Category Archives: In Depth

Interview with Atul Narkhede, CEO of GS Lab

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(GS Lab, a high-end, specialized, outsourced product development and software services company, that was founded by Shridhar Shukla and Sunil Gaitonde in 2004, has now grown to 650+ employees, and has also spun off kPoint Technologies a product company. Recently, CTO Atul Narkhede took over as CEO and MD of GS Lab. We took this opportunity to talk to Atul about the transition, where GS Lab is now, and where it is going.)

You have been associated with GS Lab since the beginning. Can you briefly talk about your transition into this new role? What will Shridhar Shukla and Sunil Gaitonde (Founders of GS Lab) be focusing on?

Atul Narkhede: CEO of GS Lab
Atul Narkhede: CEO of GS Lab

GS Lab was formed with a long-term vision of building a company which will work on exciting technologies, take market risks with new ideas, invest in R&D, and keep our lives interesting while doing all this. The company has seen steady, profitable growth for the past 12+ years during which I focused mostly on the technology and incubation front as the CTO. Today, the company has built an excellent team of technology experts and I will now be responsible for the overall growth of the company as the CEO and MD going ahead. Shridhar and Sunil both continue on the board of GS Lab, and both will spend all their time leading kPoint (a product company incubated by GS Lab) towards its growth globally.

What challenges do you see in the market?

The business model for software products and services has been shaken up in recent times by the move to the “cloud model”. The prevalence of public clouds, container architectures, easy-to-consume third-party services and readymade PaaS platforms have fundamentally altered how new products are built from ground up. All companies have to adapt to this disruption, and GS Lab has invested significantly to adopt the new technologies/tools/platforms, train the staff, and change our engagement models with customers. This cloud approach of building products needs fewer engineers compared to large teams we saw earlier, but they need to be experts. GS Lab will need to invest to build such differentiated manpower, and it is no longer a “scale the headcount” game. As the technology adoption is universal, and no longer limited to tech-savvy customers, we need to innovate to be able to reach this new demographic (which is a sales and marketing challenge) and engage this customer base (which needs domain understanding and language) to provide complete solutions which just work out of the box.

What is the long term direction/vision for GS Lab?

We will eventually get into “high value” services and products. Our yardstick for measuring our success would be “revenue per employee”. Matching the global levels of this metric is a tough target. We increasingly see customer solutions needing expertise in multiple technology and business domains; hence we seek to partner with experts in relevant domains, to be able to build multi-disciplinary problem solving teams for future. We have been investing in IP, technology assets, open-source contributions and patents for many years in a chosen set of technology areas. For example, our exploration in video streaming area resulted in a full-fledged product in the “enterprise video” space and is now a separate product company called “kPoint Technologies” which has a large customer base of global MNCs.

What are the technology areas GS Lab is focusing on?

IOT (Internet of Things) is one of thrust areas for GS Lab in the near future. We realized the need for building hardware design capabilities in the org, and are running pilots to produce hardware device prototypes along with the software-based cloud stack to power comprehensive IOT architecture for our customers. When such a system has a large number of endpoints, all generating data in real-time, a key requirement is to understand the instantaneous behavior of the system and hence we’ve created a framework for generating ‘streaming analytics’ to monitor such large-scale systems. This analysis helps pinpoint bottlenecks in the system, and help scale up/down the cloud service based on traffic patterns observed. We’re trying to apply this IOT solution to the ‘energy management’ space in particular with focus on electrical power consumption and solar photovoltaic power optimization. Connected IP-cameras are omnipresent today given the security concerns at all commercial as well as residential installations. These cameras generate continuous stream of video data. While surveillance is the primary objective, these videos are increasing used for automatic event detection, object detection, counting object movements, etc. We are looking at some streaming video use-cases to incorporate into smart-city solutions that will certainly be deployed in near future.

IT Services is a crowded market. What differentiation does GS Lab bring to the table?

GS Lab has always had the philosophy of having “small but effective” teams to build technology products instead of “large solution teams” approach. For this, we’ve had to create technology depth with a focus on full-stack engineering. Most of the customers GS Lab engages with are startups at a very early (idea) stage. We have the ability to translate these ideas into PoCs and rapidly evolving cloud services which result in mature, robust, scalable solutions. We position ourselves as a provider which spans the range “from lab to complete solutions”; i.e., we are able to work with both – early stage products which require agility, low time-to-market, quick prototyping constraints as well as mature, complex products which need scalability, maintainability and monitoring as primary focus areas. As a result, we’ve had several instances where the initial PoCs we created for startups are today large-scale mainstream products at marquee technology companies post acquisition over the course of 5-9 years.

GS Lab has grown quite fast over the past 2-3 years. What is the current size (employee base)? Can you describe your hiring strategy and work culture? What are the challenges?

We are 650+ strong today spanning from campus hires to experienced employees who have worked all over the globe. We hire mainly based on references and we have strong incentives for referrals. Our employees come from all parts of India including quite a few from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Every year, we sponsor a large number of final-year engineering projects and offer internships; this is our primary source of getting campus hires, as against participating in campus placements. This long-term relationship with prospective employees enables both the company and the employee to understand each other better and results in a more fruitful relationship. GS Lab believes in hiring for attitude and aptitude as against point skills, and we’ve had several employees who have excelledin the company even when they did not have a formal background Computer Science.

What advice would you have for a young software professional, who is just starting his/her career?

The one thing I’d advise young professionals is to value the quality of work over the company brand or pay. The kind of colleagues you work with is also extremely important to how you grow and mature professionally. You must value the “degree of freedom/control” at work and should join an organization that encourages independent thinking, ownership and demands results. Look for a workplace that doesn’t straightjacket you into a narrow role, and enables contribution to various activities to let you discover your own passion and strengths. A right choice of the first company lays the foundation for a fulfilling career.

KPIT’s Electric Bus – Towards ‘green’ transportation

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Electric cars and buses are the future of transportation. Multiple goals: 1. Reducing fossil fuel dependence, 2. Carbon taxes and 3. Urban pollution/emission targets will drive rapid adoption of emission-less electric cars in the coming two decades. According to McKinsey’s forecasts, future cities could have up to 50% electric vehicles by 2030.

We recently got an opportunity to visit the KPIT facility in Pune to see their electric bus R&D and manufacturing set up. We also saw the electric bus in operation, and got a nice ride in it around Hinjawadi in Pune. This bus was inaugurated at the Indian Parliament in December 2015 by the Hon. Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

KPIT has been working in the area of hybrid (electro-mechanical) powertrains for many years now. Their ‘Revolo’ solution for converting existing IC (Internal Combustion) engine powered cars and buses into hybrid vehicles, has been field tested for over 150,000 km.

KPIT's Electric Bus
KPIT’s Electric Bus – The Prototype. Click on the picture to see full size image.

The KPIT Electric Bus leverages and builds on this R&D and manufacturing experience. KPIT has filed over 20 patents in this area. Do note, in some aspects, an electric vehicle is simpler than an Electric-IC engine hybrid. Even if you leave aside the IC engine, a hybrid vehicle has to deal with power distribution, switching across the two power trains. In electric vehicles, there is no switching, as there is a single power train powered by electric motors. ‘Regenerative braking’ is used in both: hybrid as well as pure electric vehicles.

The KPIT bus leverages Li-Ion batteries and multiple AC induction motors. The controller can bring in one or more motors online, depending on the power/torque requirements. The bus has a range of 100-200 km (depending on the Li-ion battery packs configuration). The motors can generate power between 80-240 KW with a Torque in the range of 450-600 Nm (depending on the selected configuration). The KPIT electric bus technology has been specifically adapted to Indian conditions.

The KPIT electric bus also integrates with the KPIT intelligent transportation system and provides real-time monitoring of bus including location, vehicle health and driver behavior, along with traffic data and performance. On-board diagnostics and related remote monitoring is also available.

KPIT is working with CIRT and other concerned authorities to further refine this technology as well as the necessary certifications. Going forward, there are two primary business models for KPIT: Working with OEMs and Retro-fitting existing vehicles.  They are also in discussions with various OEMs regarding ’embedding’ their technology.

KPIT estimates that their electric bus costs will be significantly lower than other solutions, given the indigenous technology developed and the ‘Make in India’ push. The currently available electric buses range from INR 2.7 – 4+ crores, and KPIT’s solution will be a fraction of that.

Do note, the pay-back period should not just focus on the monetary savings, but the reduction in pollution and CO2 emissions. This will be a key driver for the adoption of electric vehicles in our congested, polluted cities.

It’s good to see this kind of innovation and R&D happening in Pune, especially in the area of manufacturing and transportation (not just pure IT).

“What High Tech Marketing is … and isn’t” excerpts from book published by Pune’s @AbhijitAthavale

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(Recently, Pune-based Abhijit Athavale, Founder of Markonix, a technology marketing and learning development company with deep roots in Silicon Valley, wrote a book called “The Edge of Zero: High Tech Marketing in the Age of Falling Growth”, with co-author Peter Gasperini. We invited Abhijit to give us a short write-up about the book and an excerpt from the book, for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

What High Tech Marketing is … and isn’t

Many industries suffer from an incomplete understanding of what purpose Marketing actually serves. High Tech has been amongst the worst offenders in this, and the misconceptions of Marketing’s role and domain in the Technology business has persisted in various forms and levels of severity for all of the industry’s 40+ years. Internal characterizations of Marketing’s domain tend to inexorably converge on the following set of simple descriptions:

  • “Marketing is Sales”
  • “Marketing is Customer Service”
  • “Marketing manages Programs”
  • “Marketing runs Promotions and Ads”
  • “Marketing controls Pricing”

The insidiously deceptive factor common to the above statements is that they are all true – in part.

Does the above list encompass everything Marketing is supposed to do? Actually, NO. Operations and Engineering are quite correct in their assumptions that Marketing is the proper organization for handling the above mentioned problem areas. But there is much more to the proper practice of Marketing for High Tech than what was mentioned above.

It is a very broad field requiring depth and experience in both hard and soft disciplines, purely engineering and purely business fields, and both technical and customer interaction skillsets. And since these factors influence and interleave with each other, professionally complete High Tech marketers need to be able to swim these clashing currents without being pulled under or swept off to the side.

Marketing is, fundamentally, a LEADERSHIP role. The very act of initiating a Marketing plan to execute the strategy for a company and its products means identifying the Value propositions which will make a firm’s offerings compelling to its target market. This means a high Tech marketer must be able to simultaneously grasp the potential of the company’s engineering team, the aptitude of its operations arm, the expectations, desires and dreams of its customers, and the capacity of its sales force. When a Marketing plan is formulated correctly, an enterprise will have the knowledge to develop the kinds of products its customers will happily buy, which the factory can skillfully build, and the sales force can readily sell.

Our new book, ‘The Edge of Zero’ discusses challenges of high tech Marketing in the age of falling growth. Here’s an excerpt from ‘What Makes a Good Marketer’ chapter:

Crossfire – An excerpt from The Edge of Zero

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. – Shakespeare, ‘The Merchant of Venice’

Marketers in High Tech can be overwhelmed by the 180 degree contradictions between the needs and desires of the Field and the Factory, especially at the junior level. Unfortunately, many choose the simplicity and expediency of picking a side. A technically oriented marketer will feel more drawn to their comfort zone thru siding with the Factory, whereas a more socially oriented or less technically savvy marketer will tend to gravitate towards the Field.

Either choice is extraordinarily destructive to the business as a whole. Borrowing liberally from basic Physics principles, one could make the analogy that Conservation of Energy – every action causes an equal and opposite reaction – takes hold in such companies in a very negative aspect, with long term crippling effects. By choosing a side, a Marketer reinforces and exacerbates any existing antagonism between the two warring camps.

A Marketer that fulfills his role properly is supposed to straddle the fence between Order and Chaos, reconciling them without forcing a damaging compromise on either. It’s no easy task, but skirting the challenge in favor of the easier path of taking sides creates a schism right down the center of the enterprise. It embeds conflict, distrust and friction between the Factory and Field, which ultimately translates into a complete disconnect between a company and its customers.

It boils down to a loss of vital information. The Factory cannot design and build good products and solutions in a vacuum, but can hardly expect to gain insight into customer concerns, difficulties and aspirations if the company salesmen are unable to deliver valued solutions and support from the Factory to those customers, building the foundation for a long term relationship of communication, trust and mutual support. If the Factory and the Field are divided, the enterprise is choosing a path of creating successful products by a combination of learning thru serial failures and hoping to come up with a lucky choice of feature sets along the way. In the end, this is like jumping out a plane without a parachute, hoping to find someone who is more thoughtfully equipped on the way down.
You can look inside the book here before buying a copy.

About the Author – Abhijit Athavale

Abhijit Athavale was born in Pune, India. He moved to the US for further education and lived and worked in the Silicon Valley before returning to Pune. He still lives in the same house on the same street. He has diverse interests – from hi-tech marketing to sports to WWII era history and mysteries and likes to read and write about them.

Abhijit studied Electricial Engineering in COEP, followed by a Masters in Texas A&M University, after which he spent 11+ years, ending as Senior Marketing Manager at Xilinx, developing the marketing strategy for their $150MM+ Xilinx Connectivity solution – including messaging, value proposition development and product positioning.

More recently, Abhijit has helping evangelize and market new technologies Markonix, a company he founded with the idea of helping lower the cost of marketing and learning for businesses worldwide.

Abhijit also founded and runs PuneChips, one of the technology community platform incubated by PuneTech. PuneChips is a network for Semiconductor, EDA and Embedded Systems professionals in the Pune (India) area. PuneChips provides networking and learning opportunities from Industry mavens to its members.

For more details see his Linkedin profile or follow him on twitter

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.

Event Report: VLSI Design Conference Pune 2013

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(This is an event report of the VLSI Design Conference that was held in Pune in Jan 2013, by Shakthi Kannan. It originally appeared on his blog, and is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

The 26th International Conference on VLSI Design 2013 and the 12th International Conference on Embedded Systems was held at the Hyatt Regency, Pune, India between January 5-10, 2013. The first two days were tutorial sessions, while the main conference began on Monday, January 7, 2013.

26th VLSID 2013

Day 1: Tutorial

On the first day, I attended the tutorial on “Concept to Product – Design, Verification & Test: A Tutorial” by Prof. Kewal Saluja, and Prof. Virendra Singh. Prof. Saluja started the tutorial with an introduction and history of VLSI. An overview of the VLSI realization process was given with an emphasis on synthesis. The theme of the conference was “green” technology, and hence the concepts of low power design were introduced. The challenges of multi-core and high performance design including cache coherence were elaborated. Prof. Singh explained the verification methodologies with an example of implementing a DVD player. Simulation and formal verification techniques were compared, with an overview on model checking. Prof. Saluja explained the basics of VLSI testing, differences between verification and testing, and the various testing techniques used. The challenges in VLSI testing were also discussed.

Day 2: Tutorial

On the second day, I attended the tutorial on “Formal Techniques for Hardware/Software Co-Verification” by Prof. Daniel Kroening, and Prof. Mandayam Srinivas. Prof. Kroening began the tutorial with the motivation for formal methods. Examples on SAT solvers, boundary model checking for hardware, and bounded program analysis for C programs were explained. Satisfiability modulo theories for bit-vectors, arrays and functions were illustrated with numerous examples. In the afternoon, Prof. Srinivas demoed formal verification for both Verilog and C. He shared the results of verification done for both a DSP and a microprocessor. The CProver tool has been released under a CMBC license. After discussion with Fedora Legal, and Prof. Kroening, it has been updated to a BSD license for inclusion in Fedora. The presentation slides used in the tutorial are available.

Day 3: Main conference

The first day of the main conference began with the keynote by Mr. Abhi Talwalker, CEO of LSI, on “Intelligent Silicon in the Data-centric Era”. He addressed the challenges in bridging the data deluge gap, latency issues in data centers, and energy efficient buildings. The second keynote of the day was given by Dr. Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow, on “Opportunities and Challenges for High Performance Microprocessor Designs and Design Automation”. Dr. Ruchir spoke about the various IBM multi-core processors, and the challenges facing multi-core designs – software parallelism, socket bandwidth, power, and technology complexity. He also said that more EDA innovation needs to come at the system level.

Dias

After the keynote, I attended the “C1. Embedded Architecture” track sessions. Liang Tang presented his paper on “Processor for Reconfigurable Baseband Modulation Mapping”. Dr. Swarnalatha Radhakrishnan then presented her paper on “A Study on Instruction-set Selection Using Multi-application Based Application Specific Instruction-Set Processors”. She explained about ASIPs (Application Specific Instruction Set Processor), and shared test results on choosing specific instruction sets based on the application domain. The final paper for the session was presented by Prof. Niraj K. Jha on “Localized Heating for Building Energy Efficiency”. He and his team at Princeton have used ultrasonic sensors to implement localized heating. A similar approach is planned for lighting as well.

Post-lunch, I attended the sessions for the track “B2. Test Cost Reduction and Safety”. The honourable chief minister of Maharashtra, Shri. Prithviraj Chavan, arrived in the afternoon to formally inaugurate the conference. He is an engineer who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and said that he was committed to put Pune on the semiconductor map. The afternoon keynote was given by Mr. Kishore Manghnani from Marvell, on “Semiconductors in Smart Energy Products”. He primarily discussed about LEDs, and their applications. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Low power design”. There was an emphasis to create system level, software architecture techniques to increase leverage in low power design. For the last track of the day, I attended the sessions on “C3. Design and Synthesis of Reversible Logic”. The Keccak sponge function family has been chosen to become the SHA-3 standard.

Day 4: Main conference

The second day of the main conference began with a recorded keynote by Dr. Paramesh Gopi, AppliedMicro, on “Cloud computing needs at less power and low cost” followed by a talk by Mr. Amal Bommireddy, AppliedMicro, on “Challenges of First pass Silicon”. Mr. Bommireddy discussed the factors affecting first pass success – RTL verification, IP verification, physical design, routing strategies, package design, and validation board design. The second keynote of the day was by Dr. Louis Scheffer from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on “Deciphering the brain, cousin to the chip”. It was a brilliant talk on applying chip debugging techniques to inspect and analyse how the brain works.

After the keynote, I visited the exhibition hall where companies had their products displayed in their respective stalls. AppliedMicro had a demo of their X-gene ARM64 platform running Ubuntu. They did mention to me that Fedora runs on their platform. Marvell had demonstrated their embedded and control solutions running on Fedora. ARM had their mbed.org and embeddedacademic.com kits on display for students. Post-lunch, was an excellent keynote by Dr. Vivek Singh, Intel Fellow, titled “Duniyaa Maange Moore!”. He started with what people need – access, connectivity, education, and healthcare, and went to discuss the next in line for Intel’s manufacturing process. The 14nm technology is scheduled to be operational by end of 2013, while 10nm is planned for 2015. They have also started work on 7nm manufacturing processes. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Expectations of Manufacturing Sector from Semiconductor and Embedded System Companies” where the need to bridge the knowledge gap between mechanical and VLSI/embedded engineers was emphasized.

Day 5: Main conference

The final day of the main conference began with the keynote by Dr. Vijaykrishnan Narayanan on “Embedded Vision Systems”, where he showed the current research in intelligent cameras, augmented reality, and interactive systems. I attended the sessions for the track “C7. Advances in Functional Verification”, and “C8. Logic Synthesis and Design”. Post-lunch, Dr. Ken Chang gave his keynote on “Advancing High Performance System-on-Package via Heterogeneous 3-D Integration”. He said that Intel’s 22nm Ivy Bridge which uses FinFETs took nearly 15 years to productize, but look promising for the future. Co(CoS) Chip on Chip on Substrate, and (CoW)oS Chip on Wafer on Substrate technologies were illustrated. Many hardware design houses use 15 FPGAs on a board for testing. The Xilinx Virtex-7HT FPGA has analog, memory, and ARM microprocessor integrated on a single chip giving a throughput of 2.8 Terabits/second. He also mentioned that Known Good Die (KGD) methodologies are still emerging in the market. For the last track of the conference, I attended the sessions on “C9. Advances in Circuit Simulation, Analysis and Design”.

Shakthi Kannan

Thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring me to attend the conference.

About the Author – Shakthi Kannan

Shakthi Kannan is a Senior Software Engineer with Red Hat in Pune, and is also a very active member of the open source community. For more details about him, see his Linkedin Profile, or his blog.

Event Report: Product Management Challenges Unique to India

Event Report, In Depth, ,

(This is a live-blog of the Indian Product Management Association (IPMA), Pune Chapter’s event on Product Management Challenges Unique to India by Vivek Tuljapurkar.)

What is Product Management

Different people define it differently. At the very least, a product manager is a person who is the “guardian angel” of the product. He gathers requirements from the market, and defines what the features of the product will be. But in some cases, a product manager might have responsibility of the product engineering. In other cases, a product manager might also have sales and support responsibilities. And sometimes a product manager might have full responsibility for a product – including worrying about the business profit & loss (P&L responsibility).

For this talk, we will be using the broader definition of product management.

These are the different types of product management that happen in India:

  • Product Mgmt for an Indian Software Company
  • Product Mgmt for an MNC
    • Only Product Mgmt for the Indian market is done from here
    • Product Mgmt for the global market is done from here
  • Product mgmt for an off-shore customer of an Indian product software services company. (e.g. a customer of Persistent asks Persistent to also do Product Mgmt. for their product.)

The greater the responsibility, the greater the challenges of doing the role out of India.

Product Manager and Geographic Location

The product manager’s location is important in two different ways. You can have easy access to the market (i.e. the customers), or not. And you can have easy access to the development team. If you have easy access to both, it’s ideal. If you have easy access only to the market, you can do outbound product management (creating the marketing requirements document from the market research document produced by the strategic marketing team). If you have easy access only to the development team, you can do inbound product management (creating the product requirements document from the marketing requirements document). If you do not have easy access to both, then you are in trouble.

In India-based product companies, a product manager could possibly do handle all responsibilities: requirements + engineering + sales and marketing + P&L responsibility. However, product managers in MNCs and Indian services companies, only requirements gathering and engineering can be owned out of India. Support to product sales and marketing can happen within the next 5 years, but full sales and marketing responsibility, and P&L responsibility is unlikely even 5 years from now.

Requirements for being a good Product Manager

  • Basic Understanding of finance, technology, development process, sales and marketing
  • Domain Knowledge – otherwise you will not be able to use your judgement to take strategic decisions and add value
  • Basic managerial capabilities – planning and execution
  • Organizational skills – ability to get things done
  • Social skills – building internal and external relationships. Because you need to get work done by a lot of people who don’t work for you
  • Communication skills and listening skills
  • Political astuteness. Many product managers, especially those who come from a technical background, ignore this aspect. Know who is friends with whom, which way the wind is blowing, who is trying to kill your product, and a whole bunch of other behind the scenes work that is happening, so that you can keep the future of your product, and yourself secure.
  • Negotiation skills.
  • Coping with uncertainty, pressure and changing priorities
  • Strategic thinking and foresight
  • Ability to influence, motivate and inspire

You don’t have to be an expert in all these areas, but whatever is missing will hurt you. Figure out which areas you’re weak in and work on improving those.

Engineers as Product Managers

Some of the difficulties that engineers face when they transition into product management roles (and this describes most Indian product managers):

  • Were used to “hard science”: algorithms, formulas, tools, methodologies, structure
  • Too methodical and structured, and have a tough time dealing with uncertainty and amorphous nature of things
  • Enamoured with technology, and want to do technology for the sake of technology
  • Too introverted, and don’t communicate (well) enough to succeed
  • Have a hard time letting go of technology focus and focusing on broader product management issues. (This is basically fear of the unknown)
  • We are too straightforward, and don’t have the political astuteness required

As a result, many engineers (i.e. many Indian product managers) fail at this role and end up doing only inbound product management.

So, focus on fixing these issues if you want to succeed.

Problems with a product management career in India

Typically, for product management being done in India, the role is in a very early stage, and is experimental. The responsibilities are ill-defined and evolving. The person given the job is likely to be from a development background, and is likely to have no exposure to other aspects of product management: like sales, marketing, market research, customer management etc. Further he has no access to customers or to market research.

The biggest problem: Lack of opportunity to learn and practice what you have learnt

In addition, the specific career path for a product manager is not really well defined in India.

Overall, the role is quite risky.

And if product management role does not work out, what happens to you? It is usually not clear whether you’ll be able to go back to your previous role and career path.

As a company, HR should have policies to clarify these issues, so that people feel safe about going into product management.

Getting people to do product management in a software company in India is difficult. IIM graduates don’t want to join as a product manager, but they’re happy to go to a HLL as a brand manager. Which is practically the same thing! So what is needed is that the product manager position in software companies needs to be branded appropriately, ensure that the candidate’s perception of the role is correct, and as before, the career paths are defined appropriately.

The problems are even worse for smaller companies. They cannot afford to pay higher salaries, provide the facilities and amenities. They don’t have a brand recognition, which is important to current and future employees. And smaller companies are also afraid that if they try to improve their branding and visibility, the larger companies will quickly come and poach employees, leading to attrition and major problems before they can hire new guys. Solution: don’t know! This is a tough problem, and it is unclear whether there is a good answer to this at this time.

Advice to new product managers in India

  • Understand and seek clarifications on your role, responsibilities, org structure, and processes. Don’t let unstated expectations hurt you!
  • Be prepared to deal with uncertainties and changing demands regarding your role
  • Seek a sympathetic executive sponsor. A CXO/VP who will help you with tactical challenges, or at least present your case to the decision makers
  • Stay one step ahead of the game. Never stop preparing yourself for a bigger role. Learn new things. Build new relationships with the long term in the mind.
  • Keep thinking about strategic matters. Immerse yourself, but don’t drown yourself in day-to-day stuff.
  • Find ways to exploit your best capabilities to your best advantage
  • Find a way to make a name for yourself. You don’t make a name for yourself by doing your day-to-day job well. Find something else, somewhere else which is dramatic and drastic. Keep watching for those, and if you see an opportunity and grab it. It should cause people to forget all your day-to-day issues, and focus on your big win

Specific skills and techniques

  • Keep a stakeholder mapping spreadsheet. Keep track of all the stakeholders in your project, and which of them is interested in what outcome, and what is the level of friendliness of these people towards you/your product, and when was the last time you had contact with them.
  • Never go public with strong stand, or a new strategic direction, unless you’re sure that it will be received well. Before the important meeting, or the presentation, go and meet some of the key people individually, make your point to them, and ensure that they’re in agreement with you
  • On a regular basis, check whether you’ve been doing anything specific to improve your weak areas. And if you’ve not, scold yourself.

Apple iCloud – Hype Cycle or Tipping Point for Cloud Computing?

In Depth, Technology, , , ,

(This article by Amit Naik, an architect at BMC Software, tries to separate out the facts from the hype regarding Apple’s recently announced iCloud offering for the benefit of readers)

Any Apple announcement from new products/services to the Worldwide Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is often hotly anticipated by the media and the Apple faithful alike. The WWDC 2011 held on June 6th this year was no exception. Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) took the stage to make a whole slew of announcements; most notable among them was iCloud, Apple’s vision of consumer centric cloud services.

Before the ink was even dry on the announcement, iCloud began to be touted as a Windows Killer , as a copy of Android Services, as the next big thing, attacked as not even having to do anything with cloud computing and even got Apple sued. By time all is said and done, gallons more ink will have flowed (or hundreds more blog posts will have been created) regarding iCloud. This post is an effort to separate the Facts from the Hype and provide some overall context on the implications of iCloud in different areas.

What is iCloud?

iCloud is Apple’s vision of a omnipresent cloud connection in all Apple devices that will seamlessly act as a sort of a “super synch” for different Apple applications. However it has a lot more features than just a remote storage mechanism such as DropBox. Let us look at this in a bit more detail:

(Note that as of today, iCloud is in private beta. The full public release has rather amorphously been defined as “in the Fall”. So everything that is known about iCloud is in the form of press releases from Apple/Developers given early access to it.)

Apple iCloud expected usage

There are 9 default services or (Apps) in the free version of iCloud:

Contacts – Your contacts will be synced to the cloud and shared between all of your devices.

Calendars – Calendars in the cloud supports calendars in the cloud, shared calendars and calendars pushed to all of your devices.

Mail – The new Mail service will include an @me.com account.

iBooks – your book purchases and places are stored across your devices.

Backup – Daily backups of your apps, music, camera roll, app data and more over WiFi.

Documents in the Cloud – You can download your documents, and edit it on multiple devices.

App Store – Your apps can be downloaded right to your new devices.

Photo Steam – A new built in feature will move your photos to the cloud so that you can easily share them with others on any Apple Device.

iTunes in the Cloud – Shows you all your songs, albums and artists you have purchased and download to your device. These are limited to only items purchased from iTunes to begin with.

Each iCloud consumer will be given a free 5GB of storage capacity for their mail, documents, and back-ups. A really interesting feature of the service is that for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn’t count towards this 5GB total.

For the PhotoStream service, Apple will store the latest 1000 photos long-term while every new photo taken from any device will be stored for 30 days.

Apple really seems to be shooting for two things with iCloud:

  1. Ubiquity: All iPods, iPhones, iPads that can be upgraded to iOS 5 and all Macs (MacBooks, and Desktops) with OS X Lion will be able to avail of iCloud. This will be at least tens of millions of users if not more. There will also be a Windows client (Windows 7 and up no XP support) that will support iCloud on non Apple desktops.
  2. Simplicity: As presented, the iCloud service looks like it falls into the “Just works” category with minimal user meddling. If Apple can really pull-off this vision the simplicity would be the real killer feature of the service.

Is it cloud computing?

In a rather grumpy post Carl Brooks wrote: “Apple iCloud is not cloud computing.” He went to deride as “Nothing but Streaming Media”. (He has since updated his post to clarify that it has more capabilities).

Let us address this issue “Is Apple iCloud cloud computing?”

YES it most certainly is cloud computing.
Take a look at the figure that I created recently that shows a simplified cloud computing stack.

Cloud Computing Stack

iCloud clearly fits in the top two layers – SaaS and the Client layer.

However there are those that define cloud computing more narrowly as “On-demand Infrastructure (IaaS) or Platform as a Service” in which case, No, iCloud is not strictly cloud computing from this angle. Keep in mind that by now the term “Cloud Computing” or “Cloud” has become so diluted as to be essentially meaningless, so the question raised is in-fact a very relevant one.

What are the challenges Apple faces?

The first and biggest challenge that Apple faces to iCloud is history. This is the fourth time Apple has tried its hand at internet services after failing in its three previous attempts. It first launched iTools way back in 2000 followed by .Mac and its most recent attempt was MobileMe. All the previous attempts were duds and Steve Jobs Apple CEO even admitted it on stage when he was announcing iCloud, calling MobileMe “not our finest hour”. The problem is rather simple – if used correctly the service should fade into the background and be seamless – but Apple is a master at splashy well-designed hardware and “just works”, well thought-thru software, neither of which directly align with iCloud. So the trick of getting it right will all be in the execution.

The second and somewhat lesser problem might be that Apple has underestimated the actual amount of data that its consumers will want to push thru iCloud. Steve Jobs took some pains to address this issue by showing slides with pictures of huge data centers at WWDC (Screen grabs):

Apple iCloud Data Center

And sleek next-gen hardware:

Apple iCloud Datacenter Hardware

Apple is also aggressively investing in building datacenters, so, time alone will tell on this front.

Who is the competition?

Apple is essentially in a three horse race at this point with Consumer Cloud Services. The first and most obvious competitor is Google.

Google’s Android OS has provided much of the functionality of iCloud, namely

GMail and the related contact manager; Google Calendar, Google Docs, where you can view, edit and collaborate on Office-style documents, Picasa for images, Google Books and Google Music, and the Android AppStore.

In a way, iCloud is complete validation of Google’s strategy of Cloud hosted data and consumers with multiple endpoints such as Android based cell phones and Chrome Books. The one difference is that Apple touts “Apps” as the consumption medium of choice Google focuses on the browser as the ultimate medium of consumption. Google and Apple are now locked in bitter fight for consumer’s data and both are using the Cloud as the weapon of choice.

The Second challenger is the dark horse Amazon. Amazon has become the de-facto leader in the “traditional” Cloud computing space. It’s EC2 and other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings are the leaders in the IaaS space. What is not as well known is that it is also quietly ramping up its consumer cloud services strategy. The recently announced Cloud drive is just the start with rumored plans for Amazon branded Tablets, Amazon will be in a position to challenge Apple all across the cloud stack for dominance.

The biggest consumer name missing from the list? Microsoft. It was late to the Tablet space after Apple revitalized it with the launch of the iPad. It was unsuccessful in the mobile phone space until its recent moves towards Windows 7 based phones. This is the challenge it must now confront to be relevant again in the Consumer cloud services space.

What are the likely implications?

At the launch of the iPad 2, Steve Jobs had famously declared that we are in the Post-PC era, implying that consumers had moved on from PCs and were ready to embrace more portable devices as their main computers. The iCloud vision would seem to make that a reality.

Earlier, whenever you purchased an iPhone/iPad, the very first thing the device would prompt you to do was sync with iTunes on your PC/Mac. With iCloud this will no longer happen, just type-in your credentials and you are synched with all your data and apps – truly a Post-PC experience.

Another obvious result of this announcement is a phenomenon I like to term “Consumerization of the Cloud”. This announcement is likely to associate the words “cloud computing” with Apple in a very sticky way in the minds of regular (non-tech) consumers. The next time one of us says we work in cloud computing, one sure question is “Is that like the Apple iCloud thing?” As if the cloud hype was not high enough already, this announcement has undoubtedly pushed it to stratospheric (cloudy) levels. However the positive side of this is that Cloud Computing will now become much more main stream than ever before.

About the Author – Amit Naik

Amit Naik works as an Architect with BMC Software. He builds performant cloud solutions with a focus on heterogeneity and monitoring across different virtualization and provisioning vendors in the cloud computing space. His main focus is the Architecture and Design of BMC solutions with emphasis on building highly-scalable systems with REST and other SOA interfaces.

Amit has a Bachelor’s degree from College of Engineering Pune and a Master’s degree from Purdue Univ., West Lafayette. He has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, much of it in the USA, across a variety of Technical and Techno-Managerial roles.

Interview with Vikas Joshi – CEO of Harbinger, Pune-based e-learning products company

In Depth, Interview, Overviews, , ,

(The Harbinger Group is a Pune-based software company that has products in the e-Learning space (http://harbingerknowledge.com), and also provides software outsourcing services (http://harbinger-systems.com) to software product companies all over the world. As an example of a successful product company out of Pune, as an example of a company that managed to do both, products and services, and as an example of a company that uses latest technologies in a hot field (e-learning), we felt that PuneTech readers would find it interesting. This article is based on a conversation Navin Kabra and Amit Paranjape from PuneTech had with Vikas Joshi, CEO of Harbinger)

The Harbinger Story

Harbinger was started in 1990 as a software services company. Vikas had just returned after doing a Masters in Computer Science from Syracuse in the U.S. and was a visiting faculty at the University of Pune. He, along with Swati Ketkar (one of his students) were the cofounders of Harbinger.

They started “Intelligent Tutoring Systems” and Agrawal Classes was their first customer. The first 10 years, they grew very slowly, with customers mainly in Pune/Mumbai, and only a few in Bangalore/Delhi. By 2000, they had grown to 28 employees. This was a period when they learnt the basics of how to do business, slowly and painfully.

In these early years, they were mainly helping companies with building CAD automation, and other systems that help in the engineering lifecycle. A few of their projects involved the use of computers/multimedia in training. Around this time they created their own product, CBTPro (Computer Based Training), which, in 1998,  won MCCIA’s prestigious Parkhe Award (given to companies with the most interesting new products and ideas). From this point onwards they really started growing fast, both on the services side as well as the products.

From the beginning, while Harbinger was focusing on domestic customers, the Indian IT industry had been heavily involved in “body-shopping” (i.e. sending Indian programmers to the US for outsourced (but on-site) work). Harbinger were very clear that they did not want to do this. By 1999-2000 internet in India had advanced to a stage where it became clear that it would be possible to take on outsourcing work from the US without the need for programmers be moved to the US. This is when, after 10 years of existence, Harbinger went international. From that point on they have grown their international business to a point where the Indian market is now an insignificant part of their revenues.

Their services business has 300+ employees, and their portfolio is in these major areas: e-learning, web development, testing, and mobile development. Microsoft is a major customer.

Harbinger’s products are described in more detail in the next section.

Harbinger’s Products

While services business was being built up, product business (CBTPro and e-learning) was going well in India. In 2002 they actively started exporting the products.

Their product business started based on a pattern they were seeing in their services business. They noticed that existing e-learning solutions were not interactive. In terms of technology, it was clear that adding Adobe Flash to e-learning products would easily give the required interactivity – but there was big gap in the industry between instructional designers and flash developers. Flash developers were engineers who were not good at designing instructional content, and instruction designers did not have enough programming skills to be able to create content in Flash.

This led Harbinger to their Raptivity product line. Basically, Raptivity is an interactivity building tool, which includes a huge library of ready-made interactions, which can be used by non-technical people to quickly add interactivity to e-learning content.

The main customers of Harbinger’s products fall in these segments: US High-tech companies, US Traditional Companies, US Educational/Non-Profit/Government organizations, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and India-MiddleEast-Africa.

Some interesting drivers of Harbinger’s success

One major decision that Raptivity took early on, was that they would make it work with other authoring tools (not just Harbinger’s authoring tool). This was a key decision, which reduced the barrier to entry for customers. As a result of this decision, they have to stay in close contact with various authoring tools (including new ones), and work with them to integrate Raptivity. In the process of interacting with the vendors of any authoring tool, they are very open about disclosing Harbinger’s own authoring tool.

Another important area is the sales channel. Harbinger has its own sales force, but also sells a lot through resellers and other channel sales. One major mistake many companies make when using channel sales, according to Vikas, is to think of the sales channel as an external entity. Much better results can be obtained if you think of them as a part of your team. What does this mean? Include them on road-trips, conferences, and education about your products. The channel employee assigned to you should be treated as your salesperson. Because he is your salesperson.

A third area that a products company needs to be aware of is that the value proposition for a sales channel, and the value proposition to the end customer are two different things. Sometimes they are aligned, but sometimes, they can conflict. So, both need to be managed separately.

This means that the various sales channels should be segmented carefully, and the company should create unique product offerings for each channel. For example, in case of Harbinger’s products, one channel is Training System Integrators, and these vendors are interested in building the most comprehensive and feature rich system possible. They are not as interested in margins as they are interested in the fact that your products should be cutting edge and should have all the important features. By contrast there are “box pushers” (hardware vendors) who are more interested in margins and volumes. A third category of resellers is companies who wish to be seen as thought leaders, influencers and visionaries. Their motivations on selling your products is very different from those of the previous two categories.

Thoughts on Future Trends in e-Learning

Vikas believes that the primary pain point that they were focusing on (i.e. allowing e-learning authors to easily incorporate interactivity in their systems) is now a solved problem. The next challenges will come from these areas:

  • Touch Tablets: Touch tablets are likely to have a profound impact on this industry. Not only does this give rise to a wide variety of screen sizes and hardware capabilities (which was rather limited in the PC/Desktop days), but also the fact that touch is a fundamentally different form of interaction.
    • For example, a customer recently rolled out 1500 iPads to their entire sales force and would like the desktop/laptop e-learning products “ported” to the iPad. However, iPad is a very different beast, with a different paradigm. A simplistic port will fail. It needs to be re-thought from the ground up and a completely new offering needs to be released for this market.
    • Harbinger believes it is well positioned to play in this space because of their research on interactivity (and a couple of patents they have in this area)
  • New forms of interactivity. With Kinect and other forms of interactivity becoming a reality now, very soon, there will be an opportunity to use them in e-learning/training systems
  • Testing the limits of what is possible. For example, one person used Harbinger’s products and created 250 courses over 5 years and trained 20,000 users. A huge impact possible by doing such things – as compared to traditional training. There is an opportunity for e-learning technology companies to provide more and more tools to make such things possible.
  • Using e-learning/interactivity concepts in other areas: Capabilities of human-computer-interface systems are the plumbing. Interesting products are possible if we use the latest plumbing and build the most interesting, compelling, and impactful interactive products on top of it. Examples:
    • Classroom Training
      • Every student has a internet connected device
      • And can be used to enhance class participation
      • And the presentation changes based on participation
    • Richer business presentations
      • Using a Raptivity-like technique in presentations (PPT)
      • e.g. interactive graphs pack
        • Don’t show all information at once
        • Bring relevant information up via interactivity

Thoughts on the Indian Market

Right now, the Indian Market for technology products is very small. As mentioned earlier, it makes up for a small fraction of Harbinger’s revenues even though Harbinger started off as a purely domestic company. However, Vikas points out that the Indian Market is still extremely important. Without Indian market, Harbinger wouldn’t have gotten started, and the first trip to US was only possible due to the sales in the Indian market. Also, for the future, Vikas is extremely optimistic about the Indian Market. Things are changing so rapidly here, so while he is not sure of when exactly it will take off, but take off it will.

Advice to Young Entrepreneurs

Vikas writes a blog at http://teamharbinger.blogspot.com where he regularly gives advice based on his experiences. He points out though that his advice would be applicable only to people who are not more than 10 years younger than he is. Basically, someone who is very far ahead of you (and age is a very rough indicator of this), should no longer be considered a subject matter expert in the challenges you face, since they’ve forgotten what it was like to be in your position.

An important point Vikas makes is that the patterns of entrepreneur mistakes – haven’t changed in 20 years. The biggest one is that early entrepreneurs (especially the technology entrepreneurs who abound in Pune) tend to focus too much on the product itself and the features of the product. It takes quite a while for them to transition to the next stage of entrepreneurship – which is to be able to see their offerings not in terms of products and features, but in terms of benefits that customers get from using their products. During the sales process, the entrepreneur needs to clearly be able to articulate the benefits, and this is the most important thing for an fresh entrepreneur to learn.

The next step for an entrepreneur is to be able to transition from simply talking about the benefits of using their products, to creating or painting a vision of experiences for the customer. A 43-year old accountant wants to zip through downtown on a motorbike. Is there anything in your product that gives him a fraction of that experience. How do you give your customer that feeling? This is a very advanced art, and the ultimate goal for an entrepreneur.