Technoratti of India descended to Bangalore for the annual Nasscom Product Conclave 2014 on 30th and 31stOctober. Here are some top takeaways from the conference with a few from the Pune Connect event that happened on 8th Nov.
New startups are being launched at a feverish pace in India. India has 3100 startups-taking it to # 3 ahead of Israel which has only 1000 . Technologies and infrastructure to build software products have become available and the domestic market has grown to become significant enough to take note. Devices at the edge and powerful technologies at the back end are throwing up unprecedented opportunities for startups to innovate. App to App communication is exceeding browsing traffic. John McIntyre and Zack Weisfeld presented the evolution of startup ecosystems in the Silicon Valley and Israel.
Strong universities which acted like feeders and presence of prominent MNCs provided the infrastructure needed for healthy startups in Israel. Few initial successes provided the much needed boost for the startup activity to take off. Military spending and a lenient tax regime by the Government helped. The Israel Government also promoted VCs and provided exit routes.
History of Silicon valley is similar in the role played by the US Government, world war II and electronic warfare research at MIT, Harvard and Stanford. John McIntyre said that Silicon Valley is a state of mind. “Free flow of people and ideas is natural. The team you build is more important than the idea itself. There is no stigma attached to failure- you have to fail and reinvent to finally succeed. Innovation happens when you address customer desire in a financially viable product that is technically feasible. Silicon valley is a melting pot where the magic happens because of diversity of people.”
India is following the footsteps of these countries by starting a Government funded innovation -the Aadhar card program. 700 million cards were issued in 4 years with a team of 20+ developers. Aadhar has developed an API for authentication and KYC (Know Your Customer) which is being consumed by about 500 independent developers. The Aadhar team showed some innovations that will drive the future roadmap. One of them developed at the MIT media labs was an app that does iris scans using 1.2 megapixel camera and retina display available in some mobile phones today. Soon Aadhar could make one click two factor authentication (like ApplePay) possible in rural India!
Like Appstore and Google Play there are many other platforms like Salesforce, Facebook, LinkedIn and Azure that have their own ecosystem of apps. Aadhar could become one such ecosystem.
Dhiraj Rajaram of Mu Sigma cautioned that we shouldn’t get carried away by the hype associated with product startups and seriously look at services. Services can dynamically provide solutions on the fly to problems as they arise whereas static products solve specific problems they are meant to solve. Tarken Maner also pointed our that out of $3.1 trillion global IT market only $1200 billion is accounted for by hardware and software products- balance $1.9 trillion is accounted for by services.
Tips on business and marketing
Business applications want to abstract trust broking to aggregators of services like Ola Cabs or Flipkart . Promod Haque said that App to App communication is exceeding browsing traffic. As users are demanding mobile first ; some applications are moving to mobile only. Zomato scrapped their web interface,built a mobile only app and then moved to build desktop app after 6 months. Omnichannel seems to be catching up – it not only accounts for various form factors but integrates digital and physical channels of conducting business. Users get a seamless experience across multiple channels – they can start in a new channel from where they left in an old channel. Tarken Maner said that you can strategically use channel to differentiate just the way you traditionally used customer profile or product features to differentiate. B.V.Jagdeesh said as business applications are starting to look more like consumer apps; B2B market provides more opportunities than B2C. Once you acquire 20 customers in the B2B market you are safe to start building your business on that foundation. Though B2C appears more attractive ; sustainable customer acquisition in large numbers makes it more difficult.
Dhaval Patel of Kissmetrics described how their company scaled its outbound marketing communication. He said that they focused on low cost channels like Twitter and stayed away from paid conversions. They focused on creating content that their customers loved. He advised startups to join professional groups on social media like LinkedIn to study others’ content including competitors’ content and add a new twist to put across a different point of view. Once the content is up the same can be pumped up first by e-mail and then by social media campaigns. Both e-mail and social media are complimentary tools and need to be used in conjunction.
Campaigns need to be measured by studying sharing and social engagement metrics . Qualaroo is a great tool to ask questions to visitors. Vanity metrics can kill ROI . Metrics become meaningful only when they reach high thousands. Kissmetrics published over 50 info graphics and received more than 20k comments. Info graphics get hundreds of shares on LinkedIn, FB and Twitter.
Dhaval advised startups to ” Treat content creation as customer service. Measure and optimize your content. Do a/b testing , stick to a regular schedule to publish content. Images are very important for content to make people click. Create content that teaches. Blogs are cost effective e.g.Kissmetrics’ cost per sign up is as low as $7. Always position top content in left panel so that it’s easy to find.”
Product Tips
Aakrit Vaish co-founder of Haptik Inc said that mobile first is not just a business strategy but it changes the way we build and use applications. He said that everyone at Haptik uses low bandwidth 2g connection so that they can live the user experience of an average user. He said one should use mobile web if the use case starts in the browser e.g. with Google search- this way the user can reach your application in 1 click instead of 6 needed to download and install an app. Building an app would make more sense if one were leveraging native capabilities like geo-location or push notification. He said users download and install a number of free apps which they eventually delete.
Omni-channel means unification of web, mobile and in store experience- any user switching channels starts where he left off. Lowe’s – essentially a brick and mortar company now offers omni-channel experience to its customers. Associates who walk the floors of Lowe’s stores can capture the conversations about all the products and share it so that information is not lost. Product locator kiosks placed at prominent locations in the stores give stock position. Lowes planned ahead for iOS-8 and launched touch Id. They armed their associates with 42000 mobile phones not only for better operations but for better connection with customers. With more than 500K products online Lowe’s is a good example of digital-physical blur. Tesla is another example of digital-physical blur. Its more software than car.
Ramesh Raskar of MIT Media Labs shared his advice on how to invent. He explained it with his idea hexagon with some examples. The hexagon has a question at the center – “Given X whats next?” and the 6 corners show ways of inventing based on current state X.
- Xd– Add a new dimension. E.g. if Flickr shared photos.Youtube shares videos.
- X+Y. Pair X with Y – more dissimilar Y would be better. E.g. Retina display for eye checkup
- Xv – Given a hammer get all nails. E.g. Use mobile phone as a camera.
- ~X- Do exactly the opposite. E.g. reverse auction, toll free calls.
- X++- Add an adjective like faster, cheaper, cooler, more democratic to X. E.g. Skype for cheaper international calls.
- X^- Given a nail get all hammers – E.g. LensBricks- appstore for cameras.
Tips on culture
Employees are demanding enterprises to provide more freedom. InMobi has given this freedom to bring about a cultural change in their company. They have stopped using traditional way of hiring – now they follow Hiring 2.0 to hire the best teams in hackathons conducted by them. Employees built their office to suit their liking instead of the standard cubicles.
Naveen Tewari said that “You can get 100X the valuation if you get the culture right. Culture is proving to be the disruptive differentiator.” He defined culture as experiences that the company gives to its customers and employees. Change, innovation, fast failure and learning ,fast iterative growth are difficult to implement without the right culture. InMobi has implemented an open door policy for employees who could leave to do their own startup and come back if they failed. They focused on growing instead of managing people. They did away with the performance appraisal system. Connecting with families including grandparents and also with ex-employees built the company’s soul.
Jim Ehrhart repeated what was said in an earlier post – boundaries of enterprises are blurring as we move from workforce to crowdsourcing. IT barely have the tight grip on what people do as they used to have. Employees want to use apps for everything they do. Many enterprises are planning to build their own enterprise appstore.
