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Is the Hyperlocal Model Fundamentally Flawed?

There are about 50+ startups in India, which are offering hyperlocal services (or what is being called Offline to Online O2O) – connecting online shoppers to brick and mortar retailers. They vary in the segments that they are addressing, with grocery and daily needs being the most popular ones.

One thing which is common across all these hyperlocal startups is the process followed – they put your inventory online; make the purchase happen from their portal or app; pick-up goods from the retailers shop; and deliver to the end customer. The retailer doesn’t have any visibility on the end customer. They just receive a blind order, the packaged goods are thereafter picked up by the delivery boy, to be delivered to the right customer.

Is this model good for brick-and-mortar retail? In the short run, it may seem so as you can get some additional orders from people who shop online, but what about the long run? If you are not interested in providing a customer experience, gaining trust via human interaction and building loyalty, why are you running a retail outlet in the first place? Why are you paying rentals for a premium location and spending zillions on interior decor and training sales staff? You should pack-up and set-up a warehouse in some dingy godown and just package goods as per orders received online!

I hope you can see where it is heading. With no relationship with the customer, you have lost all your identity and differentiation. Your business gets totally commoditized. You can play only on margins and the person who has scale or is capable of running a sweat shop, to cut costs, wins. You relegate yourself and your children to the bottom of the retail pyramid, with a constant struggle for margins and playing at the mercy of the on-line aggregator. If this online partners turns into a foe and demands a piece of your cake, you are left with no option but to shell it as you have lost all capability to secure a customer based on your strengths.

If the retailers want to get business from online shoppers, they have to offer something that pulls these online shoppers to their store. Create more footfalls by adding the online community to your regular shoppers. Not the other way round, wherein you lose your regular customers also to the faceless online world! This is what is happening with the hyperlocal offering today.

One of the alternatives could be a situation where the offline retailer may try and pull the online customer. The customer then, gets the best of both worlds. There are certain applications running in the market which connects an online shopper to the store and generates additional footfalls. It helps in retaining store’s identity and build upon the existing customer loyalty, instead of taking away the loyal customer.

You can share your views in the comments below.

Guest Post contributed by Suresh Kabra, Founder, PriceMap

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Open Source leaders discuss innovation, entrepreneurship and software patents.

Rohini Lakshané attended “Open Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Our Digital Culture” in Bangalore on August 13, 2015. Major takeaways from the event are documented in this post.

Prof. Eben Moglen on FOSS and entrepreneurship

  • The culture of business in the 21st century needs open source software or free software because there is one Internet governed by one set of rules, protocols and APIs that make it possible for us to interact with each another. The Internet made everybody interdependent on everybody else. Startup culture needs free and open source software (FOSS) because startups are an insurgency, a guerrilla activity in business. The incumbents in a capitalistic world dislikes competition and detests that existing resources, such as FOSS, enable insurgents to circumvent some of the steep curve that they had to climb in order to become incumbents.
  • Hardware is developing in ways that make the idea of proprietary development of software obsolete. There is no large producer of proprietary software that isn’t also dependent on FOSS. Microsoft Cloud is based on deployments that do not use Windows but are based on FOSS. The era of Android as a semi-closed, semi-proprietary form of FOSS is over. Big and small companies around the world are exploiting the open source nature of Android.
  • Free software is a renewable resource not a commodity. Management is needed to avoid over-consumption or destruction of the FOSS ecosystem. Software is to the 21st century economic life what coal, steel, and rare earth metals were at the end of the previous century.
  • FOSS turned out to be about developing human brains. It turned out to be about using human intelligence in software better. Earlier universities, engineering colleges and research institutions were the greatest manufacturers and users of FOSS. Now businesses of all sizes are.
  • When Richard Stallman and Prof. Eben Moglen set out to make GPL free, they initiated a large public discussion process, the primary goal of which was to ensure that individual developers have as much right to talk and to be heard as loudly as the largest firms in the world. At the end of the negotiation process, 35 or 36 of the largest patent holders in the IT industry accepted the basic agreement to be a part of the commons. — Incumbents like people to pay for a seat at the table. Paying to have an opinion is a pretty serious part of the landscape of the patent system.

Prof. Eben Moglen on Digital India

  • Every e-governance project that the Indian government buys should use FOSS. The very nature of the way the citizens and governments interact can come to be mediated by software that people can read, understand, modify, and improve. An enormous ecosystem will come up — a kind of public–private partnership (PPP) in the improvement of governance and government services, which is far more useful than most other forms of PPP conceptualised in the developed world in the 20th century.
  • Everybody has a stake in the success of this policy. Several corporations are working against this policy as they once stated that they do not need FOSS.
  • The biggest market for both making and consuming software in the world is in India, because the science done here will dominate global software making, which in turn will define how the Internet works, which in turn will define society. One can’t develop the largest society on earth by reinventing the wheel. The government is going to understand that only the sharing of knowledge and the sharing of forms of inventing would enable the largest society in the world to develop itself freely and take its place in the forefront of digital humanity.
  • If every state government’s data centre across India is going to be turned into a cloud, one state might have VMWare, another might have AWS, and so on, it would be disastrous. To prevent this, all e-governance activities of every state government and federal agency in India could be conducted in one, big, homogeneous Indian cloud. This would enable utility computing across the country for all citizens, which would also make room for citizen computing to happen. When one moves towards architectures of omnipresent utility computing with large amounts of memory flatly available to everybody, one is going to be describing a national computing environment for a billion people. We can’t even begin to model it until we start accomplishing it.
  • Prof. Eben Moglen’s ambition is that there comes a time not very long from now when basic data science is taught in Indian secondary schools. The software is free and all the big data sets are public. A nation of a 100 million data scientists rules the world.

Keith Bergelt on the Open Invention Network

    • Over the past 10 years, Open Invention Network (OIN) has emerged as the largest patent non-aggression community in the history of technology. It has around 1,700 participants and is adding almost 2 participants every day. In the last quarter, OIN had approximately 200 licensees.
    • There is now a cultural transformation where companies are recognising that where OIN members collaborate, they shouldn’t use patents to stop or slow down progress. Where members compete, they choose to invent while utilising defensive patents publications. What we are doing is a patent collaboration and a technical collaboration that exists in major projects around the world.
    • OIN has been making a major effort since January 2015 to spend more time in India and China to be able to ensure that the technological might and expertise represented in the two countries can be a part of the global community, and that global projects can start here. “We can expect to leverage the expertise of the community to be able to drive innovation from here [India and China]. It’s not about IBM investing a billion dollars a year since 1999 and having some birthright to driving the open source initiatives around the world or about Google or Red Hat or anyone else. You have the ability to impact major changes and we want to be able to support you in the name of freedom of action as participants.”

Panel Discussion

Patent Wars and Innovation

  • In the past 5 to 7 years, patent wars in the handset segment of the information technology (IT) market have wasted tens of billions of dollars on litigation, and on raising the price of patent armaments. This patent litigation was purely an economic loss to the IT industry and it contributed nothing. If the patent system strangles invention, non-profit groups, non-commercial bodies, free software makers, and start-ups cannot invent freely.
  • Defensive patent publications, such as those made by IBM, lead to the gross underestimation of the inventive power and output of the company. People are struggling to find something to evaluate the productive output of an entity – startup, micro-industry or macro-industry. Patents are being used inappropriately and it’s part of the corruption of the patent system. Any venture capitalist (VC) who believes that either the innovative capacities or the potential success factors of a start-up are tied to its patents should know that there are only a minuscule number of cases where patents are the differentiator. The differentiators required in order to sustain business are how smart the people are, how quickly they innovate, and how quickly they are able to adapt to complex situations. We see a trend in the US of not equating patents with innovation. The core-developer and hacker communities are largely anti-patent.
  • However, the flip side is that if the FOSS communities do not patent defensively, i.e., acquire and publish patents for their inventions in order to prevent others from getting patents in one jurisdiction or another, patent trolls will eventually encroach on the communities’ inventive output. The only people making money out of this whole process are lawyers. It is slowing down the uptake of technology by creating fears and doubts in the system.
  • FOSS communities didn’t qualify everything produced in the 23 years of (Linus’) Linux, which would have let the service serve as stable prior art, preventing other people from filing patents. We can debate what is patentable subject matter in general or whether software should be patentable, but in the meantime if we can be proactive and file everything that we have in defensive publications and make it accessible to the patent and trademark offices here and around the world, we will have far fewer patents. We need to be activists in making sure that people can’t file patents that are representative of the creativity of a community.
  • The Chinese government has instituted a programme designed to produce defensive publications in order to capture all the inventiveness across their industries, to be able to ensure that the quality of what ultimately gets patented is at least as high.
  • The US has a massive repository called ip.com, which is with every patent examiner of the USPTO.
  • India does not grant software patents as per section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, but that doesn’t mean that no software patents are being granted. One of the empirical studies conducted by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) in India shows that 98.3% of the [telecom and computing technology] patents granted till 2013 went to multinational corporations. Almost none of the assignees are Indian.
  • In the context of the ongoing patent infringement law suits filed in the Delhi High Court by Ericsson [link]: The Delhi High Court has had a reputation of being very pro-intellectual property from the beginning.
  • Also, there is pressure from trade organisations. In August 2015, Ericsson along with ASSOCHAM invited the Director General of the Competition Commission of India to present a paper about why patents are good. It is essential to determine how the rules of conflict of interest apply here. This is exactly what the pharmaceutical industry would do. The only bodies who would object are Doctors Without Borders (MSF) or some local organisations who realise that high priced patented drugs is not what India needs and that we do not need to have the same IP policy as the US or Japan. We only need a different policy.
  • The Special 301 Report of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is a big sham, and it suggests that India doesn’t have strict enforcement of IP law. India does, unlike China.
  • Accenture has been granted a software patent in India. The patent is about an expert present in a remote location transferring knowledge to somebody who is listening in another location. Universities offering MOOCs, BPOs, and many other services would fall under such a patent. SFLC spent four years trying to fight this patent. The first defence of Accenture’s battery of lawyers was that they won’t use the patent.
  • Patents of very low quality are being bought at very high prices. The tax system or the subsidy system for innovation regards all patents as equal. This is a pricing failure and that should be corrected by other forms of intervention. The pendulum has already begun to swing the other way. Alice Corp was the third consecutive and unanimous ruling by the US Supreme Court that abstract ideas are not patentable. Patent applications pertaining to business methods and algorithms are increasingly being rejected by the USPTO after the ruling.

Prof. Eben Moglen on Facebook:

Facebook is a badly designed technology because there is one Man in the Middle who keeps all the logs. The privacy problem with Facebook is not just about what people post. It’s about surveillance and data mining of web reading behaviour. It is a social danger that ought not to exist. I have said since 2010 is that we can’t forbid it; let’s replace it. It means bringing the web back as a writeable medium for people in an easy way. What I see as next-generation architecture could just as well be described as Tim Burners Lee’s previous generation architecture.

You have to be able to trust the Internet. If you can’t, you are going to be living in the shadow of govt surveillance, corporate surveillance, the fear of identity theft, and so on. We need to be able to explain to people what kind of software they can trust and what kind they can’t. Distributed social networking will happen; it’s not that difficult a problem.

An example of federated networking is Freedombox, a cheap hardware doing router jobs using free software in ways that encourage privacy. The pilot project for Freedombox has been deployed in little villages in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These routers don’t deliver logs to a thug in a hoodie in Menlo Park.

By Rohini L, Reblogged from the The Centre for Internet and Society Blog.

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Why You Should Attend the ERPNext Conference

In year 2000, Apple was lagging far behind Microsoft’s Windows Operating System and it seemed there would be no way it could catch up. In a brilliant and desperate move, Apple decided to build its next generation operating system using the best open source technology available at the time. Steve Jobs hired Jordan Hubbard, the co-creator of FreeBSD, a popular Unix distribution and a well known open source hacker to help build the best and the most secure operating system based on open source software. At this ERPNext conference, hear from Jordan how open source helped a company like Apple to build and commercialize some of the best technology we can use today.

Open source is the technology success story that few people talk about. Today the most trailblazing technology companies are not only dependent on open source, but are active contributors to it. Companies love to showcase their open source contributions not only to attract the best talent but also to build infrastructure components in a collaborative manner. And that is not all. Using open source allows companies to dive deep into their technology stack and integrate their processes to a level that is not possible with proprietary tools. And we have not even talked about the cost savings.

Along with Jordan Hubbard, you will hear from one of the most popular open source projects run out of India. Kovid Goyal was a graduate student in the US when he built an e-book converter for his use which he called Calibre. Kovid is now based in India and works full time on this project. Today Cailbre is actively used by 3 million users across 200 countries. Get to hear about this amazing journey from the author of Calibre and his views on how open source is helping millions of people use e-books without being tied to proprietary platforms.

By coming to the ERPNext Conference, you will learn how open source can transform your organization. If you ever had questions that you wanted answered, this is the event to come to. These are some of the questions you will get answers to

  1. How using Open Source will benefit my organization
  2. How are Open Source projects sustained
  3. Is Open Source software well designed.
  4. Can I get professional quality support for Open Source?
  5. Is is safe to use Open Source?
  6. Are Open Source enterprise tools mature?
  7. What is cost of using open source?

erpnextApart from this, there will be talks by ERPNext users and developers that will help you:

  1. Evaluate how ERPNext can benefit my organization
  2. Learn about the features of ERPNext
  3. Learn why ERPNext is one of the best designed enterprise applications available.
  4. Learn from other users of ERPNext
  5. Evaluate the state of the ERPNext project
  6. Learn how ERPNext can be extended and customized
  7. What is the process of implementing ERPNext

So if you are using Tally, Quickbooks, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, SAP (god forbid), you are really paying too much and getting too little from your current enterprise software.

Seating is limited, and registration is required (and will include lunch). So register your seat today.

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Show Me The Money

Who doesn’t remember the famous four words of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire? The relevance of these words encompasses all generations. We look at the rich and mighty with a hint of jealousy, sometimes incredulously , some other times in awe, yet other times perturbed. On the other hand, the poor and downtrodden are subjugated to our pity, dissidence, even repulsion.

Now that makes one thing very clear- more or less or none, but money has the power to trigger our insides.

My husband and I abide by our morning ritual of reading the good,the bad and the ugly, hidden in the dull text of black ink, spread accurately on those beautifully blending 20 crisp peachy pages; unravelling the mystery of this world layer by layer with every sip of our invigorating morning tea. A ritual so intellectually stimulating , consequential in further bonding, has now become a regular phenomenon. Every morning, the message is the same– business ecosystem in its finest form, the mood of the start-ups at its optimistic best. Such positive reinforcements does uplift our spirits but it bewilders us too.

Modi Ji’s “Make In India” mantra began to unfold with the conception of India’s biggest e-commerce space- FLIPKART, by the Bansal duo. And with it started a revolution that took the entire nation by surprise. Since the beginning of last year, every other day(if not every day) ET reflects such a luminous picture of our economy. And the chunk of this positivity comes from the exhilarating news of one start-up after another. Either they have raised a colossal amount in funding, or they have had a path-breaking M&A, or they have been subjected to overwhelming(read ‘obnoxious) valuations.

These recurrent success stories have given birth to a new breed of entrepreneurs- the “COPY CATS” who are mindlessly jumping the bandwagon. They think they have cracked the code behind the success of these new age companies. The keywords are countable- IIT, IIM , e-commerce, m-commerce, angel investor- blend one element with another or all, and your magical potion is ready. And this potion is so potent that it affirms success against all odds. Zomato, TaxiForSure, Flipkart, Snapdeal, ZoRooms- all have been founded by IIT/IIM alumni.

The “me-too” entrepreneurs have a flawless design ready to trap potential investors. The code is a no-brainer though; project a high traction metamorphosing into more investors, subsequently larger funds, perfectly ending into higher valuation.

The silver lining,however, is that crony capitalism is fading and a new crop of optimistic entrepreneurs is mushrooming. No longer you need to be a TATA or an AMBANI to dream big. The new age start-ups and their success stories have infused a new confidence in today’s generation. They can dare to dream, and that too big. Now that’s one promising change in our country’s antediluvian thinking where a farmer’s son could only dream of becoming a farmer, a teacher’s son only a teacher. It is this promising environment that allowed the 18 year old college drop-out from Orissa in 2011 to venture into an unknown territory and build today’s famous OYO rooms in 2013. He’s been in limelight recently for having raised an elephantine amount($100 million) from Japan’s Soft Bank. This definitely is an extremely positive outcome of this start-up culture where no longer fears detain you in realising your truest potential.

Have the zeal, And crack the deal.

The definition of success is,however, very unique to this breed. Ideally a successful business should generate large revenues, handsome profits,employ large no: of people and make a social impact. While a few of these new age start-ups fulfil most of these criteria, the most profound aspect of running any business is not met. Yes, I am talking about PROFIT(in BOLD letters).

Flipkart, Snapdeal, Zomato, are few such organisations worthy of enviable valuations with no profits. If I may elaborate no profits as “million dollar losses”.

SP-CP=Profit, a formula that even my 10 year old understands is of no consequence to the companies of the likes of Flipkart or Snapdeal. We have grown up in an era of brick-and-motor companies. Making purchases online is still an alien concept to me. But what exists pan any business, culture, economy,era is one and only one thing- Profitability. In the quest for scale, profitability is taking a beating. Achieving traction by offering tantalising discounts doesn’t suffice zero profitability.

This is where Media plays the devil’s advocate. It craftily masks the “no-profit” feature of these companies and celebrates their “valuations” (all on paper). It shrewdly creates a larger than life image of these new-age entrepreneurs. It chooses to present to the audience what it wishes them to see and read; featuring them on cover page of leading business papers and magazines. As a result it creates a superficial success story that revolves around raising funds and basking in multi-million valuations. The bigger the funding, the bigger the legend-like stature, the crazier the media frenzy. This creates an environment where these “real” heroes are worshipped by the aspirational youth who are totally smitten by their relentless journey.

What everyone overlooks,however, is the sustainability of these companies who are riding on investor’s money and the dubious mechanism of discounts. And when these companies start to decline in their valuations, it this media that will rip them apart so brutally, so mercilessly.

So does that mean that media shouldn’t give credit where its due? That it shouldn’t encourage and celebrate those who dared to dream, who dared to give a form to their entrepreneurial spirit? Of course it should. It must applaud those took the risks, it must boost their morale, it must glorify their achievements. But it should refrain from painting a picture so perfect.

VCs who today are messiahs to these burgeoning start-ups are enjoying the spectacle with much aplomb. Every time they agree to fund, they gain significant media attention which heightens the public interests manifolds. These VCs are the ultimate gainers in this entire game plan as they create such a promising and utopian environment, thereby painting a surreal picture for these companies, while on an alert all through to making opportunistic exits. They are clever enough to bathe by the bank of this crocodile pond but will never swim in it. An entrepreneur is so enamoured by the VC culture that he fails to read between the lines and accepts the terms so faithfully; in most cases ends up getting short end of the stick. A recent example of this would be when Lane Becker and two of his co-founders sold their $50 million customer service company ‘GetSatisfaction’ to Sprinklr. He unabashedly claimed how the arrangement was nothing short of a fire sale where the VCs happily devoured the chunk of the pie leaving a tiny morsel for the founders.

My learning:”Get investor at your own risk”.

The sharp drop in valuations of new-age ventures in the US and China should be a wake up call for the Indian counterparts. Yelp, a US based restaurant search and review venture, lost its valuation by $5.9 billion from a year ago. The survival of its Indian “me-too” company Zomato which is barely 4% of Yelp’s revenues but a whooping 58% of its valuation, worries me aplenty. Market is going to correct soon and when it does it will take all these new-found companies by storm.

Who has seen tomorrow? How can these valuations be based on what will happen 10 years hence? The promise of tomorrow does not take into account future disruptions or new competition entering the marketplace.As Peter Thiel rightly captures the essence in his book-‘Zero To One’ by stating that companies may create a lot of value, without becoming valuable itself. In same breath he also states that most of a tech company’s value will come only in 10-15 years in future. Mystery of what lies ahead coupled with a loss-making present is indeed alarming. The prime objective of any business is Profit, and it should be given a rightful significance and not allow these insane valuations to steal the show. All this boils down to one and only one understanding-

Business is in profitability,

not in valuations…

Its in sustainability,

not discount mechanisms…

On paper all seems rosy,

But somebody has got to ‘SHOW ME THE MONEY’!!!!

Guest Post by Megha Chopra, Director/Board Member, Rategain

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India Inc’s Innovators Are Setting The Stage For The Ecosystem

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple Inc and one of the greatest innovator from the tech world, believed that innovation was the only way to win, and by no means did he just see innovation in making things more complex. An advocate of simplicity, he also reiterated, “Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” That’s why we, at GHV, believe “Innovation is not just doing something new. Sometimes it means pushing the existing more powerfully and elegantly.”

Innovation or doing things differently is something that has set the momentum of the “startup scene” in India. It is because of thinking differently, the “old wine in a new bottle” syndrome that has revamped and fuelled the success of top startups in the country today. Innovation is all about bringing something new and exciting to the customer. Given the cutthroat competition in the market today, innovative products and ideas are the key to differentiating yourself from others in the race.

Successful businesses often anticipate future trends and develop an idea, product or service that allows them to meet this future demand rapidly and effectively. It is not just about fulfilling the pain points of the consumers, but also being able to preempt the future needs of the consumers before they even feel them. In essence, predicting and fulfilling a future void and working on its solution in the present, staying ahead of the curve. Innovation can help you stay ahead of your competition as markets, technologies or trends shift, thereby giving you a definite edge.

This year, India has slipped 10 places in the Global Innovation Index to a disappointing 76th position. Imagine what we can accomplish as a nation if more people were to focus on innovation. We can easily transition to become a nation of job creators than job seekers.

Renowned global brands like 3M, GE, Lego, Nestlé, Pepsi and Starbucks are all from different industries, but have been constantly innovating their products. These companies have successfully created and supported an internal innovation capability that drives new products into the marketplace year after year with remarkable success. In fact, the very reason behind their success is that they made innovation a critical capability within their organisations. These companies recognised innovation as a key driver for success by enhancing the value that the business was delivering to customers.

With Indians like Nikesh Arora and Sundar Pichai, leading the heavy weight ‘innovating’ companies like SoftBank and Google, we are looking at a complete change in the way India and Indians are perceived globally; whether it is Indra Nooyi, Satya Nadella, Ajay Banga or Shantanu Narayen.

Innovation helps large companies survive challenges. According to Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation is the key to future success in business. For companies to become market leaders and retain that position, they have no choice but to innovate and disrupt an existing technology or market by recognising opportunities.

For example, Patym had revolutionised mobile commerce in India. Earlier, people were wary of storing their debit or credit card information online. The company created a secure digital wallet where a user can put in a small amount without threat of online and credit card fraud. The payment solutions provider uses an RBI approved semi-closed wallet that is being used everywhere, right from Domino’s Pizza to Zivame to Uber. The company now has over 80 Mn mobile wallets and more than 15 million orders per month.

Innovation is that one thing that all successful businesses worldwide have in common. Innovation is a part of their culture… it’s in their DNA.

To foster a spirit of innovation in today’s youth, iSPIRT is hosting InnoFest, a daylong event focused on kick starting the next wave of innovation in the country. The event to be held at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on 22ndAugust 2015, will offer young innovators a platform to present their ideas and interact with like-minded people from across the country. The daylong fest is meant to celebrate innovation and bring forward ideas that can become game changers for the nation.

Guest Post by Vikram Upadhyaya

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When it Comes to Startups, an 80% Fix is No Fix

In this polytheistic world of entrepreneurs, who is the Startup Initiative for?

There are many types of entrepreneurs. There is the self-employed vegetable-vendor type, the Thelawala. Then there is the small businessman in Okhla or Peenya who has grown to be in GST net. And how can one ignore the technology entrepreneur who graces the pages of ET every day . Even these tech startups come in many shapes and sizes. Some are after mainstream `Bharat’ consumers; others are building mass-luxury brands.Then there are fast followers in global markets or those who are rattling ferocious global players. And who can ignore startups that are filling white spaces in the safer domestic market and are aspiring to be national leaders.

What’s the one tool all successfulIn this polytheistic world of entrepreneurs, who is the Startup Initiative for? If it’s for all the various types of entrepreneurs, then it will quickly succumb to the 80% syndrome. Policy-makers will address things that are the common denominator for all types of entrepreneurs. While this is necessary , it’s not sufficient. As any product manager in the technology industry will tell you, this 80% fix is a recipe for failure.

To make a critical mass of changes, a persona-based policy making is needed. The biggest problem for Thelawala type entrepreneurs is absence of easy credit. For Peenya and Okhla business Peenya and Okhla businessmen, it is the inspector raj. For technology star raj. For technology startups it’s outdated regulations that thwart venture financing.

Each of these types of entrepreneurs is in pain today . Last year 54% of the funded technology startups redomiciled themselves outside India. This year, iSPIRT estimates, the exodus has accelerated and the number of companies redomiciling out of India will be 75% of all funded startups! There is crisis on another front too. India’s Global Innovation Index has been falling for four years in a row. We are no longer in the top 85 countries of the world! This innovation deficit has a bearing on sustainability of the entrepreneurship boom that we are witnessing right now. We are overly reliant on copy-paste entrepreneurship and this can only sustain if we keep MNCs out like China has done.

The most important decision for a policy-maker is focus on a specific type of entrepreneur. Only then the `how’ comes into focus and a cross-ministerial approach kicks in. Some of this is starting to happen. Later this week, there will be an important announcement by the Ministry of Finance about addressing venture-financing gaps in areas beyond e-commerce, neighbourhood commerce and consumer tech. There is a lot of work to be done to bring Startup India initiative to life. A nuanced henotheistic approach is needed (henotheism: involving devotion to a single god while accepting the existence of others). It can be done. Early signs give reason for cautious optimism.

 

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Free Open Software and Growing Entrepreneurship Climate in India

“Imagine if Mathematics was owned by corporates and every time you wanted to use it you had to buy some from a corporate!” started Eben Moglan, Founder of Software Freedom Law Centre at the Open Innovation and our Digital Future Lecture series organised by iSPIRT. It was definitely a thought provoking preview of the work that is taking place in India in the space of Free Open Source Software with Moglan emphasising the need to create a viable environment for an alternative legal scenario for the growing start ups in India. If Make in India has to be a success it is pertinent that start ups not only have feasible options of protecting their knowledge but more importantly are not infringing the big corporates patents. For the growing entrepreneurial system the system of patents is not only dampening but also acts as a growth step towards fund raising albeit detrimentally. While corporates file patents to demonstrate hold over knowledge in the past few years this has led to patents over software suits that impacts open source creation adversely.

SFLC and OIN are working towards shifting the game and ensuring that start ups have effective legal counsel available to not only create long term strategies but also to have access to defensive patent pool. Keith Berglt, CEO, OIN made a pertinent point when he said that the advantage that a start up needs is access to global patents to work with while they hack new solutions to global problems. With the emerging world of big data and the scope of solution creation from big data analysis is going to lead how Intellectual Property Laws of India are interpreted and eventually amended to feature in the innovative approaches of start ups. While the legal system holds IP close to its chest Mishi Choudhary, Legal Director, SFLC pointed out that the government is keen on defining start up specific legal mandates and modalities.

The realm of possibilities that open up for hackers creating solutions for todays problems is boundless when the team doesn’t have to die a thousand deaths at the hand of protracted patent defence suits! Whether or not big corporations will move towards releasing their grips over knowledge and creations through softwares has to be waited out but open source innovations are going to pave the way for future solutions in India, especially with low cost solutions, and need a better support mechanism. The Digital India mission needs open source creations to fuel remote learning mechanisms which in turn requires a robust structure that allows hacks in the existing software architectures.

It was only befitting that Moglan closed the discussion on how models like facebook need to be replaced with distributed data models equalling it with the power that open sharing contains over capitalist ownership.

Post contributed by Megha Sharma Bhagat

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Open Innovation, entrepreneurship, and our digital future

Open Innovation has lead to the creation of priceless resources like Wikipedia, and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that form the foundations of our digital society. The freedoms enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of young people around the world, hacking on laptops, hacking on servers, hacking on general purpose hardware is the primary source of the innovation which drove much of the world’s great economic expansion in the past ten years. This freedom to hack has enabled innovation and entrepreneurship, and made it possible for innovation to occur where it can occur without friction, which is at the bottom of the pyramid of capital.

As India witnesses one of the greatest entrepreneurial spurts in its history, much of it based on technologies built through collaboration and openness, it is important to understand the forces that drive the Open Innovation ecosystem. In this session, some of the brightest minds in the Open Innovation ecosystem, and the world of FOSS, will discuss:

  • 1) Why Open Innovation is important for India’s digital future
  • 2) Why Open Innovation and entrepreneurship are deeply interconnected
  • 3) How India can become one the leaders of this entrepreneurship
  • 4) What India needs to do to protect and nurture Open Innovation

The speakers are:

Prof. Eben Moglen: Prof. Eben Moglen is Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School. Professor Moglen is the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, which has represented many of the world’s leading free software developers. Professor Moglen earned his PhD in History and law degree at Yale University. He has taught at Columbia Law School since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia. In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society.

Keith Bergelt: Keith Bergelt is the chief executive officer of Open Invention Network (OIN), a collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux. In this capacity he is directly responsible for enabling, influencing and defending the integrity of the Linux ecosystem. Central to the achievement of his goals is the acquisition and transfer of patent rights designed to permit members of the Linux ecosystem to operate free of the threat of assertion and litigation from those whose business models are antithetical to innovation and global economic growth in information technology and computing.

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iSPIRT announces the launch of InnoFest 2015

 innofest_logo

      A ‘first of its kind’ marquee event to kick-start the next innovation wave in India, where

     Bengaluru takes the lead in showcasing Public-Private Partnership.

 

With iSPIRT, we are happy to announce the launch of InnoFest – a day long Innovation festival jointly organized and sponsored by Public and Private Enterprise. The event, to be held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on August 22nd 2015 is significant – in a daring break from a ’traditional event’ format, InnoFest shall be run as a festival celebrating Innovation…

Here is why…

India needs this movement; not only for Indians, but for the aspiring and emerging worlds’ 5 Billion people, as compared to innovations focused on the one billion in the first world, who are already well served. This is the only way India can avoid the middle income trap, as we grow at 7-8%. The vibrancy of grass root innovation cannot be experienced through speeches and panel discussions within enclosed halls; its energy and exuberance has to be felt and unleashed.

The Patrons of this event are Mr. Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Finance, Government of India; Mr. Nandan Nilekani, Former Chairman of Infosys and Former Chairman of UIDAI; Mrs. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Chairman and Managing Director of Biocon and Mr. Mohandas Pai, Chairman of the Board, Manipal Global Education.

Speaking at the launch, Mr. Pai said, “The idea of InnoFest is absolutely aligned with the Government’s thinking. If we are going to increase productivity, employment and opportunity for everyone in this country then we need a grassroots movement that will bring the best ideas to the table. Our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi has great vision in developing 100 smart cities across the country as well as a digital India and a leading science and technology program; innovation will certainly be a key driver for all these initiatives.”

Why Innovation, you may ask…

Simply because we have an ‘innovation’ deficit in the country today! We are no doubt an enterprising nation, but we still have a long way to go when we look at being an ‘innovative’ nation. However, please note that there is no shortage of imagination and creativity in India. We need to build our skills where this imagination and creativity is applied to generate unique solutions to local problems. InnoFest is the platform to tackle this challenge.

We strongly believe that to reduce the innovation deficit in India, we need to operate at two levels: the individual and the policy. InnoFest uniquely brings these two elements together:

  • The Young Ignited Minds: will sharpen their innovation skills in a fun and experiential setting
  • The Government of India: will activate thoughtful policies that will help fulfill the innovation potential of India

InnoFest will have various programs like MakerSpace, Product Zone, Hall of Fame, Young Innovators Zone, Townhall and eminent speakers across a galaxy of disciplines including Naveen Tiwari (InMobi), Rohan Shravanan (Notion Inc), K Ganesh (CEO, Portea Medical), Arundhati Nag (Film Personality), Vijay Chandru (Strand Life Sciences), Bhavish Aggarwal (CEO, Ola Cabs) and Phanindra Sama (RedBus).

According to Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder of iSPIRT and Co-Convenor of InnoFest, “If companies can innovate and transform their functioning and performance radically, why can’t countries? The idea of InnoFest is to distil the best ideas in enterprise and inspire individuals, corporates and Government organizations to take innovation to the common man. We are delighted that the Government has stepped in in a big way to enable this transformation and this cooperation between public bodies and private enterprises will lay the foundation for radical transformation in the country.”

InnoFest has been conceived as a day-long festival of ideas and inspiration that will exponentially multiply innovation across the country and make India into a Product Nation. iSPIRT strongly believes that a robust software product ecosystem is the key to rapid growth across the country. More than 1,000 professionals are expected to participate, pan India.

So, if you want to change the world AND put your own dent in the universe; make sure you are at InnoFest !!

Further details of the event are available on the Innofest website & FAQ’s can be accessed here.

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Meeting Magic Mike Moritz XXL

What is common to Cisco, Oracle, Google, Apple and WhatsApp?

Besides being some of the most iconic technology companies in history, all these marquee firms share one more thing in common – an investor named Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia Capital is arguably the most prestigious VC firm on the planet and its chairman, Michael (Mike)Moritz is undeniably a legend in the tech investment arena. In a glittering career spanning over thirty years, Mike Moritz has presciently identified and backed companies like Google long before they were the behemoths that we see today.

Mike was recently in Bangalore and shared some insights in an event organized by iSPIRT, India’s leading technology thinktank.

Backing unfundable startup chasing seemingly impossible dreams

When asked about what Sequoia looks for in a startup, Mike says that they look to fund people with a deep sense of purpose working on ideas that seem unfundable to others. In his view, the best entrepreneurs are obsessed with a particular idea and see it as their life’s mission to make that idea work.

They are ready to perseverefor years and make painful decisions to achieve this mission and exhibit an almost unnatural clarity of thought when they communicate this dream to others.

Start small, dream big

While history inevitably builds a romantic narrative around successful companies post facto, Mike believes that at the time they got off the ground the household names of today, each worth billions of dollars, started off with things that seemed small with little inkling on how that their startup would evolve into anything big.

On day one, very little is obvious – but as time goes by, opportunities open up almost magically so much so that a seemingly arcane PhD thesis about a way to index information metamorphosizes into a platform called Google that is valued more than Microsoft.

Steve Jobs – what to emulate and what to ignore

Many Indian founders are besotted with Steve Jobs and are fashioning themselves after him. Mike knew Steve Jobs well, in fact he authored a seminal book on him. He feels that the media largely missed the truth about Steve Jobs – while there are multiple stories about his temper and acerbic personality traits,at his essence, Jobs was a dreamer obsessed with his ideas on personal computing.

Despite all the failures that he had to face, he preserved through over a very long period and brought out innovations like the iPhone and the iPad. Rather than emulate his personality traits, Mike feels that entrepreneurs should learn this sense of playing the long game against impossible odds from Steve Jobs.

Go East

Mike is of the opinion that while hitherto, the US had a near monopoly on tech innovation, the next twenty five years will belong to the East.

He feels that the biggest companies of tomorrow will emerge from China and to a lesser degree from India. This has as much to do with the large local markets where competition is fierce as it has to do with the greater appetite for work, the resilience and the stronger fortitude that entrepreneurs from the East have.

In an era where competition is global and information is transmitted instantly, these qualities put Eastern entrepreneurs at a marked advantage compared to their Western peers.

Unicorns that may go extinct

While there is so much euphoria about Unicorns – startups that are worth at least $1 billion – Mike feels that there is a good chance that many of these companies are overvalued and will die sooner rather than later. In his considered opinion, the best companies will not get stuck up in valuation but will instead try to build sustainable business models.

Epilogue

While Mike’s insights were valuable and his humility and candor were admirable, one couldn’t help but notice a proverbial sting in the tale.

Does the thought of backing unfundable entrepreneurs still hold true in a world where VC firms are fiercely competing with each other to fund the next hot startup in thehot category du jour? While traditionally Sequoia has avoided funding competitors, six of the largest funded hyperlocal startups in India are all funded by them opening up seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of interest.

Similarly, it seems incongruous to caution about Unicorns and bubble valuations but simultaneously deploy huge rounds of capital in unproven companies in crowded winner-takes-all markets feeding the frenzy further.

While history has already recognized Mike Moritz as a doyen of technology investing, time will tell whether his firm will continue to build on his pioneering path or chalk out a completely different destiny.

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The best way to predict the future is to invent it!

India is interestingly poised today. About half of India’s 1.25billion people are under the age of 25 and by 2020, India will be the world’s youngest country with an average age of 29. According to the World Bank, India’s will overtake China to become the world’s fastest growing big economy by 2017-18. The scale of opportunity – and of course the challenge – in India is unprecedented. Millions of jobs have to be created in the coming years. Wealth has to be created. At an increasing pace and in   an ever changing world.

It is clear to all, including the government, that technology will play an ever more important role in the future. The inevitability of that fact is slowly but surely seeping into the consciousness of all decision makers at all levels. That technology needs to be embraced and leveraged in improving the lives of Indians.

New technologies and platforms are rapidly emerging – e.g., IoT, Mobile/Smart phones, Cloud, Aadhar, Payments – that can and will have profound impact on how we as a country think about the next 5-10years. Our future.

It is clear that continuing to do what we’ve done since 1947 isn’t going to get us far into the future.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “Change is the only constant” are two popular adages usually bandied about in seminars, corporate-speak, by VC s and successful entrepreneurs! What’s left unsaid are – how do I invent the future? How do I deal with change? And from there on to, what are the possible futures? What are the possible changes? What’s causing them? How will different industries like Financial Services, Retail, Healthcare be likely impacted?

These are the tough questions. Successful entrepreneurs, investors, corporations, academics and governments spend – or, need to spend – a lot of time thinking about such issues.

What are new ways of framing the potential and overcoming these challenges? What is unique about India and what solutions and resources can be shared from around the world? How can India utilize the enormous, young and entrepreneurial energy to craft scalable solutions to impact lives? What are the emerging global megatrends that can be harnessed that will enable India to leapfrog decades of inefficiency and empower people?

We have done this before: From mainframe computing to client-server. From land line to mobile. From paper based to digital identity.

Can we do this again across multiple areas? What will it take?

Answers will be found through debate and discussion by various stakeholders invested in the India of a new India– government, thought leaders, practitioners, entrepreneurs, executives among others. A forum for learning, discussing, debating, sharing of ideas of a future impacted by technology would be very impactful. To catalyse conversations, connections and collaborations that would help provide the answers to the questions.

A journey of a million miles begins with a single step. It is time for that 1st meaningful step to be taken!

LeapFrogTIE LEAPFROG. AUGUST 21ST 2015. ITC GARDENIA BANGALORE. http://www.tieleapfrog.in/

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FinTech-Tech: The future of banking?

Banking and financial services industry is undergoing a massive transformation all over the world. While until the early 2010, FinTech wasn’t even on the radar of banking institutions let alone the entrepreneurial kinds, suddenly there is an upsurge in activity in the FinTech community.

Global FinTech financing has grown from less than $930 million for the whole of 2008 to over $1.04 billion in the month of October 2014 alone.

Customer experience is driving and bringing forth disruptive technologies and innovation in the form of mobile wallets, branchless banking et all and FinTech  startups offering a plethora of banking solutions – from payments, money transfer to apps and peer-to-peer lending.

I’ve been following the FinTech industry for a while now and can see spurt of activities in different parts of the world and different sections of the communities coming together to give it its due importance.

We can see growing signs of action in Australia with a strong FinTech startup ecosystem taking shape seeking to disrupt the traditional banking industry. Similarly, London is becoming quite a hub of all things disruptive in the financial services industry globally with branchless banking and an ever increasing focus on providing banking services to the unbanked. KPMG in collaboration with AWI and the Financial Services Council has released a report detailing 50 of the world’s strongest FinTech innovators.

Though traditional banks are now making conscious efforts to revamp their outdated systems and introduce new offerings to lure Millennials, they are, however, still competing with other global banks and financial institutions.

According to a recent post by Scott Walcheck, “Financial services are becoming à la carte. People, particularly millennials, are moving away from single monolithic banking institutions serving the majority of their financial needs to hand picking the specialized services that work for them.” Banks and financial institutions are yet to cover ground to compete with the likes of new entrants in the financial services arena.

It is already evident that FinTech is disrupting the traditional banking models. An interesting development on the sidelines of FinTech in the financial industry is the entry of new players in the banking industry. Tech giants Apple, Facebook and Google too have jumped onto the financial bandwagon and showing keen interest to provide financial services to their customer base. These players are using their platforms and scale of their existing user base to provide gamut of services – fee free payments, peer-to-peer payments etc.

We are living in a time where Gen Y or ‘Millennials’ have virtually grown up connected and accustomed to open and social lives. The future potential customers of financial services will be driven by these expectations. Tech giants such as Facebook and Apple would enjoy an upper hand compared to FinTech or traditional banking institutions in gaining the trust of these customers as they have spent time and money building brand equity and understanding their customers’ psychology. According to a recent study by Gemalto, “One in four millennials has effectively abandoned branches altogether.”

There is an interesting report by the UK Government Office for Science on FinTech  Futures: The UK as a world leader in Financial Technologies which outlines measures such as setting up of a “FinTech  Advisory Group” with representation from the government, regulators, trade associations amongst others for developing UK as a global hub for FinTech innovation community.”

While the debate over FinTech vs Tech taking over the financial world is HOT, it is measures such as the ones being adopted by the UK government that will lead the way forward. Definitive measures on a global scale will act as critical success factors for the FinTech-Tech players to flourish and launch innovative financial offerings to compete with the mainstream banks and financial institutions. We need equal amounts of innovation and disruption with government support, monitoring and intervention to regulate the industry globally.

These are certainly exciting times for FinTech startups and Tech giants around the world as they are suddenly in the limelight and a foreboding time for traditional banking & financial institutions since this will shape up the future of the industry.

What do you think is the biggest threat to banks at the moment – FinTech or Tech? Which should the banks focus on to start with. Please share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are personal and are not reflective of the organization the author works for.

Guest Post by Ina Bansal, Nucleus Software

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Lessons from the House of Tata on Technology and Innovation

There are increasing signs of breakthroughs that could provide disproportionate returns to Tata companies.

One question that I am asked frequently by companies that have launched innovation programmes is: “How do we sustain interest and commitment from employees across the company?” In other words, how do we keep up the momentum?

After attending the final presentations and awards ceremony of Tata Innovista 2015 recently, I realized the Tata group has found an answer.

This year, Tata Innovista, a “celebration of creation and innovation within the group”, had more than 2,700 teams participating from 65 companies across 18 countries. Thirty thousand people have participated in Innovista since it was started a decade ago. I don’t know where to look for comparative statistics, but it’s reasonable to assume that this is one of the largest corporate innovation events in the world.

Innovista is just one of the initiatives of the Tata Group Innovation Forum (TGIF), a group of CXOs across the Tata group that evangelizes innovation. Innoverse, another TGIF initiative, is a crowd-sourcing platform; 16 Tata companies are active participants; 685 problems were posted last year resulting in 45,000 ideas, 513,000 conversations and 2,400 ideas taken forward.

While the TGIF itself meets as per a calendar, it has a team working behind the scenes to keep up the momentum of these initiatives. This team is housed in group-wide Centres of Excellence like Tata Quality Management Services and Tata Management Training Centre.

Ratan Tata provided the initial impetus for all these initiatives. He set an example for the group through his close involvement with the development of the Nano, and other innovations like the Tata Swach and Ginger hotels. But his lasting influence may well be the creation of the TGIF under the leadership of Tata Sons Director R. Gopalakrishnan with the mandate of building an innovation culture in the group.

With Ratan Tata’s support in the background, Gopal has been the force behind TGIF. At this year’s Innovista, he was felicitated on the completion of 10 years of TGIF. In Gopal, we have the answer to the question I raised at the outset—a committed executive sponsor with an effective corporate support structure can make all the difference.

Gopal’s Takeaways

Gopal, who has passionately backed innovation activities over the last decade, had some interesting takeaways to share.

The first was to revel in stories, as these are the best ways to share the hope and meaning of human progress. I couldn’t agree more. This is why, inspired by the Heath brothers Chip and Dan, Vinay Dabholkar and I centred our book 8 Steps to Innovation: Going from Jugaad to Excellence (HarperCollins, 2013) around stories. Stories, and even myths at times, play a crucial role in overcoming the fear of failure, one of the biggest obstacles to innovation. One of the world’s most innovative companies, 3M, does this wonderfully well when it encourages storytelling about the hundreds of inventors within the company who went on to succeed at last in spite of failing many times on the way.

Revel in stories, as these are the best ways to share the hope and meaning of human progress.

The second was to focus on the innovation and not the innovator. Gopal gave the example of Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the fathers of the World Wide Web (WWW), who has steadfastly refused to hog credit for the WWW, always insisting that many different people played a role. If Gopal was trying to point out that very few innovations are the outcome of a single person’s effort, it’s difficult to disagree with him. But, stories usually centre around individuals and not teams, so I wonder how to reconcile this insight with the first one.

Focus on the innovation and not the innovator

Gopal’s third point was that an idea is no innovation. In fact, according to Gopal, it is the struggle to nurture and deliver the idea that is innovation. This point again has strong resonance with what we have seen—the road to developing an idea, seeing whether it works, refining it, combining it with others, making the process as robust as possible and finally delivering value or benefit is at the heart of innovation. This is an important lesson for youngsters, in particular, who tend to find the creative process of ideation far more exciting than the rocky road to execution.

It is the struggle to nurture and deliver the idea that is innovation.

“Rely on the compass, not on the map” was Gopal’s final point. If you think about this carefully, you’ll see it’s quite profound. Innovation tends to be an evolutionary process, with many twists and turns. Traversing existing roads will result only in incremental change. Bigger impact will need trying out the road not taken, but you have to get the directionality right. This last point is particularly salient because, in the corporate context, an innovation that lacks alignment with corporate strategy is unlikely to reach fruition. This lesson seems to have been absorbed well in the Tata companies—I found a close fit between innovation and strategy in most of the innovations I saw.

Rely on the compass, not on the map

What’s Next?

Ever since open source software became successful, the social “bazaar” has emerged as an alternative to the corporate “cathedral” as far as innovation is concerned. Coupled with the explosion of information, and the wide dispersion of creative efforts across the globe, this has induced companies to open up their innovation processes. Some Tata companies have embraced this idea with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), for example, having pursued the concept of a Co-Innovation Network (COIN). Tata Innoverse that I mentioned earlier already provides one possible platform for collaboration between group companies.

But, the strength of a group like the Tatas lies in the diversity of competencies and markets that it encompasses. Foreigners who visit India are struck by this even if we take it for granted. Some past Tata innovations—most notably the Tata Swach water filter—have demonstrated the power of such collaboration.

A big challenge is how to encourage collaboration between independently managed companies with their own stakeholder groups. Tata Chairman Cyrus Mistry referred to the importance of such collaboration in his concluding remarks. But my own sense is that the key to unleashing the next wave of innovation in the Tata group may lie in fostering such collaboration not only with other group companies but with the wider world.

Tata companies are on the cusp of a major jump in innovation. Earlier, “invisible” innovations in processes resulting in efficiency improvements were the mainstay of innovation. But there are increasing signs of technological breakthroughs that could provide disproportionate returns to Tata companies. Two big acquisitions that Ratan Tata made—Corus (now Tata Steel Europe) and Jaguar Land Rover—already possess the capability for such technological innovation. If they can be harnessed as role  models and mentors, the Tatas may well be able to set benchmarks for technological innovation just as they did for employee welfare a hundred years ago.

This article was written for FoundingFuel.

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Leveraging an open IoT platform to accelerate innovation

Every decade or so, a technology shift occurs that has an impact far beyond its original design. These groundbreaking technologies can affect industries and applications that were never conceived of by their founders. The mobile phone is an example, which morphed into the smartphone and created a massive mobile development and application industry.

IoT represents such a sea change, not only in technology, but in how we work, play, and live. IoT isn’t just a tool for technologists or businesses – it has become a part of everyday life.

IoT is more than a single technology, or even a single philosophy. Today, there are thousands of potential uses, and it is being incorporated into products from manufacturers across all segments. Thousands of developers are creating connected products, introducing an entirely new category of technology, not just an application.

As such, the biggest hurdle to IoT innovation is not the hardware development. It is a relatively easy task to embed sensors and microprocessors into virtually anything. The challenge is to create a single application to control everything, with an architecture that provides whatever the developer needs, from the infrastructure to an open development platform that allows IoT connectivity across millions of devices.

An IoT platform ought to connect more than a single IoT device, or a group of devices from a single manufacturer. It should connect an entire ecosystem of devices. A home may have dozens of devices from multiple manufacturers, so a truly IoT-enabled smart home must be created with a multi-vendor perspective in mind. More importantly, IoT requires an open platform to host and manage devices.

The present state of IoT includes multiple standards, and connecting them is often problematic. To facilitate development in this environment and connect devices from multiple vendors, it is necessary to have a unified platform to support different protocols and standards and unify all data into a single interface.

Recently, iYogi launched the Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Platform, the first enterprise grade IoT platform from India. Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform is proven to scale to millions of devices. Innovators can use the platform to deploy, monitor and automatically manage their products across millions of end users, easily integrate their products with the growing IoT ecosystem, and use its advanced analytics capabilities to build and fast track their global growth strategies.

Digital Service Cloud overcomes the barriers to commercial success for IoT developers, and is especially aimed at IoT startups and innovators who have created innovative IoT solutions, but require a technology platform, a scalable infrastructure and a comprehensive application stack.

Digital Service Cloud is a platform-as-a-service with an open platform, free to use, that developers can tap into. It includes an infrastructure-as-a-service component and an open development platform for IoT applications. The infrastructure is highly scalable, and can be used by developers to connect their devices, monitor, and manage them.

Once a pre-programmed ‘chip’ is embedded into a product and an API installed, users can stream real-time data to monitor usability, performance and consumer behavior of data events in various formats. A dashboard allows companies to view events by device and also upload “offline” third party data to map this against device data for deeper insights and intelligence. Users can configure a rule engine to define operational and business processes from simple to complex rules.

Each time an event is received, an automatic trigger is actioned, initiating a response from designated respondents, and this may include: the manufacturer, a sales vendor or even a customer service representative.

The Digital Service Cloud IoT platform enables complex business information and reports to be created, correlating data received from diverse events – across the entire customer based using an offline product and device that was uploaded. The platform makes sense of big and small data with visualization capabilities and tools to derive predictive and trend analysis.

Thus, Digital Service Platform is the back end that enables developers to launch viable commercial IoT businesses and is essential to drive innovation.

Guest Post by Inder Mohan Singh, VP at iYogi.

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A conference of the products, for the products and by the product leaders

Indian startup space is on a roll and while there is a lot of money being invested, we strongly believe that one needs a lot more talks on products – ranging from product management to marketing / growth hacking et al.

Product Nation has partnered with NextBigWhat for its upcoming conference, ProductGeeksConf.  At ProductGeeksConf, you will hear various product leaders share insights/experiences building some of the great products from India.

Some of the speakers include:

Punit Soni (Flipkart CPO), Deepak Abott (Marketing Tech specialist) and several others (more speakers will be announced by this week).

Topics include:

  1. Scaling up Product Management Function
  2.  How Social Media influences Product Management decisions
  3. The emergence of the growth hacker and how this new role and how growth teams
  4. Marketing tech hacks for app developers on budget.
  5. The Nuances of Customer Acquisition  : CAC,LTV,ARPU,MRR. WTF

As far as industry focus is concerned, the conference has something for everyone – be it consumer, enterprise or the app developers.

We are happy to announce that ProductNation community gets a special discount of 20% on the conference tickets (registration link / use the code PRODUCTNATION).

Date : June 19th
Venue: MLR Convention Center, Bangalore.
URL: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/unpluggd/productgeeksconf/

Note that the discount is valid only till June 8th.