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Gogoro

Gogoro : Tesla of Scooters, Building Energy-efficient Smart Scooters

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The environmental crisis is the biggest concern for humans, and soon, we are going to run out of many things that have become necessary for us. One such thing is fuel. In this growing world, the population is increasing, and so is the demand for fuel. Today, having a vehicle is a priority for people as it is not only comfortable to travel with personal transport, it is also a symbol of status. This has led to extra consumption of fuel, increased pollution as well as traffic. But, to help out all these situations, Gogoro has brought stylish electric scooters that are efficient and helps in saving the environment.

Gogoro was founded by Horace Luke and Matt Taylor, in 2011. It is a Taiwan based and venture-backed company that produces Smart scooters running on battery. Though there have been other electric two-wheeler manufacturers in the world, people using those electric scooters always complained about their mileage and efficiency. The two co-founders wanted to overcome these flaws for the e-scooters and build the energy-saving Smart scooters.

Luke and Taylor, before founding Gogoro, worked with major tech giants including Microsoft and HTC. Luke worked with Microsoft’s Xbox and Windows XP team, whereas Taylor was one of the key people involved in the development of Window’s Pocket PC “smartphones”. After working for ten years at Microsoft, Luke joined the developer team of HTC as the chief innovative officer that developed some of the Android smartphones. On the other hand, Taylor worked at HTC as the chief technologist.

gogoro founders
Image Source: gogoro.com

The two established the company in Taiwan, as it was the best place for accessing the most reliable supply-chain. The idea was quite promising, and that is why the company was able to raise a huge amount of $50 million from Dr Samuel Yin of Ruentex Group and Cher Wang as the seed funding. In fact, in the other rounds of funding the company raised a really good amount. In 2014, Gogoro raised $100 million in Series B funding from a collection of investors, followed by a $30 million round of investment from Panasonic and Taiwan’s National Development Fund. With a $300 million Series C round in 2017, the company’s collection reached the US $480 million.

Gogoro launched its first Smart scooter at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2015. The speciality of these scooters is that the batteries when drained can be exchanged with other batteries at a battery-swapping station named Gogoro Energy Network. The company has already built over 300 charging and battery swapping stations in Taiwan, and it will be adding 500 more stations to its charging and battery swapping network, soon. Gogoro has set up these stations at every 1.3 km distance from each other.

Gogoro Smart scooters are associated with an app. The company has launched the app to monitor the health of the scooter, adjust performance settings, check out for the nearest GoStation, see the correct statistics on battery reservations as well as check the vehicle’s battery level, etc. The scooters are for sure smart, as these can analyse riding patterns, optimize energy use, and dim its lights when necessary to maximize energy. These update their condition to the app every 10 minutes.

The batteries used in the scooter are the lithium-ion batteries that the company primarily purchases from Panasonic. In the year of its inception, the company sold over 4000 Smart scooters. According to Luke, the stylish and cool design of the scooter, and the comfort it gives to the users is the prime reason for its success. Also, people are saving a lot of money on fuel with the help of these scooters.

Being experienced enough, the two co-founders knew the real marketing strategy and built the scooters based on the users’ choice. The scooters are available in different colours and styles, including a few of its models, having the bike-type look. There are scooters also in pink colour to attract female customers.

Due to its energy-efficient model, Gogoro has also received the Government support as these help in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. The Ministry of Economic Affairs has been supportive of Gogoro Smart scooters and have helped the company in establishing the Gogoro Energy Network in the country.

The company is already supplying its electronic products to other companies as well, and it plans to provide energy-support for offices, data centres and homes, with its lithium-ion batteries.

Gogoro has got its own retail stores where it sells its scooters, batteries and other electronic products. The company is called the Tesla of two-wheelers as it is similar to the former in many ways. Both the companies are working to find better power-saving technologies and builds the edgiest designs for its automobile.

The growth of the company and its reach can be the biggest benefit to the world, as with time we need more energy-efficient solutions for our daily needs.

canon

Canon: Embracing the Story of Your Photography

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Thanks to the various social media sites, that most of the people are now able to showcase their photography talent. With this, we all have grown a craze for owing DSLRs and fancy lenses. Though there has been a professional photographer in the past, today, everyone has the liberty to flaunt their skill. It all started from primitive prototypes, and gradually, the prototypes transformed into high-quality digital cameras.

Canon is one of the camera manufacturing companies that contributed to the revolution in the world of photography. From pocket cameras to professional kits, Canon meets the demand of every aspiring photographer. Founded in the year 1937, it is one of the bestsellers of cameras around the world.

Canon is a Japan-based multinational company founded by Takeshi Mitarai, Goro Yoshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda. It has its headquarters based in Tokyo.

Canon Headquarters Japan
Image Source: hollywoodreporter.com

Early History

When Leica Model II was introduced in the year 1932, a camera that was absolutely not affordable by the common people, it provoked Goro Yoshida to create something that everyone could pay for. He studied the model of Leica, and with the help of Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda, he started making affordable cameras. Eventually, in November 1933, he established Precision Optical Instrument Laboratory. However, Yoshida left it within a year.

Meanwhile, Precision Optical Instrument Laboratory faced some difficulties arranging lens and range finders for their cameras. This led the company to come to an agreement with Nikon Corporation and use Nikkor lenses for its cameras. After the agreement, the company produced its first camera under the name ‘Hansa Canon’ in 1936.

On 10th August 1937, the company was rebranded as Precision Optical Industry Co. Ltd., and the name of ‘Hansa Canon’ was changed to ‘Canon’. After this, the company released more models, resulting in the escalation of the sale of Canon cameras. The success of the company made it plan to expand its market outside Japan, which was then ruled by Leica and Contax.

Building the Basics

Canon started making its own lenses, and in 1940, the company released Japan’s first indirect X-ray camera. Canon was the name of the camera body, embedded with Serenar lenses and Precision Optical Industry Co. Ltd was producing these cameras. This created a lot of confusion among customers. And hence, in 1947 the name of the company was changed to Canon Camera Co. Ltd. Eventually, Serenar adopted the same name, Canon, in 1953. In 1951, Hiroshi Ito, an engineer who worked in Canon, created a high aperture lens that changed the entire fate of the company. With time, the company produced a wide range of lenses which helped it in producing even better cameras.

In 1958, the company launched Canonet, an easily affordable camera that went out of stock within a couple of hours. Canon also released Canon Demi- a lightweight small camera that was the best choice for personal use. These two models changed the entire market of cameras, giving a neck to neck competition to Leica. The company also launched a zoom lens for television broadcasting in the same year, followed by Reflex Zoom 8 (world’s first movie camera with a zoom lens) in 1959.

The launch of SLRs

In 1961, the company launched Canon 7, the Rangefinder camera and 50mm 1:0.95 lens. The company launched its first SLR camera (Canon Pellix) in 1965 followed by F-1, a high-end SLR camera in 1971, and the world’s first camera with an incorporated microcomputer, AE-1, in 1975.

In 1989, Canon launched EOS 1 Flagship Professional SLR and EOS RT, the world’s first AF SLR with a semi-transparent pellicle mirror. It then unveiled EOS 5, a camera with an eye-controlled AF and PowerShot 600, first digital camera, in the year 1992. The company came with the first commercial SLR lenses with internal image stabilization in 1995, and the next year, Canon launched a digital camera that could easily fit inside a pocket integrated with the Advanced Photo System.

Position of the Company Today

In 2002, Canon launched another eye candy for professional photographers, the EOS 1DS, a digital SLR camera with a plethora of high tech features.

In recent years, Canon has released EOS 6D Mark II with a full-frame sensor, dual pixel CMOS AF, and a Vari-angle touch panel. In 2018, it launched ‘Canon Club Elite’, a customer service program for the full-frame DSLR owners.

Since the very beginning of its journey, Canon’s goal has been to make excellent high-quality cameras in affordable ranges. Today, Canon has not only achieved its goal of making digital cameras available to common citizens, but it has also become one of the leading brands of professional camera kits.

habito

Daniel Hegarty : The Founder of Habito, UK’s Digital Mortgage Broker

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Getting a lovely and comfortable house to live is still a dream for many, and it will continue to be one of the most required things for every person living. First, finding a house that goes with one’s requirements, and then buying that specific house is a quite a complicated task, as it takes a lot of efforts from finding the house, meeting the broker, finalising the price, and not to forget the tedious paperwork that everyone has to go through. To solve this very problem, a UK based musician, Daniel Hegarty, founded Habito- an online mortgage broker service.

Hegarty is a native of London, who left school at the age of sixteen to join a rock band as a guitarist. Though he was working locally with the band and was attending school alongside, after he became more involved in music, he got suspended by the school authorities for low attendance. His band name was Serum, and while touring with the band, he started earning good money. The band got signed by a record label, and his weekly earning reached £100.

Hegarty moved to LA, where he started playing with live bands. After working for over ten years with different artists, he started losing interest in the same kind of job. He returned to the UK in 2007 and started looking for a job other than in the music industry. He asked one of his friends about jobs in the UK, and she introduced him to the team of Wonga, an online loans lenders.

Habito Founder Daniel Hegarty-1
Image Source: businessinsider.in

The company was small and had been the centre of criticism for many reasons. But Hegarty liked his job, as he was in the designing, and the marketing team, at the company. In fact, while working with Wongo, he found out that there was something other than music that he could do well. To know the financial field, and also get better in web designing, he started taking online courses from Standford University and involved himself in mathematics. Hegarty continued to work with the firm for five years, and despite a lot of criticism, in 2013, the company had over 1000 employees.

After finding the job, it was the time to get that dream house that Hegarty and his wife always wanted. After looking for a few properties, the two finalised a house. But then, buying the house has never been so easy. The two had to go through a lot of paperwork filled with complex jargons. The legal work was going all wrong as the broker made the mistake with Hegarty’s wife’s name twice in the papers. The mistake by their broker lead them losing the house, and the couple was on the roads.

The thought of losing a house because of the mistake of the broker disgusted him, and he wanted to find out a better way to buy a house. This time, he was not ready to contact with a careless broker and lose the deal again.

So Hegarty decided to try his own hands in the same field. He started studying more about the mortgage and home loans. He even met many brokers and found out that these brokers always neglected the buyers. The only thing mattered to them was money. People had to waste a lot of their time and money to get a house for them. Buying even a small was like a nightmare for every person.

Hegarty finally founded Habito in January 2015 as a fee-free online mortgage broker with the help of investors Toby Coppel and Meyer Malka. In a year of its launch, the company was analysing over 60 applicants in seconds. The company launched a mortgage search and comparison service in April 2016 adjoining with over 70 mortgage lenders.

By September 2017, the company had lent £250m to 50,000 borrowers, and by November 2018, over 150,000 people had used the company’s website to get mortgage advice and applications. Since the inception of Habito, it has been growing with a rate of 20 per cent every year. Today, the number of employees at Habito has raised from 4 people to 160 people.

The company has created the world’s first artificially intelligent Digital Mortgage Adviser (DMA) for regulated mortgage advice. That means the users get their advice from the bots and unless necessary, there no human interaction with the user. Though every employee of the company plays the role of customer support every in every two weeks to provide personalised solutions to the customers.

Due to the robot-assistance, the company has faced a lot of criticism, but the ability to provide a customer with a solution within 8-10 days has made it the most efficient mortgage advice platform, whereas with the normal brokers the application process takes minimum 20 days.

The unusual idea of online mortgage advice and application processing has helped the company raise a total of £8.2 million in capital money from investors, like TransferWise CEO Taavet Hinrikus, Funding Circle CEO Samir Desai, and Yuri Milner of DST Global, etc., in just four years.

The most basic reason for the success of the Habito is that the people in the UK wanted a service that could help them with the difficult process of finding the right house at the right price, without wasting much time, and without the risk of losing the deal. And, this is what Habito is providing to them.

Ableton

Ableton : The Company that Revolutionised the Electronic Music Industry with Technology

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The music industry is vast, and so are the range of instruments used to compose a masterpiece in the same. But arranging a whole lot orchestra to create a small music composition always cost a hefty amount, and sometimes it can cost even more. But with changing technology trends, the music industry has also got its own music software that helps musicians to produce the amazing music that was impossible without a professional music team. Ableton is such music software, and one of the earliest, that has been helping numerous musicians with their composing and music production work.

Ableton was founded by two computer music artists Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. The two belonged to Munich, Germany, and had met through a common friend at the University of Munich, who ran an electronic music instruments store. At that time, they did not share good vibes with each other and had no plans to work together.

After some time, Behles moved to Holland, whereas Henke shifted to Berlin, for higher studies. Somehow, again, Behles had to move to Berlin, where he joined Computer Science same as Henke at Berlin’s technical university. This time, the two get along well, as both shared the common interest, i.e. Music. The university has a studio for electronic music, where the two started studying more about music and got introduced to a lot of electronic music. Here they began to design sounds and did a lot of installation work.

Ableton founders
Image Source: roberthenke.com

Henke and Behles collaborated in 1995, to produce electronic music under their Monolake project. At that time, they used Drum machines, synthesizers and software, like Cycling ’74/IRCAM’s music coding environment, to create music, but these could only create a limited type of music and was becoming boring with time. But being the computer engineers, the two were able to enhance the capability of the software and create better music.

With time, Henke and Behles started performing live and became famous. Some of the most popular creations of the two under Monolake includes Gravity (2000), Interstate (1998), Hongkong (1997), etc.

Even though the two were becoming popular with their compositions, they wanted something new and better for music creation. At that time, they used the Apple G3 laptop to compose music and play it live. This helped them to reduce the need to take big musical equipment with them.

Being engineers worked for them, and they developed software to create different transitions in music named PX-18, but purely for their personal use. The software worked on the Silicon Graphics workstation. For building the software, Behles met another software engineer and music enthusiast, Bernd Roggendorf, who also advised them to start a business of music software development.

The development of the software was to replace the big heavy instruments with computer and laptops. They created small pieces of programs to get the right sounds for their live performances. But still, they were not planning on selling those programs to other musicians.

But soon, they realised that there were no such programs at that time, and a new music software could do wonders for every other musician. So the two got convinced to commercialise their software, and the next step was to find investors for their idea.

The two partners participated in the trade show NAMM in 2001, with the beta version of their music software, named ‘Live’. Here they got to bag the first investment from Hans Zimmer, a German film score composer and record producer. After Hans Zimmer showed interest in their project, many other investors came forward to invest in the same. And in 2001, Henke and Behles founded Ableton the company and launched the first commercial version of the software, ‘Live’.

The two opened the first office of Ableton in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany, Behles becoming the chief executive officer of the company. The software became famous in no time and was opted by big names in the field of music production.

The company joined its hands with Cycling ’74 in 2007 to build a new product, ‘Max for Live’, that they launched in 2009. The software creates Max/MSP patches directly inside of Live. Ableton has also developed many programs, that help the users to learn about how to use the Ableton software.

In June 2017, Ableton acquired Cycling ’74. Till now, the company has released ten updates to Ableton Live. The latest version of the software, Ableton Live 10, includes features like new melodic step sequencing layout and MIDI note view, etc.

The company sells three versions of the software, i.e., Live 10 Standard, Live 10 Suite and Live 10 Intro. The standard version is the core software for music performance and creation. The Suite version includes features like Ableton Live, Max for Live and all the Ableton software instruments as well as effects. The third version is the introductory version of Live and has the track and effect limitations.

Henke worked at Ableton for over ten years and continued to record and perform his own music. Henke left the company in 2009 to completely focus on music. Since then, he has been writing and speaking about sound engineering, specifically at the Berlin University of the Arts, and Stanford University, whereas Behles still serves as the CEO of Ableton.

unacademy

Unacademy : India’s Online Learning Platform Helping People To Move a Step Forward Towards Their Dream

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Almost all the students of our country are pressurized for signing up in coaching classes after the secondary examination. But life becomes hectic after long hours in school followed by coaching and then self-study. This is the reason why students lose interest and tend to give up. Moreover, even in coaching classes, the lectures are equivalent to long hours of speech and every doubt of students is not solved.

So here, Unacademy comes to the rescue. Unacademy brings to India an online learning platform, where you can get to watch online videos of your curriculum prepared by experienced educators. The app is not only useful for 10+2 students but also for the college students preparing for exams like CAT, GATE, UPSC, etc.

History

Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, launched Unacademy.in, a Bangalore based start-up, in January 2016. The organisation is run by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd. Before launching this free learning platform, Unacademy used to be an educational youtube channel, started in 2010, which now has around 15 million video views. The channel was created and run by Gaurav Munjal, and then later in 2015, the other two members joined in.

Unacademy Founders
Image Source: techcrunch.com

Munjal and Singh before launching Unacademy, worked at Flatchat which came under the acquisition of CommonFloor in 2014. Saini was one of the civil service aspirants, who cracked the examination at a very young age, but he left his job as Assistant Collector, in order to build Unacademy. At the age of 22, Saini became an IAS Officer by ranking 18th in the civil service examination 2013. He realized that among 6.5 lakhs IAS aspirants, only 1.5 lakhs were able to afford coaching classes. So, he decided to join Munjal in the platform of Unacademy and give online coaching to help the underprivileged students.

Growth and Investors

Only after a year of launching the free app, Unacademy raised a good amount of funding. In 2016, the company raised $500,000 in the seed round of funding hosted by Blume Ventures. Some of the investors who participated in this funding round were Rajan Anandan (Google India Head), Sumit Jain (Co-founder of CommonFloor), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Co-founder of Taxi4Sure), Sujeet Kumar and Phanindra Sama (Co-founder of redBus). Flipkart’s co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal and Paytm’s founder Vijay Sekhar Sharma also funded $1 million to Unacademy. By this time, Unacademy already gained more than 200,000 subscribers and 729 videos from online coaches. The videos were short (around 8-10 minutes) and crisp with a lot of visuals like graphs and images to make sure that the students don’t lose interest.

In 9th August 2017, Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and founder of Directi (an online application for business and communication) joined the board as Director. Turakhia is a huge tech entrepreneur who apart from founding Directi also founded Flock, Radix, CodeChef, Ringo, Media.net (co-founder) and Zeta (co-founder). According to the estimates of Forbes magazine in 2017, he was ranked as 95th richest person of India. He looks upon the overall business strategy of Unacademy and focuses on creating more versatile contents.

In 2017, the company raised $11.5 million in series B funding, from Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. The company announced that the funds will be invested in hiring new employees and for increasing the number of products. The company was hiring online educators on the basis of their experience and the educational background.

The three founders got featured in ‘Forbes 30 Under 30 India’ for their commendable work and progress. In July 2018, the organisation raised $21 million funds through another round of funding, Sequoia India, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners being the main investors. The company has raised a total of $38.6 million through all the funding rounds so far.

The success

With the increasing number of active students and teachers, Unacademy has become India’s largest online learning platform. There are over 2,400 lessons in Unacademy, covering topics from the various competitive exams. With more than 2 million views on the videos, Unacademy is reaching every corner of India to help the youth and empower them. Unacademy also has some top ideal educators, like Kiran Bedi, on board. More than 300,000 students have been benefited from the free app and have cracked even the toughest competitive exams of India.

postmates

Postmates : Success Story of a Company that is Modernizing the Way of Shopping Since 2011

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We have got individual mobile phone applications for online food delivery, grocery shopping, etc. But, how often do we hear about a single platform that serves all the purposes of delivering grocery to mouthwatering dishes from your favourite restaurants? Rarely. Right?

Postmates is one of those rare mobile applications that has a wide network of delivery partners that deliver products to the customers within a few hours of ordering. It is an on-demand service providing company which was launched on 1 May 2011 by three founding members, Bastian Lehmann, Sean Plaice and Sam Street. The company has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, and it serves the cities of the United States and Mexico with efficient food, grocery, and alcohol delivery services.

Before Postmates

Postmates Cofounders
Image Source: blogs.wsj.com

Before Postmates was launched, Lehmann went through many tough situations and faced failure in business. He dropped out of college to open a company of his own, and he opened his first e-commerce website in 1999. The downfall of the company was miserable, and the most significant reason for it was the launch of a product way prior to the rise in customer demand.

After the business was closed,Lehmann started living in Europe, where he met his future partners of Postmates. The team created a start-up called Curated.by, and the entire idea of what the company would do, or how will it progress, was very confusing. Lehmann realized it by himself, after returning to Silicon Valley, and in his own words it was a “stupid idea”. Curated.by was transformed to Postmates after they pitched Naval Ravikant, owner of AngelList, who told them honestly that the idea of Curated.by won’t work.

History of Postmates

Lehmann tried to create a business where the entire structure will connect the buyers, couriers and merchants. In the beginning, the road was bumpy because the network of couriers was very unstable (the courier partners backed out). After the matter was settled, the tech team delved deeper for creating the app, which initially, planned at selling furniture, electronic appliances, etc. But customers were using it for ordering food, but definitely not furniture.

Since the demand for food and grocery was observed, Postmates, eventually, shifted their idea to delivering products on the basis of daily need, and the business started rising.

The Growth

Though the company started as a part of AngelPad, the road to the first round of funding had many obstacles. AngelPad is an America-based start-up incubator that provides two 10 weeks mentorship and seed money while the companies need to present the ideas to investors at the end of the program. Finally, the company’s Series A funding was led by Founder’s Fundraising, and the company raised $5 million.

In December 2011, Postmates launched the same day delivery service, through a new iPhone app. This new scheme was for the local merchants, and the customers from San Francisco, Oakland as well as Berkley. The Global Positioning System (GPS) helped the customers to track their orders and get real-time updates.

In May 2012, Postmates released ‘Get It Now’, an application that allowed the users to order from any merchant of the city, even from the ones, who did not provide delivery services. Eight weeks before releasing the application, the company released the private beta version of the service which was tested by over 1,000 users. During this time, the network of couriers expanded making around 1,000 deliveries a day.

In March 2013, Postmates launched the ‘One Hour’ delivery service in Seattle. The service was first launched in San Francisco, and it turned out to be a huge success with the company having around 200 couriers in San Francisco, and 40 in Seattle. By this time, the company had raised over $2 million from angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Paige Craig and Naval Ravikant.

In February 2014, Postmates raised $16 million from Series B funding led by Spark Capital. In the same year, the company announced that Nabeel Hyatt (Venture Partner at Spark Capital) and Scott Banister were joining the company’s Board of Directors. In the same year, the company completed its one-millionth deliveries and hired over 6,000 riders to ensure efficient and fast service.

In October 2015, the company announced an updated version of its API, and also, the new pricing (starting at $2.50 per pickup). Within the span of one year, the network of riders tripled from 6,000 to 18,000 and completed over 4.5 million deliveries.

In November 2017, Postmates expanded its service to Tucson, Honolulu and Mexico City (first international market). The company also came in partnership with Impossible Burgers and Shake Shack.

In January 2018, Postmates announced a partnership with Ford to conduct programs and tests on self-driving technology to take delivery to the next level. By 2018, Postmates provided services in 550 cities of United States.

In January 2019, the company raised $100 million, leading its total valuation to $1.85 billion.

The Success

From failed business to running a company with more than 800 employees, Postmates has unlocked access to every local merchant in the cities for the customers. The company has collaboration with 500,000 merchants carrying out 5 million orders a month throughout 3,500 cities.