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“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

Druva, Pune-based backup software startup, gets $25M in Series D Funding

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Techcrunch reports that Druva, the Pune-based backup software startup, has just received $25MM In Series D Funding from Sequoia, along with Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya capital, bringing their total funding to $92MM.

Usually, online backup providers get compared with Dropbox and Box.com and other, famous consumer oriented backup providers, but in keeping with Pune’s tradition of Enterprise Software products, Druva is differentiating itself by focusing on the B2B market:

First of all, they have concentrated strictly on the enterprise market, foregoing the SMB and consumer markets that bring with them the lure of big user numbers, but lower revenue.

Secondly, rather than being strictly a backup tool or sync and share, they have chosen a different route, what he says is more intelligent than simply offering “a data graveyard.” Instead, they look at data protection and governance on mobile devices, working with eDiscovery vendors like Recommind and AccessData to help companies entangled in litigation isolate and remove content involved in the lawsuit from the affected mobile devices with minimum possible disruption to the owner.

And thirdly they can provide mobile device recovery if a device is lost to get a user back up and running  quickly, and they can help IT assess what if any essential data might have been compromised..

and, as a result, they’re playing in a slightly different market than traditional cloud storage/backup providers:

puts them more in competition with traditional backup/governance/eDiscovery vendors like EMC, Symantec and HP than cloud storage vendors like Dropbox and Box. In fact, he says his sales typically involve both legal and IT, so it’s a bit of a different play than pure cloud storage would suggest.

The approach has gotten the attention of customers like NASA, Pfizer, Dell and Hitachi among others, and they have gained 900 customers since their last funding round, growing from 2100 to 3000 enterprise customers in the last 10 months.

Read the full article.

Or check out all articles on PuneTech tagged ‘backup’ – you’ll get a history of Druva over the years.

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.

Call for Papers: Computer Society of India’s Advances in Cloud Computing Conference – ACC 2014

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The Pune Chapter of the Computer Society of India is organizing Advances in Cloud Computing (ACC 2014), an international conference targeting researchers, professionals, and industrial practitioners to share their knowledge in the rapidly growing area of Cloud Computing.

This is the 3rd edition of ACC. The first two were held in Bangalore (2012 and 2013), and it is coming to Pune for the first time this year – on 11 and 12 October, 2014.

The theme of this years conference is Internet of Things (IoT). IoT envisions a self-configuring and adaptive complex system made out of networks of sensors and smart objects whose purpose is to interconnect “all” things, including every day and industrial objects in such a way so as to make them intelligent, programmable and more capable of interacting with human beings. IoT promises to be the most disruptive technological revolution since the advent of the Internet. Projections indicate that up to 100 billion objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020. IoT covers all types of sensors, communication protocols, computational tools, techniques, devices, processors, embedded systems, data warehousing, big data, cloud computing, server farms, grid computing etc.

Call for Papers

The call for papers for ACC 2014 is open, and the last date of submission is 10th August. Topics of interest include:

  • IoT architectures: things-centric, data-centric, service-centric architecture; cyber physical systems; SCADA platforms; smart grids, green technologies; enterprise cloud for IoT; future Internet for IoT.
  • IoT enabling technologies: Sensors and sensor network; radio frequency identification system; mobile technologies; smart phones; smart objects; low power and energy harvesting; resource-constrained devices; real-time systems; embedded software.
  • IoT services and applications: Smart automobiles, smart buildings, smart cities; platform as a service; M2M applications; Social networking; data management; mining platforms; middleware; open service platform.
  • IoT system integration, management, and standards: SOA based integration of IoT; M2M connectivity challenges and potentials; data management, Data Analytics; smart Data centers; open APIs for IoT; networking standards, e.g. IEEE 802.11ah; interoperable systems; ownership, regulation.
  • IoT Business model and Process changes: Supply chain management; collaborative business model; service-driven model; product as a service; resource sharing and optimization; e-commerce, C2C, C2B, B2B; user and process behavior analysis.
  • IoT security and privacy concerns: Identification, authentication, and authorizing objects; secure collaboration; context-aware security; web services security; cloud security; lightweight cryptographic primitives; infrastructure protection; trust management; legal challenges and Governance issues.
  • Big Data: Big Data Science, Data Computing, Data Mining, Data Analytics, Data Understanding, Data Applications, Data Privacy and Security.

For more details of the conference, the process, submission guidelines, see the ACC 2014 website

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.

Event: Applications of Machine Learning – with @BMCSoftware, @Helpshift, @Sokrati, @Pubmatic – 5 July

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HasGeek has arranged a day-long set of talks on the Applications of Machine Learning on 5th July, in Pune.

This should be a great event, and a must attend for anyone in Pune who has even a passing interest in machine learning and advanced technologies. Not only are the talks from a very diverse set of domains, giving you an idea of different ways in which machine learning can be used, but the set of speakers who’re talking are from some of Pune’s most interesting companies: Helpshift, Sokrati, Pubmatic, AlgoAnalytics, BMC.

The event is on 5th July, from 11am to 5pm, at Thoughtworks Pune. Please register now because the venue has limited seating, and I am sure with the topic selected and the quality of talks and speakers, the event will be overbooked. (In fact, if we manage to overbook the event soon, we can try to get the organizers to shift the event to a bigger venue…)

Here are the details of the talks

Grouping similar messages using Topic modeling

In machine learning and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents. At Helpshift, we get a lot of customer support messages. We use topic modelling and more specifically the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to classify similar message automatically based on messages. These grouped messages can be processed by the CS personnel making them more efficient.
This talk will cover Helpshift’s experience and the challenges in using LDA for grouping similar messages without any prior knowledge.

Speaker – Vinayak Hegde

Vinayak Hegde is VP of Engineering at Helpshift. In the past, he has worked at Inmobi, Akamai and Microsoft.

Twitter: @vinayakh

The Cookie as a Customer: An E-commerce Perspective

In the brick and mortar days, the shopkeeper interacted with a live human customer with appearance, expressions and behavioural traits. These attributes influenced the way the shopkeeper pitched his goods. Flip to the current e-commerce world where you are interacting with a cookie which was dropped when a customer visited your website. How does an e-commerce store know the appearance, expressions and behavioural traits of a customer? Based on those characteristics, how does the sales pitch change? Where do these conversations happen?
In this session, Rahul Kulkarni demonstrates with real-world examples how big data from cookies translates into appearance, expressions and behavioural traits of the customer, and most importantly how these are used to make a killer sales pitch for the customer.

Speaker – Rahul Kulkarni

Rahul Kulkarni is the CPO of Sokrati and has been ex-Googler. Linkedin

Application of Machine Learning for Financial Markets prediction

This session covers case studies which use some of the classical as well as cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. Due to ill-conditioning and noisy nature of financial data, there are some unique characteristics of this problem that we will focus on. Robustness of modelling methodology, averaging of models, identifying what is true improvement in prediction accuracy versus over-fitting become some of the serious issues people will need look into.

Speaker – Aniruddha Pant

Aniruddha Pant is the founder and CEO of AlgoAnalytics. LinkedIn

Machine Learning in Online Advertising Domain

In online advertising domain, there are various players which play a different role working on behalf of either publisher or advertiser, directly or indirectly. These players interact with each other in real-time to select the best advertisement optimizing their individual goals. Sreekanth Vempati will present key optimization and real-time impression allocation challenges solved using Machine Learning by different players in the advertising echo system.
As a part of this talk, he will present broadly about PubMatic’s work with Machine Learning and their applications. Specifically, Sreekanth will show some of the Machine Learning applications in online advertising domain, showcasing some of the problems that are being solved in PubMatic.

Speaker – Sreekanth Vempati

Sreekanth Vempati is the Team Lead of Machine Learning & Algorithms at PubMatic. LinkedIn

Text Analytics helping IT management get smarter

In this talk, Nilesh Phadke will discuss Text Analytics and how it can be used for better IT management. The talk will cover an Introduction to Text Analytics, going over the basics of what is meant by Text Analytics followed by some of the key techniques involved in Text Analytics and how these techniques can be used to improve IT management solutions.

Speaker – Nilesh Phadke

Nilesh Phadke is the Lead Product Developer at BMC Incubator Lab. He is working on using machine learning techniques for solving problems in the ITSM domain. Linkedin

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: https://fifthelephant.in/2014/machine-learning-pune

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

About the PuneTech Calendar

Get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events, or follow @punetech on twitter

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.

Turing100 Lecture: Leslie Lamport by Madhavan Mukund; Skilling for SMAC by Anand Deshpande

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Persistent System presents a talk on the life and work of Turing Award Winner Leslie Lamport, on 28 June, 2pm to 5pm, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, SB Road.

In March 2014, Leslie Lamport was named the 2013 winner of the Alan Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery(ACM), widely regarded as the Nobel Prize in computing.

Over the past 40 years, Lamport has made several foundational contributions to the theory and practice of distributed computing. His early work includes the Bakery Algorithm for the mutual exclusion problem and an insightful paper on the importance of causality in a distributed system. He later investigated fault tolerance in the presence of so-called Byzantine failures—worst case scenarios that could disrupt the correct functioning of a distributed system. His distributed consensus algorithm Paxos is widely used in many modern replicated data storage systems. A recurrent theme in his work is the importance of precise specifications and formal reasoning in ensuring the correctness of concurrent systems.

Speaker: Madhavan Mukund, Dean of Studies, Chennai Mathematical Institute

After that there will be a short break for tea, followed by a talk on:

Skilling for SMAC – by Anand Deshpande

Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud (SMAC) technologies will play a significant role in the building of next generation software products and solutions. Building solutions on this SMAC-stack requires a unique set of technical skills, different from the traditional software programming. This talk will focus on some of the upcoming SMAC trends and the skills needed to stay relevant as these trends unfold.

Speaker: Anand Deshpande, CMD, Persistent

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Latest schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 28 June

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Call for Papers/Tutorials: CMG India Conference on Computer Performance Engineering

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CMG India (Computer Measurement Group) is a group of performance management and capacity management professionals and students in the software industry.

The first annual conference of CMG India will be held in Pune on December 12 and 13. Last year, CMG India had a half day conference in Pune and that was quite successful.

The [call for papers][cmg2104cfp] or tutorials for the CMG 2014 conference is open currently – but it closes on 30th June, so hurry, only 12 days left.

The conference is looking for original submissions of real life experiences, (research) work in progress, tutorials in the following areas:

  • Performance Engineering of IT Systems: Design, Development, and Production System Management
  • Performance & Capacity Modelling
  • Big Data Performance Engineering
  • Cloud Performance Engineering
  • Mobile Systems Performance
  • In Memory Computing: Design and Optimization
  • High Performance Computing
  • Large System Architecture & Design for Performance

For more details of format and what is expected, see the call for papers.

This promises to be a high quality conference – the organizing and program committees consist of people from TCS (TRDDC), Cisco, IIT-Bombay, Intel, Persistent, Accenture, Microsoft and more.

For more details see the CMG India website, the CMG India First Annual Conference 2014 website, and the FAQ for the conference.