tech story

Dubber Corporation – All Three Co-Founders Came Up With The Idea While Working In Call Center.

Dubber Corporation was founded in 2011 by three friends. It is a publicly-traded company with its headquarters based in Melbourne, Australia. Dubber offers cloud-based solutions mainly called recording software across various industries. Various types of products are developed by the company not only for various industries but also for the government.

It has a customized range of solutions for large as well as small and medium enterprises. Four main sectors where Dubber is a leading provider of recording software are healthcare, education, financial services, and legal department. The solutions provided by the company are also divided into four categories, namely, compliance intelligence, revenue intelligence, people intelligence, and customer intelligence.

About Dubber Corporation

The founders of Dubber Corporation are James Slaney, Steve McGovern, and Adrian Di Piantrantonio. Dubber predominantly sells its products to Telecommunications Service Providers and Enterprise customers. It is one of the world’s leading companies for unified call recording solutions and voice intelligence clouds. Dubber has a SaaS model for selling its cloud-based software and it is incorporated in many networks communication solutions globally. Dubber has formed only a decade ago and today more than 150 service providers are using its software for call recording and many other purposes.

The company has also crossed the mark of recording more than one billion minutes successfully. Some of the biggest clients of Dubber are Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft Teams, Cox, Zoom, Vodafone, etc. Dubber Corporation has five fundamental values to establish an open and inclusive culture and grow in a strong way. They are to
challenge the status quo, leading together to create more opportunities, a champion service provider for the customers, drive extraordinary performance, and grow as a curious group of people.

Idea Behind Dubber

Founded in 2011, the three co-founders came up with the idea of Dubber Corporation over a few glasses of wine. These three friends were already working in the telecommunication sector and hence had better knowledge than inexperienced entrepreneurs. Before co-founding Dubber, all three of them were working with an Australian Service Provider whose main job was to all the in-bound call center traffic for ACCC (an Australian regulator). This was when the trio realized that though it is very inexpensive to record conversations, it is equally a very laborious job to retrieve the data. So, to bridge this technology gap in the telecommunication sector and make it simpler, they grabbed the opportunity at the earliest and started developing a whole new platform. They made the entire platform cloud-native and scalable for the entire globe. This is how Dubber Corporation was formed. All three co-founders are still a very integrated part of the group. James Slaney is the COO, Steve McGovern is the CEO, and Adrian Di Piantrantonio is the EVP, Global Channels of Dubber.

Growth of the Company

Dubber successfully raised $6 million in angel investment in 2013. After a couple of years, it went public and got listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. In the same year, Dubber successfully made it through a series of interoperability tests with BroadSoft’s unified communications software. During this time, Dubber witnessed a very high growth of 141% in terms of the number of users for the first half of the year. In 2016, Dubber established a partnership with Cisco Broadsoft and in the following years’ established partnerships with many other tech giants. It has also made a few acquisitions including CallN, an Australian call recording company, and Speik, a UK-based company.

Steve McGovern – CEO of Dubber Corporation

Steve McGovern is the current CEO of the company and before that worked at the Hotkey Internet Services Pty Ltd as the General Manager and was the Director of Sales at Sky TV. He completed his education at the University of Sheffield. Currently, he is also a board member of Dubber Corporation and Linius Technologies Ltd. McGovern, after co-founding Dubber, served as the Chairman of Firestrike Resources Ltd but for a very short time.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

VSS Mani, Started A Business On “Wedding Planning” But Was Not Satisfied And Founded Justdial.

Justdial is an Indian start-up founded in 1996 for offering the public a huge database for conducting a local search. The website of Justdial contains information about any particular company or service from contact number, address, etc. to the details of service provided across the country. So, anyone can look up the website or mobile app of Justdial to find information about any local service that we usually don’t get on the internet. Justdial has more than 10,000 employees and has offices all over the country, like in New Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Chandigarh, etc. Its headquarters is based in Mumbai, India, and the majority of its stake is currently owned by Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited.

About Justdial

VSS Mani is the founder and CEO of Justdial. The company offers local search as its primary service and apart from that it has two other services, “Justdial Social” and “Search Plus Service.” The former is a service that involves aggregating content from various social media websites, news sources, etc and the latter is responsible for managing online transactions through various apps. Justdial has also entered foreign markets and that includes opening international offices in UAE, UK, USA, and Canada. In India, the company has a total of fifteen offices.

Justdial can be accessed from both mobile and computers. Apart from the official website of the company, it has launched individual mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Blackberry. After Justdial was launched it focussed on every aspect of growth, from expanding to new overseas markets to strengthening the company’s SME relationships. Some of the major investors of the company are SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, SAP Ventures, etc.

History

VSS Mani, before founding Justdial, had several other business ideas but none of them survived in the market for a long time. Mani agrees that he has learned from the mistakes of his past business endeavors and finally made Justdial a successful brand. When Mani had the idea to develop a website with a huge database, he was working for a yellow page company. This was during the late 1980s when he thought of replacing the yellow pages with a huge database. The users will have access to the database so that they can call any service provider and receive the necessary information. Today, Justdial has a database of more than 29 million listings and over 500,000 active paid campaigns.

Growth and Expansion

Though Justdial was officially launched in 1996, Mani started working on the idea in 1994 with an investment of 50,000 rupees. He rented a garage and some PCs, borrowed furniture to start the groundwork, and also hired 5-6 employees. Justdial became a popular website within a few years and just a decade later the company launched an internet and mobile version of the database, Justdial.com. In 2011, the company was able to raise $10 million followed by $57 million in the next year. All the fundings were judiciously invested to launch new products, develop the brand, and expand geographically.

Justdial decided to go public in 2013 and out of the total 17.3 million shares, 13.5 million were offered to the public. The rest of the shares were given to the previous investors of the company at a rate of 530 rupees per share. The share price of Justdial saw many ups and downs as it went as high as 1894 rupees in August 2014 and then the next year decreased to a triple-digit number. In July 2021, Reliance Retail acquired a 66.95% stake in the company for 3,497 crore rupees. After these acquisitions, Reliance got access to the 25-year old database of the company and VSS Mani withheld his position as the CEO and MD of Justdial.

About the Founder

VSS Mani was born in Jamshedpur and was raised in Calcutta (now Kolkata). He pursued commerce for higher studies and founded three organizations. Mani’s entrepreneurial journey started with “AskMe” but due to improper timing, the business failed shortly. He also started a business on “Wedding Planning” but was not satisfied with the business model or the profit margin. Later with proper business strategies and thorough research, he founded Justdial and made it a huge success.

Annasha

Convera Corporation – Result Of A Merger That Took Place Between Two Companies.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

We are already familiar with the famous Google and Bing search engines, and we know how amazingly those search engines have changed our lives. From finding out a good institution for studies to finding a chocolate cake recipe in seconds, everything is so easy because of them. Apart from Google and Bing, there are many more that have been consumers’ favourites for a long time, whether it is Baidu, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. But there are some other search engines as well that have been designed to serve a particular purpose. There are companies like Convera Corporation, making such dedicated software products for their clients. Convera Corporation is mainly known for its flagship product, RetrievalWar, which is widely used by Microsoft even after its retirement in 2007.

About Convera Corporation

Convera is a twenty years old technology company, mainly known for its corporate search engine development. The company though is today a part of Firstlight ERA and operates as NTENT today, it has made its name solely through its flagship product RetrievalWare, which the company launched as Convera.
Convera was founded in 2000, with its headquarters established in Vienna, VA, United States. The company was already a result of the merger of Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation, and later, it again merged with Firstlight ERA in 2010 to form NTENT. As Convera, the company’s annual revenue for FY2009 was estimated to be 1.3 million USD, and as NTENT, the company is doing equally well.

Founding the Company

Convera Corporation was the result of a merger that took place between Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation in the year 2000. The latter has been in the search engine industry for a longer time, and this experience was put to good use for Convera Corporation. On the other hand, Intel’s Interactive division’s expertise was also a boon for the company. Convera bagged Intel’s contract with the National Baseball Association for the distribution of the NBA content in the first year of its inception.
In the year 2002, Convera acquired Semantix Inc. that specialized in cross-lingual processing as well as computational linguistics technology, helping the company add more features to its products. The company had started to offer SaasS vertical search services, and its RetrievalWare became the favourite of governments of the UK, the US, Canada, and a few more countries. In fact, Microsoft still uses the same software to date.
Also, Convera’s vertical search service had attracted customers like John Wiley & Sons., Centaur Media, Incisive Media, etc. In February 2010, Convera merged with Firstlight ERA and formed NTENT, a company that still offers the web-scale semantic search for vertical applications, as Convera Corporation did as an independent company. NTENT’s headquarters is based in New York City, New York, United States, and Pat Condo is the CEO of the company, who also led Excalibur Technologies (one of the merging companies to form Convera) and Convera as the CEO.

The CEO at Convera Corporation

Patrick C. Condo was the CEO and President of Convera Corporation. In the 80s, Condo served Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a company that distributed Excalibur Technologies’ products. Excalibur was one the companies that merged to form Convera. In the early 90s, Condo joined Excalibur, and in five years, he became the CEO and President of Excalibur. While developing a SaaS search platform in partnership with Intel, in 2000, Excalibur and Intel’s interactive media division had a merger and Condo became the CEO of the newly formed Convera Corporation. After ten years in the business, Convera then merged with NTENT, and Condo held the CEO position at NTENT as well.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

www.xornor.co

Support.com – A 25-year old Tech Support Company Acquired By Greenidge Generation.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Support.com was established in 1997 as a technical support company and it was merged with Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining company in 2021. Currently, Lance Rosenzweig is operating as the CEO of the company and its headquarters is based in Wilmington, Delaware and its administrative office is based in California, USA. The company is mainly known for providing tech support and related services to various businesses and their consumers. It has also expanded its products and services to security software after acquiring SUPERAntiSpyware. During the pandemic, Support.com has focused more on providing remote tech support, especially for small businesses.

About Support.com

Mark Pincus is the main founder of Support.com who along with his partners, Scott Dale and Cadir Lee founded the company in 1997. It is a technical support company that also provides various software solutions for system security and interaction optimization. The products apart from the tech support are not the original solutions of Support.com. The company offers these solutions to customers through a few subsidiaries it has acquired over the years. A company like Support.com became a great asset especially during the pandemic because of the sudden shift to remote working.

Support.com mainly focuses on two types of customers, namely, small businesses and general customers. The company offers 24/7 technical support which also includes call center services and it is based in the US. It can basically provide tech support for anything from setting up a new device to troubleshooting. The tech support can provide services via voice calls, chats, and also offline calls at home. The company also offers monthly and yearly subscription plans to avail of any tech support around the clock.

History

When Mark Pincus established the company, it was officially launched as Replicase Inc in the Redwood City of California. Mark and his other partners launched Replicase as s software company and after a year it was renamed Tioga Systems and its headquarters were relocated to Palo Alto, California. In the initial days of the company, SoftBank became a major investor and supported the business with $2.5 million. Since the company was launched in the software industry, Tioga put its focus on designing self-healing software such that Windows applications can automatically encounter any problems and fix them by themselves. Again after a year, the company was renamed Support.com and its primary solutions shifted its self-healing focus to developing software for enterprises. In this year the headquarters were also shifted to Redwood City.

Journey of Support.com

Only after three years the company was launched in the market, it decided to go public in 2000. When Support.com went public, it was backed by the investment banking division of Credit Suisse Group. After a couple of years, the company changed its name to SupportSoft Inc but after the enterprise technology of SupportSoft was acquired by Consona Corporation, the company again was back to Support.com. The company also made a handful of acquisitions before its latest merger with the bitcoin mining company. Some of its acquisitions include Core Networks (2004), YourTechOnline (2008), Sammsoft (2009), SUPERAntiSpyware (2011), and RightHand IT (2012). Apart from the chain of acquisitions, it established a partnership with Target (one of America’s largest retailers) to provide tech support to MyTGTtech solutions.

Support.com became very active during the COVID-19 pandemic and people around the world needed online support for everything. So, to help and support the consumers get used to this new online work environment, Support.com provided a month of free tech support for those working and learning from home. It also hired additional employees during the onset of the pandemic while most of the companies were discussing layoffs.

About the Founder

Mark Pincus is an American entrepreneur who has founded several companies other than Support.com. He is mainly popular as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Some of his other endeavors are Freeloader Inc and Tribe Networks. Mark completed his education at the University of Pennsylvania followed by Harvard University.

Annasha

TomTom – Leaders In The Navigation As Well As The Consumer Electronics Industry.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

Online map and navigation systems are the one revolutionary product that is being used by almost every third person on earth. They use them to locate a restaurant, to be safe when in a different place by sharing their location, or just to reach a certain destination. Though the paper maps have been there for a while, the technology-backed online maps are the most useful in today’s time. The navigation technology has not only helped big organizations like the vehicle manufacturers, Apple or Google (for their navigation software for earnings) but has empowered the common people, too. Today, the common people can independently roam around using those maps in a place, where they have never been before. Apart from the famous Google Maps, these navigation technologies are available with Apple, Bing, Here, Jawg and MapBox, etc. Most of the automobile companies are also including navigation systems into their vehicles, one big example includes the electric car manufacturer Tesla. Having navigation at one’s fingertips is the work of companies like TomTom. TomTom is a multinational Dutch company that is one of the leaders in the navigation as well as the consumer electronics industry. Apple’s maps app is also empowered by TomTom’s navigation data.

About the Company

TomTom is a thirty years old company, founded in 1991 and has its headquarters based in Amsterdam. The company started as a software developer (meter reading and bar-code reading) for corporate handheld devices (palmtop, mobile phones). But by end of the 90s, it started to focus on satellite navigation software development. Today, the company is counted among the leading navigation software developers. The company is a publically traded company and trades on Amsterdam Stock Exchange. In the past thirty years, the company has grown to have over 4500 employees. As per the 2019 records, TomTom made annual revenues worth 701 million, and its estimated operating income was € 56 million.

The Back Story

Corinne Vigreux, Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen founder TomTom as Palmtop Software in 1991 in Amsterdam. As the name suggests, the company started to develop software for corporate handheld devices, such as the meter reading and bar-code reading software. The company mainly focused on developing the Psion devices software. In fact, TomTom had partnered with Psion and developed EPOC32. Along with that, the company also released its first map software a route planning application in 1996 that worked on mobile devices. By the end of the 90s, TomTom had developed mapping software like EnRoute, Citymaps, and Routeplanner, etc.

In 2001, with a name change from Palmtop Software to TomTom, the company also released its first car satellite navigation software named TomTom Navigator. Later, in 2004, the company added a new feature, a subscription-based traffic update service to TomTom Navigator. In the same year, the company also released TomTom Go, a personal navigation device for common people.

TomTom went public on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 2005 and valued at approximately €50 million. The next year, the company introduced water-proof navigation devices for motorcycle users and also, added the text-to-speech feature for road names to its existing navigation software. In 2007, TomTom partnered with Vodafone to develop a real-time traffic data service for its consumers. The very feature was also released for the Netherlands, and in further years it reached the other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Switzerland. TomTom released its software for iPhone in 2009, and for Android, the software came in 2015.

2013, the company released a GPS sports watch named TomTomRunner, the next year, it came with the Runner Cardio GPS, and in 2015, it brought a new action camera named Bandit. By 2018, TomTom had bagged a contract from Apple to be its main GPS data supplier for Apple’s map app. TomTom reported in 2019 that it had earned over 800 million users for its various software and devices. Apart from Apple using TomTom maps data, the company’s main clients from the auto industry include Volvo, Nissan, Fiat Chrysler, Porche, Lamborghini, Bentley, etc.
In the past thirty years, TomTom has also made some strategic acquisitions that have been an additional benefit for its growth. Companies acquired by TomTom include Datafactory AG (2005), Applied Generics (2006), Tele Atlas (2008), etc.

The CEO at TomTom

Harold Goddijn is one of the founders and the CEO of TomTom. He is a native of the Netherlands and was born on 23 April 1960 in Oegstgeest, Netherlands. Goddijn is an Economics graduate from the University of Amsterdam and started his career at a venture capital firm. Later in 1989, he founded Psion Netherlands BV, becoming the managing director of Psion Computers. Goddijn left the company to full-time join Palmtop Software in 1999. With the name change of Palmtop to TomTom, Goddijn became the CEO of the company in 2001.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Insignia Systems – One Of The Biggest Advertising Media Companies In The United States.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Insignia Systems, famous as Insignia, is one of the three market leaders in the United States that dominates the promotional media service industry. The company was founded in 1990 in Minnesota, US by G.L. Hoffman and David Eiss. Insignia is a publicly-traded company that currently serves clients in the US region. It has a very experienced team comprised of shopper engagements experts who are thorough with everyday consumer behavior. The company mainly offers a point of sale in-store signs and promotional advertisements of various consumer packaged good businesses.

About Insignia Systems

Insignia Systems is one of the top 50 pop companies in North America according to Creative Magazine. The company has restricted itself to the US to date but it is one of the three dominating companies in its sector in the region. Insignia Systems is a company that is divided into two parts. One division is responsible for managing a direct relationship and engagements with retailers for placing signs in stores and the second division is responsible for marketing and providing these signs to the fast-moving consumer goods (consumer packaged good companies). These signs are placed in various retail locations.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s sales started declining, and currently, it is looking for any merger or acquisition so that the company remains afloat. In 2021, Insignia reported a net loss of $2.6 million for the first nine months. It might take some time for the company to recover, at least for the few upcoming quarters.

The Backstory of the Company

More than three decades ago when Insignia was founded on the 2nd of January 1990, the company started selling impulse signs machines. These machines could print in-store signs and labels and that was the primary focus of the company. One year after the company was founded, Insignia decided to go public in 1991 and started trading on NASDAQ. It started trading in the national market after a decade.

In 1993, new software was introduced as the precursor of the Insignia like which was known as the Stylus software. It was for Insignia’s POPS line and a few years later the impulse machine sold in the initial days was replaced by the SignRight machine. And, in 1998, Insignia’s POPS program became the featured product of the company. This program is the consumer-facing brand of the company where it consists of a sign mainly out up in the grocery stores. Through this POPS Program, Insignia has access to more than 23,000 stores all over the US.

Success

The POPS Program became the new face of the company and the reason why Insignia became famous rapidly. In the late 1990s, the sales of the company started dropping and it became a tough year to cope up. So, in May 1998, Insignia POPS signs were introduced in the market and it became the company’s primary focus. The company also decided to bring in new members into the leadership team as Scott Drill took the position of CEO in the company. It was under his leadership that the POPS business was established and executed properly. The business started growing so rapidly that from 1 million signs in 2001 to the number reached 14 million by next ten years. In 2006, the company also landed a long-term partnership with Valassis Communications for filling the in-store void for the company.

In 2011, Insignia became a part of the lawsuit that was between the company and News America Marketing. The ground of the lawsuit was engaging in various antitrust practices but after the settlement of the lawsuit, Insignia became the one and only third-party provider of in-store signs with the price. In the following years, Insignia has made its POP signs graphically customizable and also introduced The Like Machine as one of their marketing solutions.

Kristine Glancy – CEO of Insignia Solutions

Kristine Glancy is an experienced executive with more than twenty years of experience in the retail industry. She joined Insignia in 2016 and since then launched several new products. When Kristine joined the company, it was having a downward trend but under her leadership, the company reversed operating loss of nearly $3 million in 2018. She completed her bachelor’s from St. Mary’s University of San Antonio, Texas.

Annasha

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