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nazara technologies

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

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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

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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

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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.

Instacart

Apoorva Mehta : The Founder of Instacart, the ‘Uber of Grocery’

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The internet and the rise of the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have inspired a lot of people out there to start their own innovative business. And there is much evidence that the inspiration has worked for numerous people. The Internet has helped people to get idea from their daily needs and transform it into a successfully functioning business. One such person, who was inspired by the success of the big tech companies, is Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart. Mehta was awed by the fact that how the new startups were getting success overnight. And hence, after trying out over 20 business ideas, he finally started Instacart.

Early Life and Career

Mehta belongs to the Indian descent, but was born and brought up in Canada. He had always been inclined towards the internet and technology. He had also been interested in learning science and computer programming. After completing his school education, Mehta joined the University of Waterloo, to complete an electrical engineering degree.

After completing his graduation, Mehta worked for companies like Qualcomm and BlackBerry. Though he had got good jobs, he was a bit confused about what he really wanted to do. Later, in 2008, Mehta moved to Seattle, to work with Amazon. He joined Amazon as the supply chain engineer. But, here too, he could not feel the passion for work and left the company after two years, in 2010.

The Inspiration for Startup

Apoorva Mehta Instacart
Image Source: celebritynetworth.com

With the rise of the tech companies, he had already developed an interest in entrepreneurship, so Mehta started looking for ‘the’ idea, that would help him establish a successful business. It took him over two years and 20 failed startup ideas to finally reach to Instacart. Before Instacart, Mehta tried to build an ad network for the gaming com to developing a social network for lawyers. But nothing worked for him.

After brainstorming for two long years and testing out those twenty startup ideas, Apoorva Mehta stopped and analysed, what he was doing wrong. He even thought of quitting, as none of his ideas had worked out. But persistence is the key. This time, he decided to work with passion and patience. He also realized that a business is successful when it solves a problem. So, he started looking for a problem that he could solve. Ultimately, he got an idea of developing an online grocery delivery service, which came out straight from his own pain point.

While working at Amazon, Apoorva Mehta was unable to find time to go for grocery shopping. He could order anything online, but there were no grocery delivering services. He found an opportunity in the problem and started working to solve it.

Finding the Investors

Mehta developed the app for his new startup ‘Instacart’ and started looking for investors. He tried to get into the Y Combinator tech incubator 2012, but the summer intake was already closed. So he had to take the other way around. He met a few of the partners of Y Combinator to request them to provide him entry into the incubator. But no one agreed. He met the last partner, who did not reject him, but said that the startup idea was nearly impossible.

Apoorva Mehta came back empty-handed but sent a pack of beer to that last partner through his app. This act made that partner think of this idea again, and he convinced the other Y Combinator partners to open the entry for Mehta. And this way, the doors of success were also opened for Mehta and his startup. Finally, he launched the company in 2012, in San Francisco.

The Rise of Instacart

In two years from its inception, the company gained a $40 million and spread to 17 different locations within the U.S. and Canada. The company was named as the ‘Most Promising Company in America’ by Forbes in 2015, and even, valued at $2 billion just in three years.

In 2016, the company went to expand in the North Chicago Zone, and the next year, the company was serving in 1,200 cities in 25 states. By the end of the year, the company partnered with Loblaw Companies for deliveries. The company raised a total of $400 million investment and valued at $3.4 billion.

In 2018, Instacart partnered with companies like Walmart Canada, HyVee, The Fresh Market, Harps, Lunds & Byerlys. It even acquired a Canada-based grocer named Unata. After raising a $200 investment in February 2018, the company raised another $600 million funding in October the same year and valued at $7.6 billion.

Mehta’s startup idea was unique and became successful within a year of its inception. And today, it is among the unicorn companies. The reason behind the success of Instacart is that it was different from the other businesses. It won’t be wrong if we call Instacart the Uber of grocery, as there was no warehouse to store the grocery and no official vans were bought to do the deliveries. In fact, the grocery came directly from the retailers, and the company hired people with their vehicles to do the deliveries. Both Instacart and the retailer are in benefit, and there is no spending of money on the physical cost resources.

CMOS image sensor

Eric Fossum : The Inventor of Active Pixel Sensor

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Due to the high demand for mobile phones and digital camera, the production and development of image sensors have become an integral part of existing technology. And, among all the image sensors developed till date, active-pixel sensor (APS) is the widely used one, especially CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) APS. These image sensors are extensively used in smartphone cameras, digital pocket cameras, digital single-lens reflex cameras, and probably, in every other present-day camera you can name.

The history of these image sensors goes back to 1985 when Tsutomu Nakamura started working on the charge modulation device active pixel sensor. But it was Eric Fossum, who brought a giant wave of development in this field. So, next time you take out that pocket camera to take photographs, it’s Fossum you should be thankful for.

Early Life and Education of Eric Fossum

Born into a family in Simsbury, Connecticut, Fossum went to a local public school. From a very tender age, he developed an interest in science and engineering. So he spent the Saturdays at Talcott Mountain Science Center in Avon CT. In 1979, he graduated from Trinity College with a B.S in physics and engineering, followed by receiving his PhD in electrical engineering, in 1984 from Yale University.

Fossum’s Academic Career, Research and Invention

eric fossum
Image Source: yale.edu

After receiving his PhD, Fossum joined Columbia University as a professor in 1984. During his time at the university, he, along with his students, researched on CCD (charge-coupled device) focal-plane image processing and high-speed III-C CCDs. In 1990, Fossum joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California Institute of Technology and continued his research on the image sensor field. There he developed a modified version of the image sensor with intra-pixel charge transfer and un-pixel amplifier with more modifications and additional features. While he was working in the laboratory, Daniel Goldin, the then NASA-Administrator, wanted something faster, better and cheaper for the space missions. This led Eric Fossum to come up with CMOS APS, which today is incorporated in phone cameras, DSLRs, medical equipment, and automotive safety systems, etc.

According to Fossum, the growth in technology during the early 1990s was at a very slow rate, which led him to establish Photo bit Corporation along with his then-wife, Sabrina Kemeny, to develop and commercialize APS technology at a faster rate. In 1996, he joined the board as chairman and also as the chief scientist. In 2000, Fossum became the CEO of the company, which after a year came under the acquisition of Micron Technology. Even after the acquisition, he remained the part of the company and was named a Senior Micron Fellow. But in 2003, Fossum left Micron. In 2005, he joined at SiWave Inc. as the CEO and worked with the company for two years.

Eric Fossum, in 1986, founded the IEEE workshop on CCDS, which was later renamed as International Image Sensor Workshop.

He also had a sheer interest in robotics, and hence, he partially sponsored the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest in 2007. In 2010, Fossum joined the Thayer School of Engineering to teach and conduct research on Quanta Image Sensor and also to coordinate the PhD Innovation Program.

Achievements

Throughout Fossum’s academic career, he had been a recipient of ample of awards. His was in 1984, which was the Yale’s Becton Prize. In the same year, he was honoured with the IBM Faculty Development Award. He also received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986, and within the next decade, he bagged NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal. And, this is just a mere preview of his glorious achievements.

Recently, in 2017, Fossum was honoured with Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which is probably the biggest prize for an engineer. It’s a cash prize of £1 million, generally given to the engineers for inventing something which is globally beneficial.

Life after Retirement

Fossum founded Photobit in 1996 followed by another company Siimple within few years. But, he stepped down from every position, and finally, retired from his business life in 2010. He then moved to New Hampshire.

He was quite happy with his decision to leave his entrepreneurial life because he decided to embrace the retired life and pursue teaching. And thus, he joined Thayer School of Engineering to stay active in the journey of innovation and contribute to the technology as far as he can.

sql

The Story of two Genius Scientists Behind SQL

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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.