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Success Story of Xender, Sharing Files Without The Expense of Mobile Data

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India is surely a developing country but still, the internet has not reached every corner of the nation. Even today, it is a part of luxury for some people to be able to use mobile data. Now, mobile phone users without the internet can transfer a file through Bluetooth easily but it also has limitations.

When sending files from an Android OS to iOS, it is not possible via Bluetooth. In this kind of crisis, a software that can help users to transfer files from one device to another without using data and also allowing transfer between different OS is absolutely a blessing.

And to meet these needs of the people, Xender was developed in 2011. Xender is a software written in languages Java and Objective-C which helps connect two smart devices and transfer files without turning on data. The application is currently available on four operating systems, Windows, iOS, Android and Tizen.

  • Xender Founder Peter Jiang

A Chinese Start-up

Xender was developed in 2011 by three developers, namely, S.S Chandwara, Lokesh Narwani, and Tingu Urf Tikiya and was founded by Peter Jiang. Apart from the main advantage of application being running without mobile data, Xender connected with computers as well. And, in the case of computers, Xender was made available for both Windows and MAC.

The main feature of the application was the personal hotspot feature that also assured high speed for the file transfer system. With Xender launching in the market, the two main problems often faced by the users were resolved. First, people didn’t need to think about the cost of data anymore and second, file transfer was made possible between dissimilar operating systems.

The obstacles

After a couple of years of launching Xender, the main competitors of the application were Zapya and SHAREit. Though Xender managed to bag 200 million users by 2015, the stock market of China slowed down during these years. The biggest impact of this sudden change in the economy of the Chinese market was suffered by the tech start-ups as they were unable to find suitable investors. Raising funds became a living nightmare for the company but they didn’t stop looking for investors.

But, after many struggles, this four-year-old start-up raised a good amount of undisclosed funding from angel investors, Linear Venture and investors of WeChat.

Expansion of the market

Xender has been launched in more than 22 countries by now but most of its active users are from Mexico, Brazil, and India. One of the biggest markets for Xender is India given those big companies like Micromax pre-install the application before selling it to the customers. India is Xender’s biggest oversea success and the largest market after China itself. The company is expected to grow exponentially as the production of smartphones is also increasing over the years.

Xender in India

By 2016, Xender announced that it has hit a 50 percent share in the market of India and along with that revealed the growth rate of users, that is, 100 percent. Xender witnessed around 170 million active users of the application blooming in the Indian market. Xender reached 500 million global users by this year and Jiang announced that their goal was to reach 800 million by the next couple of years.

The main users of Xender were from the expected metropolitan cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi. But, the application was also gaining popularity in the northern parts of India especially in the areas where internet connections were not so strong. After the next couple of years, Xender took a gigantic step by coming into a partnership with SONY India for MovieChain Project.

An offline distribution system for movies was a huge change in the business model as compared to the conventional way. But, this sudden change would have definitely increased the Indian Xender user base as transferring movies through mobile terminals without turning on data definitely sounds advantageous in every way.

Jiang, after successfully starting a joint venture with SONY India announced that he plans to expand his partnership with major movie studios around the globe and explore new ways to expand the business. By this time, Xender was used in more than 190 countries with its availability in more than thirty languages.

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.

Sean Rad : The Founding Memeber and Former CEO of Tinder

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Digitalization has made every activity so convenient for us that we can literally do anything with a swipe of our fingers. Moreover, the younger generation prefers doing everything through the internet, starting from shopping, payment, booking shows, and even, finding a perfect date unless they happen to meet under the mistletoe. Now, how great it would be to use a mobile app where you can find a perfect match only by swiping left or right? Tinder is one such mobile dating app, using which you can chat with other users and find a ‘good match’ for yourself.

The app provides the option to swipe right if you like someone’s profile and the other way around if you don’t like any. The app was launched in 2012, and in less than a couple of months, it grew to a million users. Tinder was founded by Sean Rad, along with Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and many other executive members. Rad was also the former CEO of the company. One of the founding members, Whitney Wolfe, left Tinder after some time to work on another dating app, Bumble.

Early Life

Born into an Iranian family, Rad moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1970s and settled in Beverly Hills. His parents worked in the technology industry, which might be one reason why he knew tech very well. Since his childhood, Rad was passionate about doing something big in life and making his life worthy.

Sean Rad
Image Source: businessinsider.in

When Rad was in high school, he did an internship as an entertainment manager, and that’s how he realized that he can make money even from the things he enjoyed doing. Though Rad and Mateen went to different schools, they knew each other since they were fourteen.

Higher Education and Career

Rad started pioneering in the world of technology since he was just eighteen and launched Orgoo, his first startup that was envisioned to build a webmail service. Both Rad and Mateen went to the University of Southern California, but Rad dropped out after a couple of years, to explore the entrepreneurial world and developed a platform called Adly, in the mid-2000s.

These two young entrepreneurs, along with other members, launched Tinder in 2012 and promoted the app heavily in various college campuses. They knew very well, where they could grab the most attention, and thus, gained a billion swipes per day, within a couple of years of Tinder.

Success of Tinder

A year after the release of Tinder, the app received TechCrunch’s Crunchie Award for ‘Best New Startup of 2013’. In March 2013, the company realised the application was used only in a few localities, and hence, Alexa Mateen, social media director, promoted it in other college campuses as well. And by May 2013, Tinder became one of the top twenty-five social networking apps on the basis of users. The frequency of users kept rising, which made Tinder the first online dating app as one of the top five online utilized applications.

In 2014 Webby Awards, the company was named as ‘breakout of the year’, and by October 2014, the application finally incorporated swiping motion and processed more than a billion swipes per day. It made around twelve million matches per day, which is appreciable for a company, which is only two years old. In 2015, the company launched a new feature to let the user access the profiles they rejected earlier, but chatting of two users was only possible when both of them swiped right. Apart from this, a lot of new features were added and deleted from the app in 2015. Tinder’s main complementing site was Facebook, as the user needed to connect their Facebook account with the app for profile verification.

In September 2016, Tinder came in partnership with Vina, a social networking app, and tested ‘Tinder Boost’ in Australia. In October 2016, it went live around the world, which basically, allowed your profile to be on top in your area for 30 minutes. In the same month, Tinder announced the opening of their first office in Silicon Valley, such that to enhance the quality of the employees. In November 2016, the app introduced more freedom on the grounds of choosing gender, breaking the typical mindset of society. This feature raised the number of users by a hefty amount, and by 2018, Tinder had over 3.7 million paid subscribers. The company is now deciding to launch a lighter version of the app, called Tinder Lite, which will take relatively less storage space and consume lesser data.

Majority of the Tinder, today, is under the acquisition of IAC and its subsidiary, Match Group. Till 2018, Rad changed positions quite a number of times, stepping down from the position of CEO and getting back in the helm again. But, in August 2018 a lawsuit was filed against IAC by a group of Tinder employees including Rad. They are suing IAC of alleged stock information and seeking at least $2billion in damages.

Inshorts : An App that Brings to You Crisped News from Around the World

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Most of us, especially, the working class of our society, hardly get any time to go through the newspaper every morning. Reading each and every news in details and catching the office bus on time is next to impossible. But, it is like one of the fundamentals of our life to stay updated and follow up with the current news. Majority of the population rely on Google for that, just reading the headlines every day. But, India has brought something better for you.

An Indian company, Inshorts, has created a mobile app that summarizes the news for you in less than sixty words, covering all important highlights of the news. The app includes global news on business, education, politics, sports, technology, and everything you need to know about. The application is available for both Android and iOS.

Inshorts founders
Image Source: financialexpress.com

Inshorts was founded in 2013, and within a span of six years, the app received more than 6 million users. The company was founded by Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav. All of them dropped out from Indian Institute of Technology to start a business of their own. Azhar Iqubal and his friend, Anunay Arunav, were from IIT Delhi, whereas Purkayastha was from IIT Kharagpur. These three young potential entrepreneurs were pursuing computer science.

History

All of it started with creating a Facebook page on 23rd March 2013. Iqubal created the page to deliver summarized news for the readers. This caught the attention of many social media users, as it helped them stay updated about the whereabouts, without spending too much time in reading the entire stories.

The company, first, released its application in 2013 for Android, and for iOS, in 2015. After Inshorts started gaining popularity, it was admitted to the TLabs startup accelerator (it helps new startups to reach their full potential by proving them with capital and proper mentor). Soon, the company was shortlisted as one of the Nasscom’s 10,100 startups, and by December 2014, the company’s app had 1 lakh subscribers. In the same year, the company received funding from Sachin and Binny Bansal, co-founders of Flipkart. Other early investors, include Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra, Ankush Nijhawan and Times Internet.

In February 2015, the company received funding from Tiger Global, Rebright Partners and raised $4 million in Series A funding, which was followed by raising another $20 million in Series B funding by the Bansal brothers and existing investor Tiger Global. In one of the interviews, Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners, said that Inshorts has a very bright and enthusiastic founding team, which is a pre-requisite for any startups at the initial stage. In the same year, the company was rebranded as Inshorts from its previous name News in Shorts.

The company announced that it intended to hire over a hundred content writers, by the end of 2015. In October 2015, Inshorts acquired a Bangalore-based company, Betaglide, the originator of Retention.ai. Retention.ai is, basically, a technology that helps to track the number of users uninstalling the app, the reason behind it and reducing the maintaining cost for the user. So, this was incorporated in the app of Inshorts to track the number of uninstallation, and thus, make strategies to perk up user retention.

By the end of 2015, the company already started adding images and videos along with the news, and also, added links which directed the user to the entire news if somebody wished to read it. Thus, the company collaborated with many news websites to ensure better news reporting. Though the company raised an appreciable amount of fund and reputation within a couple of years, there was a lot of criticism labelling Inshorts as a startup without a firm strategy. Iqubal, in response to these disparagements, said that they are looking forward to experimenting with the revenue models, and it might take another couple of year for the company to settle with one.

In 2016, the three co-founders got featured in Forbes magazine’s ’30 under 30′ list. They also received the award for ‘Best Innovation App’ by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Understanding that India has stepped into the digital era, wrapping it within the cloak of advertisement, it can bring massive profit to the company. So, in July 2016, the company launched the first ad on the platform, which ultimately ended up having more than a hundred advertising partner on board till 2018.

Future Plan of Inshorts

Since digitalized advertisement has become a key to make more profit, the company looks forward to luring more advertisers and increase the net revenue rate by four times. Also, the purchases through the app have increased significantly, and hence it plans to direct the readers to sites, like BookMyShow, MakeMyTrip, etc. The company also aims to incorporate more video contents, even for the ads, and put more emphasis on the regional languages. They are planning to curate more Hindi content as a major part of India’s population is still not comfortable with English. So, focusing on languages, apart from English, has produced more room for growth.

Prezi : Communication Made Effective

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Expressions are the prime contributors to effective communication. And, in professional life, presentations are the ones that help in expressing even the most complex terms in the most sorted manner. Presentations are considered as one of the best ways to communicate efficiently. Over the years, presentations have been recognised as the mainstream source for telling analytics, strategies and stories, because visual representation is always much better and interesting. One such tool which converts stories into visual presentations is Prezi.

Founding Prezi

The story of Prezi falls back to 2007. In 2007, a Hungarian architect student, Adam Somlai-Fischer, who had a craving for innovation, was working over the design of a building. He, being creative, was not satisfied with the service that PowerPoint or Keynote would provide in terms of building a presentation. He wanted his viewers to look at the building in every possible angle and details of the buildings. So, he built a zooming presentation prototype that helped him achieve the vision he wanted to. Peter Halacsy, an engineer, saw one of these presentations and looked forward to improving the software. Soon enough, they were joined with Peter Arvai, who was an entrepreneur, in the journey of Prezi.

prezi founders
Image Source: hungarytoday.hu

The company was incorporated on May 20, 2009, with Peter Arvai, appointed as its CEO. The launch of the company took place at The Next Web Conference at Amsterdam, in April 2009. Prezi means ‘presentation’ in Hungarian. The very first office of Prezi in the US was launched in November 2009, after it received its first major investment from TED. Prezi is an out of the box software, which turns the boring presentation into interesting slides. As the website mentions, “Unlike slides, which literally box you in, Prezi gives you a limitless zoomable canvas, and the ability to show relationships between the big picture and fine details. The added depth and context make your message more likely to resonate, motivate, and get remembered, whether it’s your bread-and-butter sales pitch, a classroom lecture, or a TED Talk to the world’s foremost thinkers.

Peter Arvai once said, “Prezi helps you organize your thoughts and deliver them in a clearer way that really makes an impact on your audience and helps them reach that ‘ah-hah’ moment faster.”

Prezi has been growing ever since its foundation because of its reinvention of how one sees a presentation. It came to the mobile devices in 2011, when the company launched an iOS app for the iPads. The app gained $14 million in Series B venture capital funding. It also was indulged with Barack Obama’s ConnectED, promising over a $100M free licenses to Title1 schools.

Prezi has launched a number of services. It released an iPhone app in 2012, followed by the unveiling of ‘Nutshell’, a feature which helps in creating a mini-movie from one’s photos, and then an Android app in 2015. The company rolled out Prezi business in 2016.

Arvai admits that it was difficult to get funding from investors. He told that even though investors were impressed by the prospect of the software, they believed that it had no potential in the market. He also expressed that the company supports a healthy corporate environment. It allows employees to switch offices for a six-week period from San Francisco to Budapest and vice-versa. Prezi believes in the policy of inviting failure as a guest and learn from it.

Arvai is in the board of directors for WeAreOpen (Over 1000 companies coming together who aim to establish workspaces of openness) and Bridge Budapest (A group of entrepreneurs coming together to contribute to the future of Hungary). He remained a founder board member of Sanocore till February 2014. He was also the Vice President of Product Management at Mobispine. Peter approached companies via TED conference giving the common vision of promoting the open exchange of ideas. Also, in 2015, it came out that he was considered as a role model by Forbes for young people considering to be entrepreneurs.

The story of Prezi shows that creativity always makes way for innovation and freshness in the atmosphere of staleness. It has over 100 million users and has created over 350 million Prezis. It gives us a clear message that empty canvas and an artist can change the way one looks at the world with his/her astonishing ideas.

Facebook Might Bring Back the Chat Feature to its Mobile App

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Almost five years ago, Facebook started pushing its users to use its standalone messaging app, Facebook Messenger, by disabling the chat feature from its social media app. At the time, most of the people were annoyed with this step taken by the company, but in past years they have become apt with the messaging app.

facebook messenger
Image Source: hanoitimes.vn

But in recent years, having got the most of the user engagement on the messenger, rather than the social media platform, it might be possible that Facebook is encouraged to bring the chat feature back to its Facebook app. Noticeably, the Facebook messenger is currently serving to over 1.3 billion monthly users, which is huge.

According to a tweet by the researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is testing the basic chat feature on its social media app. Wong tweeted, “Facebook is bringing the Chats back to the app for preparing integrated messaging.” In fact, she had tweeted a few hours before this tweet that she will be uncovering one upcoming feature that most of the people will like.

About a month ago the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had mentioned that the company will be having its emphasis more on its messaging unit. He had also expressed his intention for unifying all the messaging app from Facebook, i.e., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. And, now the testing of the new chat feature for the Facebook app may be the company’s first step towards the very objective.

For now, the company is testing a basic chat feature for the Facebook app, and according to reports, there is no support for the video call, image sharing, the sticker sharing and the other Messenger options in it.

The company has not commented on the matter yet, and there may be a possibility that the feature remains unreleased for quite some time, as it is still in testing. According to Wong, there has been no mention of dissolving the Facebook Messenger as it will continue to serve the users that are on Facebook solely to use the messaging app and are not active on the Facebook app.