received a $50 million investment from from E-bay and other existing partners.

E-commerce to M-commerce
Kunal Bahl believes in constant innovation and growth. Looking at the changing user behavior and rapidly increasing mobile and internet penetration, Snapdeal created a mobile application that could work smoothly even on 2g connection. Idea was to get 50% of their orders from the mobile application.  Mobile application gave much needed push by increasing the orders, 80% of which coming only from mobile app.

With 30 million products from around 300K sellers with a reach of 6,000 towns and cities across the country, Snapdeal’s YOY growth today stands at 600%. Snapdeal counts Ratan Tata, Alibaba, SoftBank Corp, IndoUS Ventures, Intel Capital, Nexus Ventures, eBay, Kalaari Capital, Temasek Holdings etc. as their investors. Snapdeal also acquired FreeCharge, the online recharge and payment wallet in an equity deal in 2015.