Realtime Traffic and trabel information portal Traffline raises Series A funding from Matrix Partners

Realtime Traffic and trabel information portal Traffline raises Series A funding from Matrix Partners

– By Prathamesh Patil

Matrix Partners India today announced that it has invested in the first institutional round of funding for Birds Eye Systems Private Limited, which offers real-time traffic and travel information for Indian cities through a variety of mobile and internet channels under the Traffline brand.

Brijraj Vaghani, the co-founder and CEO, has extensive experience in the mobile sector with Qualcomm and Nextwave Wireless in the US, before moving back to India and starting Birds Eye Systems. His co-founder and CTO, Ravi Khemani, has worked previously with careerbuilder.com in the US and Sears International in India.

“Getting access to accurate and real-time traffic, travel and local information is a large problem for millions of Indian commuters in major cities. We want to address this problem using an approach tailored to Indian ethos and travel conditions. We partner with private players, government, police, public transport utilities and our users to ensure that information is real-time. We aim to own the everyday door-to-door travel and information space on mobile, be it private vehicles, public transport, or local businesses, across major Indian cities” said Brijraj Vaghani and Ravi Khemani, co-founders, Birds Eye Systems Private Limited

Nitin Agarwal – Investor, IAN said “We are very pleased for the Traffline team. This is an endorsement of our belief in the company and its founders, as well as of the ability of IAN to source, evaluate, and nurture high-potential startups at a very early stage.” Rajiv Dadlani – Investor, IAN added “We have always believed in Brij and Ravi. Their focus and determination was the key factor in our investment decision at the angel stage. We look forward to continuing to work with them, as well as with Matrix Partners India, to grow Birds Eye into a valuable company.”

“We are excited by Traffline’s unique approach of using technology to solve the offline traffic and transportation problem in India. Traffline is a pioneer in this space and we’re investing to expand the product to 10 cities in India and multiple transport modes in a short timeframe. We look forward to partnering with Brij and Ravi in their journey to build a large company. We continue to focus on more early stage investments in the mobile space in India.” said Vikram Vaidyanathan, Director, Matrix India

Birds Eye Systems provides real-time traffic information across 4 major Indian cities under the Traffline brand. Traffline’s products already have several hundred thousand users, and have been covered extensively in major offline and online media outlets. With a network of data sources running into several thousands, Traffline prides itself on its ability to provide short, contextual, conversational calls to action to millions of commuters daily.

Can Indian entrepreneurs build the next Google? Yes, says Eric Schmidt

 Can Indian entrepreneurs build the next Google? Yes, says Eric Schmidt

– By Prathamesh Patil

India’s entrepreneurial innovators have the potential to build the “next Google” if the country “plays its cards right” and ensures Internet access for millions of its citizens, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has said.

In an essay written for the book ‘Reimagining India: Unlocking The Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower’ edited by global consulting firm McKinsey, Schmidt dubbed India “an Internet laggard” saying he feels Internet in the country today is like where it was in America in about 1994 — four years before Google was even born.

He said India must increase its Internet penetration across towns and cities, a move that will have a positive impact on its economy and society.

The former Google CEO said he witnessed the creative potential of India’s people all around him in Silicon Valley where India-born entrepreneurs account for 40 per cent of start-ups.

“Just think what will happen when India’s entrepreneurial innovators are able to create great global companies without leaving their country. They will change the world. Hundreds of large firms focused on the Internet will be founded and will succeed by focusing purely on Indian consumers, Indian taste, Indian style, Indian sports.

“Can anyone of those companies ultimately become the next Google? Of course.”

“That may not happen for quite a few years. But if India plays its cards right, we will soon see Indian engineers and small businesses tackling Indian problems first, then exporting the solutions that work best,” Schmidt said.

With a total population of 1.2 billion, India has over 600 million mobile phone users but only about 150 million people regularly connect to the Internet.

In 2011, India’s Internet penetration rate was 11 per cent, “far below” that of developed nations where penetration rates average 70 per cent.

India’s Internet penetration rate is less than a third of China’s penetration ratio of 38 per cent and less than half of those in developing countries, which average 24 per cent.

“By any reasonable definition, India is an Internet laggard… In spite of its well deserved reputation as one of the world’s leading IT and software development hubs, India is far from being the connected society many foreigners imagine,” Schmidt said.

The number of India’s broadband users, 20 million, is even smaller, Schmidt said however adding that India is on the cusp of a connectivity revolution.

“I believe India has the chance to leapfrog its current connectivity challenges, bring Internet access to a majority of its citizens — and even raise its penetration ratio to 60 or 70 per cent within the next 5—10 years,” he said according to a PTI report. 

Snapdeal expects its online sales to cross Rs 2,000 cr in FY14

Online market place Snapdeal.com expects the total sale of products traded on its platform to cross Rs 2,000 crore in the next fiscal helped by its robust growth in the past two years and the growing popularity of e-commerce in India.

“We expect the sale of goods on Snapdeal’s platform to cross Rs 2,000 crore in 2013-14 fiscal on the back of a strong growth. We have maintained a growth rate of about 400 per cent year-on-year in the last two years,” Snapdeal.com Co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl told PTI.

Besides, there has been a constant increase in the number of online transactions, which will also help Snapdeal increase its reach, he added.

Independent experts have estimated e-commerce segment to have more than doubled in India to about $14 billion in 2012 from $6.3 billion in 2011.

Last year, Snapdeal had said that it expects to garner revenues of about Rs 600 crore in the current fiscal, which will end this month.

According to Bahl, the company presently has 5,000 brands and over a million products listed on its website, which it expects to increase to 25,000 brands and 20 million products in the next 2 years.

Betting big on the growth of mobile commerce, Bahl said at present 15-20 per cent of the sales on Snapdeal comes through m-commerce.

“In the next 18 months about 30 per cent of the sales will come from m-commerce,” he noted.

According to a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB, India is expected to have close to 165 million mobile Internet users by March 2014, up from 87.1 million in December 2012 as more people are accessing the web through mobile devices and dongles.

On the outlook, Bahl said “2012 was a good year for firms like us and in 2013 the economic sentiment seems to be recovering.”

Launched in February 2010, Snapdeal employs over 1,500 people and delivers to more than 5,000 cities and towns in India.

MobileFirst: IBM asking companies to design mobile applications first, rest later

ING Vysya Bank, with around 500 branches and an additional 500 ATMs, is too small to compete with the banking titans directly. So it does what small companies do in such situations: use tact and finesse to lure and retain customers.

The bank was evaluating technology options to use mobility as a strategic edge, when it was attracted to an Israeli company, Worklight. This startup, set up in 2006, had a useful piece of technology.

It enabled companies to create, in one seamless process, an application that could work in any device: a laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android phone… Its capabilities were impressive, but there was one problem.

Worklight did not operate in India. This was in early 2012. Soon after, ING Vysya heard an interesting piece of news: IBM was acquiring Worklight.

IBM, which had worked hard to build formidable products and services in cloud and analytics, had suddenly found itself inadequate in mobility, a rapidly-emerging area that was becoming a conduit to these two businesses.

With IBM having a substantial presence in India, ING signed up with Worklight quickly. IBM went on to acquire more companies, totaling 10 in the mobility space in four years, and launched a brand called MobileFirst on Thursday last week.

“We are planning to double investments in mobility this year,” says Ed Brill, director of IBM Mobile Enterprise Marketing. MobileFirst, as the name implies, asks companies to turn their current development philosophy on its head.

Instead of making mobile applications an extension of their desktop software, IBM is asking companies to design mobile applications first and then think about the rest later.

For them to do this well, IBM has spread a splendid set of tools: a mobile development platform, a security platform, a mobile device management product, mobile analytics, an ecosystem which includes service-provider A&T (only in the US) and universities, and a plethora of services around of them.

Although not mentioned explicitly, it would include a cloud service also, often serving as a critical part of mobile services. Mobility is now considered as one of the mega trends affecting the IT industry, on par with three trends that defined and directed it earlier: Mainframe, client-server and Internet.

Many chief information officers and analysts now bundle mobility with other recent developments like social, cloud and analytics. These four trends are together called SMAC, a term that describes the close association between social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

All four areas are bustling with startup innovation. Big IT companies are watching them closely. Mobile applications have been growing slowly over the last decade, but mobile commerce had not, till recently.

Phones were not good enough then. The networks were slow. Enterprises had legacy applications that were not easy to extend to a mobile. So you could, in theory, buy stuff on the mobile or do other financial transactions, but customers were often put away by the poor experience.

Yet, many companies underestimated the power of mobile commerce. In just two years, a number of enabling factors began to coalesce into a powerful wind that pushed customers to mobile commerce.

Phones can now compute as fast as desktop computers five years ago. 4G took off in developed markets. Clever startups made mobile application development easier. Customers who have started complex transactions on their mobile are often left frustrated, and companies began noticing that they end up not making purchases.

“During the Internet days,” says Sowri Santhanakrishnan, vice-president of mobility at Cognizant, “the enterprises and the consumer had pushed equally hard. With mobility, the consumer is pushing the most, and also saying ‘I want my experience my own way.”

Companies did not understand the speed of change — Facebook is a good example — and struggled with the development of mobile applications. Phones had smaller real estate when compared to laptops.

There are a large number of these mobile devices, and each one needs to be treated differently. Mobile browsers were not good enough for complex transactions, as even HTML 5 is still not fully mature.

IBM says its products and services convert these problems into a revenue opportunity. Worklight helps customers build applications once and deploy everywhere.

The Rational Test Workbench helps companies test these mobile apps. The new Appscan for iOS — it had launched Appscan for Android devices — finds and fixes security issues in iOS applications early during development.

IBM Endpoint manager helps CIOs manage multiple devices that employees use these days. Tealeaf mobile solution analyses the mobile behaviour of customers and converts them into revenue opportunities. And so on, with more products and services. It is an impressive array to match for competition, but other IT companies are building their own strategies to penetrate this market.

The Distraction Of Twitter

It’s going to come to a head at some point soon. We’re all going to realize that Twitter is the ultimate distraction.The problem with saying that Twitter is a distraction comes at a cost. People don’t want to think (or admit) that they are wasting their time – mostly because even defining what a “waste of time” is can be subjective (and who is to say that a distraction in one’s life is also a waste of time?). I try not to kid myself. I realize that watching most prime time television is a waste of time and there are many other activities that us human beings engage in that don’t really add much value to our own lives and the lives of people around us. Twitter could well be the next great distraction, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, so long as you can admit it to yourself and appreciate that we all need moments of distraction. The challenge comes in identifying when these little distractions wind up taking up too much time in our lives. Twitter as a distraction engine. Brands that turn to Twitter usually do so to ensure that: If someone is talking about their brands, they can be (somewhat) responsive. They can broadcast/engage with those who are interested in their brands. Ultimately, Twitter is just a short, fast and easy way to share a message. As much as it has become a distraction for the majority of people, it is also a great place to poke your nose around to find out what is being talked about, what’s in the news or to find something interesting to read, watch or listen to. All of those activities are – fundamentally – activities that are distracting you from doing the work you were meant to do. Why is Twitter such a distraction? The short messages (tweets) happen in bursts. This is both addictive to watch and so “snackable” that it’s hard to resist. It’s easy to bang out a tweet in a couple of seconds… and it feels good to let people know what you’re thinking/what you’re up to. It happens in real-time, so whenever you’re engaged with Twitter, you are “in the moment.” People say, do and share interesting things. It’s the ultimate in reality programming. What’s more interesting: to watch the story of people we don’t know (or those that are made up) verses the story of people we do know or are interested in? It’s highly mobile. Tweeting or following Twitter is something that’s easy and mindless to do when you’re standing with one arm wrapped around the pole in a subway or have a handful of minutes while in-between meetings. It’s an easy way to follow and connect with new and interesting people. A distraction is still a distraction. Some will take this Blog post as an indictment on Twitter. That is not the case. I use, like and connect with Twitter on a more-than-daily basis, but I’m cautious of it. I can see/feel how easy it is to sucked into the vortex of interesting quips, tweets, retweets, responding to messages, links and provocations. While I love that type of back-and-forth banter, the work I do for our clients at Twist Image takes precedence. So too does my writing (this Blog, my newspaper and magazine columns, my future books), speaking and Podcasting. While I can appreciate the value of Twitter, it falls well below the value I get from creating more substantive ideas in other forums (my own art). Twitter and the tweets that go along with them are fleeting moments that disappear almost as quickly as they are published. I’m ok with Twitter as an engine of distraction, but I often wonder if the more serious power users see it in the same vein?