ProjectHeena is such an online platform to connect and engage micro-volunteers to contribute back to causes that interest them. Be it a tech startup that you wish to code for, a NGO or non-profit where you can lend a hand, or lend an e-hand for helping a business out with social media promotions. It just can be a meeting point of anything that an individual or organisation wants and you can deliver.

L to R: Nikhil Kataria, Himanshu Chanda, Jigar Jain

Founder, Himanshu Chanda used to work at various non-profits on weekends and this is what gave him the idea, that there must be others like him, who would wish to contribute something but wouldn’t know whom to reach out to. In his words, “I realized that all of us want to contribute back in some ways but generally don’t take action because there isn’t any opportunity customized for us. Those who do take action, don’t stick around. So when I was about to complete a decade in IT industry I was sure it was time to hang the corporate boots and plunge to build a solution for this problem. The result is ProjectHeena!”

Today he is assisted by Nikhil Kataria and Jigar Jain on the technical fronts

A story behind the name

When I first came across this name, I was intrigued. Why “heena”? Heena means ‘Mehendi’ in India. It’s an urdu word for a paste that when applied on palms leaves a nice red color stain. It is used during festivals and weddings in several countries including India. “It colors not just the hands of the receiver but also the hands of the giver. Heena for us stands for happiness, help and gratitude. It increases as we share it further. When we volunteer to help someone we don’t just help the receiver; even ourselves get helped in some ways by the gratitude shown,” says Himanshu.

How it works

NGOs can register themselves following the steps mentioned on the website and ‘create’ tasks on the site. The interested volunteers would then take up these tasks.

Spreading the word

“The application itself has some growth hacking built in” , says Himanshu. Once you achieve a task the ‘karma profile’ will reflect the same & you can share on various social networks. They’re also in talks a with few education institutes that want to encourage their students and faculties to volunteer for different causes.

“We neither charge the NGOs, non-profits, startups, nor do we charge the volunteers as they provide the time and effort. We plan to have corporate sponsorships and CSR engagements done via the platform which will be a premium feature and will even generate good buzz for the corporate initiatives. There are other avenues too like the philanthropy and pro-bono market that are huge yet neglected. We think post some considerable traction we can disrupt the same,” remarks Himanshu.

Application interfaces are relatively static, but with these APIs, the application interface could adapt to the user’s location and context.

Here’s a quick look at the APIs:

Fused location provider API

GPS feasts on your smartphone’s battery (though not as much as the display does). Many users turn GPS off on their phones to extend battery life, and even apps use it cautiously.

However, GPS (or location) is also a key component of what many of the interesting apps and services rely on (pic of Google Now).

To handle the battery life problem, Google announced a fused location API. In principle, this would be a single API that would let users access location services. Behind the scenes, the API combines GPS, WiFi, cellular data and other sensors to detect the user’s location.

The Next Web writes:

Developers will have access to three levels of location-information priority. Keep in mind that the more accurate your location data, the more power you are using.

• High Accuracy:  5 second check interval, consumes 7.25% per hour, accurate to within  around 20 meters, uses GPS when outside, and WiFi when inside.
• Balanced Power: 20 second check interval,  0.6% battery usage per hour, and accurate to within 40 meters. This method is what it appears that Google envisions as a way to bring location into a host of new applications, without sacrificing end-user device satisfaction.
• No Power: No poll interval, no power consumption, accurate to within around one mile.

Geofencing API

Geofences are areas that an app or user can choose on a map to trigger an alert, eg: a location based reminder. As a user, you would mark a spot and a radius to alert you that you’re near the location. As you move, the Android keeps checking whether your current location falls within the radius. If so, it pulls up the relevant application or alert.

Geofences can also trigger events on exit, though that is more common for fleet tracking applications.

Since geofences involve constant checks whether the current location falls within the desired radius, it drains the battery. Google has reduced power requirements by close to two-thirds. Apps can create up to 100 geofences for their own use.

Activity recognition API

This is probably the most exciting API of the three. Using the other sensors like the accelerometer, Google tries predicting  the user’s activity – biking, walking, standing still, etc using machine learning. It also tries not turning on GPS to ensure low power requirements for the mode.

These APIs could be the foundation for more interesting stuff ahead.

For instance, we may see an app that lets you search for all veg restaurants within 5 km, then automatically set a geofence around each. As you drive past, the app could notify you of restaurants immediately ahead.

Or maybe you could have an app that automatically detects your home and office depending on when you’re there, and turn off WiFi when you’re away from either to save battery life.

Think of all the info that your app has access to: It can sense the time of the day, orientation in three-dimensional space, motion, location, and much more.

In addition, there are multiple other information sources that the app can tap into using relevant APIs. eg: weather, sunrise/sunset, etc.

The new location APIs from Google mean that apps now can use GPS more confidently without worrying about battery drain, and mesh the others to come up with interesting services.

Reach the author at @shrinathv or at shrinath@yourstory.in

But within minutes, the crowd was up on its feet, following Rubia’s every instruction for “brain activation” exercises and gathering changed to what we were more accustomed to in the past editions – interactive and energetic. Rubia spoke about how to connect to your market. More specifically, how to connect to a young market.

“Niche isn’t small. Think targeted.”

“How many of you think that your product addresses a mass market?” asked Rubia, which generated a lot of positive answers. “Does that mean my old aunt in Australia will be interested in the product?” she followed up, only to receive silence.

The point was to bring out the difficulty in addressing a mass market. Rubia said, “Targeting a mass market is like finding a flea on an elephant’s back. It is exceptionally difficult and you don’t even know if it is there in the first place, in which case, you’ve been feeling up an elephant for no reason whatsoever,” she quipped.

She then quelled the fear of addressing a niche market. She says, “A lot of people today are scared of being niche. Don’t think niche is small. Think targeted. It’s a lot easier to do because you at least know whom you’re selling to.”

The importance of selling to the millennials

Rubia shared some important numbers about the consumers of the world. “Most businesses here are going to address a young market; the proverbial “generation me.” and here’s why – 30% of all consumers worldwide are millennials.” More relevant to the gathering, she also shared that 58% of all technology consumers are millennials.

With respect to traditional marketing, Rubia shared that it is still the most necessary and effective way of promoting products to the masses. However, advertising to the millennials is tricky. Rubia said, “Millennials don’t like FYI advertisements. Most of them will go past it, be it on TV or web or anywhere else. Unless the advertisement is educative or entertaining, it is not going to catch the attention of the millennials.”

4 essential ways of connecting to your market

According to Rubia, there are 4 main ways of making your product interesting to a young target market -

1) Your Product needs to be different –  This is especially relevant in India. Rubia said, “There are so many people who go by the name Raj Kumar, how can I tell one from the other? Products face a similar problem as well. Your product has to do something different from the others competing with you.”

2) Your Product needs to be bold – Millennials don’t like wishy washy thing. Rubia credited this to why the youth don’t vote much in India, “because politicians don’t say the same thing all the time.” A product must have a defined function. It’s like a handshake; a firm one has a better chance of keeping you in the other person’s memory.

3) Your Product needs to be memorable – First impressions always last. So make lasting impression, first. Earlier in the talk, Rubia went around the packed hall asking some unrelated, sometimes uncomfortable questions. She later shared that, she did so to make a lasting impact to the people whom she met, and said that this needs to be done while marketing your products as well.

4) Your Product needs to talk to your market’s human side – The Katrina Kaif Slice ad was taken as a case study – “Now is this ad selling sex or is it selling mangoes? Or is it selling mangoes via sex?” asked Rubia. She then related it to the Maslows hierarchy of needs, stating that startups need to identify where their target market comes from, and make sure your marketing talks to the human needs of that group.

On a concluding note, Rubia said, “Remember that you shouldn’t always see what’s in it for you. If you want your product to be used massively, always see what’s in it for your customers. More often than not, your customers will pay you lots of money for it (at least most of them will do).”

Stay tuned for the video of Rubia’s talk at TechSparks Kochi.

In our first article in the ASW series, we focused on what motivates employees to join startups. In this article, we present our findings on what employees find most important while working at a startup. These insights are derived from YourStory’s recently concluded Awesome Startup Workplaces (ASW) Awards – the first exclusive employer of choice awards for startups globally.

To understand what drives startup employees, we identified 11 key parameters and asked respondents to rate each parameter on how important it is to them. The parameters used were:

• Vision-Mission Alignment: Understanding why the company exists, what are the business goals and how their work contributes to the achievement of these goals
• Information Sharing: Being kept informed about how the company is performing and knowing what various departments and teams are doing
• Innovation:  Being encouraged to think innovatively, propose ideas and having differing opinions discussed openly
• Pay & Recognition: Getting a satisfactory salary package and being recognized for their contributions
• Fairness and Empathy: Being confident that the company will be fair to them and will look after them in times of need
• Co-workers: Having competent colleagues whose company they enjoy
• Autonomy & Flexibility: Feeling empowered to take decisions and having flexibility to manage their work tasks
• Collaboration: Succeeding at work thanks to contributions of colleagues and teamwork across teams/ departments
• Nature of Work: Finding their work meaningful and developing/ growing knowledge and skills
• Leadership: Having capable & competent leaders with whom they feel a personal connect
• Culture: Having a work culture that encourages fun, while driving for performance and results

Key highlights and insights:

• Vision-Mission Alignment is the most important factor, followed by Nature of Work. While employees understand that roles can tend to be relatively unstructured at startups, they need to see the larger picture of the organization and how their work fits in. They are willing to multi-task but they must feel that they are effectively utilizing their skill sets and are developing as professionals.
• It is also very important for startup employees to work with capable people, be it their Leaders or Co-workers. With relatively smaller teams at startups, there is a need to bond and a major component of this is to be able to look up to others at the workplace. That said, Collaboration ranks amongst the lowest in terms of importance, which seems a bit counter-intuitive. A possible explanation is that with higher empowerment (and possible higher levels of self-confidence), startup employees don’t feel so dependent on their colleagues. It could also suggest that the smaller size of teams and a greater alignment to the organization’s vision and mission automatically drive collaboration; employees do not expressly feel the need for formal structures that promote the same.
• Pay and Recognition also features low on the importance scale for startup employees. There are clearly loftier goals which drive startup employees more than material gain. Internal recognition is something that anyway comes with working in smaller, highly driven organizations.
• A slightly concerning trend was that employees in Operations and Other functions consistently gave lower importance scores to all parameters than their counterparts in Technology and Sales & Marketing. This could suggest a couple of things. First, that employees non-core functions may be a little disconnected from the rest of the organization. Second, that these employees are a bit more conservative. Of course, it could also suggest that there are factors other than the 11 factors analyzed that are important to these employees!
• The importance of Vision-Mission Alignment goes up with seniority, with employees having >5  years of experiencing rating this parameter significantly higher than other parameters.
• Overseas employees have given higher scores across all parameters compared to their counterparts in India. The difference in scores for Overseas employees versus employees in India is starkest on Information Sharing, Pay & Recognition and Co-workers.

Editor’s note: Entrepreneurs are one of the most excited community and are always on their toes with the sparkling hope in their eyes. But they’re humans after all. When the chips are down, entrepreneurs look for hope and if they don’t find it, their interest might start waning…

Be true, you don’t like working for your startup anymore!

This is exactly what happened to me few months back and thanks to which many people are still under the illusion that I am plain lucky to get work! But this was not always the case, I come from the same breed of the first time entrepreneurs who have worked more, slept less, lost touch with most of the sane friends who believe life is more important than work. Then one day I realized that I had stopped waking up with a zing and work was not interesting anymore. So here goes my journey and things which made me come back to reality and the feeling that yes this is what I wanted and this is what I shall have:

Have a conscience: “There are people who have shown confidence in me and are working with me even though I have not been able to provide swanky offices and perks which corporate are able to.” This nagging feeling is all you need to force yourself into looking at the rosy picture. Hey! We are entrepreneurs and looking at the brighter side is in our DNA.

Give Communication a Break: Switch off all mode of communication to the world for a week and then come back. You will feel lost and ignorant especially on the topic you secretly used to think you were an expert and that, my friend, is not a place to be in for an entrepreneur.

Ask for Help: Before you go out shouting I need help. Evaluate the reasons why exactly you are in the state you are. Is it the that the success you envisioned not happening or the monotonous routine you have managed to create? For me, I was clueless how to take my company from point A to point B and that is when I went ahead and asked for help. Since I do not have an official mentor the only person who I have seen working and progressing as an entrepreneur is my Dad. It’s interesting to know what amazing insights you get from people who have been doing what we are trying to create for so long. For him it was “family” and “peer pressure” which keeps him moving. For me, I realized it is ambition and freedom. I can never forget the importance of these two words, in fact they even have found a place on my office billboard. “AMBITION” and “FREEDOM.

This exercise also made me realize one important thing, having a mentor is important and when you experience a mood swing, a slap on your back does wonders.

Find a lover and an enemy: You need a lover to spend money on and an enemy to ask you and tell you that you suck. When you know you need to go out on expensive dates, buy good clothes to impress, you find ways to make money and for us entrepreneurs, our startup is the place where we will find money. Now the more important part, how will you gauge success unless you have set goals and deadlines. It’s a good idea to have someone you can compare yourself with? We need to set targets and references of success stories in our sector. As they say visual effect is always better than words.

In short it’s important to be in a relationship to take all the pressure off you and you need to have competition to put the load back on.

Revisit the past: You were good at what you did and that is why you are doing what you are doing. In the past people must have applauded you for your great work, your do or die attitude or your thought process. There is no harm in dreaming about that time. When you will be nostalgic, you will realize what you are missing and missing that for something like sleep or staring at the ceiling is not the thing to do. Call me self obsessed but I save all the praise mails/messages even DMs saved just in case I am in that state again.

We are entrepreneurs and we just don’t dream. We dream to make them reality even if we face certain setbacks in the process.

Zalp is a product of Pebstone (we have earlier featured another product of theirs, imlee), a technology company focused on products in the social media and mobile space. Pebstone was founded by Aatish Dedhia, an alumni of IIT Bombay and Intel Corporation in the United States (at Intel, he was part of the core design team on Pentium II processor). Aatish, the mind behind Zalp, is also the CEO of Zycus Infotech Pvt Ltd (provider of Procurement Performance Solutions), who are the primary investors in Pebstone.

Why Zalp

The idea behind Zalp is simple – most Indian companies, no matter how established or huge, are still using the age old traditional methods of manual employee referrals, thereby staying unexposed to the potent combination of employee referrals and social network. Zalp, which integrates the two, serves a dual purpose of ‘making the job easy’ and, like all product/service that simplifies a process, makes it cost effective. Aatish elaborates on this, “A strong employee referral program can directly impact the business by increasing turnover, reducing costs, and improving productivity in the recruitment process”.

Is it just about tapping into social media?

Is Zalp based on the assumption that recruiters are not tapping into social media effectively? Actually, no. According to the team, while the growing popularity of social media in recruitment cannot be debated, most recruiters are not able to use it to their advantage, mainly because the social media integrated recruitment tools do not have a single point focus. Aatish explains, “Zalp is a specialized SaaS (software as a service) based social recruitment tool, that exhaustively exploits the potential of social media with a focused approach towards reducing the cost per hire and time to fill. In other words, to unleash the true potential of an employee referral program, the organization needs to embrace online tools.

Aatish Dedhia

The SaaS model ensures that the product can be seamlessly used by organizations of varying sizes, without the hassles of integration and implementation and global organizations can adopt it through a single interface.

The product, built on the basis of two strikingly contrasting facts of recruitment- that employee referrals are the most valuable and the most underutilized source of recruitment for every organization, helps accelerate employee participation in the recruitment processes.

How does Zalp work?

Some of Zalp’s features:

-  employees get easy and convenient ways to refer jobs to their connections,

-  Zalp suggests the most relevant referral matches for a job out of the employees’ social network connections,

-  the ‘share’ feature makes it possible to share the job with thousands of passive candidates present on the social platform, and

- the products allow integration to social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Going forward

Zalp was launched in the US market in Feb 2013, and is now ready to hit the markets in India, UK and the Middle East. The marketing team is currently focused on customer feedback to enhance the product and the company is also building an after sales service team.

Leveraging the power of social media and using socially intelligent tools that use employees as recruitment ambassadors is definitely a build up to a great product. And no doubt, if organizations open up to this potential, several costly sources such as consultants could potentially be eliminated from the hiring process, not to mention the ‘time-cost’ that it would save. However, the success of the product is based on a basic premise that employees would make these referrals for no added benefit, whereas traditionally, an employer-employee relationship has been largely driven by incentives.

Like all new products challenging the rules of the game, Zalp will first have to test the markets to realize what it’s true potential is.

Website: Zalp

Life before entrepreneurship

Sonal Shah is an MBA holder from K J Somaiya college and has previously worked in the banking and financial sector. She has an experience of around eight years with HDFC and Kotak Mahindra. Sonal did not have any liabilities in life at that time, and therefore she decided it was the right time for her to start something — thus Koonik was born. The word Koonik stands for an expression, which is usually between parents and their newly born ones and involves pressing the nose and upper lip against the skin. She wanted her brand to resonate the same feelings and thus the name, Koonik.

Sonal decided her entry into the Rs 27,000-crore children’s apparel market, which is growing at about 20 – 25% per annum, would be differentiated. All processes and products at Koonik are certified. The organic cotton garments are global organic textile standards(GOTS) certified and made at an FTA certified factory. She also lays special emphasis on the design of the products and wants to make sure they follow an ethical way of doing business.

Why Koonik isn’t just another kids wear retailer

Launched in November 2012, Sonal has exclusively designed clothes for babies that are anti allergic, soft and comfortable. All this is possible because of the use of organic cotton — the raw material she uses to make her clothes. Organic cotton is free from any allergic or reactive chemicals and is used with non toxic dyes to make sure that the toddlers do not absorb any harmful chemicals. “Organic cotton is the kind of cotton that we grew up with, much before chemicals and genetically modified seeds found their way to our farmlands. It is the kind of cotton that our grandma would approve for our little ones,” says Sonal.

The toys that Koonik manufacture are handcrafted by partner NGOs, self-help groups and small businesses. These toys are also made from soft cotton stuffed with non toxic fiber or cotton. All the detailing on these toys is embellishment free to ensure zero injury for the baby. All her products are currently sold in Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Chennai and Delhi. Sonal is also in talks with offline and online retailers like BabyOye, Shop Home to distribute her products. All products are also available at the Koonik.com.

Based in Mumbai, Koonik currently has a team of six which includes designers, freelancers and marketing personnel. Koonik is a bootstrapped venture and will soon raise the required funding from potential investors for expansion, and wants to raise money in form of equity than debt. Another player vying for the market share in this segment is Nino Bambino. Currently the brand has a range of 26 SKUs and Sonal says she hopes to even within a year. She markets Koonik, by being present at woman entrepreneurship summits; parenting sites and blogs related to upbringing of children. She is very thankful for the support from her husband, parents and friends. “Years down the line, when people hear of child care, Koonik should be the first name coming to their mind,” says Sonal ambitiously.

Website: http://www.koonik.com

Kurt Roots

CogCubed, founded by Kurt Roots and his wife Dr. Monika Heller, is a Minneapolis-based game and data company engaged in creating games that produce data to improve health and education outcomes. Dr. Heller is a practicing Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist.

I spoke to Kurt Root who shared with me CogCubed’s plan to change the lives of millions across the world through their games leveraging technology and psychiatry.

Monika Heller

I met the entrepreneur couple at a dinner event hosted by Google in Silicon Valley and was amazed by the passion they displayed toward bringing a great product to the global market. Now over to the conversation with Kurt.

Starting Up

Our team is a cross between computer science, neuroscience, and psychiatry. We started this company after I showed some new and innovative technology from the MIT Media Lab to my wife, Monika Heller, MD, who is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. I was interested because there was an SDK for this new manipulative gaming system, which means I could program games for it. She was immediately interested because it meant that we could use data collected from sensors and games to understand behavior. The Sifteo Cubes are wireless blocks or cubes, which have been described as a cross between Legos and Nintendo. They contain a variety of sensors, can be touched and moved spatially, and have an LCD screen for high-resolution graphics. As medicine, Monika’s domain, is very subjective, we thought it might be a great opportunity to see what objective data we could collect from game play and then analyze it to both identify and improve cognitive health.

Founders’ Background 

I spent roughly five years at Oracle as a programmer and have graduate degrees in Software Engineering and Information Systems. I also have an MBA. Prior to working on CogCubed full-time, I was a management consultant focused on data and analysis-driven results in health care and retail verticals. What drew me to this though was that computationally it is not very different than what I had been doing. Also, I have a brother with special needs and so the problems we are trying to solve mean a great deal personally.

Monika was completing her Fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. Prior to CogCubed, she had already practiced in a variety of settings including schools, community outreach programs, and medical/physical rehabilitation units. She is still actively involved as a clinician, in addition to being Adjunct Faculty at the University of Minnesota.

On Capital and Funding

The barriers to entry are the lowest they have ever been to start a company. With that said, starting a company in health care can take more capital. We recently completed a clinical trial, with analysis done at the University of Minnesota. Further, in health care, proving out an idea can typically take longer time, thus more money. Lastly, because we are based in Minnesota, we have to be creative with how we raise funds and find talent. It was said at Google I/O that while money is liquid, venture capitalists are not. Minneapolis is a great city, but it is not Silicon Valley.

Product Market Fit and Go-to-Market Strategy 

We have done a lot of work analyzing the market and need for our product. For example, neurological illnesses affect more than 50 million Americans annually and cost more than $500 billion to treat. It’s estimated that 830,000 children/adolescents have Autism, with a treatment cost of $29 billion annually. ADHD impacts 5.4 million children/adolescents and costs $3.2 billion annually to diagnose and $79 billion annually to treat. These are two disorders we care deeply about.

To apply our solution to the marketplace we are currently working with schools and clinics in our local area to build additional evidence to prove both the technology and the business model. We are also going to be running controlled business experiments where we test price points, delivery mechanisms, and overall solutions over the next few months.

Differentiation 

We are creating a suite of fun and engaging games, based on neurological correlates, which span a spectrum of behavior behavioral disorders. We are also fundamentally a data company, where we collect large amounts of data in a new way, and then utilize sophisticated and novel algorithms to extract value from it.

How is it to be an entrepreneur?

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Elon Musk was right when he said, “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” We have been at this for about 1.5 years, and it has been one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, things we have done.

Road Ahead 

We are proving out our solution in the United States first, but definitely have international plans. Without being too specific in regards to our strategy, we will be focusing on Asia and will be coming to India.

Digital well-being is touted to be more than $ 2 trillion market and with the world embracing a more frenzied lifestyle, we believe huge opportunity lies in addressing this market. While the journey of CogCubed will be worth following, we look forward to hearing from you on what is your big idea in this space.

Exilant has five offices in India and two abroad and the person heading global IT for the company is Dhinesh Kumar. Exilant services a large variety of clients ranging from Allahabad Bank, GE Power Controls, Siemens Information Systems and TATA Elxsi among others. Dhinesh says that they provide customer service solutions, in an IT oriented architecture, where different layers are built at the client end according to the demands of their businesses. As the number of layers go up, one thing that has to be ensured is that these layers are well protected and secure from all external threats and any kind of internal problems.

“Clients are highly demanding when it comes to SLAs today. The earlier 60-70 day buffer that we would get to implement a new technology, or an update, at the client’s end is going down. Today as soon as there is any new technological update available in the market, clients expect it to be present at their end too,” says Dhinesh. This highly demanding nature of the job, requires the IT team to be always on their toes.

The Exilant IT team comprises 30 people who manage around 2500 end points, 80 servers and 50 network devices among them. They rely a great deal on remote desktop management to ensure customer satisfaction and have built a virtual environment to service as many client needs as possible.

Symantec is partnering Exilant to help them take care of the IT infrastructure at different endpoints for the company. Exilant also relies on Symantec’s backup solution, for its data backup needs. “We had a lot of trouble using different vendors in the past and we faced many problems in centralizing our solutions. And in such a case if there is a virus outbreak then to manage every end point individually was very difficult,” explains Dhinesh. Now since deploying Symantec, Dhinesh and his members in the IT team are quite relaxed, as there is no longer the need to manage end points individually.

Symantec’s backup and restore solution is also helping these two functions be done centrally at Exilant now. Dhinesh is happy about the fact that Symantec solutions have integrated well with existing software, and human interference in managing these processes have gone down considerably. While he is not sure of the cost saving Symantec has given Exilant, he quantifies the savings in efforts to be in the region of atleast 25%.

Mohan Nair

CCAvenue recently launched India’s first Social Network In-Steam Payment collection service after launching a free payment gateway plan for startups. These steps generated quite a buzz among the startup community and here, we get in a conversation with CCAvenue CMO, Mohan Nair to learn more about S.N.I.P.

Edited excerpts:

Q: What exactly is CCAvenue S.N.I.P.? How does it work from the buyer’s perspective?

A: CCAvenue S.N.I.P. or Social Network In-stream Payments is a unique collection service we offer our merchants which allows them to collect payments in-stream and instantly through a link on Social Media. If a social network user, let’s say a Facebook user, accesses the product page of the merchant and decides to buy the product after going through its details, then he just needs to click the SNIP link on that page. The link will take him directly to the mobile-friendly payment page from where he can complete the purchase. There’s no shopping cart or lengthy forms for the customer to fill. He snips right through and buys the product in-stream without hassles.

Q: Do you feel that India is ready for this?

A: Gauging from the response we have got so far, I definitely think so. Social Media has grown by leaps and bounds in our country. Facebook alone has more than 65 million users in India. Even more internet users visit other social networks like Twitter, Google+, WhatsApp and Pinterest. Besides, India has a very young population. More than 75% of its population is below 35 years of age. Many of these youngsters are tech-savvy and socially networked and will find it easy to make purchases from the S.N.I.P. link on Social Media. All these factors translate into huge business potential for merchants who choose to register with us and avail of this service.

Q: What is your take on Social Commerce?

A: Social Commerce is a brand new phenomenon. It constitutes a whole new way of doing business. Earlier social networks were merely used as an advertising platform or a source for lead generation. CCAvenue S.N.I.P. actually enables merchants to sell their products or services directly from pages on Social Networks.

Social Commerce now transcends national borders. People living abroad, including NRIs, can buy products easily from links on Facebook, Twitter and other Social Media. Online businesses need to get on the Social Commerce bandwagon as quickly as possible. It will extend their customer reach significantly. Social Commerce harnesses the immense potentiality of Social Media.

Q: How safe is it for your customers and merchants to transact in-stream on social networks?

A: It’s absolutely safe for customers and merchants to transact in-stream on social networks if they are using the CCAvenue payment gateway. We offer the highest level of security possible. Our proprietary tool, Fraud and Risk Identification System and Knowledge Base (FRISK), has a significant negative database collated over a decade across merchants. CCAvenue has achieved the new PCI DSS 2.0 Standards of Compliance, which makes it one of the most secure payment gateways in the world. We have registered with VeriSign, the world’s premier net authentication agency. Besides, CCAvenue has implemented key authentication protocols like Verified By Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. The risk of fraud or chargebacks is negligible because of the state-of-the-art security processes we have in place.

Q: Avenues has announced that this feature works for offline media too. Please elaborate.

A: In addition to this Social Commerce facility, CCAvenue also generates a QR code which merchants can publish adjacent to their products on offline media channels like newspapers, magazines and posters. When customers scan the QR code, it will take them directly to the payment page that already has the product details and amount filled up. Customers can simply enter the card details and make the payment. Both the SNIP link and QR code campaigns will be mapped to the same inventory in the merchant’s account.

Q: What are the main benefits of CCAvenue S.N.I.P.?

A: CCAvenue S.N.I.P. offers several benefits for customers. They can buy products easily from their favourite social networking sites. The payment processing is instantaneous, convenient and secure. They don’t have to fill lengthy forms or use shopping carts to make the purchase. The transaction processing time has been drastically reduced.

CCAvenue S.N.I.P. is great for merchants as well. They can tap a huge tech-savvy and socially networked customer base to expand their business. Their fans, friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social media can spread their SNIP link across these social networks. Moreover, their products can be purchased by customers living abroad. CCAvenue S.N.I.P. will popularize their branding and widen their customer reach substantially. It will also enable impulse purchases by converting casual observers into serious customers.

Q: So what’s next after SNIP?

A: Avenues has always been several steps ahead of our nearest competitors. We are constantly upgrading our technology and up-scaling our services to help our merchants enhance their business potential and thrive in the market. We will soon be rolling out several new features and facilities for the benefit of our merchants and their customers.

Website: S.N.I.P

Disclaimer: CCAvenue is an advertiser with YourStory.in

There has been so much hype about it around the media, that I was somehow expecting a star-trek like interface that automatically floods my vision and starts tagging everything I’m seeing. Sadly, it’s not as cool as that. Google Glass creates the illusion of a display, about the size of a TV some 10 feet in front of you. The resolution of the display  isn’t very high, even though it appears really big.  It can really fit only about 6-7 rows of text, so it feels like a really old-school menu system, rather than a rich, high-res display. The right side of Glass is touch sensitive, so you can swipe through menus and select commands.

The coolest thing, though, was that the display is transparent, which means you can simultaneously look at what’s on the display and see through it as well. This could lead to lots of cool interfaces, like automatically tagging everyone you’re meeting with meta data like what their name is and when you met last, which would be great thing for absent-minded people like me.

The first problem that I ran into was that it had trouble recognizing my voice. Glass is meant to be used hands free, and depends on voice for a large part of the interaction. I don’t know if it was the noisy background at the event or my accent, but Glass couldn’t recognize my commands consistently.

Me looking like a dork trying out Glass

The biggest problem, though, is that everyone looks like a dork wearing Glass. The issue is that the screen appears slightly to the right and top of your vision, so you have to “look above” without tilting your head upwards, which makes you look like you have some mental disorder while you’re interacting with Glass. It was really funny to see people wearing Glass gazing upwards and walking about. It feels like they are disconnected from this world and are out in their own. It’s nearly impossible to maintain eye contact with the person you’re talking with and look at what’s happening on the Glass display at the same time.

Overall, it seems like a cool toy. A lot will depend on the Apps that Google can get developers to build, but balancing the tricky parts of privacy and features. It has a lot of potential, and I might actually buy one if the price comes down to more reasonable levels.

Undoubtedly, Amazon is the most mature and proven Cloud platform followed by Windows Azure. Both AWS and Windows Azure have a comprehensive set of services bringing more value to the platform. Customers can start small and tap into additional capabilities as they grow. Services like RDBMS, NoSQL, Messaging, Virtual Networking, Big Data and Analytics appeal to startups and enterprises equally.

Google is now adopting the same strategy as AWS and Windows Azure by bringing all the services under one roof labeled as the Google Cloud Platform. Google’s biggest differentiator is that it’s Cloud services are used internally by many teams over a period of time. Services like CloudSQL, Cloud DataStore and BigQuery have been used by Google for many years before they are offered to the customers. That makes the platform proven and rock solid.

Google’s game changer comes in the form of Compute Engine. Announced at last year’s I/O conference, GCE was positioned as the IaaS for enterprise workloads. Unlike AWS, which started as the Cloud for startups and now struggling to capture the enterprise market, Google is targeting enterprises from day one. Based on initial performance benchmarks, GCE offers better IO capabilities than Amazon EC2. This makes it ideal for running Big Data processing and IO intensive workloads like ERP on the Cloud.  GCE’s sub-hour billing with a one minute increment challenges every IaaS provider in the market. This might even force other vendors to follow the same billing pattern changing the economics of the Cloud forever. Google has also managed to support up to 10TB of persistent disks, which is 10 times of what Amazon EC2 supports. These features place Google in the big league on the day it entered the market. While most of the IaaS offerings start with the features of Amazon EC2 in 2009 and then attempt to fill the gap, GCE has leapfrogged to meet (and in some cases exceed) the features and performance of Amazon.

Google’s PaaS offering App Engine, finally supports PHP. This was the single most demanded feature by App Engine developers for ages. While Cloud Foundry, Engine Yard, AppFog and Windows Azure have been supporting PHP effortlessly, Google has been adamant in bringing the same to GAE. Despite the lack of frequent updates and investments into GAE, there is a loyal community of developers out there to support App Engine. With PHP, there will be more developers willing to bet on App Engine because of the stability of the platform and the brand value of Google. This will certainly impact the PaaS market which is already struggling to make money. Google also talked about the Mobile Companion powered by App Engine, which makes it easy for the mobile developers to deal with the Cloud. This marks the official entry of Google into the crowded Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) market. I expect that Google will continue to add features and capabilities to the mobile backend service to bring it on par with mature MBaaS offerings like Parse, StackMob and Kinvey.

Services like Google Cloud Storage for storing static content, Google App Engine Cloud DataStore for storing schema-less data, CloudSQL for storing structured data and BigQuery for processing and analyzing large data sets make Google Cloud Platform complete and mature.

Finally, Amazon gets the real competitor and the customers get the real alternative!

If you are up to speed on the term ‘flat world,’ this is the next term you need to understand: ‘tilted world,’ the shift of economic power — jobs, wealth, and market opportunities – from Northern countries to Southern countries (south of the 31^st parallel). The West and Japan are “a physical and psychological ocean” away from countries such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

According to research estimates, by 2015, the number of Asian middle class consumers will equal the number in Europe and North America; by 2030, India will account for about 23 per cent of global middle-class consumption, followed by China (18 per cent), US (7 per cent), and Germany and France (2 per cent each).

The world is becoming increasingly interconnected, complex and financially unstable, and driven by the forces of digitisation. In the last major economic shift, power tilted away from China, India and Japan towards Europe over centuries; this new shift is happening in mere decades, explains Ram Charan in his latest book. (See also my reviews of the books Reverse Innovation, China Fast Forward and India Inside).

Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author and speaker. His previous bestselling books include Execution, The Game Changer, Talent Masters, Leadership Pipeline, Know-How and Boards at Work. He has worked as a coach and consultant for GE, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Verizon, Coca-Cola, 3M, Merck, Hindalco, Tyco, Aditya Birla Group, and Tata Group. He has an engineering degree from India and an MBA and doctorate from HarvardBusinessSchool.

Charan has been hailed by industry leaders as a gifted visionary, pragmatist, catalyst and even a ‘secret weapon.’ His latest book on global strategy is a good mix of case studies, literature review, personal anecdotes, business insights and actionable checklists.

Businesses in Southern countries have ready access to the capital and expertise they need to grow, and many of them are not yet known to companies in the North, thus creating disruption as well as opportunity. Momentum and sprit are on the side of the South: they are creating their own rules, with a blend of state capitalism, protectionism and even communism.

“Another characteristic of the new world economy will be invention of a type and scale never before seen,” says Charan. Innovation was dominated by MNCs and Western universities in the last century, but now innovators are emerging in Silicon Valley startups as well as entrepreneurs around the world. “Their ability to do so singly and collectively comes largely from the increasing real-time openness and democratisation of knowledge and availability of start-up funds in a digitised world,” Charan says.

Mobile phones and the Internet enable entrepreneurs to share information they could never before access. “Much of this innovation is at the local level for the local market, and some will find its way from one country to another. Online contests and crowdfunding help small-scale entrepreneurs get the money they need to develop their ideas,” says Charan.

Digitisation helps create new global industries from scratch in just a few years. Google, Vonage, Skype and Apple have disrupted the telecom industry; Amazon is challenging retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart. The Internet of Things and Big Data can also improve supply chains and operating margins.

“The most dramatic change of all may be the power of digital technology to create structural changes in the composition of national economies,” predicts Charan, with the rise of mobile penetration as compared to landlines in Africa and India.

In addition to the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Charan also advises keeping an eye on the CIVETS nations (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa). China has not only created successful private companies like Haier and Huawei but state-owned enterprises in strategic industries, with a much longer-term focus than Wall Street companies. Companies and talent from Southern countries are expanding across their regions as well, such as Marico (from India to the Middle East) and Airtel (from India to Africa); mining companies from Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa are luring away Indian engineering graduates.

Charan provides detailed profiles of successful Southern large-scale entrepreneurs: GMR Group, Hindalco, Airtel, Ambev and Haier. They have aggressively expanded even into domains where they have no prior familiarity, recruited the best local and Western talent, focused on tight margins as well as long term strategy, innovated on business models, and built strong brands.

In addition to ‘tilted world,’ other important terms explained by Charan include  “outside-in” and “future-back” thinking – looking at your business through the lens of another leader sitting elsewhere, and looking back from time horizons 20 years into the future.

Charan also profiles Northern companies who have successfully made the global tilt: Dow Chemicals (moving from commodity to specialty chemicals), Allied Signal (moving from auto parts to aerospace), Thomson (moving from print newspapers to digital business information), P&G (moving one headquarters to Singapore), GE (forming an avionics joint venture in China; selling its plastics division to Saudi Arabia), Borealis (forming a joint venture in Abu Dhabi), and 3M (centres of excellence in emerging economies).

The decades ahead will witness increasing competition for resources and jobs, trade imbalances, and talent shortages; business leaders and entrepreneurs should factor these in now in their long term plans. “Information is readily available. Time for reflection is what’s in short supply,” Charan observes. Business leaders should be on the alert for pivotal events and be able to see bends in the road ahead.

To do so, leaders need to ‘use buckets rather than spoons’ and ‘take a flight instead of driving a car’ – in other words, expand their thinking and strategic horizon. This also calls for ‘multicontextual thinking’ — blending multiple local perspectives via structural and social changes in organisational information flow and decision making power.

Soft skills matter a lot in dealing with businesses and customers in different countries; social networks of ‘global integrator’ leaders need to be culturally diverse and experientially deep. Formal and informal discussions with business leaders from various cultures are needed so that people connect with issues and with each other socially as well as intellectually. “In many cases, you may have to be less efficient to be more effective,” Charan accurately describes.

The concluding chapter provides a checklist of how business leaders should create tangible vision, develop strong talent pools, direct budgets towards growth, adjust compensation, let knowledge flow, and make the right decisions.

“The pace and timing of the global tilt may be uncertain, but the direction is clear,” concludes Charan. Use imagination to see opportunities before they fully form, and the courage to act in the face of uncertainly, he advises.

It would be apt to end the review with some of the good quotes in the book.

“Control your destiny or someone else will.” – Jack Welch

“Attitude is a little thing that can make a big difference.” – Winston Churchill

“If you’re caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed and perfection will follow.” – Sunil Mittal

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” – Wayne Gretzky

[Follow YourStory's research director Madanmohan Rao on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MadanRao]

We kicked off the 4th edition of TechSparks for 2013 yesterday with the first regional round in Kochi. The event was a grand success and a first event of scale for the entrepreneurs in the city. More than 300 entrepreneurs attended the event and the venue was buzzing with energy throughout the day. 3 exciting startups from Kochi pitched during the session as well.

Catch the glimpse of how the event unfolded through Twitter here: Kochi Roundtable Storified.

Photo Highlights of TechSparks Kochi 2013 (view the complete album on YourStory FB Page here)

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When we decided to add Kochi to our bouquet of cities this year for

Meet Abin Jose Tom, the founder of Webandcrafts – a web solutions company that provides companies with web designing, web development, graphic designing and internet marketing services. The firm started in Chennai in 2009, then shifted base to Thrissur, Kerala last year in May 2012. Abin started his entrepreneurial journey even before he could finish college. It all began when his college authorities assigned him the responsibility of creating a website for the college. Abin was only 19 at that time, and that opportunity gave him the chance he had been waiting to prove his skills. The website that he created for his college was widely appreciated by all and that further boosted this young man’s intent to startup on his own. While he was still to come up with a business plan, he registered the name ‘webandcrafts’ as a trial space for him.

As a youngster he discussed his ideas to startup with his friends, but didn’t get much enthusiastic response. Abin credits Joseph Mattappally, a social worker and director of Indian Thoughts for showing his path and believing in his dream. Joseph motivated Abin to startup and, finally with the help of four of his classmates, Webandcrafts took birth. “As students, the schedule proved to be very hectic for us – as we had to manage both studies and work. We didn’t have many resources at our disposal and the innumerable established web development companies were tough competition,” admits Abin about the early days. However good looking classic designs and prompt after sales service, helped Webandcrafts carve a niche for itself in the market.

Webandcrafts mainly helps hosting websites and has the distinction of being the “first hosting provider in Kerala with payment gateway,” claims Abin. Today the startup has successfully hosted over 2,500-plus websites. The startup currently has a client list of over 500 clients, including Australian construction company Strong Force, Thomson and SMR, which Abin counts as their most prestigious clients.

Webandcrafts today has 15 employees, who take care of different aspects of the business like designing, programming, marketing & sales, philosophy and literature. Joseph Mattappally continues to mentor the team and they have a senior designer Clint Antony, who Abin says has played a key role in the startup since inception in 2009. The startup registered a turnover of Rs 80 lakh within its first year of service and Abin says they continue growing from strength-to-strength.

“Yes the the business has not been the same since we started. There have been many odds while marketing ourselves, as people had a bad impression of hosting providers in and around Kerala, our quality and support was questioned. But our ability to service the client 24×7 and the ability to resolve the queries in the best way possible has cemented their faith in us,” says Abin. However, besides its large list of client or customer satisfaction, Abin considers his greatest achievement to be molding a team of youngsters that others will envy upon. “The bonding among the team is so intense, that it is visible through the work we deliver. The team has equipped itself to compete even with the best in the industry and the thirst to continue to acquire knowledge is the driving force, which keeps strengthening them,” says Abin proudly.

The company currently is based in Thrissur, Kerala, but over the next five years Abin wants to become the best hosting provider in the country and employ over 100 employees. “We would also love to inspire young minds and give talented people a platform to present themselves,” he says.

Get2Galaxy, founded in 2012 and a team of 15 today, is trying to provide an end to end hiring platform to connect organizations and job seekers. It provides an online cloud based platform where companies can post and manage job descriptions, set up criteria for applying, get assessment options for various skills, manage and filter candidates, communicate with them and finally make an offer. Companies can customize their hiring process too using flexible workflows and customizable assessment tests. Third party assessment tools can be integrated, niche game based and analytic assessments can be developed and companies can integrate a jobs widget into their website or Facebook page as well.

A member of founding team, Thejas Gupta says, “We want to enable opportunities for people with talent but without access to the right jobs which is mostly the case with Tier 2 and 3 cities job seekers. They face a lot more challenges in connecting to the right job profiles as compared to metropolitan and Tier 1 cities people.“ The intention behind Get2Galaxy is to reduce the struggle which people face for getting their first jobs. Though the inspiration came from smaller city’s job seekers’ problems, it is a platform for everyone and not specific to small cities.By connecting SMBs and startups to the right talent they are trying to provide access to a large pool of talented people to companies which do not have the exorbitant budgets and time at hand to reach them.

This is Subramanyam Kasibhat aka Subbu’s fourth venture, after Aureole Technologies Pvt Ltd, Violet3d and Contineo, for which they won the first 5 lakh grant from “The Power of Ideas Contest” in 2012. The team worked closely with 100+ colleges in Tier2 cities and 20 companies to analyze the challenges on both the ends. They have close connections with placement centers of colleges and all the marketing has been done just via the word of mouth till date.

Thejas says “Our platform has been used by 45+ companies till date and has 55,000 registered users for entry level jobs.” In 3 weeks since the launch, 10 colleges have signed up to leverage the platform. They are providing the tool for free to startups which are not making revenues. For other companies or colleges which want to recruit online, it is available at a price of INR 5,000 per hiring event. They charge $20/month for unlimited job postings and $100/assessment for the job widget on website or facebook page. They are open to partnering with startups or SMEs providing niche assessment apps, expert consultants for conducting interviews or building custom assessment.

Indian companies like interviewstreet and HackerEarth provide platforms for hiring programmers. Get2Galaxy’s vision is to provide an end to end hiring platform, of which assessments are a part, spanning across all job domains and not just IT or software jobs but currently the platform has majority of these.

Android

While there was no new hardware announced, there were a lot of exciting new APIs and features that Google announced. Things like the beta-testing and incremental rollouts feature from the Play Store are a big deal. Android Apps quality has always been a question mark when competing with Apple’s store, and Google wants to give all the tools and techniques possible to the App developers to help them build better Apps. By beta-testing the Apps in the real world, and rolling out their App incrementally, App developers can essentially catch bugs and issues earlier, and prevent the nasty 1-star ratings that users seem so happy to give.

Google has clearly paid of a lot of attention to what developers want with announcements like the new Maps APIs and Android Studio. At a meta level, it is very exciting to see that Google is putting the interests of developers and their needs right at the top. Developers are essential to any platform eco system (And Google has a stake in several – Android, Chrome/Web Apps, Google +, Glass), and catering to all the needs of developers is absolutely essential. Even giving away free stuff like $1300+ Pixels is sometimes criticized, but you have to see the value that Google gets out of this – By putting beautiful, high-end devices like the Pixel early into the hands of developers, Google is encouraging them to write Apps for Chrome and the Web, and make sure the Apps look and work beautifully. Handing out developer devices like the Pixel may actually be the cheapest way to recruit developers on to your platform, something that Intel and Microsoft could do well to emulate.

Google +

On the consumer side, Google + announced a host of new features and products aimed at making lives of consumers easier. The new suite of tools for photos is quite brilliant. Google can now automatically sift through the tons of pictures that you click on your vacation and automatically pick the best ones, enhance them and make you look like a professional photographer, without spending inordinate amounts of time.

This is actually a great strategy from Google +. By automating mundane processes that people go through to get brilliant and beautiful results, it makes it consumers lives easier, but also (and more importantly), it reduces the threshold for consumers to give more and more of their data to Google. If you’re going to get gorgeous looking pictures from your vacation automatically that you can show off to your friends, you’d be more than happy to share your pictures with Google, right.

And Google bread and butter, really, is to get more information and data from its users so it can show them targeted ads. Data is king in the online world, and Google, which already has a significant lead, is building on it, convincing users to part with their data voluntarily.

Search

Which brings us lastly, but most importantly to search. Google has never been one to rest on its laurels, and this year as well, they showed off some pretty cool advancements in the Knowledge graph and the related areas. Google’s voice search has grown by leaps and bounds, and has now started to understand language syntax, automatically figuring out context-words like “here”, “it” etc…, based on what you searched previously.

The most significant step, actually, might Google’s focus on providing information to you without even you asking for it. Google Now has added several new cards, and can “just answer” questions that you might have just thought about. Google clearly believes this is the future of search, where information you need is automatically available to you, without even you needing to explicitly ask for it.

Overall, this was another successful Google IO. Lots of interesting tech announced, and it more-or-less achieved its goal of getting developers excited about Google’s platforms.

Kochi was the first stop of the six-city round in this year’s TechSparks event. We are conducting regional round tables in six cities before we crown the final 30 at the Grand Finale in Bangalore, later this year. As a part of these regional round tables, we identify local entrepreneurs and give them a platform to pitch their startup’s offerings in front of an esteemed panel. And based on various parameters on which these startups are evaluated, they may very well go on to present at the TechSparks Grand Finale.

The three bright City Sparks from Kochi who will get a shot at glory are:

From left to right – Founders of iTraveller, DecideQuick and Mashinga

iTraveller - iTraveller is an ERP platform for travel agents who are managing destinations. Here you can configure your company in simple 15 minutes and start taking bookings. iTraveller’s automated platform helps you manage bookings, payments, hotel reservations, client management, inventory management and so on. There are no entry barriers, setup fees or lock-in periods – pay only if you use it and stop any time when you don’t have bookings.

DecideQuick – DecideQuick is a Trivandrum based startup which claims to help you make buying decisions based on experiences and opinions that have already been shared by your friends, influencers, experts, people like you and others anywhere on the web; all in under 60 seconds.

Mashinga - Mashinga leverages the technology of Multi-touch and the art of Human Computer Interaction to bring computing to new mediums. They offer products and tailored solutions including multi-touch tables, interactive kiosks, inclined or vertical displays. If it involves big screens and touch interfaces, they are the guys to talk to.

Do you think your company has what it takes to be a CitySpark? Register today! 

Their first play was The Skeleton Woman which was an original script written and performed by Prashant Prakash and Kalki Koechlin. It was directed by Nayantara Kotian and produced by Anurag Kashyap. The play won the Hindu Metroplus Playwright award 2009 for the best original, unpublished script in English. Kalki associates very well with the multiple hats that an entrepreneur dons.

Yesterday, we happened to be on the sets ‘Conversations with Namu Kini’ – a talk show which will be online soon where we had a chance to meet Kalki.

Quaff was in every sense like a startup, “I was doing so many things at one time!” she says. Acting, writing and theatre. Running a theatre group has a lot of parallels with a startup- consider a tech one- replace the product with the play, the developers with the performers, the technical architecture with the creative clashes. It’s the same process, the setting is different.

Kalki has now moved on from the theatre group but that was her stepping stone into the industry.

Talking about what she would say to the gutsy people in India starting up something of their own, she says, “It is good for you. If people tell you that you are crazy, it is a good sign!” And we agree. As great Gandhi put it, First they ignore you. then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. This belief should be the cornerstone of every daring idea.

On a personal front, Kalki exposed an interesting aspect when she told us about being almost famous, “It is annoying,” she says. You either want to be famous or not, dangling midway is not very comfortable. Throwing light on her work, Kalki is on the lookout for only one thing- good work. “I would like to go anywhere in the world for good work. The great thing about being an actor is that you are open to many places and different cultures,” she said.

Stay tuned for updates on conversations with Namu Kini.

- Kirti Punia with inputs from Jubin Mehta

Brandniti was formed under Regenti Media Pvt Ltd as a full fledged Design and Communication agency. Brandniti primarily focuses on adding value to the real estate space in India. It was started in February 2012, with a vision to emerge as one stop solution for all marketing and business needs of real estate developers. It addresses varied needs of Real Estate Developers like developing renders & walkthroughs to traditional advertising mediums like print, hoarding & digital.

Both Smita and Haresh have been actively involved with the development of Brandniti since inception. Having been in the real estate industry, they have also observed the changing trends in the same. Haresh says “We observed that trends were changing. Clients in the industry were asking for more innovative, creative solutions and weren’t clinged to only the traditional mediums.”

Building on the existing gap in the Real Estate, they were able to carve out the essential values for Brandniti. Its focus on quality service delivery and innovative communication approach in traditional mediums like brochures, websites, walkthrough, print, outdoors and choice of innovative mediums like tablet applications have helped them retain existing clients and also get references for future contracts. Some of the clients include India Bulls, Suntech and Equinox Reality.

Haresh shares “My experience of 14 years in marketing & sales with real estate developers has come in handy in marketing & sales expertise with involvement in activities such as marketing plan, media plan, sales plan to launch real estate projects across the board etc.” In addition to the above, his experience in graphics & animation adds value to his creative instincts and ability to think through innovative concepts and brainstorm along with other team members. On the other hand Smita being a qualified Architect with honours brings her enormous strength as a business leader and networked individual. She has been at the forefront when starting up and has been leading the team effectively.

Brandniti works with developers during varied phases of their business cycle. Haresh also shares that majority of their revenue is generated through repeated business and hence client satisfaction emerges a priority for the whole team. The effective last financial year turn over for the startup was INR 14 Million. The founders are hopeful of attaining a 100% growth this financial year. The success rate of the startup adds fuel to the burning spirits of team Brandniti. Haresh mentions that they are looking forward at other industries such as Pharma, Retail, FMCG, and Jewelers etc. They are also planning to setup regional offices in Pune and Bangalore. “We have been approached by various developers in these markets who value and appreciate our expertise in the domain. We are also continuously looking to step-up on improving client experiences through use of technology and adding up strength to our creative & client servicing team” 

He also shares “Our prime challenge as a startup was putting together the right team, we believe in this space quality of resource is foremost, and getting them together is daunting.” However, over a period of time they have been able to put together skilled & passionate team that is aligned to their long term vision. Brandniti is a 12 member strong team and are aiming high to grow into 22-24 members by the end of this year.

His venture Magickart.in, is targeting women who like experimenting with contemporary kitchen ware designs and range. “We offer our customers access to over 5000 products across 50 trusted brands at the best price. The portal showcases exclusive and varied collection of national and international kitchenware brands that include Butterfly, Prestige, Wonderchef, Philips, and Hawkins among others” says Rohit. The key categories sold on the site are kitchenware, cookware, bar accessories, baking vessels, food storage containers, kitchen tools, knifes and the dining range.

Rohit Jain

Though the portal faces stiff competition from other websites like Zansaar.com, Fabfurnish.com, Goodlife.com, Homeshop18.com, what makes Magickart different is the wide range of products, niche segmentation, personalized attention to customer requests, easy assistance and a 360° customer satisfaction approach backed by warranty/guarantee from the suppliers. “The pricing of our products has always been customer friendly, and we never change the MRP of the products. Continuous efforts are made to keep the customer updated about new promotions with luring discounts,” explains Rohit.

“Quality is a very subjective concept with different criteria of benchmarking,” says Rohit. At Magickart, only those products are included where brands offer customer service setup or service is out sourced to some third party. All products are inspected and checked for damages, expiry and if they are according to customer specifications before they are packed and shipped. In case a customer has received a wrong specification or a customer wishes to exchange a particular product, a 100% exchange guarantee is offered.

Google ad-words, retargeting along with SEO, online marketing, Facebook advertising and promotional mails are the usual ones used to market the product. Recently the portal conducted an online recipe contest for its Facebook fans where participants had to submit a recipe which can be made in 10-12 min. 85 responses were received and the winners were felicitated by a local chef at a small function. The team at Magickart continuously innovates on methods to engage customers by way of opinion polls, live chats and helpline services through which they give them tips to improve their home and kitchen.

A self-funded venture, Magickart is looking for funds to expand their operations. “We plan to increase our products listings to 15,000 products by the year end. Our aim is to bring for the Indian market, brands which are big internationally,” says Rohit. Entering more markets and diversification is also on cards.

Join us at Gokulam Park Hotel & Convention Center, Kochi for the first round of TechSparks 2013 and stayed tuned to our site for all live updates from the event.

It will be interesting to know how many people use their phones for audio recording. In the field of journalism, where a large part of your day involves interviewing people, a sound recorder has always been a journalist’s best friend. However, sound recorder apps on smartphones have the potential to replace these devices, and have done so to a large extent as well.

Today’s App Friday is one that I have used extensively ever since its closed beta stage. Sky Recorder is a simple app with which you can make high quality audio recordings, which can be later shared through various channels. Having used the app for several months, here’s the review of Sky Recorder -

What is it about? 

The recording screen

Sky Recorder is recorder app. But unlike most recorder apps which sport a bot red record button and a list of recordings, it has been designed in a way which makes this recording app feel like a lot more. This is a two page app. The first page is the record screen. While not recording, the app gives you information about the number of recordings made and the number of recordings available based on the space used and the space available. When recording, the same page shows a waveform animation and a clock which shows the duration of the recording.

The second page shows a list of recordings, in the top half of the screen. The bottom portion of the screen has the play/pause, forward/rewind and the back/next functions. The elements on the list can be renamed, deleted and shared using various applications on long press. If you have a long list, there’s a search feature which you can use to find older recordings.

The playback screen

Sky Recorder provides the user with a lot of options. There are a couple of themes that you can choose from, alter the font size, change the recording quality and format. You can even choose how you want the ads on the app to show up!

Sky Recorder can sync with DropBox, which uploads all the recordings over a WiFi network to a DropBox folder of your choice.

What is simple? 

The first thing that strikes you about Sky Recorder is that it is really simple. The focus of the app is on recording and playback. But once you get through the good looks of the app, it is no more than a recording app. I will keep coming back to this app because I am a journalist, but for other users to keep coming back to the app, Sky Recorder will definitely need more features.

Themes on Sky Recorder

For example, photo/social tagging recordings is something that will make sorting and finding recordings in sound cloud really easy. If the app could also transcribe recordings to text, then it would be a first of its kind on a smartphone.

Because it is a well designed app, the ideas to build upon Sky Recorder are endless. But it might come at the cost of the app’s simplicity. The maker of the app made it with the intention of keeping it simple and easy to use. Given that the app has recently launched, it will be interesting to see how it adds features to it, without affecting the app’s simplicity.

Pros and cons

Sky Recorder is a very good utility app. You can record, playback and sync with it, and it does it very well. It is simple and easy to use, which keeps you coming back to the app. Furthermore, its good design makes Sky Recorder pleasing to the eye.

Sky Recorder Sync

The app is still in a public beta, and understandably, there are some bugs in the app. For example, while recording in high bit rates, the audio skips a fraction of a second at regular intervals. Also, I feel that the app should prompt you to name your recording. Renaming the default date and time stamp is the only off thing in this very easy to use app.

Our take 

With great design and simplicity, Sky Recorder stands out from the regular recorder apps in the market. However, in its current form, it has a very niche population which will contribute to the apps active user population. It definitely needs a lot more features that will cater to a wider audience.

There are two version of SkyRecorder – Free and Paid. The free version is ad-supported and the paid one gets rid of the ads. There are no additional features in the paid app. Give both a spin and tell us what you think.

Techsparks 2013, the largest technology product startup recognition platform of India KickStarts on May 18. Join us for this 7 city startup extravaganza!

Next Big Idea is a prestigious national level business plan competition that provide students with a platform to blossom into entrepreneurs. NSRCEL (NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning) at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) hosts the competition and the 2013 edition of Next Big Idea (NBI), is scheduled between May 20^th and May 22^nd , 2013 at IIMB.

National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB) sponsors NBI under the aegis of Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and Intel India.

The competition will be conducted in 2 rounds. 32 teams that have been selected to participate in the pre-final will be shortlisted to 10 teams to present at the finals. The top three teams will be identified at the end of the finals.

The two teams will participate alongside participants from close to 30 countries across the world.  The cost of participating in the global challenge is borne by Intel and Department of Science & Technology, Government of India.  Participants at the global challenge get a great opportunity to present their ideas to highly successful entrepreneurs and investors in USA.

The first prize winner of NBI 2012, Greenway Grameen Infra (mentored by NSRCEL), also won the Intel Global Challenge in 2012. (read full story)

Website: NBI

He’ll be joining us for TechSparks and many more people like him. Make sure you’ve booked your tickets for this startup extravaganza.

Nitin Raghunath & Pramida Posanipalli

Nitin Raghunath & Pramida Posanipalli are expats who have been living in the States for over eight years. Nitin has worked with AT&T and few startups in the Bay Area in the past, while Pramida still works for Cisco. Nitin loves making movies and has made a couple of short films in the past that were showcased at San Francisco film festival and a recent one which was screened at the 2011 Cannes film festival. Despite these short films, Nitin always had the desire to do something bigger. He decided to do give it his all in early 2012, when he quit his job and started working fulltime on the script and research of Mere Haule Dost – his second full length feature film. Nitin had made one with his friends right after college. Mere Haule Dost is a fun and quirky ride set against the backdrop of lives of five laid-back friends in the city of Hyderabad. A film for young adults, it is a journey of friendship, girls, parties, bikes, madness and their thrill for the Himalayan bike rally. ‘Haule’ is a popular Hyderabadi word that loosely translates to ‘silly’, ‘crazy’, ‘mad’ etc. depending on the context.

Making of the movie

The hiring research for the film started in April 2011. Seeing her husband rough it out alone, Pramida decided to help him in the journey and took a long leave from Cisco. “There are many things that goes into making of a film, and I decided to help Nitin so that he can concentrate of the actual movie making,” says Pramida. They put together the cast and crew of the movie with the help of couple of websites that list the services of freelance technical experts.

Mere Haule Dost crew members

The result was — Ankur Raina, a young cinematographer born in Srinagar, Kashmir, who studied his craft at Whistling Woods International in Mumbai. Their creative director, Asheesh Saini is a road trip expert and besides his role of creative director in the movie, he also lend support in idea generation for the movie. Divyang Arora, the music director for the movie has been drumming since he was eight years old and has assisted mainstream Bollywood directors in the past. Dev Verma and Munish Chopra are the associate directors for the movie and have both graduated from NIFT Delhi.

To identify the cast they advertised through fliers in newspapers and conducted proper auditions to get their actors.

Releasing the movie

Completing the movie was an easier task, compared to releasing the film. “You can say ours is a micro budget film and we didn’t have big money to release the movie. If you go to production houses with your movie, some of them will buy it and release it – then they can invest big money to market and advertise the film. But we didn’t want to sell our movie,” explains Pramida. So they met a lot of people who could help them release their movie, and even approached production houses to help them with the release.

Mera Haule Dost movie poster

While the couple didn’t have as much trouble as Dadasaheb Phalke faced with his first full-length movie, they had their own share of struggles. They found their savior in PVR Cinemas, which has a vertical, called PVR Director’s Rare — that distributes independent movies. “With PVR, we are now getting a proper release,” says Pramida. The movie is being taken to 7 cities in India, including Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. “PVR is a big help, because if we were to try and do our own release we would have to pay a big sum to the theatre owners and we may still end up with some early morning slots which may not be the best time to showcase the movie,” explains Pramida.

Marketing the movie

Since the advent of multiplexs and the decline of single screen theatres, movie marketing has become equally, if not more important than the making of the movie. And this creative duo is doing it in whatever cost effective ways as possible. “We did approach a few TV and radio channels, but the cost of association was quite high,” says Pramida. They are now tying up with retail brands, telecom brands to give away vouchers to the movie wherever possible. The movie was also showcased at the London Asian film festival, where the movie was screened. They are also conducting contests with partners to publicize the movie.

Once the movie is released in the theatres, they will also start discussing the satellite rights, DVD rights and foreign rights for the film. However all eyes and hearts are now set on the release date of the movie, which is scheduled for June 7.

The experience of a lifetime

Looking back at the entire experience, Pramida is quite happy they made the film. “We have been watching and writing about films since a long time and then when the thought to make a feature film came by, we thought it was probably a good idea to do it now, lest we regret later on in life about not doing what we wanted or following our hearts,” says Pramida. Once done with Mere Haule Dost, Pramida will go back to her job at Cisco, while Nitin will take a break before he decides his next move. “We invested all our savings in the movie are completely broke now. We will have to wait for sometime before we can get back to making movies again,” laughs Pramida.

So if you have been wanting to do something that you strongly feel about, then follow your entrepreneurial heart and write to us – preethi@yourstory.in – to tell us your story.

And don’t forget to be at Gokulam Park Hotel & Convention Center, Kochi for the first round of TechSparks 2013 and stayed tuned to our site for all live updates from the event.