Category Archives: Overviews

Scala University: A free continuous learning initiative for the Scala Programming Language by ThoughtWorks Pune

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Scala University is an initiative of Scala practitioners from Pune – who want to drive continuous learning/teaching of Scala in the form of free public workshops. It was started by developers at ThoughtWorks who are passionate Scala users for many years. As of now, Scala University is specifically interested in helping communities in and around cities where ThoughtWorks has offices.

How did it start?

The people who started Scala University felt that they have benefitted a great deal from the open source Scala Language, the wonderful Scala community, and from other free and open resources around the web, for example, like Coursera courses on Scala and Reactive programming. They felt that they should give back to the community, and that is why “Scala University”

As a first step, they conducted a 4-day Scala Workshop in Pune on 20-23 June 2014. The event was “free” for all those who could clear a coding test. The response was overwhelming:

  • It got 350 registrations
  • 95 of them submitted the coding assignments
  • 30 candidates were selected after code review
  • 29 of them confirmed and attended all 4 days of the training!
  • Along with them, 10 ThoughtWorkers also attended, taking the total batch size to 40
  • Apart from developers there were 5 Quality Analysts and 1 Project Manager
  • The experience level varied widely: from 1st year engineering grads to people with 12+ years of experience.

The workshop also generated huge amount of goodwill in the local community. Enthused with the success, they conducted the 2nd workshop in Gurgaon on 24-27 July. The numbers were similar (around 25 people including 6 ThoughtWorkers attended). The 3rd workshop is scheduled in Chennai on 4-7 Sep. Workshops in Hyderabad, Singapore and Bangalore are being considered. You can keep track of list of all events conducted so far.

How does it work?

The Scala deep-dive workshop currently covers language fundamentals with hands on assignments. The workshop is always planned around the weekend. So, each attendee (which include ThoughtWorkers) have to invest 2 working days, plus a full weekend for the workshop. People have suggested compressing the workshop to 3 days, but it needs at least 4 full days to give a complete perspective of the basic language.

Folks from local ThoughtWorks offices are critical for organizing and logistics. They also help with the code reviews. Reviewing so many code submission is the most difficult task.

The workshop is announced around 1 month in advance. Roughly 25% of those who register submit the code, and 30% of those who submit the code qualify for the workshop. The course turns out to be ‘intense and fun’ for smart developers.

What are the rewards?

Learning and teaching Scala is a joy which in itself is a big reward. But there are other good side effects of this initiative:

  • Building local community around Scala
  • Building internal Scala capability within ThoughWorks
  • Positively influencing hiring. Some attendees from the 1st workshop applied to ThoughtWorks, and ThoughtWorks ended up making 2 offers!
  • Companies in the local markets find out about the workshop with requests for doing a dedicated commercial training.
  • The workshop model has inspired similar trainings by other ThoughtWorkers. See Agile Dev Bootcamp w- hich is scheduled on 15-August.

Next steps

Scala University also wants to do this in other cities where ThoughtWorks has offices, and they want to do multiple batches at each location if there is enough interest. If you are are a ThoughtWorker interested in doing a batch of “Scala University” in your city, please get in touch. If you are a potential attendee, please let them know in which cities you would like to attend these workshops. Based on that data, they might also plan a workshop in cities where ThoughtWorks does not have a office (for example, Mumbai or Nagpur).

Many have requested workshops on advanced/focused topics. The following topics are being considered:

  • Reactive programming (futures, promises, streams and actors)
  • Tools (Sbt, Play, Akka)
  • Big data computing (Spark stack)

If you’re interested, let them know about your preferences

For more information, see the Scala University website or see the contact us page there.

Overview of KPIT: A Tech Company With An Auto Focus – via Forbes

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Forbes has an interesting overview of Pune services company, KPIT.

Some excerpts:

The company, founded in 1990, soon evolved into one of the fastest-growing IT enterprises in the country. Revenues went from $10 million in 2002 to $100 million in 2007 to $444 million in 2014. Profits have more than tripled to $42 million in the last seven years. This performance has earned it a spot on the Best Under A Billion list for the second straight year.

Next stop? It’s targeting $1 billion in 2017.

One of the important ways in which KPIT distinguishes itself from its competitors (including Indian biggies like Infosys, and other Pune companies of similar size, like Persistent) is that it leverages Pune’s manufacturing industry, and thus has a focus on software for the auto/manufacturing industry. This is a USP that that most other Indian software companies are missing:

In the auto sector the company works in a range of areas, including providing software for vehicle safety and developing technology to convert gasoline-powered cars into hybrids.

For instance KPIT offers software that detects when a driver is distracted: turning away from the wheel, say, to look at a child in the backseat or out of drowsiness, elicits warning beeps. KPIT is also developing infrared systems for pedestrian detection.

The company is also jazzing up things on the road. Take its work for Jaguar Land Rover’s sports car, the Jaguar F-type. KPIT has helped in the development of the software that deploys the spoiler at the rear of the car.

Of course, there is competition:

Meanwhile, as KPIT forges ahead it contends with intense competition for software services from midcap IT companies like Mindtree and Hexaware as well as biggies like TCS and Cognizant. And when it comes to auto engineering services, it’s pitted against Ricardo, Bosch and niche German companies in auto electronics.

Keeping up with the competition is hard work, and 12-hour days across the management chain are common.

But:

“We are all workaholics in the company,” says [Chairman Ravi] Pandit. “But it’s not really work when there’s so much excitement. Very few people get this kind of an opportunity to be part of something big like this.”

Read the full article – for much more details.

Overview of TripHobo (Formerly JoGuru), Pune-based travel itinerary planning portal

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TripHobo (which was earlier called JoGuru), is a Pune-based online travel/itinerary planning portal that has recently raised Series A funding from Kalaari Capital (the same folks who have also funded Pune-based tablet maker Swipe Telecom). Trak.in reports:

TripHobo, a Pune based online travel planning portal announced their series A funding from Kalaari Capital. TripHobo has not disclosed the amount of funding. However, we have a confirmation that funding is between USD 1 million to 3.5 Million.
They had previously raised their seed funding from a Pune based private investor in 2012.

We take this opportunity to give PuneTech readers an overview of TripHobo’s offerings and it’s current state:

What exactly does TripHobo help its users do?

The main feature of TripHobo is personalized itinerary planner. A traveler can simply choose the destination and date they wish to travel and TripHobo presents to them with the attractions in that city.

Travelers can then choose the attractions and prepare the entire travel itinerary in minutes. If a traveler is not sure of the attractions, they can also search through thousands of itineraries created by other travelers and modify them as per their requirement.

Source

Also:

On TripHobo, one can discover itineraries created by other users and use them for his/her planning. Users can also create their own itineraries from scratch and share it. The startup has developed a ‘Theory of Constraints’-based algorithm that claims to optimise the trip route chosen by a user, depending on the distances and open & closing time of attractions.

According to the company, the ‘Itinerary Planner’ feature on its site displays the tentative time a user can reach a particular attraction. This is aimed at helping them to accommodate their breakfast, lunch and dinner plans.

“Travellers often struggle to get critical information like opening times, ticket prices, nearest public transport and eateries. We at TripHobo have tried to address all these issues,” claimed Kumar.

Source

According to CTO Saket, TripHobo has listed more than 25,000 itineraries from close to 200 cities across the globe on its site. It is now planning to add more cities and take the total city count to 2,000 in the coming years.
“At present, about 40 per cent of our users come from the US, followed by 35 per cent from Europe and Latin America combined, and 20 per cent from Southeast Asia. In the last six-eight months, we saw close to one million users checking out the platform. The site has around 1.3 lakh monthly unique visitors,” said Saket.

Source

According to VC Circle, they are doing quite well as far as traction is concerned:

According to CTO Saket, TripHobo has listed more than 25,000 itineraries from close to 200 cities across the globe on its site. It is now planning to add more cities and take the total city count to 2,000 in the coming years.
“At present, about 40 per cent of our users come from the US, followed by 35 per cent from Europe and Latin America combined, and 20 per cent from Southeast Asia. In the last six-eight months, we saw close to one million users checking out the platform. The site has around 1.3 lakh monthly unique visitors,” said Saket.

What are their next steps?

they are now aggressively looking at developing a mobile app that will help mobile users to create travel itineraries on mobile devices.

Additionally, TripHobo also plans to develop API’s on their platform so large OTA and travel sites can seamlessly integrate TripHobo’s itineraries into their existing flow. Currently non of the large OTA’s provide this service.

Source

About the Founders

Praveen Kumar – Founder, CEO: Praveen has flair to go on and on endlessly about things he is passionate about, irrespective of who’s listening. He says he is national integration personified. Rajasthani by descent, Hyderabadi by birth, he studied in Lucknow, roots for Royal Challengers Bangalore- IPL, has traveled almost whole of India. His friends say he is over enthusiastic, full of life and a happy go lucky chap. He brings to TripHobo (JoGuru) his 7 years of rich experience in setting up an ecommerce portals for his past organizations. Extremely zealous about traveling and exploring new places, he has occasional bouts of backpacking urge and takes off without notice, his 18 day bike trip to Leh, Himalayas being a case in point. He never misses out an opportunity to tell his travelouges. Praveen is the CEO of TripHobo (JoGuru) and has a Management Degree from IIM Lucknow. He loves adventure sports, fast cars, and dreams of owning a private island in Maldives.

Saket Newaskar – Founder, CTO: Ever since Saket developed some algorithms at Toshiba, and got a patent, he thinks he is a clone of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, much to the annoyance of everyone around him. He has an uncanny ability to argue about anything under the sun with or without making any sense. He wanted to be a Marathi film star but ended up with a Master’s degree in Management from MDI, Gurgaon. He has over 7 years of experience in Product Development, Product Management and Business Development across the Globe. Passionate about anything related to technology or travel, he has been to more than 20 countries till date and dreams of covering the UN. He loves life, singing, watching movies and is famous for his PJs among friends . Saket is the social media wizard at TripHobo (JoGuru) and manages product development and roadmap.

Karthik Ramachandra – Founder: Karthik is an avid traveler (traveling close to 6 hours daily to and from work) and loves adventure sports, reading and above all – Sleeping. When awake, he constantly dreams of attending every single Grand Prix in Formula 1 someday. He speaks with immense confidence about things he has no clue about and mostly manages to get away with it. He lists Sarcasm as his majors, but has a Master’s degree in Marketing Management from IIM Indore. He is the quintessential salesman. Once Karthik starts talking, the listener almost invariably ends up saying OK. He brings to TripHobo (JoGuru) over 4 years of experience in Business Development for new products and new markets. He is a gadget freak and an Apple fan boy and it is recommended to refrain from asking him about it unless you have a couple of hours to spare.

Source

For more information, read:

Overview of Function Space (@fspace314), Pune’s “Facebook for Science”

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FirstPost has an good overview of Function Space – Pune’s Science Social Network, the startup founded by Pune’s Adit Gupta, Sakshi Majumdar, and Sumit Maniyar, and that was recently funded by Nexus Venture Partners.

How did Function Space get started?

The venture, started in April 2013, was conceived as a sort of Facebook for science – a way to make knowledge sharing accessible and approachable. Now known as Function Space, it uses the social learning model to make science easy and understandable for all skill levels – be it novices or experts.

In April 2013, both Gupta and Majmudar quit their jobs in the design and IT fields respectively, and decided to focus on creating a science platform full-time – within two months they had a basic prototype of what Function Space would look like. During that period, their current partner Sumit Maniyar heard about their venture through a common friend and soon after decided to join the duo.

How did they do the initial marketing for Function Space?

Maniyar, 28, explained how word about Function Space got out. “Adit’s friend posted that we were working on social learning science platform on Hackernews, a social news website dedicated to content related to computer science and entrepreneurship,” Maniyar said. Soon, someone picked up the thread and the discussion went viral.
Within a day’s time, the Function Space team had between 800-1000 people sending in requests for invitations to the beta site. As with many startups, word-of-mouth was Function Space’s number one marketing tool, with the team spending no money on advertising.

What exactly does Function Space do?

The main goal of the site is to bridge the gap between an academic curriculum to the skill-based requirements of the workplace. Through the use of videos, articles, problems, diagrams, equations and codes, the site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other on everything from algebra and applied maths to cosmology and particle physics to artificial intelligence.

For instance, a user might post a query or an opinion on a subject which could result in discussion threads that could include solutions, readings or even more questions and opinions. Users can also share news or post challenges for others to solve. Tabs on the screen allow users to navigate between sections like ‘Feed’, ‘News’ and ‘Challenges.’

What were the next challenges?

The buzz Function Space started out with helped it get noticed in a few hallowed educational institutions. PhD students and professors from universities like IITs, Stanford and MIT began logging in to check out the material being shared and sometimes even engaging with users from across 190 countries globally, Maniyar said.

But trawling through the mounds of sometimes useless data on the site to find that one IIT professor’s post was a painful task. So the Function Space team signed on volunteers to “sanitise the platform.”

“We get a lot of garbage on the site and maintaining the quality is a big challenge. It’s also difficult to find good talent,” he said. “The volunteers remove factually inaccurate content.”

As regular readers of PuneTech are aware, Function Space entered the list of tech companies in Pune that have recently raised funding last month, which now makes it one of Pune’s hottest young startups.

Naren Gupta, of Nexus Venture Partners who funded Function Space, points out how Function Space is different from a MOOC:

“Would anyone expect a Physics Noble prize winner to discuss relevant issues and share ideas on Quora?” he asked. “Function Space could take learning to new levels even beyond MOOCs (Massive Open On-line Courses). While MOOCs are one too many learning platforms, Function Space would become a many-to-many learning and discussions platform,” believes Gupta.

Read the full article on FirstPost.

Overview of Helpshift: Pune-based Mobile Customer Service Software Product Company

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Helpshift, the Pune-based company that builds customer service software solutions for mobile app developers has recently raised $10 million in funding from Intel Capital, Visionnaire Ventures, True Investors, and the VC most active in Pune, Nexus Venture Partners. This funding is in addition to the $3.2 million it had raised earlier.

We decided to take this opportunity to give PuneTech readers an overview of what exactly Helpshift does.

Helpshift provides mobile developers with tools, software and an online service that allows them to easily incorporate various in-app customer support and service features in their mobile apps.

Helpshift: Product Overview

The key to understand Helpshift’s offering is to realize that the current “industry practices” of customer support were largely developed for desktop applications and still have remnants of the era when everybody wasn’t always connected to the internet. As a result, customer service is still stuck in the 80s.

However, mobile is a very different world, and it is possible to do things with smartphones that were not possible earlier. Thus, it becomes possible to create a customer service experience far better than anything else that was possible before. And mobile is eating the world, so developers need to pay attention.

Specifically, Helpshift provides the following features:

  • Support: Easily incorporate tools to do provide in-app support for customers. Integrating this with the app results in a “Contact Us” tab that has a full-fledged in-app messaging system that customer support personnel can use to interact with the customer and solve their problem. In addition, it allows easy creation of a FAQs section, that can be dynamically updated, organized, tagged by customer service, and can be easily searched and displayed to/by the customer
  • Notifications: Helpshift allows app developers / support personnel to easily send push notifications to customers. This appears as an in-app notification if the app is in the foreground, or as an alert or a badge if the app is in the background (and also updates the app icon)
  • Tracking: Helpshift allows the app to easily track user actions and events in the app, and can be used to automatically attach customer and app configuration metadata along with every support conversation with that customer. The app developer can customize what medadata is automatically attached. This removes the biggest pain of any customer service interaction – that of collecting information about the configuration and environment of the customer, and what s/he was doing at the time of the issue.
  • Reviews and Feedback: Helpshift also allows easy integration of the ability to ask customers for feedback on the app, or reviews on the appstore/play/marketplace. This can either be triggered automatically by the app software, or manually by a customer support person after an interaction with the customer.
  • Localization and Internationalization: If an app is targeted towards an international market, it is important that all of the above features (messaging, FAQs, review/feedback screens) need to be made available in local languages. Helpshift comes with support for 12 languages out of the box, and if the customer has already set their device to the appropriate language in the device settings, then the correct language will be chosen automatically by Helpshift.

For all of this, the app developer does not actually need to write all the code; just a little bit of code is needed to incorporate Helpshift’s libraries and online API. However, to ensure that the whole experience is seamless and appears to be part of the app itself, Helpshift allows extensive theming and skinning of its SDK so it can be made to match the look and feel of the app.

Helpshift: Company Background

Helpshift has been founded by @Abinash Tripathi and Baishampayan Ghose. Abinash, who’s the co-founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who was the head of Zimbra India in Pune earlier before he founded Infinitely Beta, which experimented with various startup ideas (including the now defunct paisa.com) before settling on Helpshift. You might be interested in a profile we did of Abinash on PuneTech back on 2009. He was based in Pune, but shifted to the Silicon Valley after Helpshift began taking off.

Baishampayan (aka BG) is the co-founder and CTO of Helpshift. Before Helpshift, BG co-founded a sport-based social network company and before that he was responsible for designing and creating the air ticket fare and reservation system at one of India’s largest online travel operators. BG is an active member of the Free & Open Source Software community and has contributed to many projects including Clojure, Ubuntu, Python and Django.

What are they planning to do with the funding? Abinash told TechCrunch that:

We’ve realized we have something that most mobile companies could benefit from and the only challenge for us has been the ability to scale to meet the explosive demand. This round of funding will enable us to attack each of these major mobile verticals and bring the benefits of Helpshift to thousands of app publishers.

and

most of the company’s growth so far has been organic. With the help of this new funding, the company plans to expand its sales and marketing team in San Francisco. He also notes that the company will continue to invest heavily on building the end-to-end customer life cycle tools for mobile companies to provide the best customer experience and solve the customer retention issues they face.

The company says its service has now been installed on over 150 million devices through the different developers that have integrated it into their apps. Helpshift counts Supercell, Glu Mobile and Flipboard among its customers, but as part of its plans to expand its service, the company will specifically target mobile commerce apps and on-demand services like taxi and food delivery.

Protoprint Pune – allows waste-pickers to convert waste plastic to 3D printing filaments

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Protoprint is a Pune based “social enterprise”, founded by an alumnus of MIT (USA), which has figured out how to take waste plastic from the waste that is picked by the waste pickers in Pune, and convert that into the raw material that is needed by 3D printers, and which can then be used to create any product using the 3D printer.

Here is an overview of what they do, from Mashable:

Protoprint was founded in early 2013 by Sidhant Pai, an environmental engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the summer of 2012, Pai had been researching low-cost recycling technology around the same time his father began dabbling in 3D printing as a hobby.
“[I realized] that 3D printer filament” — the plastic, coil-like material used to mold 3D-printed creations — “was basic in its chemical composition. So, we started looking into whether it was possible to recycle the filament from waste plastic,” he says.
It was. After a brief research period, Pai partnered with Pune, India-based cooperative SWaCH, which employs “pickers” to sort through the city’s waste bins for plastic bottles. They developed a system: After the pickers collect the bottles, workers wash and run them through a FlakerBot shredding machine, and then melt the plastic and spool it into reels of filament.
“This really bridges the gap between cutting-edge technology and grassroots recycling,” Pai says.
The group is in its final stages of its pilot launch, and plans to begin commercial production by the end of the summer.

Source

For more information about Protoprint and what they do, see their website, and their (FAQ)ref2.

In addition to this, they also provide 3D printing consulting and services for educational institutions and companies. Here are details:

We work collaboratively with companies and institutions interested in setting up 3D Printing Services for their students or employees. We set up Print Labs on and off campus, providing access to large format 3D printing facilities at affordable rates. In addition to high quality 3D printers, we offer a fully developed and customizable web portal and a thorough knowledge of the industry. Contact us to see how we might assist your institution.

For educational institutions:

A correctly implemented prototyping hub can provide an incredible value to students and young designers. We consult with educational institutions and schools and provide affordable case by case implementation plans taking into consideration the end use objectives of the institute. We also offer an easy to use web portal that can be customized to individual institutions, providing their students an added measure of accessibility. Contact us to learn more.

and for companies:

High Quality 3D Printers can provide professional designers with an efficient method to prototype and iterate on their designs. We provide companies with a detailed understanding of different 3D printing methods and empower them with targeted information and structure. We also offer fully developed web portal solutions to their employees, making prototyping easier and more intuitive. Contact us for more information.

References:

Pune’s Ayojak integrates Cash-On-Delivery payment option in its ticketing service

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Ayojak, a Pune-based company that offers a suite of technology solutions & services for online event ticket selling, conference registrations, payment processing, event promotion, and event logistics, has become one of the first such services to integrate COD (cash-on-delivery) as a payment option for their online event ticket sales service.

As anybody familiar with the ecommerce situation in India is aware, COD is one of the most important forms of payment in Indian ecommerce, since Indians are still not very comfortable with using credit cards online. Thus, offering a COD option almost becomes a must-have for any product or service that is being sold online. Inspite of the fact that COD is an expensive option in general (often with charges of up to Rs. 100 per delivery), it is still the most common form of payment for many ecommerce vendors in India.

In this context, we believe that this announcement by Ayojak would be welcomed by many event organizers and potential customers of Ayojak.

In an article on YourStory.in, Santosh Panda, Founder & CEO of Ayojak explains the thought process behind this announcement:

“We see that close to 45-55% of our users have trouble in booking tickets online through Net banking, Credit cards or Debit cards, sometimes the payment gateway is too busy to respond or the connection is very slow and the browser times out. Because of these various reasons most of the users or frustrated with the online ticket booking experience and prefer the offline mode. Even from our in-house research and analysis and from consumer surveys – we see that the demand for CoD is very high in India, as a major chunk of our population still do not have access to Debit or Credit cards and not to forget the large community of students as well.”

Here are more details of the exact service offered:

Ayojak have integrated their event ticketing & registration e-commerce engine with several logistics solution provider like – FedEx (AFL), GharPay, and Santa Claus Couriers. This tie up will enable Event Organisers to reach the last miles of customer’s convenience and enables users to buy event tickets from the comforts of their home, office or other various locations from across 3000 cities/town in India. For all CoD delivered using Ayojak’s integrated solution, event organizers will be provided with a detailed CoD tracking system and easy, timely and assured delivery of orders. Ayojak has already been privately serving few selected customers to deliver thousands of CoD across India.

PuneTech caught up with Santosh Panda to get a few more details about this new service in particular, and about Ayojak in general.

Are there any other online event/ticketing providers that providers that provide an integrated COD solution? If yes, how is Ayojak’s solution different?

Santosh: There are likes of BookMyShow.com who do this for bigger events only. However with Ayojak, any event (whether big or small) now can avail the COD solution and plan to reach much larger segment of event ticket buyers to pay via cash. Our other competitors don’t have this solution.

What are the extra charges for COD tickets?

Santosh: We are charging 100 rs for delivery less than 1700 rs. For delivery amount from 1701 Rs onward, we charge 6%. The rates may sound higher but if we compare average online charge which is 5%, this is reasonable. Also COD has several complexities such as genuine buyers vs. not, insurance by logistics provider whether money is lost/stolen, support for COD tracking, many such issues. Also COD is designed as part of payment solution suite.

Can you give a quick overview of Ayojak? How is it different from the competition?

Santosh: Ayojak’s mission is to solve 360 degree aspect of an event management. Hence while competitors are focusing on online registration only, we are solving customer’s following pain such as :

  • Payment via online-cash-retail payment solution : Helping event organizer to avail all payment channel and sell it out
  • Promote: Ayojak promotes event heavily in various channels and we consider this as our job. Whereas our competitors don’t provide this as a service or spend time in helping an event get promoted. Ayojak provides promotions like ‘digital marketing, social media contest/content oriented promotion, advertisement on Google Ad/LinkedIn’. We intend to bring more ‘conversion’ oriented solution in coming days.
  • Support: Ayojak provides huge support during an event such as answering event attendee queries, event setup related help if needed, tracking each payment and reaching buyer to help them to select other options, many such. Our customers are very happy with Ayojak support.
  • Product : While our competitors looking event as one type, Ayojak is designed to treat each event type differently. For example a ‘Sonu Nigam Event’ is different from ‘Indian Medical Conference’. Therefore we have developed different apps such as ticketing app, conference app to solve the process flow needed in each type.

Also Ayojak apps are designed keeping the 360 degree principle : Create, Promote, Sell, Support.

Where is Ayojak located. Specifically we’re interested in what part of Ayojak is in Pune, and what exactly does the Pune team do.

Santosh: Ayojak’s Pune team is the prime team, most of our biz/tech decisions/development happens from Pune. Also our key sales & marketing team in pune, although we have freelancers and employees located in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad/Visakhapatnam.

For more information, check out Ayojak.com

Modern Gaming Industry – Challenges and Strategies

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(This article is a guest post by Rohit Gore, a Pune-based senior IT professional and novelist.)

Social scientists have forever been the chief antagonists of the gaming industry that has generated $25 Billion revenues in US alone and has employed more than 120,000 people. The reasons are several and some of them quite compelling. However, the industry has shrugged off all the fears and grown at a rate that few other industries have managed. From the humble beginnings in the early ’60s, when a few bored developers just wanted to kill time by creating something to amuse themselves to a time when we have a video game ‘CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2’ being declared the highest revenue generating entertainment product ($3 Billion and counting), the gaming industry has come a long way in its technology adoption and engaging its consumers.

The most modern trend in the industry is that of ‘Social Gaming’. This is closely tied with the wider, more pervasive ‘social media’ or ‘social internet’ phenomena. Platforms like Facebook have a plethora of applications that are essentially games pitting its users against one another.

The Gaming Industry Value Chain

The gaming industry has six components in its value chain

[Image of Game Industry Value Chain]

  1. The Publishers: Entities that are engaged in commissioning the developers for development of the games. They are the ones who pick the tab of the wizardry that the developers create and the consumers enjoy. Electronic Arts, Microsoft Game Studios, Activision and Ubisoft are some of the world’s largest publishers
  2. Developers (Talent layer): These are the prima donnas of the industry. The people who ideate and develop. They could be working on contracts or are on the rolls of the publishers.
  3. Tools providers: Entities that provide the necessary tools, software development frameworks, middlewares and game engines to the developers. Gamebryo and Renderware are biggest of the middleware providers
  4. Distribution: People who are responsible for generating and marketing catalogues for games
  5. Hardware: The platform on which the game runs. It could be an arcade, a PC or a gaming console. Xbox and Playstation are the two most ubiquitous consoles.
  6. Consumer: The people who play the video games

Let’s look at the top challenges that the industry is currently facing:

No more Consoles?

The console market in the recent years has seen a flat trajectory and there is a distinct possibility that it will go down. Although there is a surge in the number of variants launched by the likes of Sony and Microsoft, the problem lies more with the market than with the product. Consoles are primarily value products and are targeted at value markets viz, US, parts of Europe and Japan. We can add parts of South Korea to this mix. The population of these countries is stable and the users aren’t growing. The console makers would need the support of the publishers to create newer markets in these geographies. In some cases it has been successful. For example, the game Diner Dash that was targeted at primarily women audience sold close to 200 million copies and created a hitherto untapped market of women gamers.

The strategy being adopted by the console makers is to partner with a Publisher right at the console development stage. This ensures a) a sustained interest from the gaming community for the launch of the product, b) higher market penetration immediately after the launch as the gamers want to experience the game in the way the perception has been created – on the ‘new and most suitable’ console, c) ties the future of the game from the publisher with the console resulting in the loyalty from the gaming community.

A recent example of this is the tie-up of Ubisoft with Nintendo’s Wii U launch.

Another significant challenge that the console makers are faced with is that of ‘Gaming Clouds’. Cloud gaming solutions are particularly attractive for the industry as a whole because the key drawbacks of cloud computing like security and data integrity are relatively less intensive in the industry. What gaming clouds would ensure, though, is the redundancy of the advanced consoles. All the processing power will reside on the cloud and the users would be essentially using a dumb terminal. This even eradicates the need of cyclical upgrades, which is the key revenue generating factor for the console makers.

Do you Multi-platform?

The gaming industry, although young compared to several entertainment industries, is fast becoming extremely competitive. As a result there has been more than 100% year on year growth in the number of publishers, most of them independent, who pose significant challenges to the established publishers like Electronics Arts and Capcom. This has led to several game titles flooding the market and in turn, this has led to shorter attention span of the gamers. The challenge for the publishers is to engage the consumers on multiple platforms to ensure higher mindshare. Single platform games, and especially a segment of games called ‘casual games’ that are single platform have faced shorter shelf lives. The key is to multi-platform. From PC and consoles to several handheld devices, social media platforms like Facebook and Myspace. Publishers are investing in the future of ‘casual games’ that are truly portable to multiple platforms. The challenges for the developers are manifold, as they have to develop games that are technology agnostic and can have APIs for as diverse platforms as a Playstation to Facebook. The emphasis is to create a truly ‘social game’.

A big bad bubble?

There are worries in the industry that much like the ‘social internet’, the ‘social gaming’ is fast becoming a big bubble. The recent valuation of PopCap, a social gaming company, of $1 Billion is the most glaring of all such examples. The recent M&A trends in the industry point to significantly high valuations of independent publishers. Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA paid out up to $400 million for iOS game developer ngmoco. Electronic Arts paid $300 million for PlayFish last year, while Disney paid $760 million for Playdom, and has been aggressively restructuring its entire games business around the social gaming model. The challenge is the correct valuation of the independent publishers. Like several other mature industries, Gaming industry is going through a large scale consolidation and players like EA, Disney and Capcom are emerging as the consolidated global entities. The question that needs to be answered is whether good money of these large publishers is being spent on bad assets.

Our impressions:

  • Innovation is going to be the key in this industry. Both process as well as product innovations. In this respect, it is a unique industry as several other industries offer innovation opportunities either in process or product
  • New market development is the key for the long term success. Markets like US, Europe, Japan and South Korea are fast approaching saturation. However markets like India, China and Brazil are the markets to tap into. Especially for publishers who have a long term focus areas in Social/Casual Gaming. Every publisher needs to have an entry strategy for these markets and the early entrants would enjoy significant loyalty
  • Newer distribution channels need to be developed. The traditional channels are putting a lot of pressure on the margins, even for large players like EA and Microsoft. Cloud Gaming solutions are the way to go, even for new markets. Companies like Gaikai and InLive are investing heavily in cloud solutions
  • Gaming industry can play a significant role in socially impacting areas like education. Newer markets like India and China are especially receptive to finding innovative means of learning and therein lies the opportunity for the industry

Concluding, we believe the gaming industry is poised for a significant churn in the near future propelled partly by the rush to be the ‘first’ to exploit the burgeoning and untapped social gaming market.

To discuss this perspective in more detail you can contact Rohit at rohit.gore@in.fujitsu.com

About the Author – Rohit Gore

Rohit Gore is a Pune-based senior IT Professional and novelist. Rohit is a Lead Consultant at Fujitsu Consulting India, and has 10+ years of Industry experience including stints at Infosys and Sasken after an MBA from S P Jain Institute.

Rohit is also the author of ‘FOCUS, SAM’ a novel from Rupa Publications and the upcoming ‘A DARKER DAWN’. He grew up in a number of towns in India. At various times in his childhood, he wanted to be a theatre actor, an architect and a bookshop owner.

He loves sports, specifically the discussing and watching part of it, since the playing days are long gone. He has travelled a lot – a consequence of living in Mumbai and London. His greatest passion is reading and it inspired him to write. He is a frequent contributor to many online writing forums and wishes there were more writing groups.

Pune Startup launches Vaultize – Cloud-Based Enterprise Backup & DR

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Pune Startup Anoosmar Technologies, has just come out of stealth mode, and announced the public beta of Vaultize, which they describe as:

Vaultize is next generation data protection: cloud-based backup and disaster recovery that also enables collaboration between users, synchronization of devices and sharing over web. Vaultize turns your zero-returns investment in backup into an asset that improves availability, increases productivity and makes sharing easy.

Anoosmar Technoloies has been founded by Anand Kekre and Ankur Panchbudhe, both of whom are Pune old-timers, with an ex-Veritas (Symantec), and ex-McAfee background. Both of them have been in the data protection, security, and storage space for over 10 years, and have deep expertise in enterprise infrastructure software. Between them they have 64 US patents.

Before you dismiss Vaultize by comparing it with Dropbox, or , remember that Vaultize is not a consumer product – it is targeting the enterprise space. In that sense, I see Vaultize as more of a competitor to Pune’s Druva. However, given the backgrounds of the founders of Druva and founders of Vaultize, I would be tempted to guess that Druva is likely to be more interested in enterprise backup, and replication and generally areas more to do with performance and availability in an enterprise, while Vaultize is likely to move more in the direction of archiving, and e-discovery and generally areas more to do with risk management and legal compliance. But that’s pure speculation – I might be wrong.

Also check out the customer case studies page and the management team page.

Druva is one of the few Pune software product companies that has received funding from well known VCs, and hence, Anoosmar, which has a similar pedigree and similar target markets, is a company to watch closely.

eduVARTA – SMS-based education/jobs info-service for rural college students

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eduVARTA is a new

eduVARTA provides informational SMS updates to rural and semi-urban college students with a focus on educational, jobs, and skills information. The idea is to empower students, and increase the opportunities they get, in terms of more education, employment and self-employment opportunities.

eduVARTA hopes to reach 5 lakhs rural and semi-urban college students (11th std. and up). Considering that the people behind this initiative are the same as those behind SMSOne, which is already reaching 5 lakhs rural and semi-urban households with local updates and ads, it should not be difficult for them to achieve their target quickly.

There is a pressing need for a service like. While students of colleges in cities like Pune are very aware of what is going on in the world, and usually end up getting decent jobs, there are millions of students elsewhere who are so devoid of information, basic skills, and confidence that even a little trickle of information can pay huge dividends. And, at this time, there is no better way to reach this population than SMS.

The eduVARTA website points out that provide the students with this kind of information:

  • Notices, announcements, alerts, decisions
  • Courses, admission, fees, due dates
  • Trainings, workshops, seminars, guest lectures, camps, study tours
  • Researches, articles, references, books, publications
  • Competition, Events, youth festivals, programs, gathering
  • Exams, competitive exams, results, forms
  • Sports, magazine, cultural, social committee activities
  • Higher education, job opportunities
  • Facilities, needs, demands
  • Achievements, appointments, success news, sad news
  • Alumni news, guest visits
  • Scholarships, awards, prizes

And the information comes from the following sources:

  • National Innovation Foundation, IIM, Ahmedabad
  • CIET, National Center for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi
  • Stanford Mobile Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Network, USA
  • Youth Employment Summit, USA & New Delhi
  • Youth & Sports Committee of Planning Commission, GoI
  • Digital Empowerment Foundation, New Delhi
  • NASSCOM Foundation, Mumbai
  • Development Communication India, New Delhi
  • Nehru Yuva Kendra Sanghathan (NYKS), New Delhi
  • National Service Scheme (NSS), Maharashtra
  • National Youth Awardees Association
  • Universities, Researchers, Career guidance organizations
  • and many individual honorary contributors…

A few days back, at the mbillionth awards 2011, eduVARTA was given the VODAFONE “Mobile for Good” Award by VODAFONE INDIA Foundation & Digital Empowerment Foundation. The award carries a cash prize of Rs. 10L.

Check out the eduVARTA About Us Page to find out more about them.