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India Makes It Big: ISRO Sets World Record By Launching 104 Satellites On A Single Rocket

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Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) today made history by creating a world record of setting 104 satellites into the orbit. PSLV-C37, the heaviest PSLV launched Earth-mapping Cartosat 2 series satellite weighing 700 Kg. along with 103 nano satellites belonging to UAE, US, Israel, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, Switzerland etc. With this successful launch India becomes world’s first country to set more than 100 satellites with a single rocket. Last record was held by Russia when in 2014 it launched 37 satellites in single go.

The PSLV rocket was launched from Srihsarikota space centre in east India. The Cartosat 2 series satellite is capable of taking high resolution pictures and India may use it to keep a watch on neighboring countries like China and Pakistan. For last two decades India has been focusing more on its space research program. ISRO is already working on mission to moon (Chanderyaan) and mission to Mars (Mangalyaan). Mangalyaan, a $74 million mission made India the first country in the world to have successfully launched its mission to Mars on the very first attempt.

For the first time India has used Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) and whole process was completed in 26 minutes. A reusable launch system is capable of launching satellites into space more than once which means it can be used again and again to set satellites in the orbit. In 2016 India successfully launched its own space shuttle and joined the league of few countries in the world to have this capability.

With this feather in cap India seems to take the commercial rocket & space industry by storm.

Video Credit: Doordarshan

Palmer Luckey: An iPhone repair technician who built a $3 billion VR company

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Success is most often linked to age and a good experience. It is generally assumed that one could achieve success only after reaching a certain age but lately, these assumptions are breaking as today youth are coming forward to take control of entrepreneurial world in their hands. Like Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, Palmer Luckey, established a company, Oculus VR at the age of 21. He has established the notion that if you are truly interested and dedicated in something, nothing can take it away from you.

Early Interest in Electronics and Technology
Getting success in any field is not an overnight thing. One has to start building up for it from a very early age. Passion for technology was deep seated in Luckey right from his childhood. Although he was home schooled by his mother when he was a child, yet the drift towards electronics and technical world was initiated by then. At the age of 14 he founded a forum called ModRetro which concentrates on modifying vintage game consoles. This forum was made for all the electronic enthusiasts. Despite not gaining any formal training in electronics, he kept on experimenting with various complex electronic objects like lasers, coil guns, Tesla coils etc. His passion for electronics grew more with age and this could be marked by his success in stepping into the gaming world when he made a PC gaming ‘rig’. It costed him a lot of money but he took it as a challenge and went ahead to develop the game with a six-monitor setup.

As he began stepping out of teenage, he found himself very passionate about Virtual Reality. Trying new projects is a costly affair and need a good amount of funding. Luckey, being a self-dependent boy didn’t turn to his parents, friends or relatives for financial help. Rather, his own talent got him all the funding for his new experiments and projects. He repaired and resold damaged iPhones from which he received around $36,000. He also worked as groundskeeper, computer repair technician and youth sailing coach in his free time. His dedication and passion for his work made him build a private collection of more than 50 head-mounted displays.

palmer_luckey_at_svvr_2014
Image Credit: Wikipedia

His Enthusiasm for VR Led Him to Build Oculus VR
He enrolled himself at California State University and joined a degree course in journalism. However, his love for technical filed did not fade even for a moment. As a result of which he had to drop the course and dedicate his whole time to Virtual Reality. His motive behind establishing the company was to develop a unique head-mounted display which would be highly efficient, low cost, light weight and easily portable. The first prototype of his model was designed by him at the age of 17 in his parents’ garage. This gave a 90 degree featured view and also proved to be a push for his company. From then on he developed a series of such prototypes and kept modifying them as per the need. He intended to sell one of his prototypes which he named as ‘Rift’ on Kickstarter crowdfunding website and for the launch of Rift’s Kickstarter campaign he officially started Oculus VR.

With the establishment of his company, more responsibility piled upon him as he was the sole worker and owner of the company. He did all the paperwork, model making, and client dealings all by himself. But not for a single moment he tried to escape from the hard work and stood up all alone to take his company further in the entrepreneurial world. With time his company got more members and soon he was joined by Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov. Luckey’s prototypes greatly interested Iribe and he agreed to invest a few hundred thousand dollars in the Rift Kickstarter Campaign and later joined in as the CEO of Oculus VR. Anatonov left his job in a company named Scaleform and joined in as chief software architect of the company. The Kickstarter Campaign turned out to be a huge success as its value raised to $2.5 million with an additional funding of $16 million.

Oculus VR Acquisition by Facebook
Facebook never fails to get hold of any great product. When the popularity and success of Oculus VR reached Zuckerberg’s ears, his interest grew more in it. In March 2014 Facebook acquired the company for $3 billion. But Luckey still works at Oculus VR on the technology he developed.

In September 2016, Luckey in support for Trump donated $10,000 to Nimble America, a group against the then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. There was a hate post on Reddit from Luckey’s user id in the name of Hillary Clinton. This brought down his image and also posed much loss for Oculus VR as many clients turned down their deals with the company. Palmer Luckey has been named as most richest entrepreneur (22th) under 40 in America. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth around $700 million.

Infosys Story: From A Small Room Office To $11 Billion Multinational Company

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After seeing the success of startups like Whatsapp, SlideShare, Uber, Snapdeal, the thirst of becoming entrepreneur among today’s youth is increasing at a rapid pace. However, after two or three failed attempts, most of them step back in despair. One thing everyone should keep in mind that nobody or no venture becomes successful without tasting failures. Setting a high aim is perfectly fine but one should also be prepared for the challenges that will come on the way. Worldwide acclaimed and India’s top software company, Infosys too has tasted failures before it became software giant. The huge empire we see today also started from a speck of dust. The only thing that made this company a huge success is firm determination of Narayana Murthy, one of the founders of the company.

The Foundation
The fire to get success in entrepreneurial world was ignited in Narayana Murthy in the early 70’s, when he founded his first venture, Softronics. But unfortunately, the company couldn’t stand the demands of the business world and Murthy had to shut it down. Murthy went back to job and joined Patni Computer Systems as General Manager. However, the urge to go back to entrepreneurship didn’t let him settle down in job. The wait for the right time was finally over when on one morning of January 1981, he sat with his six software engineer friends, N S Raghavan, S Gopalakrishnan, Nandan Nilekani, S D Shibulal, K Dinesh and Ashok Arora to talk about opening a company to develop software.

infosyslogoThe spark and passion to establish the company was then brimmed in all of them but the biggest hurdle was funds required for setting up a company. None of them had the required capital to invest in the business. This is when Sudha, Narayana Murthy’s wife helped them with $250 (Rs.10,000), her savings of three years, to lay the foundation of the company. The first milestone was crossed after 6 months and  they registered their company on 2nd July 1981 as Infosys Consultants Private Limited.

Burning mid night oil
Although they had registered N S Raghavan’s house in Dadar, Mumbai as the company’s office but there was no company office as such. But in 1982, when Murthy and his wife moved to Pune and bought a small house there, the front room of the house was then used as the office of the company.

In 1983 Infosys got its first client, Data Basics Corporation, a U.S based company. They had to move their company to Bangalore to make the dealings with their client easier. Murthy alone moved to Bangalore to manage the company. The environment around was not at all business friendly and this is why Murthy and the other company founders had to face difficulties at every step. Due to insufficiency of money, he could not make a separate office for the company and worked from home. As time passed, the whole team shifted to Bangalore and devoted themselves to the work. The financial status of the company didn’t allow them to recruit employees and thus all the founders along with Murthy’s wife toiled themselves day and night to write codes.

On the verge of breakdown
Around three years later, the company moved into a joint venture with Kurt Salmon Associates. But the venture couldn’t last long and collapsed in 1989. This dissolution of the joint venture gave them a big jolt. The little bit of hope left to take to company few steps ahead was also gone. Even after 8 years, they found themselves stagnated at the same place without any success while their class fellows were all leading a luxurious life. This failure got them into a situation of crisis as the company was about to collapse. Seeing the present condition, one of the founders, Ashok Arora decided to sell his shares and quit as he could not see any hope left in this company.

A new beginning
While other partners were left bewildered from this failure, Narayana Murthy stood firm in his determination and decided to continue trying. The others too got inspired from his optimism and soon they returned to work with the same passion and vigor as they started eight years ago. This time they made up some plans and strategies to move ahead. They divided the work among themselves where Murthy took the responsibility of a manager, Nilekani handled sales department, Krishnan and Shibulal overtook the technical end, Rhaghavan was given the responsibility to deal with people and Dinesh looked in the matters of quality.

With their dedicated efforts, talent and efficiency the company began gaining the momentum. The light of success was visible now as their hard work started paying off. The company began expanding with more employees and offices. In no time they established their first international office in Boston city of U.S.

Infosys established itself as an top software company in India by mid of 90’s. Narayana Murthy now looked forward to build up a good image of the company in the country as well as overseas. He began investing in building huge campuses to seep deeper into the global market. But the stupor of success could not infect him as he always followed the principles he made for his business. For him ethics in business were more important than gaining profit and this is the reason that took his company to become India’s second biggest software company.

By 1995, Infosys opened global development centers including an office in U.K. In the year 1999, the company with a worth of $100 million got listed in NASDAQ. Though there was some troubling time in 2012-13 which forced Narayan Murti to come back to Infosys. Now under Vishal Sikka’s leadership Infosys is again on growth path. Today, Infosys has offices in various countries and its present worth is around $11 billion.

SlideShare Story: How a barcamp idea turned into 119 million dollar business

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In 2003 Rashmi Sinha a Lecturer at university of Berkeley quit her job to start the entrepreneurial journey. She was later joined by her husband Jonathan Boutelle and brother Amit Ranjan do something together. These are the people who later co-founded presentation sharing platform, SlideShare.

They started a “user experience and usability research tool” called “mind canvas” in 2004. Later they thought of developing it as an online product. Mind Canvas was started from a 240 square feet small office in Delhi, India. After two years of product development the B2B  software was launched in 2005. Though the product got good traction, the only problem was  scale. Product was such that it could not scale with technology. It required more and more people to scale.

In 2006 mind canvas organized first “barcamp” in Delhi. After barcamp event speakers wanted to share the videos, pictures and presentation with audience. While  the problem to share event videos and pictures was taken care by YouTube and Flickr, there was no other option than email to share presentations. This is when Jon, Rashmi and Amit thought about a platform to share presentations.

SlideShare

They started working on the project and after 6 months of development,  “Slideshare” was launched in Oct 2006. It was a platform for the professionals to share their presentation online that included PowerPoint & Pdf files. It attracted people the moment it went online. Within first few weeks of launching they could see many people uploading their slides.

People wanted to share their presentation with world and Slideshare provided them with the platform to do so. Many big companies and organizations like IBM, White House also started using the platform to share their presentations online. They kept innovating and upgrading feature like sharing videos, podcasts etc.

SlideShare Team

With features like commenting, tagging and rating SlideShare turned into rich community of people sharing and discussing presentations. Site soon grew to 30 million  monthly visitors and  7.4 million presentations. After 2 years SlideShare got $3 million in first round of funding from Angel investors and Venrock. SlideShare never lost focus  and vision to make it an easy to use presentation sharing tool. SlideShare always focused and listened to end user feedback. They engaged with presentation professionals and offered them tools like Analytics, Lead capturing. Though many other products like authorSTREAM, Scribd & DocStoc with more features were introduced, yet SideShare backed by solid engineering team and presentation professionals continued to grow. SlideShare also created a great culture inside the organization. Employees were given stock options and other perks to make them part of SlideShare’s growth story.

When LinkedIn launched their Apps platform, SlideShare was among few companies like Google, WordPress, Amazon to build and integrate their app in LinkedIn. This relationship grew stronger and in 2012 SlideShare was acquired by the biggest professional network LinkedIn for $119 million. Along with founders many employees got rewarded for their hard work and fruitful efforts. Post acquisition, SlideShare is integral part of LinkedIn.

More and more people and companies use LinkedIn Slideshare to get more branding and business leads. As per one study the presentation sharing website generates 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook & Twitter. SlideShare is today part of every marketing or SEO strategy.

Video Credit:NextBigWhat

Rahul Sharma: Raising Micromax to 10th largest mobile company of the world

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“It’s an Indian product, why don’t you look for a similar one from a renowned company like Samsung or HTC…”

A quote that could be easily heard in mobile stores whenever someone tried to buy a mobile phone of Indian brand few years back until Micromax made its debut in the mobile market. Since the entry of Micromax in the world of mobile phones, the perception of Indian products have changed globally.

Micromax  an Indian mobile manufacturing company is world’s 10th largest company and India’s no. 2 mobile company after Samsung. Micromax was started by Rahul Sharma along with his friends. When smartphones emerged in India, the market was dominated by Samsung and few lesser known Chinese phones. Micromax has changed that to large extent. Today people proudly flaunt their Micromax smartphone.

The Beginning
Micromax Informatics was started by Rahul Sharma and his three friends, but the main driving force behind the success of company can be attributed to the dynamic nature of Rahul. Rahul Sharma is married to Indian Bollywood actress Asin. The company was started in 2000 as an eCommerce company. Since gadget industry was very lucrative at that time, Micromax pivoted to developing embedded systems. The company was providing best class products and services and hence got the attention of the world’s leading mobile company, Nokia. Micromax clinched a hardware deal with Nokia for their M2M (Machine-to-Machine) business which resulted in a huge success for the company.micromax

 The Unwavering Beliefs
But the road to success was not supposed to be easy. In 2013 their M2M business partner, Nokia sold their mobile business to Microsoft. Nokia, considering the excellent quality of products and services provided by Micromax Informatics,  offered them a new collaboration in Nokia Networks. But the Micromax team decided to decline the offer to collaborate with Nokia and walked away. Now being separated from Nokia they continued their existing business believing in their own products and capabilities.

Working independently in India, Micromax decided to manufacture their own hardware. With their services already being top notch, they soon collaborated with the Indian network provider giant, Bharti Airtel. Micromax’s first project with Airtel was to install payphones in the remote areas of Jammu and Kashmir. With their dedication and hard-work the project was completed successfully despite the rough geographical terrain.

Inspiration is just a different perception
Things were going smooth with company but it was not enough for the founders. Being chased by their passion and dreams to achieve new heights continuously they were always trying to grow their company. When such ideals are being followed, a small spark is enough to light a dazzling flame to blind the world.

When Rahul Sharma was on a trip to an interior region of West Bengal, he met a payphone operator, who was operating his business in an area with no electricity and very low network coverage. That network operator was using truck battery to supply power to the payphone. Rahul was amused by this innovative solution to the problem of power shortage but this encounter also made him think about the most common problem faced by the customers of mobile phones, fast draining batteries that required charging after few hours.

Rahul came up with the idea of entering the mobile phone market with mobile phones with battery lasting one month on a single charge. But his partners were reluctant to accept his idea as there was heavy competition in the mobile market. Not willing to give up, Rahul managed to convince them about the huge possibilities in the mobile market.

Expect the Unexpected
Though everyone agreed to the idea, it was decided to manufacture only 10,000 units initially and then observe the market’s reaction to their product. Hence, Micromax’s first ‘Stamina Battery’ phone was launched in 2008. In just 10 days, all phones got sold. The thing that astonished everyone was that their product went out of stock in such a short time without any serious advertising. It was publicized only through word-of-mouth.

Motivated with this huge positive feedback, company invested more money and resources in mobile phone market and soon launched more models. Considering the end users in India, Micromax’s all phones are designed keeping in mind the daily usage of common Indian customer. One of the main qualities of their products is their reasonable pricing.

While rising through the Indian mobile market and considering various options to help their customers in their everyday life, Micromax came up with the idea of dual-sim mobile phones. Providing this extremely useful feature to their customers this revolutionary idea had an ever changing effect on the mobile industry and created new niche in the mobile sector. Micromax’s popularity rocketed to new heights. To keep up with the extreme challenge being posed by Micromax many other top companies had to follow in the footsteps of Micromax and hence also introduced dual-sim mobile phones.

Soon after Micromax challenged all major mobile phone players globally  to became  world’s 10th largest phone manufacturing company. The company believed that if the end user are benefited from the product in one way or the other,  the product would definitely be a success. Which proved right for various devices that the company launched into the market worldwide.

Things fall but to rise up again
In 2014, Micromax was second largest mobile phone company in India, and was challenging the world’s top and the number 1 mobile phone maker in Indian market. Its founders decided to bring managers from outside to help the company go forward. In the fourth quarter of 2014, with full dedication towards the company’s betterment its executives and CEOs along with the innovative ideas outperformed, the Korean company, Samsung and took the No.1 spot in the Indian mobile market.

But soon after the appointment of new executives, problems arose. The creative and risk taking dynamic approach of Micromax founders like Rahul Sharma, was not easily comprehended by the new executives who used to rely more on the facts and figures. Thus, Alibaba (one of the huge investors of Micromax) left the client pool of Micromax and walked away from a $1.2 billion purchase of about 20% shares in Micromax.

Due to lack of funding some of the Micromax projects had to be shut down and by final quarter of 2015 its smartphone market fell to 13% from 22%. But with founders Rahul Sharma, Vikas Jain, Sumeet Arora and Rajesh Agarwal still controlling the about 80% of the company have kept the company in profit.

Facing tough competition now, Micromax plans to increase its production by 100% that is from about 1.5 million units every month to 3 million units per month. Micromax also plans to increase its business overseas. Already a top 10 brand in Russia, Micromax has been looking for a partner to help it expand outside India and to indulge more in the business of televisions and tablets.

The Battle Royale
With vendors from Dragon land  and other beasts like Samsung, Lenovo and Sony now taking the Indian market more seriously and introducing better products at cheap prices, the legendary Indian warrior Micromax has taken the fight head on and has been continuously rolling out products with performance at par with products from any other competitor, giving all competitors a run for their money around the globe. Today Micromax is a popular name in LED TV industry in addition to Smartphones.

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Snapdeal Story: How a deals website became top eCommerce platform of India

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Two best friends having common interest in food and maths from Delhi Public School started an offline coupons business which later turned into one of the biggest eCommerce companies of India. The CEO Kunal Bahl (alumni Wharton School, US) and COO Rohit Bansal (IIT Delhi alumni) joined hands to create Snapdeal.

Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal
Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal, Image Credit: Wikimedia.

Back in 2007 when Kunak Bahl’s US visa got rejected and was asked to return to India, he along with Rohit Bansal who was working for CapitalOne in India, decided to work together and do something different.  Kunal while studying in US did 3 different jobs to make up for his monthly expenditures. It is there where he started using food coupons so that he could get a discount and mitigate his expenses with only two jobs. This is what he along with Rohit planned to start in India.

Moneysaver to Snapdeal
They started their entrepreneurial journey in December 2006 from MoneySaver. The business model had no technology involved and was pretty simple. Snapdeal (then MoneySaver) would  get attractive deals from the restaurants, hotels, saloons etc. on the promise of getting them more customers. These coupons were printed in a discount book which they would sell to  customers.

It was a simple business model but they had a hard time getting those deals and coupons. It wasn’t easy to convince businesses to offer coupons as well as customers to buy those booklets. Not many people were aware of this coupon model in India.

As soon as a they started this business they were at a stage where they had only 20,000 Indian Rupees ($300) in their company bank account with current liabilities to the tune of 500,000 Rupees ($7000). They had to pay salaries and other dues from their personal savings and ended up only in Rs. 50,000 ($700) in their personal bank accounts in total.

They did many experiments including community coupon mailing where they would get attractive deals from the hotels, restaurants, spas, saloons etc and mail those to the community around. “It was a total waste”, says Kunal Bahl as the mailing infrastructure in India was very bad. Slowly things picked up and Snapdeal went online in 2010 with initial investment from Vani Kola’s venture capital firm.

Pivoting from deals to eCommerce 
The company was generating  good revenues and was on right track. They acquired Grabbon in 2011. On suggestion of some of the merchants involved in deal business with Snapdeal, Kunal and Rohit checked out Alibaba.com. Inspired by the success of Alibaba, Kunal Bahl took a firm decision to pivot from deals business to eCommerce. This was a tough and risky decision. However, this decision turned out to be so good that today Snapdeal is among top 3 eCommerce websites in India.

They created a marketplace for small merchants and industries so that they could directly connect with the millions of customers online. This eCommerce model was not applied by Flipkart (at that time) as it used its own huge inventory to sell and deliver products. However, later Flipkart too joined the marketplace bandwagon.

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Snapdeal in 2011

To sustain growth and compete with companies like Flipkart they raised further investments of $45 million from Nexus ventures and Bessemer venture partners. They also received a $50 million investment from from E-bay and other existing partners.

E-commerce to M-commerce
Kunal Bahl believes in constant innovation and growth. Looking at the changing user behavior and rapidly increasing mobile and internet penetration, Snapdeal created a mobile application that could work smoothly even on 2g connection. Idea was to get 50% of their orders from the mobile application.  Mobile application gave much needed push by increasing the orders, 80% of which coming only from mobile app.

With 30 million products from around 300K sellers with a reach of 6,000 towns and cities across the country, Snapdeal’s YOY growth today stands at 600%. Snapdeal counts Ratan Tata, Alibaba, SoftBank Corp, IndoUS Ventures, Intel Capital, Nexus Ventures, eBay, Kalaari Capital, Temasek Holdings etc. as their investors. Snapdeal also acquired FreeCharge, the online recharge and payment wallet in an equity deal in 2015.