Tag Archives: mobile

Barcamp Pune is Back: 27 Sept #BCP8

Events, Featured, , , ,

What is a BarCamp

A BarCamp is an unconference. Basically, it is a crowd-sourced conference; which means that the date, time and theme of the conference are announced but the actual talks and speakers are not decided until the day of the conference itself. On the morning of the conference, a whiteboard is put up with the rooms and speaking slots, and anyone who feels like talking on any topic (that is in line with the theme of the conference) can add their topic and name to any of the open slots.

And then people are encouraged to go to any talk they find interesting, and use the “Law of Two Feet” – i.e. if a talk is not interesting, walk out, and go to the next talk, or start your own informal talk in the corridors.

What this really does is that you get a much more dynamic and diverse conference. The speakers and topics are not the same old ghisa-pita stuff – You discover new topics and new speakers and make new friends. You find enthusiastic and genuinely interested people – not corporate types who attend because their company requires them to attend.

More about Barcamp Pune

BarCamp is happening in Pune after a gap of about 6 years and we are expecting that this time around BarCamp Pune 8 will be more focused on early-stage web and mobile apps. However, the BarCamp is open for a variety of other topics, including healthcare, education, banking, real estate, Social Media, lifestyle, Auto, Aeroplanes, environment, Police, Anti-terrorism, Songs, Movies, Books, etc. Practically anything and everything under the sun (and even beyond) can be discussed in BarCamp.

What Should you expect?

Apart from networking and meeting people from various walks of life in different sectors, a BarCamp is probably the only place where ideas evolve during the course of the event. Nothing is planned in a BarCamp – Every participant has right to talk on the subject they love (and think that others may also like). While this format can be chaotic sometimes, it also opens doors to something you may never have known or been exposed to in an event.

And yes, BMC Software, the place where we are hosting the event have sponsored us with Free Lunch and beverages.

BCP8 Details

  • Where: BMC Software, Wing 1, Tower ‘B’, Business Bay, Airport Road, Yerwada, Pune
  • When: 27th Sep 2014 (Saturday) 10:00 to 5:00pm
  • *Map: http://bit.ly/BarCampPune8

Venue Instructions

BMC Software office is based in a large complex and the participants of the event need to follow certain rules and regulations. Please read below carefully.

  • While arriving from Yerwada, the venue is on your right and if you are coming from Airport it is on your left.
  • When you reach the building, use gate #3 to go to Parking level 2.
  • 2 wheelers & 4 wheelers must enter through Gate #3
  • Pedestrians can enter through Gate#3 or Gate #4
  • Tell the security you are going to “Barcamp at BMC software”

Keep in Mind

  • Being an IT company, registration is important
  • To facilitate that, online registration for the event is a MUST
  • Due to security reasons, you’ll be asked to provide laptop serial number etc. at reception. Do not carry if not necessary
  • If you want to talk on something and need presentation, do carry your own laptop.
  • Internet connections will NOT be provided by the organizers or venue sponsor. Make your own arrangements or talk to volunteers in advance
  • Event will be on 4th floor & lunch will be served on 5th floor
  • Entry will not be allowed on any other floor apart from 4th & 5th

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. However Please register here: http://bcp8.explara.com/

CMG Pune Meet: Scalable Data Streaming; Mobile Tracking & Analytics; Benchmarking OpenStack – 12 Sept

Events, Featured, , , , , ,

CMG India, a professionals’ forum for measurement and quantitative analysis in IT enterprises, invites performance engineering and capacity management professionals to their fourth half-day event in Pune, on September 12th, 2014, 2:30pm, BMC Software (near Pune Golf Course). This event is free for anyone to attend. See here for details on how to register.

Agenda

Agenda

  • 2:15pm: Event kick off
  • 2:30pm: Reliable and Scalable Data Streaming in Multi-Hop Architecture, Sudhir Sangra, BMC
  • 3:15pm: Optimization for Large Scale Wi-Fi Mobile Device Tracking & Analytics System, Santosh Kangane, Persistent
  • 4:00pm: Break
  • 4:15pm: Rally – Performance benchmarking of openstack – private cloud, Deepak Mane, TCS
  • 5:00pm: Windup

Reliable and Scalable Data Streaming in Multi-Hop Architecture – Sudhir Sangra

The changes in technologies, customer requirements, and visualization and consumption of data demands has led multiple point products to integrate and evolve into a solution. The value of the solution is in the seamless flow of information through multiple product layers and consuming this information in real time. Many times, if the “time to consume” the data to build information is not within the agreed service levels, the data loses its value. Thus, timeliness and reliability are the two most important aspects of multi-layered application integration.

In the IT Management domain, the data collection and the system analytics engines need to go hand-in-hand. The data collectors should feed the analytics serves in real-time, to enable it to build intelligent analysis and to do various sorts of data modelling to help IT Managers have the holistic view of the underlying system resources and let them perform a root cause analysis of any problem proactively. The more granular, and consistent data, the more accurate will be the analytics and capacity estimates.

Sudhir Sangra is the Product Development Architect at BMC, leading data centre performance and availability solution suite.  One of the focus area in recent time is fault tolerant, Load balance, real time data management.

Optimization for Large Scale Wi-Fi Mobile Device Tracking & Analytics System – Santosh Kangane

Mobile Device Tracking System handles the movement of 70K+ mobile devices in WiFI network and present valuable insides like, Most famous paths, crowded places on flowers, patterns of device movement in Wi-Fi network, device count on different flowers and Zones.

The case study present optimization around handling heavy write operation and performing analytics on Oracle database. It demonstrate the effective use of Oracle performance monitoring tools like OEM, AWR & ADDM report. How to draw conclusions from reports and co-relate that with Oracle internal functioning to gain maximum benefit.

Rally – Performance benchmarking of openstack – private cloud – Deepak Mane

OpenStack is open-source software which is used for building public or private clouds. Competitors include VMware, vCloud and Amazon Web Services (News – Alert), so steps need to be taken to make OpenStack as popular as possible in the competitive marketplace.

OpenStack has become increasingly important to enterprises of all sizes as its reach extends beyond Web 2.0/SaaS companies, such as Workday, Webex and PayPal. OpenStack is now a major element of both enterprise cloud computing and broader cloud initiatives.

Customers also need to know how well OpenStack performs, but OpenStack is complex with many subsystems and components, which makes it hard for customers or potential customers to predict how “different implementation decisions and changes proposed to OpenStack affect the whole system’s behavior and performance,” according to a statement from Mirantis. On top of this, there are many alternative cloud configurations where OpenStack can be installed and used. Benchmarking becomes very difficult because it’s hard to get results from just parts of OpenStack. What was needed is a way to find benchmarking on the entire OpenStack system, with a predefined cloud configuration, the company explained. The benchmarking tool would also need to come up with complex and reproducible scenarios on actual OpenStack deployments.

In other words, customers basically need to monitor how well of a job OpenStack is doing. So IBM, SoftLayer (News – Alert) (part of IBM) and Mirantis have developed Rally. It’s a benchmarking tool that reports on OpenStack performance.

In this session, we describe the details behind the process, talk about the Rally – Performance benchmarking tool , performance assessment strategies we used. We’ll also share our findings on key scalability and performance bottlenecks, validations approaches, and suggest solutions.Performance benchmarking of Openstack component – nova.

About CMG Pune

Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organisation of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis, and forecasting. CMG Inc, which is headquartered in New Jersey, USA was setup in 1975 and it now has more than 25 US and International Chapters.

CMG India has been recently setup with the objective of networking performance engineering and capacity management professionals across India. Large IT systems across India need to process millions of transactions per day and CMG India will allow for the experts to share their experiences and learn from one another. The facilitation will be done through regional events across major cities, an annual conference, and posting technical articles on this site.

See the CMG India website for more information.

Fees and Registration

Seating capacity is limited. Event participation is only for CMG India members – but you can sign up for a free membership here: http://www.cmgindia.org/punevent-registration/. Members can register for this event here: http://www.cmgindia.org/punevent-registration/

Event Website: http://www.cmgindia.org/events/event/4th-cmg-india-pune-event/

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.

Note: you are currently subscribed to the PuneTech main newsfeed. However, there are lots of technology events happening in Pune every week, and most of those are not posted on the main newsfeed. If you want to be informed by email about all the tech events happening in Pune, you need to separately subscribe to the PuneTech Calendar. It’s free so what are you waiting for? Check out the PuneTech Calendar to get an idea of the kinds of events that you’re missing out on.

>@PersistentSys acquires Pune-based Mobile Search and Ad firm @HoopzPlanetInfo

News, , , ,

Persistent Systems has announced that it has acquired Pune-based Hoopz.

What does Hoopz do?

It allows users of mobile to see “interesting” information without having to specifically search for it. Based on whatever keywords happen to be in the content you’re currently viewing on the mobile, whether it is in an app, or a document, or a website, like facebook, twitter, or anything else, or an email, sms, Hoopz will show you other content it believes you will find interesting. It will show you other apps, or information, or it will show you ads.

Based on the above description, Business Standard is calling Hoopz a “web discovery technology” company, while Medianama called it a “mobile ad firm”.

Interesting, Hoopz is not sold/provided to consumers directly. Instead they’ve chosen to go via the OEM route:

As a strategy, Hoopz is targeted towards hardware manufacturers than the application eco-system. “Hoopz is not hardware dependent, but as a technology framework layer it needs to be integrated into the operating system. Hence we prefer to work with OEMs. At present Hoopz is with over half-a-million handsets,” said Surekha. Going ahead the company will focus on international expansion into regions like APAC and China.

Why did Persistent buy Hoopz? Especially considering that Persistent now has a venture fund and could just have invested in Hoopz, like it did with wearable tech startup Hyginex, video calling iPad app Ustyme and life sciences company DxNow?

Here is what Anand Deshpande had to say about that:

“We did have the option to invest in the company through our venture arm too, but the technology and space that Hoopz is made us believe that acquiring them would be better,” said Anand Deshpande, chairman and MD, Persistent Systems. Deshpande also explains that though the application fits into the consumer internet space it can be scaled into the enterprise set-up too.

and:

The acquisition fits in Persistent’s focus area of mobility and though Hoopz is consumer focused, Deshpande is betting on the data discovery platform than can be scaled to the enterprise segment. “Our objective is to align technology and the company. We keep looking at technologies and see how we can participate in them. This also means taking smaller companies to a bigger core group,” added Deshpande.

References:

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

Featured, In Depth, Overviews, ,

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 Helpshift: Pune-based Mobile Customer Service Software Product Company

Featured, In Depth, Money Matters, Overviews, , ,

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.

Pune based AdSparx gets Rs 3.5cr Angel Funding From @IANetwork (@manish_saarthi @sharads)

Money Matters, , , , ,

DealCurry is reporting that Pune based AdSparx, a company that allows video publishers to seamlessly and automatically insert ads into their videos at runtime has received Rs 3.5cr in angel funding from Indian Angel Network, Mumbai Angels, and GrowX Ventures

Excerpts from the announcement:

LetsVenture CEO Manish Singhal and Indian Angel Network’s Sharad Sharma acted as lead investors for the deal.

About the company:

The company was founded in 2012 by former Patni Computers employee, Kunal Lagwankar. AdSparx uses a server side technology to serve device independent, high quality, targeted, pre & mid-roll video ads for linear TV, live events and videos on demand. It counts NexGTV, Vodafone, Airtel and Sony Liv among its notable clients. The startup has done mid-roll ads for online streaming of Indian Premier League, French Open and New Zealand Cricket Series in the past.

About the product:

  • AdSparx’s unique real-time targeted Ad Serving technology works for all devices, irrespective of OS or form-factor, while retaining smooth switching between video and Ad content for a seamless experience
  • Linear TV, Live Events & On-demand Video
  • AdSparx works with your existing content delivery set up and requires no modification. AdSparx easily integrates with Wowza, Adobe FMS and Apache servers and content delivery networks
  • ‘Lowest’ time to Market: A single point of integration on your servers for all your Ad serving needs, AdSparx does not require any changes in your client apps and cuts down your time to market drastically

About the team:

The founders all seem to be people who worked in Patni, founded Novix Media in 2005, then joined Patni in 2008, and finally started AdSparx in 2012. Details:

In case you find such things interesting, here is a US patent application (not yet granted) that AdSparx has filed.

Read the full article

Uber (mobile based p2p cab company) Launches in Pune (offer: 2 rides free)

News, ,

Uber, the mobile app based taxi cab / ride sharing company, which allows you to get cheap car rides using your smartphone, and which is extremely popular in the US, has just launched in Pune yesterday, according to their blog.

So, here’s the breathless launch announcement:

From the bustling streets of Koregaon Park to the corporate parks at Hadapsar, Punekars went all out to grab their first Uber! The music community took the ‘lead’ with Vishal Dadlani, Bollywood music director and Pentagram vocalist, grabbing that coveted Rider Zero spot. He fired up his app to get an Uber to his studio and within minutes a slick beemer showed up. We only got a few seconds with him and the car, before they zoomed off. Close on Vishal’s heels were Indian Ocean, India’s first fusion rock band, who did not miss a chance to grab the gleaming white Audi that was cruising around the neighbourhood.

and here’s the more interesting part – information about their introductory offer of 2 free rides:

During our testing phase we will have limited cars available; expect longer ETAs than usual. We are working hard to add cars and deliver the ‘Uber’ experience in Pune. Give us a try if you haven’t yet! New users, use the promo code ‘UberPuneLaunch’ and get 2 free rides up to Rs. 300 each! (New users only, valid up to 30th June, 2014)

How does Uber work? BGR.in has this to say:

In Pune, Uber will have an interesting fleet of cars that include the Renault Duster, Toyota Innova, Nissan Sunny, BMW 3 Series, Toyota Fortuner, Ford Fiesta and Volkswagen Vento.

Pune will have one of the most affordable tariffs than any other Indian city. The base fare will be Rs 80 with Rs 15/km and Rs 2/minute. The minimum fare and cancellation fee will be Rs 150 each.

For more, read Uber’s original blog post and the BGR article

Pune’s Swipe Telecom gets further funding from Kalaari Capital (30cr)

Money Matters, , , ,

(Sorry, this news is being posted here a little late; I was on vacation when this news broke, and decided that a late update is better than no update at all.)

Pune based Swipe Telecom, which has been selling low-priced tablets in the Indian market for the last 2 years has received Rs. 30 crore in funding from Kalaari Capital, [reports the Economic Times][blink].

Here is some interesting information about Swipe from the article:

Swipe offers around 23 types of tablets which include those with 3D resolution as well as a range aimed at children. While its current products are on Google’s Android platform, it will soon introduce tablets on the Microsoft Windows platform.

and, some information about the founder:

“We want to be a leader in one category ,” said Shripal Gandhi, cofounder & CEO of Swipe who has 11 patents in nanotechnology. He has earlier worked at Unidym, where he worked on touch screen technologies for clients like Samsung and Apple. It is this focus that is proving attractive to investors.

And information about their revenues:

The fast growing company, founded by Gandhi and Aman Gupta two years ago, has seen a three-fold increase in revenue which touched Rs 100 crore in fiscal 2014, with an estimate to touch Rs 300 crore next year. Swipe Telecom, which says it can develop and roll out products in five weeks, is able to customise its tablets for enterprises and plans to make pre-loaded tablets for education institutes and banks.

Read the full article

Interview with @KevinHenrikson of @Acompli, hot mobile startup with Pune connections

Interview, , ,

Mobile email startup Acompli has been in the news recently for raising $7.3 million in funding.

Kevin Henrikson, co-founder Acompli, has a long history with Pune, and Acompli has a 4-person team in Pune which is expected to grow. Kevin is visiting Pune this week, and we took the opportunity to interview him for the benefit of PuneTech readers.

Can you give a quick overview of Acompli as you see it?

iPhone Email Just Got a Promotion. Acompli allows professionals to take more action with email on their mobile devices. Leveraging the full capabilities of smartphones, Acompli uniquely combines advanced email, full calendaring, file sharing, predictive search and smart contacts into one powerful app. Request an early invite to the iPhone app at http://www.acompli.com

Can you give an overview of Acompli’s development activities in Pune and overall – in terms of team size, composition, and responsibilities?

Vishwesh Jirgale leads a team of 4. The focus is identical to those in the San Francisco, CA USA office. Make Acompli the best place to work for those focuse on solving the hardest problems for professionals on mobile using email. Team is made up of experienced experts in both the email and mobile space.

Specifically, can you give details of the technology stack you’re working on, the kinds of skills that your team has, and generally the cool technology challenges you’re tackling?

We’ve got a very modern tech stack. Server side Java running on AWS talking to mailboxes on both Gmail and Exchange. We have a Python based Frontend device API proxy and a custom binary TCP based protocol that delivers lightening fast dat to our iOS Objective C client. In short we use the best tech for the task and are very focused on both end-user UX and speed of the application.

How did Acompli land up in Pune? Can you talk about the structure, and other important aspects of this relationship?

9 years ago I started a team in Pune for my last company Zimbra. After 12 trips to Pune in the last 9yrs it’s become like my second home. I know so many people and have so many friends it was an obvious choice for us when starting Acompli. Vishwesh and I connected via mutual friends and we quickly assembled a team from within our networks. Having a team in both Pune and San Francisco is a huge advantage to a small company like Acompli. We get 24/7 coding and operations support. We also get to hire the best talent from two super strong software cities.

Doing geographically distributed development is always a challenge – how are you tackling this problem at Acompli Pune?

Number #1: Hire great people. Great communicators, great engineers. The rest really just falls into line. Also you need to spend time together. I’ll be back in Pune the first week of March. This constant face-time with the team is the best way to build a strong team and great relationship. It’s also the best way to recruit. We are looking to hire a Sr Java Platform engineer and a Sr Android engineer. For communication we use Google Hangouts. It works really well.

(Kevin is visiting Pune this week. Those interested in meeting him should get in touch with him or Vishwesh)

LiveBlog: Intelligence at the Edge

Live Blogging, , , , , ,

This is a live-blog of the event organized by @NexusVP, with the CTOs of @DruvaInc, @Helpshift, and @Uniken_Inc, talking about “Intelligence at the Edge” – i.e. the increasing amount of enterprise data that is now found in mobiles, laptops, and other devices of their employees, and how that is changing the world of enterprise software.

The panel consisted of these people:

  • Jishnu Bhattacharjee (@b_jishnu), of Nexus Venture Partners:
  • Sanjay Deshpande, CEO and Chief Innovation Officer at Uniken, a Pune-based enterprise security company.
  • BG (@ghoseb), CTO and Co-founder at Helpshift, a Pune-based company that provides a software platform that allows mobile app developers to incorporate high quality customer service and support into their apps.
  • Milind Borate, CTO and Co-Founder at Druva, a Pune-based company that provides backup solutions for the enterprise.

Here is a random list of interesting stuff said during this discussion:

  • More and more data and intelligence is being pushed at the edges of the corporate networks. Translation: Imagine a large company. It has an IT department that runs many servers and complicated applications in their labs and data centers. In the past, most of the data and intelligence of the enterprise was in these servers. But in recent times, the devices in the hands of the employees (the desktops, laptops, mobile phones) have more and more powerful apps, more sensitive data, and more unique data (i.e. data which is not replicated on the servers). This is the “edge” of the enterprise.
  • What does Druva do? Druva looks at data that is sitting on laptops, mobiles, and other devices at the edge from 4 different angles:
    • Backup of the data
    • Data theft prevention if the data falls in the wrong hands
    • Analyzing the data on all these devices and providing intelligence (actionable insights)

    • Being able to share that data with others: colleagues within the company, but also outside – customers, vendors

  • What does Helpshift do? Built a SDK that mobile developers can download and incorporate into their app to automatically and easily get very sophisticated customer service into their app. For example:
    • Reduce customer service calls through the use of in-app FAQs, which can easily be updated by the developer – updates to the FAQ can be pushed to all customers mobiles automatically
    • When a customer reports an issue, the Helpshift runtime uses breadcrumbs to keep track of what the customer was doing just before hitting the issue, so that without any extra effort on the part of the customer, details of the device, the configuration and what exactly caused the bug are sent to the server
    • Now they are focusing on building machine-learning based higher level features. Their bigger customers have millions of daily users and get thousands of support issues per day. So, they need sophisticated analysis to figure out the common patterns.
    • 80% of Helpshift’s market is the US and the remaining 20% is from the rest of the world, including Europe and Latin America
    • 80% of the money comes from iPhone users. But Android is still young, and growing.
  • What does Uniken do? Uniken realized that most of the technology on the internet has been driven by media companies who want to sell ads on their websites, and maximize the number of users, whereas enterprises (like banks) are trying to use the same internet to give a very secure experience to their (captive) users. There is a mismatch here, and what the enterprises need is a much more secure environment where they have much more control over all the pieces in the chain – including the network and the devices being used by the customers. This is the area Uniken is in.
  • Indian market vs US market: In India, there is a software/web/mobile market, but a lot of it is mostly consumer oriented. The B2B software market is still not really well developed, and is it not easy to make much money here.
    • 60% of Druva’s revenue comes from the US, 30% from Europe, and 10% comes from the rest of the world (India included).
    • Druva started off trying to sell in the Indian market. They tried in-person enterprise sales, and had a tough time. In the meantime, they started getting enquiries from the US from people who had simply downloaded their software, tried it out, liked it, and wanted to buy it. Over time, this increased, and they soon realized that US was where the real market was.
    • One of the key things that helped them was that they built software that was very easy to download off the web and install without requiring any help from the company itself. This was unheard of in the enterprise backup business (which was dominated by companies like Symantec/Veritas, EMC etc.)
    • Druva used Google adwords very effectively to market its products. The big players like Symantec/Veritas, EMC have very large sales organizations with great reach, and it would have been very difficult for Druva to compete with them in terms of reach of their salespeople. But Google adwords allowed them to reach out to customers all over the world.
  • BigData is big. The number of devices (mobiles, laptops, desktops) that people are using is so huge, that with even minimal intelligence in each device the amount of data is huge – petabytes.
    • Collect as much data as possible. You will find uses for it later.
    • Don’t worry about where/how to store the data. Just store it in flat files initially, and then later you can figure out where to put it to analyze it.
    • No single software will solve all your problems. Use everything – SQL, NoSQL, Hadoop, etc.
    • What has made this possible is the fact that all these devices are now internet connected, and hence all the data can be collected and stored centrally in the cloud. Further, again because of the internet connectivity, it is possible to push software updates to the devices, so the data collection abilities can be continuously upgraded.
  • How has Uniken managed to sell into the Indian enterprise market? It is currently 100% in the Indian market – and it sees India as a big market, with lots of potential. Most Indian software startups struggle with this (as seen by Druva’s experience above). You need to do this:
    • In any company, identify the right person – the one who has enough vision to do things differently, try new products, and who can also get things done in that company
    • Choosing the right champion in the customer company is key
    • Keep meeting the right people, keep selling them your story, keep plugging away, until the sale happens
    • Think of an enterprise sale as dating with a long-term relationship in mind
    • Have lots of patience. Don’t give up. India is a market requires a lot of patience.