Your Tech Story

founder

Michael Aldrich inventor of online shopping

Michael Aldrich : A Connoisseur in the Entrepreneurial World and the Founder of Online Shopping

Leave a Comment / Founder, Marketing, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

In the biggest success stories of start-ups of that, we hear from around the world today would have not come into existence today, if online shopping did not exist. From the prospering online shopping sites, like eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, to the very small newly started e-commerce sites should be grateful of the English entrepreneur who came up with the idea of online transactions. That great innovator is none other than Michael Aldrich, who developed e-commerce from scratch in the late 1970s. With an experience of 28 years in the IT sector, he worked for reputed companies before inventing teleshopping (today known as online shopping).

Early Life

Born into a family living in Hertfordshire, England, on 22nd August 1941, Aldrich did his schooling from Clapham College, London. He was a very bright student and even received a scholarship to study history at the University of Hull in 1959. During his time there, he met Sandy Kay Hutchings and got married to her just before completing his graduation. So, Aldrich already established a family before starting his career.

Many say that getting committed and entering into married life at a very young age can create difficulties and stops you from giving your best. But, in this case, it’s diametrically opposite.

Beginning of Aldrich’s Career

Michael Aldrich inventor of online shopping
Image Source: alchetron.com

Aldrich worked for Honeywell and Burroughs in the sales and marketing department of the company for almost 15 years. After that, he joined Redifon Computers, which was a part of the UK Rediffusion Group of Companies. The Rediffusion Group manufactured televisions as well as computers, but Aldrich worked for the department of computer manufacturing.

This is when the journey of the invention of online shopping (he named it teleshopping) began.

The Story

One day in the year of 1979, UK Rediffusion Group sent a colour television to Aldrich’s office, but he didn’t pay much attention to it, as his main concern revolved around selling computers. This television came with a new service called Prestel, a paid commercial service that would be delivered through a telephone line.

Seeing no interest of Aldrich in that television one of the engineers in his company, Peter Champion, decided to learn more about this new TV, and its new feature. After studying about the TV for a few weeks, he told Aldrich that the television came with an auto-dialer that could hold four telephone numbers. He gave Aldrich the idea of building such a controller for a computer, and then, connecting the television. Aldrich noticed his point, but he didn’t give it much of thought at that time.

After a few days, when Aldrich was complaining about the weekly tour to grocery shops, the idea of Peter hit him hard. This was when he thought of connecting the television to the supermarket itself and get the groceries delivered to home. Without wasting a single second, Aldrich started working on this idea.

After days of research and writing papers, finally, a prototype TV to test this real-time transaction process was connected to one of their computers, and the test was successful. There wasn’t any year of research going on to support this idea of teleshopping, and hence, it seemed like a sudden scientific mutation took place in the communication world.

Once it was developed, Aldrich needed to set up a market and build up demand as the entire world wasn’t aware of how to use this new system.

After Reality Hit Hard

Aldrich found himself in a total mess, as he invented a product, but there wasn’t a market to sell it. So, after the invention, he tried reaching out to people for real feedback and everything was done in sheer privacy as their product wasn’t officially launched.

He went to a conference in New Orleans, kept it low and received positive feedback from the people. Returning back to the UK, the company designed the multi-port controller, built the computer interface software, and finally, launched it on April 1980. The entire world was amused by the idea of shopping from home, but no one was actually able to interpret how it worked. So, Aldrich hosted a press conference, and again, launched the product in July 1980.

Marketing Strategy

After launching the product, the idea was very clear to Aldrich that he would sell this to big corporations so that he could connect the agents, customers and distributors directly to the system without the involvement of a third party. He divided the market into leaders and followers and approached the leaders with this product. This business idea was later known as business to business online shopping (B2B).

The company had almost no competition, so it flourished for the next ten years after its launch.

After the great invention

In 1984 Aldrich became a fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Fellow in 2004. He was also awarded an honorary degree of Doctorate of Letters by the University of Brighton in 2004. In 1987 he was made a Freeman of the City of London, England. Aldrich became the Chairman of Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1989. In 2010, University of Brighton named an award after his name, which is given to the talented students excelling in e-commerce.

Aldrich died on 19th May 2014.

nazara technologies

Nitish Mittersain : The Founder of Leading Mobile Games Publishing Company in India, ‘Nazara Technologies’

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The thrill gaming world brings to us, especially to the youngsters, is boundless. To plan a start-up based on gaming technologies brings with it a great potential to flourish in future. But, in a country like India, the major part of the crowd doesn’t support this unorthodoxy. Indian families always oppose the idea of gaming and even being a part of it. So, thinking about a gaming start-up is next to being delusional.

But, breaking all the social norms Nitish Mittersain, a boy from a typical Indian Marwari family, made bigger plans and established his gaming company, Nazara Technologies. Nitish Mittersain is an entrepreneur who founded India’s leading mobile gaming company in 2003. He was always passionate about video games and so decided to build his future around his interest without any hesitation.

Early Life of Mittersain

Since Mittersain belonged to a Marwari family, he was expected to join his father’s textile business after he completed a degree in MBA. But Mittersain as a very young kid was strongly attracted to the world of gaming and coding. His room used to be full of modems, video and computer games of all kind. Thinking that every kid loves to play video games, his father gifted him a ZX Spectrum, but little did he know that this is just the beginning of something incredible and unexpected. Receiving this gift was just like a spark that ignited the passion of gaming in him, and he coded his first game at an age of seven.

Nitish Mittersain
Image Source: glaws.in

During his college life, Mittersain started a bulletin board service which helped him connect to many influential and famous people over the internet. And this is how he got an opportunity to come across the 1960s actor, Shashi Kapoor. Apart from being known as a talented actor, he also showed great interest in technology and the internet. After his cinematic career, Kapoor engrossed himself in spreading of technology, and that’s how both, Mittersain and him, hit a common ground to discuss. Mittersain spoke to Kapoor almost every day, regarding the perfect blend of entertainment and technology. And, Kapoor was the one who inspired him and gave him ideas to start his own business. Getting motivated enough, Mittersain decided to launch his gaming company, Nazara Technologies, when he was still in college.

Beginning of the New Business

Nitish Mittersain founded Nazara Technologies in 2000 in Mumbai. But land swept off from under his feet after an unfortunate incident took place. The first dotcom crash in that very year made him question his decision repeatedly and whether to back off or not. But, he didn’t want to shut down his business as it was the doorway to his dreams. He tried his best to survive the bubble burst and with some clear strategies and a little luck he finally survived the crisis.

Stepping Ahead of Others

Being an entrepreneur with an innovative idea, he was already one step ahead of his competitors. And, in the early 2000s, there weren’t many companies in India that planned to develop gaming technologies. So, using it to Nazara’s advantage, Mittersain’s first strategy was to invest in advertisement and brand campaigning. He knew that once it captures the attention of mass, investors would line up in front of his door. So, in 2004, he approached Sachin Tendulkar, the legendary cricketer of that time, to come on board. After months of requesting and convincing, Tendulkar finally made a deal with Nazara Technologies. This strategy of his stirred the existing competitors away from his way.

Soon, Nazara came into a partnership with Electronic Arts (an American video game company) and brought it to India. Once, the company started taking up a good and faster speed, Mittersain planned to expand the market with stronger and bigger partnerships.

Keeping aside Nitish Mittersain’s passion for games, when he developed the company, his dream was as simple as that to make huge profits. But, he also wanted his company to play fair and square in the market, and it is appreciable that even after 19 long years of sustaining, his company doesn’t have any lawsuit against it.

The success of Nazara Technologies

Today, Nazara is doing business in 61 different countries, with more than 130 million monthly visitors. In 2017, nine in-house games of Nazara were listed among the top three games by download on Google Play Store.

Recently, Nazara has acquired 27.42% minority stake in Crimson Code, which will allow the company to offer real money on winning live quizzes. In 2019, the company acquired a 67% stake in Sportskeeda and now expecting an IPO in early 2020.

rapido

Rapido : India’s Biggest Bike Taxi Pooling Service

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Though taxis were always there, the ride-hailing services have got even more popular after the companies like Uber and Lyft has come onboard. These apps provide the most convenient method to hire cabs and travel independently. But for a daily basis, these are not the affordable choice for people. In countries like India, there is also a problem of traffic in big cities, which also affect the efficiency of a rental car. But with the motorbikes, there is still hope for affordability as well as escaping the traffic. This very fact has inspired many people to build a bike ride-hailing service, and companies like Uber and Ola are not any exception. Even though these big companies could manage to host the very service, it is Rapido that has successfully established its motorbike ride-hailing service in India.

Rapido was founded by three engineer friends, Aravind Sanka, Pavan Guntupalli, and S.R. Rishikesh, in 2015, in Bengaluru India. Sanka and Guntupalli are childhood friends, and Rishikesh was the flatmates with Guntupalli. Three of them were working as engineers in Bengaluru, earning good bucks, but none of them could not escape from the startup fever.

After the app-based ride-hailing services came to India, all three loved the concept and used those apps to commute to their offices and back. But it was not an affordable option. One fine day, all three decided to overcome this problem and look for some better and affordable option for daily travelling.

Rapido founders
Image Source: Forbes

Motorcycles are quite popular in India and are also the most affordable mean of travelling. All the three decided to quit their job and start working on a business model that will help people hire bikes to commute from one place to the other at cheap prices. At the beginning of their business, they named the company ‘theKarrier’. They started theKarrier in November 2014 and rebranded it as Rapido in 2015.

The basic idea behind the startup was to hire people who owned two-wheelers. The idea was different from Uber and Ola, as these company invested heavily on the vehicles. But in the case of Rapido, the bike owners just needed to register on the Rapido-captain app and verify their details with the company. And, they were good to go. Another thing that helped Rapido to rise above its rivals was that it did not bother that the driver wanted to be full or part-timer.

The driver in terms of Rapido is called the Captain, and the company provides its every captain with insurance. For the safety of the rider, it has included a few features on the app. The user gets the assistance just in a single tap on the app. Rapido has also set up a customer care service for the users and also offers perks on the rides.

Almost over 5000 drivers use the app every day, and an average of 15,000 drivers log in to the app every month. These drivers also complete over 30,000 rides per month on an average, and the company aims to make it one million rides per day by the end of 2019. The women drivers have also registered to the app and are successfully earning good money over it. According to the stats, the app usually registers drivers of the age between 18 to 50 years.

In April 2017, Rapido raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A funding, backed by Hero MotoCorp Ltd chairman Pawan Munjal and Google India managing director Rajan Anandan. By 2018, the company has raised $6 million in two rounds and was earning a $1.5 million revenue every month. It hosted the latest round of funding in August 2019 and raised over $58 million in funding led by Westbridge Capital. Rapido wants to spend this money on technical innovation and intends to reach 100 major cities in India soon.

Rapido began its service from Bengaluru and is now expanded to 40 cities across the country, including Hyderabad, Mysore, Vishakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai, Coimbatore, Indore, Guwahati, Surat, Patna, and the NCR region.

The Rapido founders got their names listed in Forbe ‘30 Under 30 Asia – Consumer Technology 2019’.

voicemail

Gordon Matthews : The American Inventor Who Invented the Voicemail

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Some inventions have become such an integral part of our lives that we cannot imagine our lives otherwise. One can even go to the extent and say that we have almost taken such services for granted. The biggest such example is a subtle yet impactful invention- the Voicemail. This telephone service has been a part of our life for a very long time. It is almost impossible for us to imagine our mundane lives complete without this. But the voicemail is the result of sheer hard work and novelty. Gordon Mathews, the inventor of Voicemail, teaches us some of the most important lessons of life as we unfold the story of how a normal man went on to become the visionary who changed the way people communicate.

The Beginning

Gordon completed his graduation in engineering science from the University of Tulsa in the year 1959. Soon after his graduation, Gordon joined the U.S Marine Corps, and this life decision laid the first foundation stone for Voicemail. We can all agree on the fact that there comes a day in everyone’s life when they have the make it or the break it moment. For Gordon Mathews, this time was when he witnessed the accident of his fellow pilot.

A part of him believed that he had a role to play in it. Soon after he was discharged from the U.S Marine, Gordon went on to join IBM and contributed hugely in developing voice-activated cockpit controls that would play a major role in decreasing air catastrophes such as his friend’s. The incident managed to influence and affected him in such a way that the man decided to dedicate the rest of his career trying to find a solution for such problems in transmitting information between people.

Gordon Matthews
Image Source: ithistory.org

There are a lot of stories that revolve around how Mr Mathews invented Voicemail. The most famous and widely accepted one among them is of his travel to his office in Dallas on a rainy day. On his way to the office, Gordon noticed a trash-filled with pink slips full of while-you-were-out messages and other important information. This sparked an idea in him, and later, led to the invention of the Voicemail.

Gordon once said that if he sees anything that irritates him, he tries to fix it. This was exactly what happened with Voicemail. At the time of his invention, there was already the existence of a simple home answering machine that could only store messages. It uses an ordinary typewriter to do its function. The system found by Gordon did so much more than just record and save messages, i.e., send, forward, receive, store and even erase messages.

VMX

With the rocketing success of voicemail, Gordon started his very own company called ECS Telecommunications, which later on went on to be known as VMX. Soon enough, he received a patent for his invention of Voicemail and sold his first system to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company). It is believed that his wife Monica was the one to send the first commercial voice message over it.

Later on, Mr Mathews went on to sell major shares of his company to huge firms such as 3M, Intel, Hoffman La Roche and Zenith Data Systems. But later in the year 1988, VMX went into the verge of a major bankruptcy and was soon acquired by a firm named Opcom. This firm was in turn obtained by Octel communications which were then, the largest provider of voicemail services and equipment across the world.

The Legacy

The legacy that Gordon Mathews left behind is huge. He is someone who believed that he could make the world a better place and actually went on to do the same. Even though he did not have much of a success story to tell as a businessman, everyone has a lot to learn from Gordo, as an inventor. The world is always in dire need of new inventions and people like Gordon Mathews, who indeed makes a huge difference in how we perceive the world.

sql

The Story of two Genius Scientists Behind SQL

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce are the original developers of the SQL Server, a product for storing and managing data. Both of them started working on it in the 1970s, and the first version of the software was released in 1974. SQL (Structured Query Language) was built as a domain-specific language to be used for accessing and manipulating data, data query and much more.

Apart from SQL, Chamberlin and Boyce are well known for their contribution in XQuery and Boyce-Codd normal form respectively.

Donald D. Chamberlin

Born in 1944 in San Jose, California, Chamberlin attended Campbell High School. He pursued electrical engineering in Harvey Mud College and later, completed his master’s as well as a PhD degree from the Stanford University. While he was in his college, he managed to land an internship in IBM Research in New York, and it is the same place where he started working after his PhD.

donald d chamberlin sql
Image Source: computerhistory.org

In the 1960s, at the time Chamberlin was in college, Computers were merely reachable by commoners. In fact, at that time, Harvey Mud College also had only a single computer, an IBM 1620. Chamberlin got lucky to have access to the computer and managed to write a program for tic-tac-toe for a human player on a keyboard.

During this time, two significant figures, Charlie Bachman and Ted Codd, were making exceptional contributions to the database management system. When Chamberlin joined IBM, one of IBM’s main concerns was to launch an efficient optimizing compiler for Codd’s Relational Model of data. Chamberlin was a part of the group working for the prototype, and hence, he was sent to CA, where he met Raymond F. Boyce.

Raymond F. Boyce

Boyce was born in 1947 and grew up in New York. He graduated from Providence College in 1968 and received his PhD from Purdue University in 1972. After receiving his doctorate, he also joined IBM and worked on database projects. Shortly, he came up with Boyce-Codd normal form in collaboration with Todd and was later sent to CA to work on the optimizing compiler.

And, when he met Chamberlin in CA, both of them set their course to develop SQL.

The Idea of SEQUEL

Raymond F Boyce Sql
Image Source: alchetron.com

SEQUEL stands for Structured English Query English which is one of IBM’s original database management systems.

While they were working on Codd’s relational ideas, they found one major drawback that made this relational model look very complicated. Since Codd was a mathematician, he explained everything with reference to the Cartesian plane and used many complex mathematical symbols and relations to elaborate his models. Since they were working to improve the data management system, both Chamberlin and Boyce thought of coming up with a language that would simplify the complexity of his models because Codd’s ideas were undoubtedly too strong. So, both of them started working on writing a language and named it SEQUEL for everyone (non-mathematicians) to use it using simple terminologies.

When they came up with SEQUEL, IBM didn’t have any product plan based on this language, so the company suggested them to produce the paper at a technical conference in Ann Arbor. Boyce went to the conference and realized that the relational database system (RDBMS) is truly the future of database management in every field. Soon after Ray returned from the conference, he died of a brain aneurysm.

Success of SEQUEL

IBM lost one of its greatest computer scientists, and Chamberlin, unfortunately, lost his partner. But, this didn’t hinder the growth and exposure of SEQUEL. Once the paper was released, IBM started working on testing the usefulness of the language in the practical world. They started building prototypes of the product (system R prototypes) based on this language. A team of 12 IBM programmers was made to work on this system R.

Products like System/38, SQL/DS and DB2 were commercially available during the late 1970s and early 1980s. After SEQUEL started launching commercial products, the shorter version of the commercial name became SQL.

During the early 1980s, the prices of computers fall unexpectedly, thus, allowing every organization to shift their paper records to a computer database. This led to the growth of database management systems, having a grip on the market and opening a vast source of profit for SQL.

Oracle also started making SQL database systems for the U.S government and sold them successfully. The language becomes so easy and efficient to command that the government launched FIPS 127, a federal database system that used SQL.

By 1986, both ANSI and ISO accepted SQL as the database language, and since then, new versions of it have been popping up into our systems.

caviar

Jason Wang : The ‘$10 to $90M’ Journey of a Passionate Entrepreneur

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, Story, Tech Story / By

Entrepreneurship has always been a term that possibly the three-fourth of the world population look forward to. There are rarely any people who are happy with the idea of the 9 to 5 job. Every person must have thought about starting up their own business and being their own boss at least once in their lifetime. And it is fair too, as working for oneself and doing the work out of passion is what makes everyone successful. One such person, who was always in the favour of becoming his own boss is Jason Wang, an American serial-entrepreneur, who founded the food delivery service Caviar.

Jason Wang belongs to the Japanese descendent and graduated from Berkely University. He was still in school when he started his first business, i.e., an anime website, which served a total of 30,000 unique visitors every month. He received $1 for every ten visitors through ads, and hence, was earning $30 a day. But soon, the creators of Cardcaptor seized the domain name of his website, and his first business came to an end.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, (Haas School of Business), he worked with big-name companies, including Google and Microsoft. Though he had a good salary package and had a stable job, he was still dreaming of building his business. So finally, after leaving his corporate job, he founded a mobile app development company, 815 Productions, in 2010. With his company, he developed an app that extracted data from Craigslist. Though the app was quite useful, the venture also got shut in a few months. But still, he remained to be encouraged to do something big and on his own. He kept on thinking of new ideas that would be a kick-starter for his entrepreneurship.

Jason Wang Caviar
Image Source: bizjournals.com

During the same time, Groupon was taking over the world with its amazing deals. He was impressed by how the company was establishing itself in no time. Seeing the growth of the company, Jason was forced to look at the business model of Groupon, upon which he found out that most of the people were going for the food deals on the platform. This led him to think of a similar coupon business that only would provide deals in food items.

Jason concluded that it would be better to target the university students to get more customers in one place without investing in ads. So he launched MunchOnMe for the Berkeley University students first. At the same time, Paul Graham from Y Combinator came to the university for his keynote and asked the students to apply for the accelerator program at Y Combinator.

Jason Wang had already registered 3000 users to MunchOnMe and applied to Y Combinator with the same idea. He made it to Y Combinator for its summer batch. It was a life-changing experience for him, as he got to listen to the big tech entrepreneurs and learn more about the business. He also received an $18000 seed funding for MunchOnMe.

After launching MunchOnMe officially for the general public, Jason realised that the business was good, but could not sustain for a longer time. So after operating it for a few months, he decided to sell the company. While selling the company, he made it clear to the buyers that he won’t be a part of the company and will lose every right over it.

The money he earned from the company’s acquisition helped him and his teammates to survive for a year and a half. But after that, he ran out of money. According to an interview with Jason Wang, there was a time when he had only $10 in his business account. But fortunately, the place he was renting had enough space to make room for new tenants, and he rented half of the place for $600.

While working in his office in San Francisco, he and his teammates felt the craving for Ike Place’s sandwiches, but the restaurant was on a distance of 45 minutes. So it would take them to go and come back from the restaurant a total of one and a half hours plus one hour of standing in the long queue at the restaurant. They called the restaurant for delivery, but they did not have the service available at that time. This was the year 2012, even before Uber. So there were no resources that could help Jason and his teammates to get the sandwich in time.

This incident made Jason think of a delivery service that would help people to get the desired food at their doorsteps. This led to the launch of Caviar.

Jason started working on the idea and partnered with three restaurants, i.e., Ikes Place, HRD and Nick’s Cripsy Tacos. The idea was to get people what they wanted to eat, delivered at their doorsteps. And, initially, Jason and his team would deliver the food by themselves. It was easier for him to get new customers as he talked about the idea with his friends from the University, Office, and also from Y Combinator. In the beginning, they would deliver on the lunchtimes and only on the weekdays. But soon, the company started gaining more customers and partnered with more restaurants. This way, Caviar gained most of its users within the six months of its launch and became popular among the masses.

The company had a kickstart, and in two years, it raised more than a $13 million from the investors. Jason did not have a long journey with Caviar, but it was the most successful business of his life. He sold the company to Square in 2014 for a rumoured $90 million.

Though Jason Wang sold his company, he is still active as a growing entrepreneur and has made a few investments in different ventures. Alongside Caviar, he also launched a few restaurants and also co-owns a hospitality group called Umai. He is also the founding partner of Beluga Capital, the venture that helps the tech startups with funding. He is a big food lover and also founded a food blog named Cityfoodsters. Jason also got his name listed under the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015.