During their college days at IIT-Bombay, Kovid Kapoor, Rohit Shroff, and Prateek Chauhan were always on the lookout for weekend holiday destinations. Their friends too scouted for little known places to visit. They soon exhausted all the travel options available online and realized two shortcomings in the industry: “The destination choices offered by most websites are limited and generally populist in nature, leaving very little options, especially if one is a power traveler. In that scenario, travelers have lesser independence in choosing a destination and have to depend on what is being offered,” Rohit found. That’s where the idea for  Holidify came from. After the trio graduated from IIT-B, they worked with some startups briefly, and launched Holidify a few months ago.

Kovid Kapoor

There are several startups evangelizing destination discovery currently as more and more domestic travellers prefer to head to the unknown, far flung places. In fact, personalized destination discovery, adventure and experiential holidays, activity based trip planning are all being sold aggressively in India. What differentiates Delhi based Holidify from other startups in this space is that Holidify offers map-based approach which enables users to have a broader perspective of the destinations.

Holidify helps travellers right in the first step of trip planning. It helps users find the perfect destination, and removes the bias of popularity which typically comes in a list or a grid view format. The startup ensures that even if user arrive on the website with no preference in mind (beach or a hill-station, etc.), he/she can still start browsing places by themselves.

Prateek Chauhan

Besides a map-based approach, Holidify has comprehensive travel guides. “Our content team has created the best possible guides for each destinations on our page by using various online and offline resources so that our users get all the information at one place,” Rohit says. The guide helps users to decide on their final destination and also plan their trip , things to do, what and where to eat, options to stay, travelling within the city with hand-picked images of the destination. On personalization front, the startup ensures that users see only what they want to see “We are using a social connect which helps users create their profile, store their travel information which we use further to customize the site for them,” says Rohit.

The startup is currently in beta stage and Rohit says that the traction so far has been very encouraging. “We released our private beta product this month and are inviting users in a controlled manner, even though requests for invites have been overwhelming, that too without any publicity,” he adds. Currently, Holidify focuses on collecting feedback which they say has been constructive till now. The company will be soon opening its website to everyone.  “We don’t have a direct competitor when it comes to destination discovery. However, in due course of time, we would be competing with the likes of mustseeindia.com, ixigo.com and holidayiq.com.

Rohit Shroff

The entire process of starting up is indeed much more challenging than it looks from the outside, says Rohit. The major challenge for Holidify is how to get the right people on board. “Getting talented as well as motivated people for almost negligible money is very difficult, especially techies,” adds Rohit. Another challenge was working with almost no funds. The trio didn’t have much savings but they didn’t want to compromise on the quality of the product. “This made the entire process a bit slow, but, it’s better to be slow rather than compromising on the quality,” says Rohit.

Currently, the company is focusing on building the product. In the next few months, Holidify would be looking only at the Indian market and will tie-up with offline and online travel agents so that it could also help users in executing their planned trips. In the long term, the company would expand to other geographies, help users plan their multi-city trips and raising funds to grow quickly and build team.

Visit holidify.com for a private beta access.

We feel writing about interesting technologists is one of the best jobs in the world. In the last two months, we have profiled eight brilliant minds, some of whom were quite young, while some did not have any online footprint despite being a techie. Today, we relook at all the technologists we wrote about and even learnt from. Each one of them is special as they have used their time and skills effectively, which led them to where they are at present.

Sunil Urs – Founder of Fenopix, a techie with a failed startup attempt. He believes computers are nothing but magic and to extend the magic, he developed the Data Visualization Library Canvas.js. Story of sunil is nothing less than inspiration.

Dennis Ritchie – Dennis Ritchie needs no introduction. Featuring him was our way of giving tribute to the founder of C. Dennis built the foundation of current computing. In a way, there can’t be a better contribution to modern computing than his.

Amar Prabhu – Someone who made money by winning quiz competitions during his college days, Amar prefers to stay away from social media. Emphasizing on the build-to-learn principle Amar stays away from tutorials. Amar is a good example on how you can have a life away from Facebook.

Devendra Rane – Having started a venture in the field of nanotubes, Devendra has aerospace close to his heart and worked for over eight years, steering clear of any corporate stints. Currently, Devendra is looking forward to fixing the incubation space in India. Devendra is a follower of 10,000-hours rule and is a good example of adage “Practice makes perfect”.

Trithesh Ganatra – He started quite late with computers as he initially wanted to be a civil engineer. He joined PriceBaba as he couldn’t find another campus placement. Well, it doesn’t matter even if you start late. Things will be alright if you work hard, Trithesh proves.

Santosh Kumar – Starting his way from HTML and learning from Orkut, Santosh is helping people learn using open source and believes in giving back to the society. Even though he is still in college, he is giving back by teaching code to underprivileged children.

Rahul Dominic – Still in school, Rahul has his way with apps and was among the top 10 winners of Intel App for India Challenge. It’s never too early to start, he shows us.

Varun Banka – He is the co-founder of SocialCops. While working with Kinect after watching a rumor video, he wanted to make it true. Varun is working hard to enable people to use technology to solve social problems. He shows us how to step out of mere online discussions and act to solve real problems.

Hitachi, the US$80+ billion Japanese engineering and electronics conglomerate has today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Prizm Payment Services Pvt Ltd., one of India’s fast growing payment solutions provider, relating to transfer of all the issued equity shares of  the company  from the shareholders, including Winvest Holdings (India) Private Limited, Sequoia Capital, Axis Bank and other minority shareholders. Prizm Payments is a leading provider of payment services using ATMs and POS systems to banks and financial institutions in India.

Given the exciting phase of growth that the Indian payments market (online, m-payment and the latest bitcoin, etc) is currently undergoing, this news strengthens the belief in the existence of much larger total addressable market size and entrance of bigger players in this space. Hitachi sees India as an important region in its global strategy and is stepping up development of the Hitachi Group’s Social Innovation Business in the country. Hitachi aims to grow revenues in India by nearly 3 times to US$3 billion by the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016, compared with the year that ended on March 31, 2012. Furthermore, in the information & telecommunication systems business, a fulcrum of the Social Innovation Business, Hitachi has set forth the growth strategy of expanding global businesses and strengthening service businesses in order to create a business portfolio with growth potential. It’ll be interesting to see if with this acquisition Hitachi’s Social Innovation Business group will look at disrupting the payments market by providing alternative, economical and easy to transact solutions to enable and empower more local and rural businesses.

Latest updates from Prism Payments shares that after six long years of founding the company and building it into a leading payments company in India, they are at a threshold where they would needed a strong financial and strategic partner to achieve exponential growth as well as expand into international markets. And in order to achieve this objectives they have reached an agreement with Hitachi whereby Prizm Payments will be acquired by Hitachi and will become a subsidiary of Hitachi.

Prizm Payments has had a long association with Hitachi over the last four years through one of their subsidiaries called Hitachi Omron Transaction Systems (HOTS), in bringing their Cash Deposit Machines (CDM) into the India market. Over time, this close business relationship had evolved into strategic discussions in early part of this year, and concluded yesterday.

Speaking on the acquisition, Mr. Loney Antony, Managing Director, Prizm Payment Service, said “By becoming a member of the Hitachi Group, we are excited to capture synergies from the combination of Prizm Payment Services’ robust customer base and know-how in India, and the Hitachi Group’s expertise in IT services for financial institutions built up in Japan and around the world as well as its advanced technological capabilities, including cash recycling ATMs. Being part of the larger Hitachi family provides a unique opportunity to expand our service offerings to customers not just in India but across the globe. Furthermore this deal provides the management team and employees tremendous potential for professional growth.”

Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital, one of the investors in Prism Payments said “Sequoia Capital is delighted to have partnered with Prizm when it was just a dream in the eyes of its founders. Prizm’s stellar management team have executed on a unique business model to emerge as a leading payments company in India. We are excited to see Prizm move to the next phase of its journey along with a global leader like Hitachi. Prizm’s success will be an inspiration for the next wave of startups seeking to build large enduring companies.”

Many financial institutions in India are working to roll out various services, including mobile device-based payment services in near future and the number of ATMs and POS systems, which currently have a low penetration rate, are also increasing. ATMs in particular are estimated to nearly triple in number in 4 years from around 100,000 in 2012. In India, non-financial-institution service providers are expanding ATM outsourcing business, providing banks and financial institutions with comprehensive services, extending from deploying the ATMs as its own assets, managing the cash-in-transit services, to managing, monitoring and maintaining ATM operations.

With over 1000 employees and approximately INR 500crores in revenue (as of March 31, 2013), it is good to see another Indian startup success story scripted in under six years, following the recent redBus acquisition by Ibibo. Hopefully, we’ll see more!

REPL (Rudrabhishek Enterprises Pvt. Ltd.) is a consultancy firm that provides solutions related to architecture, planning, geographical information systems, engineering, strategic, consultancy and project management services. Set up in 1992, their services range from scope and feasibility studies to the design and implementation of successful projects.

Why chose entrepreneurship

Pradeep Mishra, founder and director of REPL, was working towards his degree in civil engineering from the Institute of Engineering and Technology in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, when he noticed that the recruiters who had come in for campus placements had one thing in common – they didn’t choose students who were smart and enterprising. “It was as though companies wanted intelligent employees but were afraid if they might go against the wishes of the top management. I did not want to give in to every whim and demand of my bosses, so I chose to startup,” says Mishra.

When everyone, including his family, swore by stable government jobs, Mishra moved into a rented apartment in Delhi in 1991 and started working as a freelance professional consultant with a real estate consultancy. “I soon realized that consulting did not require an exorbitant upfront investment—all you needed was a few computers,” Mishra recalls. He was just 23 then. After discussing his idea with a family friend, Mishra set up REPL in September 1992.

Early days of struggle

Pradeep Mishra

“As I learnt, I also grew. I was on my own, learning everything from printing visiting cards to dealing with clients, filing my own tax returns and preparing company balance sheets. We generated Rs 3-4 lakh as turnover in the first year, though we were yet to recover the seed capital,” says Mishra. It was only in 1994 that Mishra managed to break even. Towards 1995-97, the infrastructure market went down, and what Mishra tried had failed.

Yet his father didn’t let the failures bog him down. He never lost confidence and continued to motivate him. “Motivation and encouragement from my father revitalized my belief in REPL’s idea,” remembers Mishra. After two years of lull period (1995-97), REPL bounced back in 1998 and continues to have year-over-year growth  since then.

Offerings

REPL offers consulting to real estate companies, right from scratch to town planning, water treatment, sewerage planning and end-to-end consultancy in real estate sector whether it is approvals, PMC, architecture, structure design, pre sales and advertising to post sales and financial closeout of projects, which gives client a single window for all the project needs from ground floor execution to sale out level. “We are the pioneers in Uttar Pradesh for our various consultancy services. Recently, we launched end-to-end ERP solutions for real estate developers,” says Mishra.

REPL also provides advance GIS solutions to various clients and has a web-based portal to target individuals for their  home construction and interior designing in various cities of Uttar Pradesh. Presently, the real estate business is considered to be one of the most complex businesses due to the uncertain market. So most organizations focus only on one aspect of real estate business stream but REPL offers a complete set of solutions under a single window for all verticals.

Future plans

REPL recently opened its Singapore office and is interested in expanding its business in South Asian countries. REPL has also entered in a MOU with a reputed firm in the airport industry. It aims to enter new verticals of construction sector. “Managing all verticals with profitability is the biggest challenge now. As we are entering into international market, we are trying to do something competitive which we have not done yet,” says Mishra.

In 2012, Chidambaresan Ananthan, an alumnus of National Engineering College, and his three friends – Ponprakash Ponnusamy, Ponkumaresh Jothi and Kathiravan Dhanapathy — were on the lookout for a few technical courses online. They couldn’t find what they wanted, and that futile search led them to explore a solution for this problem. Why not build a platform where industry experts who wanted to share their learning could do so, they thought. And that’s how they decided to start Courseeplus.

The debate is still on about the success rate of massive open online courses (MOOC) in the education sector. But there has been a definite shift in students’ behaviour and the way they consume information using online courses. Noteworthy is the good adoption rate among students even from developing countries like India. A major challenge for most of the MOOC platforms is how to get quality courses from industry experts, which makes up a big chunk of their expenses.

Chennai-based Courseeplus focuses on this market segment using a different strategy. Unlike others, Courseeplus offers a platform for all the educators to create content and offer it on their portal. It connects knowledge providers with knowledge seekers. It, currently, has 55 courses, 82 course creators and 1700+ users. They have reach in 43 college campuses now, and also have three technology product-based companies adopting their product.

Courseeplus Online learning engine is an online authoring tool, which helps users create video presentations, online courses and online training across diverse topics in simple steps even without any knowledge of the how-tos of e-learning content creation and instructional design. Course creator can create storyboard, content, graphics, and assessments using single click and drop. They also have inbuilt libraries for voice, images and themes, which reduce the cost of translation and voice over process.

“Most of the MOOC websites like Coursera and Edx provide online courses. They source the course from experts and create it with their team. Experts with less e-learning content knowledge suffer while trying to find e-learning course creators and if they find any, they are expensive. It is after analyzing these pain points that we created an online platform in which the course creator can easily create the course without the help of e-learning experts. We offer a curriculum that focuses on employability, especially on web technology related courses. That has received a good response from the student community,”  Chidambaresan says.

He says that their main focus is to create employability based courses to hike employment opportunities for candidates. They also offer tablet based education.

You can check out more details about Courseeplus here.

Attend the EduStars 2013 Finale – the ultimate Ed Tech conference of the year on 6th December at Ginserv, Bangalore. Click here to learn more and buy tickets.

Two new books describe opportunities and strategies for startups, with particular emphasis on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. Parthajeet Sarma (Smart Phones, Dumb People?) and Vineet Bajpai (Build from Scratch) are entrepreneurs and writers who have taken to books to motivate aspiring startup founders in India.

Parthajeet Sarma believes 21^st century tools like mobiles and the Internet can be used to address 19^th century problems in India. India used to be a global economic power, but colonial rule skewed its economy and five decades of socialist rule created a culture of risk aversion and a preference for job security.

The mindset of engineering for the joy of entrepreneurship needs to be inculcated more broadly; today students join IITs and IIMs more for the brand than the innovative potential.

ATMs, Internet banking, mobile commerce, and online ticket booking are examples of domains where entrepreneurs and big business are increasing convenience for citizens. The pace of change is picking up; what was ‘in’ in January is ‘so yesterday’ in February, Sarma jokes.

His book has a touch of humour and recalls the days when people had to memorise phone numbers, and would prefer to physically meet friends. Today, children in India have unprecedented exposure to technology, information and social networks.

But India still has a long way to go to catch up with the West’s smooth connections between academia, R&D, government policy, industry, investors and startups. Many entrepreneurs are still at the ‘me-too’ stage of copying Western startups.

Thankfully a wide range of mainstream and online media are accelerating the startup mindset in India, along with catalyst initiatives such as The Power of Ideas (DST, IIM-A, ET), Sankalp Forum (Intellecap), Spark the Rise (Mahindra), Eureka (IIT-M), and Samsung Innovation Awards. Government departments are also getting into the act (EDI, MSME, NSTEDB).

The Delhi Metro, Konkan Railway and Kolkata Metro have improved productivity and travel safety for millions of Indians; the author calls for many more such initiatives, as well as others like UID and online passport application. Urban-rural disparities need to be reduced; Goa and Kerala have less disparity in this regard.

Innovations exist not just in core technologies but in their application to change and create processes. India has a chance to leapfrog generations of legacy technology and processes of the West, if creativity and industry-government initiative go hand in hand for value re-engineering. “Technology is the great leveller,” according to Sarma.

He classifies entrepreneurs into three kinds: innovation driven (from the urban educated), process improvement (less risky, more scale), and needs based (usually from the bottom of the pyramid).

The startup mindset needs to spread even more to rural areas, where two-thirds of India’s population lives; new models of social entrepreneurship are needed. More success stories like Narayana Hrudayalaya, Aravind Eye Hospital, SELCO and BASIX are called for. ICTs can help re-design the housing sector through innovations such as modular design and component manufacturing via standardisation and quality enforcement, to address the shortfall of 26 million homes.

Entrepreneurship is key to generating wealth, jobs, efficiencies and happiness in India, Sarma explains. Entrepreneurs should target not just symptoms but the deep underlying problems, and address sectors such as vocational training and urban planning.

India has just a few planned cities such as Lavasa, whereas China is planning to create dozens of new cities as well as a mega-urban corridor in the Pearl River delta which will be 70 times bigger than Mumbai or 28 times the size of Delhi.

Hopefully ICTs can also help expose and track corruption at different levels: big government deals (Type A), street level (Type B) and corporate level (Type C). The West still has some Type A corruption, but India has all three.

Sarma advocates that entrepreneurship is key to nation building but unfortunately deep-rooted cultural fixations can come in the way in India, such as fear of failure, lack of support for women entrepreneurs, and fear of being mocked at by the community.

In his book Build from Scratch, Vineet Bajpai, founder of Magnon TBWA and Magnon e-Graphics, offers specific strategies and real-world examples for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and scale their startups. His earlier book is The Street to the Highway.

The material is structured into seven chapters based on the phases of entrepreneurship, as summarised in Table 1.

Table 1: Building a Successful Startup

Bajpai identifies a number of risks entrepreneurs face: faulty business plans, inability to execute new business orders, poor growth management, failure to learn continuously, inability to keep innovating, breakaway of employee factions, and promoter/investor impatience. Additionally, in India, some entrepreneurs fear that they will not get social acceptance, or that people will think they started their own company because they could not get a ‘normal’ job.

At the same time, entrepreneurs offer employees a work environment which is creative, innovative, flexible, empowering, and driven by pure passion. Entrepreneurs need to display strong IQ as well as EQ. They need to be able to draw on personal contacts not just to be funders but also customers.

Based on his experience, Bajpai advocates creating an informal culture (eg. calling each other by first name only), but also avoiding smoking and drinking in the office. Foul language and double standards should be avoided, and ethical standards should be high.

Founders should strike that delicate balance between sticking to their core vision – but also not getting stuck. They should get team alignment for their mission and values, so as to prevent uncontrolled drift later. Employees should be picked on the basis of skills, energy, dedication, honesty, warmth and camaraderie.

As for funding, Bajpai observes that high net worth individuals can be good investors; they are looking for self-esteem and recognition, but their credentials should be checked and above board.

“Your instinct for survival will be your biggest sales agent,” he predicts. Founders should lead the sales force by example, and like a lion. Their toughest time may be managing the transition from turbulent startup to stable company.

“All revolutionary new industries are established on the graves of thousands of startups,” observes Bajpai. Give your dream your best but don’t try to be superhuman; do not compromise on health either, he advises.

“The best ship is entrepreneurship,” he evocatively concludes.

The book is packed with superb inspiring quotes, and it would be good to end this article with a sampling of these words of motivation.

A leader is a dealer in hope. – Napoleon Bonaparte

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. – Benjamin Franklin

Hire character. Train skill. – Peter Schultz

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent. – Bob Dylan

The beginning is the most important part of the work. – Plato

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. – Theodore Roosevelt

To go forward is to move towards perfection. – Khalil Gibran

Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future. – Ayn Rand

Let’s say you have to catch a flight and you are driving down to the airport. More often than not, you will not factor the time it takes to cross the toll plazas, to pay at the parking lots and the time spent waiting for it in the queues. You hit a toll plaza and you notice a long queue of vehicles waiting to pass through. Someone may not have the exact change, speed of the queue is extremely slow and you are getting late. It happens a lot of times and we wonder how easy life would be if there was an easier alternative for these payments.

There is a burning need for a solution which reduces such queues. Pyush Agrawal’s Hyderabad based MTolls, which was founded in May 2011, is trying to solve this problem of payments at toll plazas and parking lots by making this transaction cashless between infrastructure provider and user.  

How will it work?

MTolls intends to enable automated electronic toll collection for Indian masses – infrastructure providers, vehicle owners, fleet operators and anybody involved in this process. With the use of MTolls technology, one can use a single tag on multiple toll plazas. MTolls will be catering to both the infrastructure providers and users. It will be deploying the automated cashless toll collection technology at the toll plazas and enabling the toll plaza for cashless toll payments. It will also distribute the tags and provide the customer service to the vehicle owners. As the vehicle passes through the MTolls enabled toll plaza barrier, the money will be deducted from the vehicle owners’ account and credited to the toll plaza operator’s account.

Pyush says, “We envision that every gate, be it toll plaza barrier or commercial parking or office/residential parking lot gate, opens automatically for your vehicle. We envision a future where the vehicles are able to actively present their identity to on road devices so that better & new services could be provided to the vehicle owners. We want to enable smoother uninterrupted driving on the roads.” It can also reduce frauds & enable smooth cashless toll collection for infrastructure providers.

How it all started?

Pyush has completed his Masters in Computer Science from PennState University in the U.S.A and B.E from Delhi University. He has over 14 years of industry experience working with Microsoft, IBM and Accenture. He has also worked with a US based startup called VideoMining and played a pivotal role in launching multiple products. He has a strong academic experience with 10 international publications to his credit including two patents.

MTolls started because of a personal pain point of waiting int he long queues and sometimes getting stuck in them for long time. The good part was that the condition of roads had improved enormously and driving had become much more fun but the toll plazas became the traffic choke points. He says, “I found myself questioning the use of creating world class roads if we have to wait in long queues to pay the toll fee. I felt that the current system requires an overhaul.” He realized he was getting into an unknown world of entrepreneurship with MTolls and spent approximately three months doing extensive market research. His concept was  validated and now he felt that the idea was grounded in factual data and not an assumption.

What sets MTolls apart from the competition?

A lot of the international tolling companies are already in India and few are trying to setup their base here. But what makes MTolls different from them and how will a startup grab some market share with so much established competition present in the market? Pyush tells us that none of these companies are really addressing the core problems in making the cashless toll collection a reality. The core issues are that one smart tag works only at one toll plaza and not at all the other toll plazas. He says, “If we consider the 24 toll plazas between Delhi & Mumbai, most of them do not provide the smart tags. Even if they started providing the smart tags, and I took all these tags, I would actually have 24 different tags.”

MTolls’ tags work across multiple gates. They are aware of the fact that the tags need to be cheap and they need to craft a business proposition such that infrequent users also use these tags. “Our competitors just provide the toll collection equipment to the toll plaza owners, and leave it to the toll plaza owner to operationalize their own cashless toll collection solution if they want. For our competitors reducing or removing the queues at the toll plazas or providing mechanisms for web or cell phone recharge of tags is not a goal at all,” says Pyush.

How will MTolls conquer its market?

They are reaching out to their target audience via digital marketing, business networking, affiliate partnering, etc. Pyush says, “At a typical highway toll plaza, approximately 65-80% revenue is through fleet operators, such as state transports, taxi & bus operators. So, we are reaching out to the CxOs in the fleet operator companies and creating awareness of MTolls with them. Some of these companies have already signed up. We are seeing tremendous traction in this segment.”

The other part of the equation is deploying the technology at the toll plazas. And they are trying to reach out to the companies where new toll plazas are coming up or to the toll plazas where the current toll equipment is reaching end of life. Their biggest problem in this segment is that the number of toll plaza operators’ companies is very limited and reaching out to the decision makers is not a cakewalk.

MTolls is a pre-revenue company sustained by family & friend funds. They are currently in talks with bus & taxi operators and are liasioning with toll plazas as well. Though the solution is smart and can be very effective, convincing various parties involved in the process including the Government is a necessity. The diffciukty in initial adoption of this system can be hindering for MTolls’ growth.

What has Pyush learnt from his startup experience?

Pyush shares that they had resource crunch, no money and no office space but they took up one problem at a time, solved that and went to the next one. As per the Murphy’s law – ‘whatever can go wrong will go wrong’. A lot of things will not pan out as per your planning or expectations. At a startup you will make mistakes, slip and trip on the way to success. The tripping does not determine the fate of the startups but the fate is determined by how soon you get up again and start striving towards your company goals without the loss of enthusiasm.

If you are a  mobile startup, join us for the most cutting edge discussions and insights on “Mobile First” Economy at MobileSparks 2013

At the beginning of the year, we came up with a prediction for 2013 saying that it is going to be the year of enterprise software startups. Gartner projected the enterprise application software to grow to $157.6B by 2016, attaining a 6.5% CAGR. Building an enterprise company is a challenging ask and you generally see entrepreneurs with prior experience entering the space. Why?

Well, B2B businesses are the ones which sell to businesses and are very different from their counterpart B2C businesses which tend to be glamorous and attract a lot of attention. Mike Holt, CEO of Singapore enterprise incubator Get2Volume gives some of the differences between these two businesses:

1) Target Market is large for B2C while it is small and niche for a B2B busines
2) The sales cycle is very short (single step) for a B2C venture while it tends to be in months for a B2B venture
3) The sales driver is usually repetition and recognizition for a B2C company while it is a lot of detailing and relationship building in case of a B2B business

And a B2B internet business in India especially becomes difficult due to various reasons ranging from low technology adoption in businesses to absence of habit of paying for software. “Indian customers tend to be the ones who like instant gratification. The cultre of paying for software will come but it will be incremental. The customer needs to see the results of the small sum she pays first up. Post this, she will pay more if the results are there,” says Ambarish Gupta, the founder of Sequoia based Knowlarity which is a cloud telephony company.

In general, enterprise companies are formed by entrepreneurs who’ve had previous experience and know their space very well. They’re in it for the long haul. Many Indian companies like FusionCharts, Wingify and Webengage have hung in their to eat the fruits of persistence. “We have more than tripled our revenue run rate and we are meeting all other big strategic milestones on the product side. I’m extremely proud of our ever-growing team,” says Valerie Wagoner, the founder of ZipDial, a company based on the concept of missed calls (has received followup funding rounds).

Pricing is a huge dilemma for enterprise companies as many of the companies as it is very hard to determine an optimal range for which customers will be willing to pay. We had earlier done a post that details on pricing for SaaS products that laid stress on how the successful companies have done it.

Another major trend this year has been the global focus for companies. It has become essential for companies to think globally for scale. “A major trend we’ve seen, especially with enterprise or B2B model companies is the expansion outside of India. That is a mission we have also undertaken with ZipDial’s launch this year in Bangladesh as well as Sri Lanka. We may even have our fourth market to add to the list before the year is over,” says Valerie. Wingify crossed 2500 paying customers in more than 75 nations and Paras Chopra, the founder did this without raising any venture capital. Knowlarity also went international and we’re also seeing more and more investors pushing their companies to have an international office (read more about GSF’s Singapore Push).

All in all, it has been a good year for all the enterprise companies that were touted to do really well this year: WebEngage, Wingify, Knowlarity, Exotel, Zipdial, FusionCharts, Freshdesk, etc. There has been some negativity in terms of drying up of funds post the seed stage and companies not having enough exits but it is also a time when many entrepreneurs are coming off age. The initial glamour of entrepreneurship will start tapering off and the more serious realistic entrepreneurs will remain. The year for enterprise companies has been encouraging and with the global outlook coming in, the next year will probably see a further consolidation of the existing successful companies and entrepreneurs coming up with more solid international businesses.

The Pearson Affordable Learning Fund and Village Capital initiated a campaign earlier in July via which they were two invest $150,000 in Indian education companies (Pearson launched the Affordable Learning Fund last July with $15 million capital to invest in low-cost private schools and other affordable educational solutions). The program has concluded and the two companies who have raised investment are:

Experifun and Sudiksha Knowledge Solutions. Both the companies have received $75,000 each to scale up their businesses.

Experifun is a Bangalore based company that helps science teachers bring their subject to life by providing them with kits and activities to conduct classroom experiments. Founded by Vivek Pandey, Rakesh Kumar and Rashmi Singh, Experifun has started rolling out the kits to schools and with this funding, they’ll have the bandwidth to scale it further.

Sudiksha is also in a similar domain and is a social laboratory that works towards designing, training and researching various facets of education. They aim at finding practical solutions to improve the overall quality of educational standards by maintaining low cost Indian schools at the urban and rural levels. Sudiksha presently owns and manages 18 schools in Andhra Pradesh, 12 are in Hyderabad and 6 in rural Andhra Pradesh.

The company has been founded by Naveen Kumar, Nimisha Mittal and Vanaja Dollu. Pearson’s executive director of the Affordable Learning Fund, Katelyn Donnelly says, “These inspiring entrepreneurs are excellent examples of the innovations desperately needed to improve access to, and quality of, education for low-income learners around the world. Both Experifun and Sudiksha have established strong traction with customers and shown early promise to transform learning outcomes and scale quickly.”

Education is one of the biggest sectors in India along with healthcare where startups can come in and create an impact. There are challenges in the space but the opportunities they hold to bring about a change are immense. Specifically for education startups, we at YourStory have launched EduStars, a program to recognize upcoming startups in the space. EduStars is in its second edition now and is organized in association with Intel and Accel Partners.

The event is on 6th December, 2013 and you can know more about it on the EduStars website.

Prasoon Joshi

An ambassador of creativity and storytelling, Prasoon Joshi’s journey from Almora in Uttarakhand to Mumbai the city of dreams, has lessons for everyone. He has done more than justice to his multiple roles as a lyricist, script writer, and the Executive Chairman and CEO of McCann World Group (India), one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.

YourStory caught up with Prasoon at SAP Labs, Bangalore, where he took part in their ‘Leadership Series Talk’ targeted at “helping employees realise the importance of inspiration and creativity across disciplines”.

Advertising industry: A perspective

Prasoon finds advertising to be an industry which reflects changes in the society and business environment. “It is constantly evolving to be in sync with the time.” He added:   “In the evolution, we have to take the right decision, IP protection being one such decision. In the changing nature of business, values of ideas have to go. We have to make sure that the advertising industry does not become commodified. Every system evolves around a set of people and that is how a culture is evolved.”

A company like McCann has definitely done something right to survive for long in the international market. Speaking about McCann’s philosophy, he said: “Your partners are your clients and your client’s needs are your needs. So you need to be constantly abreast with the changes which clients are facing in the business environment. As a result, you have to give them adequate partnership and tools which can win their battle in a much more efficient way. McCann is one such company with this understanding and that is the reason I am a part of the management of this company.”

How to position your brand

Prasoon believes that a brand is built out of a product and that’s why it’s important to meet people who envisioned it. “I ask (owners) why they got into this business at the first place. Sometimes they can articulate it, sometimes not. Brand resides in the heart of people. So I have to make the connection between the brand and people. And for that, I need to know the social relevance of the product and why it exists in the first place. That truth is important for me,” he said.

Once the connection is made, the next step is to build on that and share it with the audience. People, who create products and manufacture them, have put a lot of passion and energy behind the business. “I want the same energy to be communicated to the consumer so that he understands it. Then, I look for a narrative because we do not connect with anything in life which is cold. You should have a narrative which stays, that’s the brand story. Through that story, I start getting connected with the consumer and tip-toe into his heart,” he said.

The famous ‘Thanda Matlab Coca Cola’ campaign by Prasoon Joshi

Designing to sell

According to Prasoon, information is the most important ingredient of designing to sell. Moving forward, one can learn the art but it is crucial to have to a lot of information. He added: “Our job is to soak ourselves in the information and then process it to bring it out in a creative way that connects to the whole world. My clients know their products very well and if they are made to sit in front of the consumer, they will be able to sell their products. But unfortunately, they cannot go to every consumer and tell how passionate they are about their product. That is why I have to convert it into a narrative, which people can consume in a shorter format.” Prasoon emphasised that it was an art and a science at the same time. “One needs to have the right information and be able to process the same to arrive at the solution.”

On a lighter note, he said: “You can discuss how you arrive at the solution till cows come home, but you’ll never arrive at it because each one does it very differently.”

Most favorite campaign so far

For Prasoon, every campaign is a favourite at the time of its execution. He said that it was for other people to decide if they liked a particular campaign more than the others. “Currently, the ‘malnutrition’ campaign is very dear to me. A lot of people would not have seen it because it comes on Doordarshan. This campaign is very important for the country because every second child is malnourished in India. I am very happy that Aamir Khan is the face of the campaign. It is really satisfying and inspiring for me because my skills are benefitting someone and changing some harsh realities.”

Prasoon likes Coke’s recent campaign on ‘Bewajah Khushi Lutana’ — help somebody without a reason to do that. He likes the thought. Another ad campaign, which has been close to his heart, is the ‘Atithi Devo Bhav’ campaign.

So, which of the Prasoon’s campaign are your favourites? Drop in your responses in the comments section below.

Meet the thought leaders in the field of inclusion at India Inclusion Summit 2013 on Nov 29 and 30 at Ritz Carlton, Bangalore.

Abhishek Kamani hails from a family with a strong business background that goes back many generations. He oversees the India operations of The Zuri Group Global, the parent company of Zuri Hotels. This year, Abhishek ventured into the online business space with office supply e-commerce portal Zoffio, which he founded in January. It is an e-commerce venture which caters to all office needs including stationery, machines, furniture, pantry products etc. It gives a choice to order online, through phone or via email. The portal aims to cater to the needs of startups, SMEs, MSMEs and large corporations as well.

In an interview with YourStory, Abhishek shed light on how an established brick and mortar entrepreneur looks at an internet business and much more. Edited excerpts:

YS: Coming from a business family, was entrepreneurship always the first choice?

AK: As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Growing up in a very entrepreneurial, traditional Gujarati family, you are not groomed to be a professional. From a young age entrepreneurship, is in the environment around you. It is in your mind that even if you have a very small business, you will be at it. It is not about the money, it is all about being an entrepreneur. You grow up looking at business opportunities all around. I am a hotelier but it does not mean that I am going to be that for life.

If you see most Guajarati families, they are always looking for new things as opposed to what they are already doing. When I was very young, I used to think I will be a lawyer or professional golfer or something else. But by the time I went to college, I didn’t want to do anything else because I enjoyed what my family was doing. And I knew that’s where all my strengths lay as well. My brother and I have been working in the family business since we were 14. I was already familiar with the business. And as soon as I graduated, I joined the business officially.

YS: There has always been a debate about the pros and cons of being a first generation entrepreneur. You come from a well established business family. Does that make things easier or difficult?

AK: The grass is always greener on the other side. Having said that, I prefer the side I am on. If you are a first time entrepreneur, you don’t have the family and social pressure that comes with succeeding. You can afford to fail five times. But when you are in a family business and that too a successful one, you are being judged by the barometer of someone else’s success.

However, you get those head starts which a first time entrepreneur may not get. If I was a first time entrepreneur, I might not have started Zoffio. One of the reasons that I started Zoffio was because of the advantages that Zuri lent me. My learning experience with Zuri and my confidence that came from it had a big role in it. And the reason why I am saying that I still much rather be on this side is keeping in mind that in my family, we have been given the freedom to make mistakes.

My grandfather and father do not check how the company (Zoffio) is doing regularly. But they keep reiterating that this is my first business and there is a very high likelihood that it will fail. They keep telling me not to take things too much to heart and that there are going to be ups and downs. So, I get the advantages that come from not only being in a family business but also the advantage of being allowed to fail if it so happens. My brother and I have been taught that you can fail and no one is perfect. We don’t mind if people fail in our company or if we fail ourselves as long as it is not because we didn’t try.

YS: Your family has always been in the brick and mortar business. When and why did you decide to enter the online business?

AK: It happened by chance. It wasn’t that my brother and I were planning for years that we will do this one day. We were living in Bangalore, reading about startups in newspapers. A lot of new businesses were coming online and things looked pretty interesting in the digital space. We set aside some time to come up with something we would want to do in this space. And we wanted to work on some idea that would be good even 10 years or 20 years from now.

We put our heads together and came up with about 20 things, not only in e-commerce but different online ideas. We settled down on office supplies because of an experience we had with Zuri. Once we were looking into how our office supplies are managed and asked our procurement department at the hotel about the process. It was an eye opener for us. We were getting paper and pens from one place, printers and cartridges from another place and something else from somewhere else. It was very scattered. We had three vendors and the contracting was terrible. The pricing was unclear. I asked why were we using three different people when there was a Staples in the market. And the procurement department told us that they don’t have the time or the bandwidth to supply to us. They are only dealing with multinational companies. That’s when we saw a very clear cut massive need in the market. People are getting their office supplies in the most haphazard fashion and there is almost nobody in the market solving this problem. There was just OfficeYes and some other smaller portals which have shut down now.

YS: How has online business been different from the brick and mortar one?

AK: To be slightly philosophical, I think every business has very similar challenges. When you go into the extreme details, they differ but if you look at the strategy level, it is all similar. Every entrepreneur is thinking how will we sell? What is the culture of the company I am building?  Where do I go next? All these things are the same and are present in every business. In a way, Zoffio has been easier business than Zuri Hotels. With Zuri, we are selling a perishable product, if we don’t sell the room today, it is gone. We can’t sell yesterday’s room. Whereas here, we can sell the stock tomorrow as well.

YS: What is the problem Zoffio addresses? 

AK: When we entered the business, we realised we will be solving many problems which we did not perceive when we started. We didn’t know that people are selling fake products. We didn’t know that they are under selling, or that pricing is not transparent, taxes are miscalculated and so on. People are getting conned and they don’t even realize it. There is a better way where one can save money and get good products conveniently. If you want something in the next 30 minutes, then definitely you should go down the road and get it. We are not catering to the last minute market. We are catering to the businesses or SMEs who generally place orders in advance.

YS: How has the market response been till now and what is the big dream you want to achieve with Zoffio?

AK: The office supplies market in India is worth USD 20 billion and the online players have negligible market share in it. The only players in the market are us and OfficeYes and we don’t have even a 1000^th of the market. Of course, the potential is not 20 billion dollars, because the whole of India is not going to buy online. But if I target even 5% of the market it is a billion dollar space. It is enough to make sustainable business for a lifetime. The opportunity for an online player is so massive that we don’t mind even 5-6 more online players. We prefer having them so the word spreads about this through them also.

We have processed a little over 5000 orders till date. We are closing over 100 orders a day now between the two locations, Delhi and Bangalore.  We have our ware houses at both these locations. Our plans are very aggressive and we are aiming to be in 12-15 cities in the next 5 years. And we would only continue to invest in it if the traction is looking good. I am glad to say that our phase 1 is going very well. We reached our first year target in just 8.5 months and we are looking to finish year one with the double of our revenue target. It is very promising and exciting.

We are not judging ourself by the barometer of a traditional e-commerce business. In 5 years, if it’s worth it we will continue, otherwise we won’t. We are not under any pressure to show results which is good for us because we can grow without that.  We don’t have to do desperate things. We don’t have to pump in lakhs of rupees on online marketing and that’s the money which doesn’t come back. We are happy to grow slowly. The pace at which we are growing is good but even if it was slower we don’t mind. We are not looking to exit in two or five years. It is a long term idea and even if it takes 10 or 15 years, it is great. It should be a good company to work for and should be self-sustainable.

Checkout Zoffio here

Flipkart, the poster company of Indian ecommerce, had a very humble beginning. The company started in 2009 from a two-bedroom apartment and is now valued at $1.6 billion. Binny Bansal, one of the co-founders of Flipkart, reminisces about the initial days of the company, while having a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma during TechSparks 2013. Emphasizing what really worked for Flipkart, Bansal  says the right ambition, a consumer-centric approach, perfect timing and a little bit of luck drove Flipkart to achieve its scale and win consumers’ confidence. From day one, the Bansal duo had stayed hungry to make etail happen in India.

Here’s a video of Binny Bansal talking to Shradha Sharma about various challenges, opportunities and the secret sauce behind the country’s largest etailer:

Here are the top 30 companies at TechSparks 2013

Krishna Teja, a computer science graduate from University of Toronto, went on a backpacking trip to Europe in 2011. While, the trip was quite enjoyable for him, the planning wasn’t much of a good experience. On average, it took him close to two hours every day for a month to plan his perfect trip. He cherishes his remarkable trip, he also shudders at the thought of coming up with a practical itinerary for future trips. Information overload on the internet, outdated, contradictory travel information and hardly any local perspectives on the destination made the planning process very time consuming and inefficient for him. Krishna decided to find a solution to this and Think Places was born.

Find places, see places, experience places online and now Think Places? How do you do that?

When Think Places started, the product revolved around crowd-sourced itineraries. Travelers could search and create itineraries on their platform. Soon, they realized that users are looking for a more personalized experience and to quickly plan their travel with insights from a trusted source. They started experimenting with the idea of connecting their users to a well traveled expert to help plan their trip. Users liked it and Think Places became a platform for travellers to connect with an expert to plan a personalised and palatable trip by getting accurate information about places.

The process of connecting with experts is completely automated. Once the user chooses an expert, they are connected via a message centre. The message centre is the point of contact between the user and expert. Then they can chat and decide on a convenient time for a call. Any follow up questions will also be answered by the expert via the message centre. Once the call is scheduled, the expert virtually sits with the user on Skype and plans the travel in a way that closely involves the user and their interests. Once the itinerary is published, users are able to get a virtual tour of each of the places suggested by the expert. This is only possible where Google street view exists as they are using the street view API.

The travel experts are brought on board if they meet at least 3 out of these 4 requirements: their articles have been featured on popular publications like Forbes Travel, Nat Geo, Lonely planet, New York Times etc, they have written a guidebook or have covered the place professionally on several assignments, they have travelled extensively or lived in the place for at least 2 years and they maintain a popular blog with the latest information about places they advise on.

What is special with Think Places?

They currently have around 40 experts who cover 61 countries. Think Places is a marketplace where the experts charge what they think is reasonable (within certain guidelines). On average, their experts charge about $30, which includes a consultation time of 20 minutes, a customized itinerary for up to 5 days and answering follow up questions if any from the travelers. Each expert has 3 pricing options depending on the duration of the trip and length of the call. Here is an example: http://thinkplaces.com/pricing/147. Their revenue model is straight forward, they take 15% commission on each transaction. So if an expert charges $30, they keep $4.5.

They are currently focusing on travelers from India and the US going on international trips. Their ideal travelers are families, couples and young professionals who don’t have time to plan their travel but are looking for an authentic experience. They have a lot of competition in form of travel agencies and online recommendation platforms like Trip Advisor. Krishna says, “There is nothing out there that directly puts you in touch with a travel expert at an affordable cost. Sometimes we are asked, ‘why a Think Places expert and not a travel agent?’ The answer is simple. Unlike travel agents who spend most of their days in an office, these experts spend their time out there exploring the world and staying up-to-date on the latest in travel. They don’t make any commission on the recommendations they make, so they will not push any hotel, route or product without firsthand experience.”

What lies ahead the curve?

Scaling this solution without compromising on quality would be a challenge. As their customer base increases, they also need to increase the list of experts and finding high quality experts is not going to be easy. Many ‘travel experts’ are not really experts at all, just long-term travelers with opinions. Think Places aims to simplify travel planning. Krishna says, “In the future, we want travelers to be able to instantly connect with experts in a click of a button. Imagine if you were thinking of a scuba diving trip to Thailand, and you can instantly talk to a person who has scuba dived all over Thailand. This will revolutionize the way people plan their trips.”

Currently, they have a promotion going on where they are offering a free 10 minute call with experts. If the user does not like the service, he gets a complete refund. Checkout Think Places and let us know the experience of thinking places with a travel expert.

If you think all things mobile, you must think of being at MobileSparks 2013!

Upasana Taku

Zaakpay is an NCR based company in the business of making online payments easier in India. The company was founded by Upasana Taku back in 2011 and has been venture backed by Sequoia Capital. Building on the product, the payment gateway was launched in April 2012 with 5 customers and has grown since then to have more than 500 customers.

Zaakpay’s first product was Webpay that provides an intelligent payment processing solution for businesses to accept credit cards, debit cards and net banking payments online. And their second product Mpay launched in April 2013. Mpay is a complete payment solution for Mobile First businesses in India. Mpay offers In-Application payments, where transactions are completed in APP itself (a user does not need to open a browser). Here, we get in a conversation with Upasana Taku to learn more about their growth:

YS: Who are some of your marquee clients and tell us a bit about Mpay.

UT: Starting with just 5 customers in April 2012, Zaakpay currently has 500 clients, including JabongWorld, HomeShop18, Hungama, Yepme, Shopnineteen, Exotel, IIMjobs, E2ENetworks, MtsiAdvertising, AmericanSwan, Ansals, etc.

Mpay is India’s only In-APP payment solution, available for Android and iPhone apps. Mpay also includes a mobile web (browser-based) payment solution, which works on all popular mobile browsers. Mpay has processed mobile payments worth Rs 70 crores since launch.

We also provide features such as collect card data on merchant website, email invoicing, international multi-currency payments and recurring billing payments.

YS: You’ve been tackling the payments space for quite some while now. How has the experience been?

UT: Payments is a tough business to build globally, even more so in India! One has to figure out many moving parts – (what the end user wants) the user’s payment experience, (what our customer – the merchant wants) the merchant’s experience with our platform/people, (what banks want) banks’ requirements from our operations team, what the regulators want (how our product works; how our backend operations work), etc. Key learnings for us have been – understand compliance, innovate on the product and provide the highest quality of service to customers.

YS: How has the pricing evolved?

UT: In the market, we see some players going for pricing based customer acquisition. This is a race to the bottom of the well. We are not in this business to become the low cost leader. We believe quality product and quality service cannot be provided at the lowest cost. Websites that need lowest cost payment processing to meet their business goals may opt for it in the short term. Eventually businesses realize that they are losing revenue due to the poor payment product they are using and start looking for quality. We are happy to service them once they have understood that good product does not come at dirt cheap prices.

Our pricing models are straight forward – we charge a percentage fee on every transaction. The fee charged to every website depends on the website’s product category, its risk level and transaction scale.

YS: There are multiple players in the field who’ve been trying to solve this massive problem of online payments in India. What are your views on the competition landscape? (PayU, CitrusPay, Juspay, etc.)

UT: Despite the mushrooming growth of e-commerce transactions in the country, sluggish payment gateways have been one of the biggest deterrents. Until 2012, besides banks there were just 2-3 third party payment companies ruling this segment. Almost all of them had either high sign-up costs, or long sign-up processes or inferior technology, or all.

Most of our new age competitors are busy playing pricing wars. It seems no one is focusing on improving the user experience or the merchant experience or the payment technology. We are a product startup and our focus is on improving the payment experience for the Indian user. We are banking in a big way on Mobile payments. Since the last 10 months, our product development and merchant acquisition efforts have focused solely on Mobile In-Application Payments for Android and iOS. We believe we are the leading payment gateway for mobile payment processing in India.

YS: How big is the team and how have you built it?

UT: We are 19 people now across 3 teams – Merchant Acquisition, Product Development & Merchant Operations. The average age in our team is 25 – our strength is our highly enthusiastic and curious employees. Everyone takes their contribution to the company very seriously and is constantly learning and innovating. We had a very hard time hiring initially in 2012 but now we have figured out the core DNA to look for while interviewing candidates. We find that attitude, basic smarts and ability to adapt are more important than degrees and pedigree.

YS: What’s on the roadmap?

UT: We are working towards making Mobile Commerce a reality in India. More Indians will transact on the mobile in the coming years than they do on computers. Mobile Internet is becoming the Internet. Internet users in India will experience the Internet for the first time on their mobile phone. (According to reports, mobile Internet traffic surpassed desktop Internet usage in May 2010.)

With the advent of cheap smartphones, especially Android, millions of Indians have sufficient power in their hands to make payments instantly using 2G/3G data networks. We are creating specific solutions for Mobile Websites and Mobile Apps to enable merchants to collect payments from Mobile users in a simple and secure manner.

Many questions about mobility including payments will be discussed at this year’s edition of MobiSparks, be there!

We have several online platforms that help job-seekers find white collar jobs. But when it comes to blue and grey-collared jobs such as plumbing, driving, carpentry and so on, there have been just a handful of startups like Babajob, Jack on the block, etc. The latest entrant into low and mid-level staffing space is Mumbai based Nanojobs. It is a job-cum-employment portal, which bridges the gap between recruiters and job seekers (low and medium level staffing). Currently, the startup has over 1000 categories of job seekers right from drivers to plastic machine moulding operators.

Team behind Nanojobs

Founded by Anupam Sinhal and Vikash Chowdhury, Nanojobs is currently operational in Maharashtra only. Anupam has a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from P.E.S.I.T, Bangalore, while Vikash did his Bachelor in Computer Science from Queensland University, Australia. Before venturing into entrepreneurship, Anupam worked for IBM and Cognizant and Vikash had been running his maiden entrepreneurial venture – Raj Consultancy.

Motivation behind starting up?

While running his consulting business for white collar jobs, Vikash once bagged a contract for hiring 4,000 drivers in Mumbai. But he found it extremely difficult to find such people using offline manpower consultants. Much to his surprise, none of the online portals had such a database to meet his contractual requirement. “The idea to have a platform for blue and grey collared jobs evolved from our inability to find 4,000 drivers. Right from the beginning, we understood the real pain-point of making a database of plumbers, drivers, carpenters, motor mechanics, etc.,” says Vikash.

To make candidates enrol, Nanojobs had put several offline stalls and leveraged small retailers, mobile recharge shops, etc.

The founders always wanted to create a solution, which would bring a social impact.

Initial days of Nanojobs and its impact on jobseekers

Initially, almost no senior level executive wanted to be a part of Nanojobs. Recruiting good talent seemed to be a tough task. “However, over a period of time, we have been able to hire good team members, and trained some junior staff to take care of managerial responsibilities,” says Vikash. So far the duo have pooled in around Rs. 2 crore as bootstrapping investment and they hope to achieve break even by the end of next year. Meanwhile, Vikash says that some investors are keen to invest in the idea and the company will raise fund soon.

Ramesh Singh, a 26-year-old immigrant from Bihar is all the praise for Nanojobs. “I saw a hoarding in Lal Bagh (Mumbai) about Nanojobs and gave a missed call on the number given on it (07303440550). Later, a Nanojobs executive called me back and asked for all the details over the phone to create my resume,” says Ramesh. Within 8 days, Ramesh got a call from another Nanojobs associate and was appointed as an office-cum-delivery boy with a Mumbai-based startup in the education space.

Problem statement

At present, most of the manpower-consultants use existing job-portals, which have very little focus on low and medium staffing space. Generally, manpower consultants/startups adopt either word-of-mouth referrals or newspaper advertisements though both these ways have their own shortcomings. “Word-of-mouth is highly non-dependable whereas the newspaper advertisement model is very expensive and the life of an ad is just one day,” says Anupam. The above pain-points prompted the duo to create a portal to enlist only those who are required by every household or organizations. They make them available to prospective employers on-the-fly.

Feature and USPs

Besides listings, Nanojobs helps job-seekers to build resume over the phone and for non-tech savvy employer, the company offers offline service recruitment wherein it shortlists job-seekers for interview. In terms of traction, Nanojobs has received phenomenal feedback and appreciation. “Individuals who were finding it very difficult to find drivers or maids are now using NanoJobs.com to recruit such people on the go,” says Vikash.

Launched in September 2013, Nanojobs claims to have done over Rs. 25 lakhs of business so far. “Our USP lies in the database and we follow multi-tier verification mechanism before listing freelancers on the website,” says Vikash.

Challenges and how Nanojobs tackled them?

The startup depends highly on freelancers who work on the field to collect data from the job-seekers. As of now, more than 150 freelancers are working on it and the founders expect the number will see multiple-fold growth in the next two quarters. Building a database of job seekers in this segment proved to be the biggest challenge for Nanojobs. “Since we cannot expect them to come online, we need to go to them to get the application form filled. We have used various media to reach out to such job-seekers who are otherwise not available anywhere,” says Vikash. The startup had used smart advertising that enables jobseekers to register with just a missed call to 07303440550, which is then returned. No registration fee is charged.

Road ahead

The company would soon be expanding to other cities, including Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Hyderabad. “The plan is to build a database of at least 5 million job-seekers in the next 18 months,” signs off Vikash.

Conceptualized by B2B marketing experts with extensive experience and backed by QEDbaton, LeadEnrich is a full service marketing data management platform, providing cutting-edge solutions to enable B2B marketers to reach their audiences more precisely and cost efficiently. It is a self-serve platform designed to help companies filter dirty data, which helps them to conserve and stretch their marketing budgets.

Brainchild of Santosh Abraham, Milind Katti and Abhijit Gangoli, LeadEnrich primarily helps marketers reduce their data acquisition cost by 50%, as the platform first checks the existing repository to avoid duplicate purchases. Prior to LeadEnrich, Abhijit and Milind co-founded QEDbaton while Santosh was one of the core members of the company. Earlier, Abhijit worked with Xerox Corporation and Castrol India (Now BP).

Motivation behind LeadEnrich & starting-up

Abhijit Gangoli

Its parent company QEDbaton has been helping B2B marketers with their marketing data needs. Over time, the company noticed that a lot of its clients kept coming back to them to procure new marketing data, which they might have within their repository already. “But marketers faced a challenge in terms of reusing contacts from their existing repository mostly due to the absence of a platform, which could unify their scattered marketing data from various sources like spreadsheets, CRMs, and marketing automation platforms,” says Santosh, CEO and co-founder, LeadEnrich.

Generally, marketers did not have an option to look through their existing data, verify the contacts, and de-duplicate redundant data records. Hence, they ended up procuring new lists for different campaigns, losing the past acquired intelligence. Considering these challenges the trio designed the LeadEnrich platform to help them conserve their marketing budgets and also target audiences more precisely.

Milind Katti

“I was inspired by the passion of great entrepreneurs to bring dreams to reality, which changes the way we live, creates opportunities for others and leaves one’s mark in history,” Santosh says. At a simpler level, the motivation kicked in once Santosh had a grasp on the problem and soon, he became obsessed with finding and delivering a solution.

USPs and traction

The LeadEnrich platform can back-fill all firmographic and demographic level fields for your data to a high degree of accuracy (often in excess of 90%). The startup addresses the B2B marketer’s challenges via three solutions – EasyLead, DataEnrich and DataDoc. EasyLead is a web form/landing page form solution which helps marketers keep their form fields to a bare minimum, hence increasing conversions and preventing inaccurate leads entering the database. DataEnrich takes care of the unusable marketing data across different files, platforms and applications and ensures verified, cleansed, and marketing ready data.

Santosh Abraham

DataDoc is the marketer’s dashboard to assess the gaps in the current marketing data and to understand how much can be improved. This information can quantify the value of investing in data cleansing and data enrichment and identifies the impact poor data quality can have on the business – from lead generation to lead scoring to marketing revenue growth.

So far the company has been experiencing a considerable market response for LeadEnrich. “We have acquired nine clients since our beta launch in April 2013. Our customers comprise of enterprise product companies, mid-tiered software services companies, large enterprise software services companies and B2B media publishers,” informs Santosh.

Future plan

LeadEnrich intends to expand its partner network, integrate with more world class data sources and add an analytics layer to its platform that will provide clients with qualified leads and reduce time to market their solutions. “Our core differentiator is the ability to connect with multiple data sources to clean, enrich and analyse the quality of data and provide real time intelligence to our customers on potential leads,” concludes Santosh.

The EduStars 2013 finale is just 10 days away and we’ve been incredibly busy, going through the large number of startup applications that we received. While so much is said about the sorry state of the Indian education system and the low employability of our graduates, what has been really heartening to see is the number of exciting startups that are focusing on this space and trying to make a difference. With a large number of applications and very high competition, it was a tough call to shortlist a few.

Having said that, there were a few companies that really stood out and these companies were invited for one-on-one discussions with Accel Partners. After careful evaluation, we were convinced that one company really led the pack in terms of the traction that they have achieved. Please join us in congratulating Coimbatore-based Focus Academy for Career Enhancement (FACE) as we crown them, EduStar of the month.

To know more about FACE and the other 4 finalists for the month, please visit here.

With this, we have closed the EduStars application process and are gearing towards the finale on 6 December 2013, at GINSERV, Bangalore. Join us for half-a-day of interesting keynotes, panel discussions and pitches by the 10 EduStars finalists. To check out the agenda and book tickets, click here.

If you love shopping, what can be better than getting paid back for the shopping you do? While this is not possible in everyday life, such a possibility exists if you are a Mystery Shopper – where the shopper is shopping with the intent of assessing the product or quality of service of a particular company at the behest of the company. And for taking this effort of giving qualitative feedback to the company, they reimburse you. Shoppers are informed of the assignment and those who pass the profiling criteria are selected to perform the audit. The actual audit is even simpler – the shopper visits a store or experiences a service like a normal customer, and makes observations on key parameters like store ambience, staff’s selling ability etc. Post this, they fill up an online questionnaire and submit it to Red Quanta. In return, they get a pre-decided incentive for their time and effort. This then becomes a valued feedback which helps to garner a reality perception map for the brand.

This service has been traditionally provided by many brand consulting companies, but now we have a startup, Red Quanta, that has found a niche to do just this. Founded by Pankaj Guglani two years ago, Red Quanta has today grown into a sizeable business. We had spoken to founder Pankaj when the venture had just launched, and recently caught up with him to map the progress.

From 10 clients in the first year to 250 clients today, Red Quanta has grown exponentially. The shoppers network working with Red Quanta to service this 250 clients is 30,000 strong and spread across the length and breadth of the country. Today Red Quanta offers its services in over 550 cities in India as well as a few other countries. The startup recently launched its mobile app, which lets shoppers select, sign up and perform audits on the go. The app lets shoppers browse through a variety of assignments, get more information on the ones they are interested in and also sign up for the same. The shoppers are also constantly updated about new brands, new assignments and mystery shopping related news from around the city. The app will be available through both Android as well as iOS platform.

The startup has worked with brands like Sony, Reliance Digital, French Connection, Calvin Klien, Pepsi, ITC and Nissan among others. On the expansion plans, Pankaj says they plan to grow across industry verticals, services offered and geographies. “We are looking to build separate business units for different sectors like automobile, real estate, hospitality etc. to offer more specialized services. In terms of services offered also, we have a few innovative services in pipeline to complement our existing offerings. We are already serving our clients in some of the international markets and plan to increase our global footprint soon,” he says.

On 20 April 2010, when half the world was asleep, an underwater rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico: the infamous Macondo blowout. BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig burnt, sank and leaked 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. At last count, this cost the oil company $42.2 billion in criminal and civil settlements alone.

This was the largest marine oil spill in the world, but even smaller blowouts than the Macondo have huge costs – upwards of $1 billion. Hence the oil and gas industry’s desperation to find newer, more effective ways to prevent them. And this is where Flutura, a one-and-a-half-year-old tech startup in Bangalore, comes into the picture.

It seems inconceivable that a small company started last year by three ex-employees of MindTree can solve a problem as mammoth as preventing oil well blowouts. But that’s the beauty of information technology – it’s often more a matter of brain than brawn.

Oil rigs have thousands of alert mechanisms. Each drill head has about 25 sensors, all of them spewing out data every 15 seconds. The problem is that each sensor is monitored individually. This is like going to a concert and being plugged in to only one instrument at a time. If you don’t listen to them all playing together, how can you appreciate the music?

That’s what a Flutura data wiz figured – that if the big data from all the sensors on an oil rig were to be correlated, and made sense of, there would be more than enough warning of impending trouble. And this is exactly what Flutura does. Their patent-pending Cerebra Signal Studio makes sense of big data from machines, not just in oil rigs, but in areas as diverse as telecom and retail, power grids and smart buildings.

“Machines are constantly talking. It’s just that not many are listening. We do. Quite like how the brain receives millions of signals in any situation, processes it and makes sense of it in order to respond,” says Krishnan Raman, Co-Founder and CEO, Flutura.

When a major travel portal saw a sharp drop in bookings after they moved applications from the desktop to a mobile platform, they were puzzled. Analytics indicated that large numbers of people were still looking at their offerings, but far too few of them made bookings. Flutura helped them figure out how to remove friction points in the booking process. “We took their entire machine logs on customers — login, location, browser data, mode of payments, etc. — applied our algorithms to identify patterns and suggested corrective actions (such as offering more payment options). This significantly increased the look-to-book ratio,” explains Derick Jose, another co-founder of Flutura. The technology can thus be used both to contain massive operational risk, as in the oil rigs, and to dramatically increase operational efficiency, as in the travel portals.

Tame, Sense, Respond Engine

Flutura places themselves at “the cusp of M2M and big data”, M2M standing for machine-to-machine. Krishnan, Derick and the third co-founder, Srikanth Muralidhar, had earlier been responsible for scaling up the data and analytics division of IT major MindTree, where they worked for 15 years. They had dealt with big data too in projects such as UID which set out to create a unique identification for every Indian citizen. The architecture for the large datasets in UID, similar to those used by Google and Yahoo, opened their eyes to new possibilities. But it was when they saw the untapped potential in big data from machines that they decided to branch out and create a new software product for this space.

“Today we face a firehose of machine information. To make sense of it, we need to tame that data beast first. This can be done only by using complex algorithms and data models. Cerebra Signal Studio does that, and then responds to the answers found, in real time. We call it a Tame, Sense, Respond Engine,” Krishnan explains.

The underlying technology – or Lego blocks of algorithms and models, as Derick puts it – can be applied across a wide range of sectors, while specific solutions called Cerebra Nano Apps are developed for each business or industry. “The technology component is not easy to understand. Those are like the roots of a tree, hidden below the ground. Above the ground are the Nano Apps, the fruits. Businesses understand those,” adds Derick.

Cerebra Signal Studio is in the process of being patented in the United States. That will just be the next step for Flutura, winner of the TechSparks 2013, a flagship programme of YourStory which ferrets out the most promising technology startups of the year. They were also picked among the global Top 20 Most Promising Big Data companies to watch out for, by CIO Review in the Bay Area.

Driving product renaissance

Krishnan is excited at being part of what he calls a software product renaissance in India. Large Indian companies, he feels, are still preoccupied with services, in which there was easy money to be made in the past. Krishnan, Derick and Srikanth, whose inclination had been towards developing software products, felt the time was ripe to break away.

“Earlier, for product startups, it was tough to find risk capital or mentors. In the last two years, both these aspects have changed,” says Derick. Flutura recently attracted funding from the Bay Area based Hive, which will be used to expand their markets in the US, Germany and Japan where there is big demand for Big Data Analytics.

Three men in a garage

Breaking into these markets has not been easy for Flutura. There is an obvious mistrust for product solutions from India because of its long service industry association.

About 15 months ago, recounts Krishnan, Flutura made a presentation to a multi-billion-dollar company, showing the tremendous value their solution would provide. The company’s officials were suitably impressed, and the Flutura team flew back to India happy with the promise that a letter of intent would follow soon. When there was no offer, they called up the company only to hear this: “How can we give such a crucial project to three men in a garage?”

The Flutura trio decided to take a chance. They risked their own money and time to go ahead and build the solution anyway. “Three-and-a-half months later, we presented the solution to the company. They loved it so much that they signed us on immediately,” says Krishnan.

Flutura’s solutions now have several early adopters among Fortune 25 companies in the US, Europe, the Middle-East and India. They have also learnt the hard way that it wasn’t enough to have a great product. It was after they started presenting their solutions in monetary terms, showing the return-on-investment, that they began to clinch big deals.

The power of listening

Flutura currently has a 60-member team, and it has become an aspirational company, able to attract top notch engineering talent for cutting edge software product solutions. Sugato Ray, for instance, has an electrical engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but chose to work at Flutura. He feels this is where he can connect all the dots between the product being developed, its impact on businesses and how it is being monetised. “Here, we have the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach at the same time. So I can see the whole puzzle at once. Also, there is direct visibility to the top leadership, unlike in huge companies,” Sugato says.

The learning curve has been steep. “When I joined, I didn’t know as much programming as a computer scientist does. That was because I studied electrical engineering in college. Within two months here I learnt what I would’ve learnt in three semesters of a computer engineering course. That was a huge thing for me,” he explains.

Most of all, Sugato is excited to be working in the futuristic domain of building software products that act on big data from machines. There can be a myriad scenarios where it can play a vital role. A Flutura data scientist sitting in Houston, for instance, recently played digital Sherlock Holmes for an oil major, preventing a possible disaster at the other end of the world in Australia. Noticing a radical increase in the temperature of the drill head, he reached out to the team on the ground, but there was nothing in the ambience to explain it. It was on correlation with data from another sensor showing an increase in wind pressure – without wind activity on the ground – that the problem was finally identified. The exhaust gas was being blown into the motor air vents of the drill head, causing the rise in temperature. A simple change in direction of the exhaust sorted out what was a potentially hazardous situation.

Perhaps, if anybody out there had been listening to the machines, the Macondo blowout may also have been avoided, saving billions of dollars and preventing irreparable environmental damage. Thankfully, Flutura is listening now.

We had Krishnan Raman & Derick Jose, Founders, Flutura at TechSparks Grand Finale 2013. Watch this video, as they talk about the genesis of Flutura and how they are interacting with machines.

In 1970, an Indian lady traveled to the US on a whim. It was only after she reached there that she realized she didn’t have enough money on her. In a foreign land without any aid at hand, she somehow managed to make her way around. It was the travel DNA in her that let her jump out of her comfort zone in the first place and then she was able to survive. She came back home with some very happy memories that lasted forever. This lady was the grandmother of Yuktie Jhangiani and Diipti Jhangiani.

Yuktie Jhangiani and Diipti Jhangiani

Travel has always been in the blood of this family and they’ve especially had a liking for colder places. “We absolutely love trekking and I remember that most of the vacations of mine have been in the lovely mountains of North India,” says Yuktie. It was in 1996 that their mother, Vandana Jhangiani who is also a travel freak decided to setup a shop that would cater to the needs of travellers going to cold places. That is how their retail store came up in Khar, Mumbai.

That shop has been a popular one amongst the tourists and taking this legacy forward to attain scale, they have went online now. “We realized that a lot of people wanted the gear we stocked and a lot of orders were coming from outside Mumbai. eCommerce was the best way that we could satisfy this need,” says Yukti who along with Diipti take care of the eCommerce store. Yuktie is a CA while Diipti has been a media professional working with several Media MNCs.

The company is named after their grandmother- Prrems and they deal specifically in winter wear. Snow and winter jackets, woollen coats, thermals, sweatshirts, raincoats- they’ve got all things winter and they promote Indian brands. “We have more than 50 brands with us and more than 90% of them are Indian,” says Yuktie. She goes on to give an example of a couple who bought gear worth INR 2 lakh from a well known global brand while she and her sister got everything from Prrems for under INR 10,000. “We have been in the space and now have an eye for which brands actually work. So shopping from us will surely save you some money which you can use to make an additional trip,” says Yuktie with a smile.

Owing to a lack of some specific gear, Prrems has also ventured into manufacturing which has helped them complete their range. A total team of 10 including the store and the eCommerce venture, Prrems works very closely with their customers and takes delight in talking with them and sharing their stories. “We also intend to do events which will bring all the travellers together and share their stories with like minded people,” says Yuktie. (they have started building towards this with their blog)

The eCommerce store has been launched a couple of months ago and do around a delivery a day. We’ve seen this growing trend of retail business being taken forward by the new generation via the eCommerce channel. Be it Hardik Shah with education or Premsri Jain with Bartanwale, online channel is proving to be a good support for the offline businesses and all these efforts accumulate to help realize the potential of eCommerce in India.

Website: Prrems