Formal Attire, Cabin & Timetable is Mundane & Uninspiring: Lokesh Chauhan [DOER of the week]

Lokesh Chauhan, Co-Founder, PlusTxt

Every week we pick one of the many people around us who are up to something good and try to bring out some of the interesting aspects of the person. The DOER of this week is Lokesh Chauhan, one of the Co-Founders of PlusTxt, a great texting app that supports Indian languages.

Lokesh was never in love with the idea of working for a corporate. “The formal attire, the cabin and the idea of a timetable sounded mundane and uninspiring to me,” he says.  The idea of being bogged down by a hierarchy and tending to a schedule was not in tune with his free spirited approach to life. At his first job in Webaroo, he realised that its where he belonged: “A place where we worked at our own pace and schedule.”

The deliverable mattered not your sitting at office adhering to a time table. “The culture of startup was such that I instantly fell in love with it,” he says.

So far, he has worked at three startups. To our question about the not so great salaries in the startup world, he had one thing to say

Take the chances while you are young. Your ability to learn is higher when you are working for a startup as you get to don many hats. You get recognition for your good work and you are criticized about your mistakes much sooner in a startup environment.

The buzz of startup drives you to put more efforts than in a regular corporate job making you realize your own limits and pushing hard to get better with each day. Money matters but the experience and knowledge that comes along with a startup equips you for higher dividends at later part of life.

What does he think about ESOPS?

ESOPs are like a lottery ticket. You cannot make your plans on basis of ESOPs. They are a good driving factor but your priorities should be learning and growing as an individual and team contributor. You should not base your monitory expectations on it as ESOPs can be of zero worth if things don’t turn out well for the startup. Never be afraid of the worst outcome but always be ready for it.

‘Engineering’ vs ‘Coding’ – how would he define them?

Engineering – Creating a solution for a hard to define problem. Requires imaginative thought process.
Coding – Implementing a solution. Requires following the guidelines.

His weapons of choice? DJango/Python for development. Vim is his favorite editor and Eclipse for everything else.

Now that he works for an app startup, we took a peek at his phone’s home screen to see what it looks like. Being a communication and news junkie, its filled with reading and communication apps.

What does he think of the Indian product eco system? Indian product startups need more help as compared to valley because of lack of early adopters  Indian angels and investors need to start believing more in them because waiting in line for a trend to start will never allow the startups to grow at the right time and pace as required, he says.

Related posts:

1. Do not care about ESOPs? Read this 70X Success Story (From India)
2. Invites for this week: LifeInLines and LifeBlob
3. Best of the Week–Salesforce Acquires Dimdim

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KakaoTalk Challenges Apple and Google with New Digital Publishing Platform

The Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk has over 70 million users and a social gaming platform running in a couple of countries. But the app doesn’t stop there. KakaoTalk has launched Kakao Page as a media and content publishing platform for companies to distribute content.

At first glance it looks a bit like the customer-relation management (CRM) function that WeChat, the huge Chinese messaging app, rolled out last year. That involves the likes of Starbucks and other major brands, along with celebrities and media outlets (including us), reaching out to consumers and fans sort of like many do already on Sina Weibo or Twitter. But KakaoTalk’s new feature is more than that, and seems to be very much aimed at specific publishing and monetization.

The Kakao Page platform is available only in Korean for the moment, but it’s going further than WeChat’s CRM tools to effectively make the Korean startup a sort of media company. It’s aimed at content creators, and the published material will be paid for. As such, it will be more of a challenge to magazine subscriptions in Apple’s NewsStand or Google Play.

The interface for publishers. Click to enlarge.

Content producers can use either the new Kakao Pages web interface (pictured right) or the Kakao Partner app to create and organize their material for consumption on users’ smartphones. The idea is that people will be more likely to use – and pay for – this kind of media within a fun social app than go out of their way to app stores to buy subscriptions.

KakaoTalk’s other major platform is social gaming, done in conjunction with numerous app developers. So far it has rolled out in South Korea and Japan.

(Source: TheNextWeb)

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Beyond Responsive Design: Adaptive Game Design

In 2011, the global video game industry was valued at US$65 billion. This number is made up of games across many different platforms: consoles; hand-held devices; desktops; web browsers and mobile. For those interested in game creation, there is a wide plethora opportunities to develop on, but at the obvious cost of needing to develop on many stand-alone devices.

Taking the lessons we learned from Responsive Design, game creators are discussing the viability of adaptive game design, or a future of games and a gamer’s experience that exist across multiple devices, adapting based on how your interact with the game’s content.

Build platforms, not games

This discussion is best framed with a quote from Build New Games:

“We can shift around the problem entirely by providing an entirely new class of entertainment to our end user. What I propose is a progressively enhanced, responsively designed approach to web gaming that encompasses all devices, everywhere, by providing engagement across all levels. This involves breaking away from the idea of building a game, and instead, building a lasting, engaging experience.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean building the same game across all devices, but as the quote says, building engagement across all devices. This can be exemplified with games like BioWare’s Mass Effect franchise:

• Console Engagement: Main Mass Effect games on mainstream consoles and desktops
• Mobile Engagement: iPad and Android game (Mass Effect: Infiltrator) where achieving in-game objectives affect the console game’s ending
• BioWare’s forums

What’s missing is the web browser that could have been paired with a responsive design so that there could be simultaneous engagement on desktop or mobile browsers.

Another great example would be Gearbox’s Borderlands 2:

• Console Engagement: Main Borderlands 2 games on mainstream consoles and desktops
• Browser engagement:
  • Borderlands Browser Game: Retro-styled game used as a marketing tool
  • Borderlands Skill Tree Planner: Users can plan their character’s in-game growth on a web browser

Developing for the Adaptive Game

Clearly, it’s no easy task to create unique experiences that speak to the gamer across multiple devices. Creating one good game is arduous enough, much less two or more. However, there are some points that came be taken into consideration.

Building for different contexts and different needs

We use consoles different from how we use desktops and laptops. We use web and mobile browsers differently than how we use an app. For example, a gamer will only be able to experience the main portion of the game by portioning time in front of a screen to play, but that gamer might have 5 minutes to check on his in-game stats through his smartphone while queueing up for lunch. The experience to be created should be done in-line with how the device is normally used.

Keep devices ‘talking’ to each other

For example, building off a desktop client in HTML 5 allows the developer to take advantage of modern browsers’ graphics processing hardware through WebGL or Canvas, and allows developers to test browser capabilities and provide a lesser experience to less-capable browsers. It also allows the building of a mobile-specific interface and use one of the many HTML5-to-native-app frameworks available (or build a native app and connect through the common WebSockets interface.)

The future of gaming

People consider a virtual reality to be the holy grail of gaming, where a gamer ‘lives out’ the experience of his or her game through all their senses of touch, sight, sound, smell, taste. However, in between here and the future, there is this amazing opportunity for game creators to create wonderful experiences for their users across multiple devices, all the while being part of a game’s world whether online or offline.

This post is part of “Harnessing HTML5″, a series that explores new browser technologies in partnership with Modern.IE

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Startup Roundup: BearShop, Koolskool, decidebuddy, Dominder and bizpunditz

Besides the dozens of startups we profiled in detail over the week, here is a quick roundup of interesting portals/startups we came across. If you are a startup who wants to get reviewed/get profiled on NextBigWhat, add details here. This week we have BearShop, Koolskool, Dominder and bizpunditz.

BearShop

If there is one thing that’s common between a majority of shopaholics, its the tendency to compare prices. price comparison. And why not? Everyone loves a good deal.

The latest to launch price comparison engine is Mumbai based BearShop, which allows users to compare prices across various online retailers and find the best deal across categories such as mobile phones, television, gaming console amongst others. The platform offers unique features like want to buy, follow a product, and later notify them when the price of product drops.

Launched by Puneet Sharma, Narendra Kumar, Ankur Jai Kumar, Praveer Bhatt and Ashish Ranjan in September last year, BearShop allows users to login via FaceBook or email account.

KoolSkool
Koolskool is an integrated multi-channel retail venture for K-12 grade across India. Currently, the website offers NCERT textbooks, CD and DVDs, stationery, arts and crafts, sporting gears, amongst others. The Bangalore based startup is founded by Suhas Dutta and Vyom Khandelia. Apart from B2C model, Skoolkool affiliates with schools, coaching/training classes, corporates for bulk sale.

Decidebuddy

decidebuddy is a digital platform that encourages consumers to review everything that they use – right from automobiles, laptops, mobiles, books, movies, finance, travels, websites and anything else that inspires users to express their opinions.

The Mumbai based company is being founded by Dushyant Bhatia, Rohan Bhansali and Ahmed Naqvi.

Dominder

Dominder is an online service that allows you to manage multiple domains from a single control panel. Essentially, the startup weeds out the pain of businesses or individuals using different website to manage their project.

Launched by Ivan Alexandrovich, the Gibraltar based startup constantly checks the expiry date of users domains and hosting, and inform them a month prior to the end of registration.

bizpunditz

bizpunditz is a digital learning content library where practitioners share their experiences through short video films. The startup brings amalgamation of content and technology, its digital library addresses the need for soft skill training, and tries to bridge gap between theory and practice through expert mentoring by leading industry practitioners.

For Phablets, bizpunditz has developed apps for IPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms which can be downloaded here.

Related posts:

1. Startup Roundup: Nupinch for apparel, Oomph for wellness, Pricepaaji and Flickbazar
2. Startup Roundup: Freshbazaar, Shopr, BuyHatke and Woolor
3. Startup Roundup: Gyeser, Desisamachar, eShack and Dogspot

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Micromax Starts Selling A116 Canvas HD For Rs 13990 & Samsung Launches Smart Feature Phone Series REX

The Micromax A116 Canvas HD

Indian handset manufacturer Micromax has started selling its quad core A116 Canvas HD phone today for Rs 13,990 online. The pnone will be sold exclusively online with and will be delivered in 5-7 working days from order, said Micromax.

Wonder whats taking them so long to ship a phone they’ve already made. Unless, they aren’t very sure of the demand forecast. Coming from Micromax, which made the Canvas A110, a superhit Rs 10k Android phone, this one holds a lot of promise. It’s got decent memory (1 GB RAM) and a 1.2 Ghz Quad Core processor.

The 5 inch phone ships with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and has a 2100 mAh battery besides specs that are pretty much standard for phones in its price category these days. The quad core processor and RAM stand out.

Micromax, which has supplied with e-commerce store Snapdeal to sell the Canvas HD says that the first lot has been sold out. Though they don’t say how many were made in the first place. It could be taking a leaf from Apple’s playbook to make sure there are enough people queuing up before they actually give them the phone.

A notice on Snapdeal reads

The first lot of orders are sold out and will be shipped as per stated time lines. You may book the new lot which will get shipped in 21 business days

Micromax is proving a bit of a challenge to Samsung which has a large market share in India. The company’s smart phone range has struck a chord with the price sensitive Indian market.

Samsung launches REX series

Meanwhile, the Korean electronics giant Samsung has launched a range of new smart feature phones costing between Rs 4280 – Rs 6490 called the Samsung REX series. There are four phones in this range. Namely: REX 90, REX 80, REX 70 and REX 60.

The series is being launched globally from India, given how large the feature phone market in India is.

The Samsung REX series

According to Samsung‘s President & CEO, Mr B D Park, the series has been developed in India and will be introduced across the world.  More details here.

Related posts:

1. Micromax launches A116 Canvas HD, Powered by MediaTek Quad Core processor
2. Micromax A110 Canvas 2 Review: Can the phone-that-can, can?
3. Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy phones in India. Micromax is a big challenger.

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Project Lana Launches a New Challenger in Vietnam’s Online Lingerie Market

Project Lana, is the team that launched Web Tre Tho, Vietnam’s largest women’s forum, and now it has a new venture: an online store selling lingerie. It’s called Foreva and it launched quietly last week.

The launch of Foreva will be troubling news for Noyyo, which at the time I wrote the article, was the first and only online lingerie shop in Vietnam. And even more troubling for Noyyo will be the price range of Foreva’s selection. Most of the lingerie on the front page ranges from 36,000 VND ($1.80) to 505,000 VND ($24.23). Noyyo’s selection ranges from 192,000 VND ($9.21) to over a million VND ($47.97). That’s mainly because Noyyo carries quality brand names like Wonderbra whereas Foreva carries more Vietnamese brands like Relax.

Another difference you’ll see between Noyyo and Foreva is that the latter only has Vietnamese models in its photos, possibly underlining a difference in the funding and relationship with the local community. Foreva has the advantage of riding the wave of the Web Tre Tho online community, which already exceeds over one million users, and the team is completely Vietnamese. Noyyo has had to strike out on its own and one of its founders is European.

Clearly, lingerie is a hot market in Vietnam with two e-commerce companies going head to head. I’d say Foreva’s got a significant advantage, with the community and going for the lower-end market, but Noyyo’s also got international brands in a higher end market that won’t be as impacted by the Vietnamese economy. We’ll see who makes it out the other end of 2013.

Aside from the popular forum and the new e-commerce store, the Project Lana team also runs Lam Dieu, a specialist e-commerce fashion site for women, and Be Yeu, a vertical online store for mothers and mothers-to-be. Since I last talked to Project Lana, the team has also released a pretty iPhone app for Web Tre Tho.

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Cacoo Enterprise allows online drawing collaboration with more control, autonomy and security

If you want autonomy, security and a higher level of control while diagramming and drawing online – check out Cacoo Enterprise. It allows web creation teams to share and execute ideas real time without any fuss.

Nulab Inc., a software development company that develops collaborative software tools, just announced yesterday that they have launched their free-of-charge, new, alternative version of its online drawing and diagramming application, Cacoo.

This latest version of Cacoo Enterprise allows users to install the software on their private networks, offering them more control, autonomy and security when designing.

On the Active Server Pages (ASP), users can install the application onto their own servers, making it customisable in terms of access in network, ability to set rules on how the programme is used and security requirements. It is said to be ideal for those looking to explore advanced control features and have greater efficiency while using the programme.

It has an intuitive interface so users can understand and learn how to use it fast. Covering all basic drawing functionalities, the software assists users to draw both easily and efficiency. Besides being able to create sitemaps, mockups and wireframes, Cacoo is also a collaborative application that enables teams to share ideas, execute decisions smoothly and quickly in real time while working with the team.

Users can also store all application development diagrams on Cacoo to avoid the hassle of retrieving files from different places. The programme is also a great help when users want to develop different parts of the application development process like UI layout, transition design and database diagrams.

It also aims to help teams be more productive, by having tools to illustrate and visualize work processes and a comprehensive flow chart. Diagrams are made easy to update, which greatly reduces the time and simplifies the task of updating during server or network maintenance.

One of the best points about Cacoo is that users can create their own templates and stencils. These can also be shared in the global inventory, with all other users in the organization.

With no charge, users can access Cacoo but should they want additional features like multiple admins and more shared folders, they can also purchase a team or plus package.

On Cacoo’s website, it states that over two million diagrams have been created, and the programme supports 21 different languages.

Image Credit: Cacoo

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SingTel sees 8% dip in third quarter net profit, India decreases but Southeast Asian subsidiaries post strong growth

With increasing demand for smartphones and better Internet services, SingTel has seen a growth in annual customer base of nine percent, but the bad investments and rife competition could have cost it an eight percent dip in its net profit.

It was reported today that Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel), which has multiple subsidiaries, has seen an increase of nine percent in terms of annual customer base with 473 million mobile users. But they have also suffered a drop of five percent in group revenue, which totals up to be S$4.6 billion. It also noted that there is a eight percent decrease in net profit to S$827 million.

SingTel has released its earnings for its fiscal third quarter, which goes about saying that it has seen “resilient performances against the competition”.

According to the published data, in Singapore, revenue grew one percent to S$1.7 billion. It is also noted that revenue from mobile communications increased by three percent to S$507 million, banking on strong customer growth and the ever-increasing demand for smartphones. The Asian telecom also suggested that this might have been offset by lower roaming revenues. It also sees its customer base at 3.76 million, with a leading market share of 46.6 percent as of 31 December 2012.

Ms Chua Sock Koong, CEO of the SingTel Group, said, “The performance of the Group demonstrates the resilience of our core operations and focused execution even as we recognise the challenges in the various markets. We are executing our transformation plan to grow in the new digital era, exploiting opportunities in mobile data and enterprise ICT services to grow our share of the customer wallet. The Group is focused on driving growth in mobile data services with continued investment in its infrastructure, attractive tiered data plans and meeting customer demand for higher speeds and better user experience.

It is also noteworthy that Internet-related revenue for Singapore grew by five percent with more users adopting fiber-based services and higher-tier plans. SingTel also saw 29 percent of households on their bundled plans, which constituted 338,000 customers.

The company also saw an uproar, especially online, when it announced its revision of the data bundle from 12GB to 2GB of free data, alongside the other two telcos, M1 and StarHub, in Singapore.

What is thought of as bad decisions have also seen SingTel through the economic downturn, with the acquisition of Optus among others.

As for Optus in Australia, it is said to have an increase in margin despite lower operating revenue for its mobile services. It has also maintained its postpaid customer growth well, and saw net additions of 58,000 for the quarter. In addition to expanding its 4G coverage across the country, the 3G network was said to have improved.

Its other operators mostly saw increases in revenue and customer base. Telkomsel, in Indonesia, noted a jump of 16 percent in revenue, with strong growth growth across voice, SMS and data usage. Its total customer base also reached 125 million, growing by 17 percent as compared to the past year. AIS, in Thailand, also saw growth in both voice and non-voice revenues.

Globe, in the Philippines, saw an increase of seven percent with continued strength in both mobile and broadband platforms, even with an especially competitive environment. It also observed a 10 percent growth in mobile customer base, as compared to a year ago.

However, Airtel, which is in India, suffered a 46 percent decrease in share value to S$70 million, reasons cited by SingTel as the weaker currency, increased depreciation and higher net financing costs. This, despite its total mobile customer base reaching 251 million, an eight percent increase from the previous year.

In January 2013, the Singapore-based service provider announced its plans to divest its stake in Warid, a telecommunications group in Pakistan, for US$150 million and a right to obtain 7.5 percent share of the net proceeds from any future sale, public offering or merger of Warid.

Image Credit: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg

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Veeam brings its backup solutions to the cloud

Veeam Backup Cloud Edition aims to simplify backups and offer an affordable alternative to tape and offsite backup storage.

Veeam software, provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions, announced yesterday that the #1 VM backup solution is now cloud-ready.

Veeam Backup Cloud Edition supports 15 different public storage clouds, such as Windows Azure, Amazon S3, HP Cloud and Rackspace. This also includes support for clouds built on OpenStack. It aims to turn every cloud storage in the market into a simplified data storehouse for backups, offering an affordable alternative to tape and offsite backup storage.

Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Director of Server and Tools and Marketing at Microsoft said that the Windows Azure cloud platform can offer an affordable and highly available alternative. She added, “We’re pleased to work with Veeam to make it easy for small to mid-sized organizations to take advantage of the Windows Azure cloud.”

Key benefits include automated copying of local backups to the cloud on a scheduled basis, more secured backups to the cloud with an AES 256-bit encryption, simple and fuss-free set up with no need of cloud storage APIs knowledge, and an annual subscription license.

Ratmir Timashev, President and CEO of Veeam Software said, “We’re proud to have set the standard in virtualization for modern data protection. With Veeam Backup Cloud Edition, we’ve raised the bar yet again with a solution that’s powerful, easy to use and affordable.”

Subscriptions are available in one, two or three year licenses for new customers with discounts for multi-year subscriptions. Existing customers can purchase a Cloud Edition license to their existing back up and replication licenses.

Jason Buffington, a senior analyst for data protection at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) said, “Improving backup and increased virtualization continue to be top planned IT investments in 2013, which is just one of the reasons for Veeam’s success. [...] Today, every IT conversation seems to have cloud-considerations in it.”

Image Credit: AZ Informatica

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Blackberry Z10 Comes to Indonesia in March

Kompas reported today that Indonesian telco Indosat has confirmed that the Blackberry Z10 will arrive at the end of next month.

How about the other new BB10 phone? Detik cited Indosat director and chief commercial Erik Meijer as saying that the QWERTY version of the Blackberry 10 handset, the Q10, will arrive around two months after the Z10. So far there is no word about the exact price for the handsets.

Singaporeans will get a taste of both handsets as early as next week.

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