Tag Archives: companies

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

For educational institutions:

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

and for companies:

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

References:

Pune’s Rolocule games (Motion Tennis App) covered in TechCrunch

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Pune-based game development company Rolocule was covered in TechCrunch last week for its latest game, Motion Tennis App.

Here are excerpts from the article:

It’s not Rolocule’s first foray into virtual racquet sports, but it is the first that turns your iPhone into the controller and Apple TV into a gaming console.

The Motion Tennis app, which costs $7.99, uses the iPhone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer to track the phone’s motion, so players can slice and slam shots across the court. All you need is an Apple TV and an iPhone: hook the two up, open the app, and you’re playing tennis.

And also:

Rolocule raised an angel round in India last year with Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures, though Gupta would not disclose how much they raised. He said that they might be looking to raise again, especially if they want to become leaders in this technology. I wouldn’t put it past them.

Read the full article

The Ninja Club at BMC Software

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(BMC Software Pune has created a by-the-techies, for-the-techies group, called The Ninja Club, to give the technical individual contributors in the company a place to learn, hang out, and get recognition for their work. This article about the Ninja Club is by guest author Neeran Karnik, an Architect at BMC.)

The problem is well known in the IT industry in India – why are smart techies tempted to switch to the management ladder, a few years into their careers? The industry loses technical talent, and quite possibly, gets saddled with mediocre management talent in the bargain! Techies who stay on the technical track complain about a lack of control, a lack of visibility, and a lack of rewards. Society also seems to treat “managers” as an exalted breed, and someone who remains an individual contributor is seen as having stagnated in his or her career.

The Ninja Club the BMC
The Ninja Club at BMC is a techies-only club, created to provide cross-team visibility for techies, encouraging collaboration, peer reviews of design and code, and in general, letting the smartest techies interact with each other more easily.

Organizations are taking different approaches to tackle this problem – including creating explicit technical ladders, giving more high-profile recognition for technical accomplishments, even awarding junkets for creating IP. At BMC Software, we have taken a somewhat different approach – a grassroots effort in the technical community that is backed by, but not actively promoted by management. It’s loosely patterned after the martial arts, and is called the Ninja Club.

The Ninja Club is a forum created by techies, for techies. Its membership is self-selected (by invitation), purely on the basis of demonstrated accomplishments on the technical front. As such, membership itself is a badge of honour. In addition however, like in a martial arts discipline, members qualify for different coloured belts – starting with white, and earning their way to black. These belts are completely independent of the usual grades or bands in the HR system, and unrelated to promotions and performance evaluations. A points system has been put in place – a Ninja earns points for activities such as technical talks, participating in coding contests and ideation sessions, filing invention disclosures, publishing conference papers / whitepapers, etc. Points make you eligible for ‘promotion’ to the next coloured belt: white –> yellow –> green –> red –> black. But promotion is not necessarily automatic – in addition to points, the Ninja may have to get past, for example, an online programming test or an interview by other Ninjas at the higher belt level.

Like martial artists, the idea is that Ninjas get together regularly to practice their skills – coding, design, etc. – and to learn from each other. To that end, the Ninja Club organizes various activities such as coding contests, design review sessions, etc. for club members. We are also starting Special Interest Groups (SIGs) focused around technology areas like Big Data, Cloud Computing, SaaS, etc. Discussions can also be around the business domain (IT management and data centers, in BMC’s case) and customer use-cases, not necessarily on technology. Smaller groups of Ninjas can get together in SIGs to discuss, brainstorm, and do small side projects on such topics of their interest.

Such activities enable techies to network across their product teams, find role models and/or mentors, benefit from peer review of their ideas, and expand their sphere of influence. However, the club also organizes wider events that are open to everyone at BMC, not just its members. Over the past year, Ninja Club has organized the following different types of events:

  • Ninjutsu: Quizzes focused on technology and programming – with questions ranging from tech trivia to ‘spot the bug in a snippet of code’
  • Kaigi: Technical talks on hot topics like Hadoop, Android development…
  • Tougi: Debates, where teams argue for or against a given proposition, such as the effects of Consumerization of IT, “BYOD”, or Desktop Virtualization
  • Online contests like treasure hunts, crosswords, etc.
Ninja Club emee screenshot
A screenshot of one of the pages in the Ninja Club, powered by eMee.

One key element of Ninja Club is its online presence, in the form of a gamified social network called eMee. This was developed at Persistent Systems, and heavily customized by them for BMC. Ninjas get their own profiles and avatars on eMee, using which they can showcase their technical skills, certifications and accomplishments. Points earned for various activities can be exchanged for ‘gifts’ that are used for decorating your house. Promotion to a higher belt results in your moving to a fancier house! Like in the martial arts, a Ninja can have ‘followers’. You can follow your role models or mentors, to keep track of their activities and status updates. Common news items are published to the “Ninja Times”, and visible to all. Non-Ninjas also get their own limited profiles, and the ability to follow Ninjas. A search mechanism allows anyone to find people with specific skills. This melding of the real and virtual worlds in eMee levels the playing field for smart programmers who may not be very social in the real world!

The hope is that this Ninja Club initiative will improve the technical vitality of the organization, and make technical careers more desirable and rewarding. By providing cross-team visibility, encouraging collaboration, and peer reviews of design and code, product functionality and quality should also improve over time. Success will eventually be measured in terms of the quality and growth of the technical populace at BMC Software, and being seen as the techies’ employer of choice in the region!

About the Author – Neeran Karnik

Neeran Karnik is an architect at BMC for their Bladelogic Server Automation product. Before that Neeran has worked at IBM India on the datacenter automation and cloud computing products in the Tivoli group, and as a Technical Director and Research at Symantec, and a Research Staff Member at IBM India Research Lab. Neeran has a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from University of Minnesota, USA.

Neeran is also one of the co-founders of Cricinfo.

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

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(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.