Indian Innovators (10 page)

Sachidanand Swami

Interactive Touch Surfaces

If touch phones and touch tablets were not exciting enough, think about touch tables – interactive, large, touch user interface devices, enabling multiple users to engage with each other via a common interface. Imagine playing virtual air hockey in a mall on a touch table, or a boardroom corporate discussion via a touch table rather than a whiteboard. All this and more might soon become reality, thanks to the accomplishments of Sachidanand Swami.

Hailing from a small city in Uttar Pradesh, Sachidanand made it to IIT Delhi, without any coaching. Preparing for one of the most competitive exams in the world and doing better than the peer group, that too without any formal guidance, calls for a lot of courage and self-confidence. There is definitely no dearth of these qualities in Sachidanand.

“Since the days of my early schooling, I dreamt of doing something big and different in the technology space. IIT seemed to be the perfect place to do that. However, adapting to life at IIT wasn’t all that easy. There were immensely bright people all around, many from big cities, prominent schools or famous coaching institutes. It created immense pressure, which led me to neglect academics altogether. I had very poor grades at IIT. Good academic standing sometimes helps you gain credibility with new people – good grades portray you as a sincere person to someone who may have no other parameter to judge you. I feel all the other things that I did could have been easily managed without ignoring academics.”

Despite an average academic performance, Sachidanand managed to get a job with AT Kearney, a leading strategy consulting firm. However, it was not the job he was looking for.

“I was enrolled in a five-year Mathematics and Computing degree. In my fourth year, I got involved with touch devices via projects underway at IIT Delhi. The technology sparked instant interest in me. I could see its long-term potential and wanted to continue working on it. Technology has always been my first love and it seemed far more exciting than a consulting job. So, I became an associate researcher at IIT Delhi after graduating and started working full-time on the touch user interface.

After a few months, I received an offer from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) for a research position. It was a tough choice. Going to DTU meant I would have to stop the research work on touch devices, which I did not want to do; yet, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss. Eventually, I decided to take up the offer and continue my research on the side while in Denmark.

At DTU, I worked on a graphical user interface for city traffic simulation, which relates to programming traffic signals and other elements of the system, in order to ensure smooth flow of traffic, especially during peak hours.

The Danish stint helped me understand the European market better and also imbibe the positives from the research culture in Europe.

After coming back to India, I continued my work on touch devices with renewed vigor and spent the next 15 months perfecting the user experience to international standards.”

With help from the Industrial Design Center at IIT Delhi, Sachidanand made a 103-inch tall interactive wall, which could be put to multiple uses, such as gaming, interactive learning or information dissemination. “Much like what you see in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
The 6th Day
or Tom Cruise’s
Minority Report,
this was an intelligent wall that could interact with the user via touch interface. We put the wall up in the IIT campus for users to interact with and the response was amazing. That’s when I decided that it was time to create a company around this product.

After walls, I started focusing on interactive touch tables, because they are more suited to corporate discussions and have more applications and user engagement than a wall.”

Sachidanand applied for the Government of India’s TePP grant, via FITT (Forum for Innovation and Technology Transfer) at IIT and started work under the guidance of Prof Hanmandlu of the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Delhi. He also took interns from other engineering colleges who were keen to learn and ready to commit a year.

“Developing software applications for the hardware was the most time-consuming part. We are still working on expanding our software offerings. The touch table in itself is more like a big tablet. The surface area enables a greater number of people to use it simultaneously; however, the key constituent for a great user experience are the applications that can be run on this hardware. Because this product is not aimed at individuals but at businesses, there is a greater need for customization of software applications for the target business. So, for example, a real estate company may ask us to deploy an interactive wall with software that enables users to learn more about their projects at the touch of a finger, provide further details about a property that the user chooses to touch and give a virtual tour of the flat that the user wishes to see, letting him rotate the view or move back and forth, or even letting him customize the home and calculate the price of the flat after customization.

We have so far applied for five patents in all, both for hardware and software. We are currently working on developing gaming applications for the entertainment industry, various business application suites to enable collaboration at work and simulation software for training purposes.”

Touch tables form a niche segment in the technology space and are dominated by MNCs like Microsoft and Perceptive Pixel. However, Sachidanand remains unfazed.

“These companies have their own proprietary technology. So, Microsoft’s product is different from Perceptive’s and so is ours. Though we essentially compete in the same market, our edge is in our costing. Currently, Microsoft Surface SUR-40 costs around
5 lakh. We would be able to sell our touch tables at about half that cost. Moreover, the battle will be about who is able to develop better applications – so, if we have better software offerings for the education industry, then schools and colleges will have a reason to choose us over Microsoft. Therefore, software development is our current focus, along with greater localization of content.”

Sachidanand finally incorporated his company, Invoxel Technologies, in April 2011. He explains, “Invoxel is short for ‘Interactive Voxel’. Voxel is the name for a 3D pixel. So, Invoxel would imply an interactive 3D pixel.”

Sachidanand talks about his future plans. “In future, we plan to make gesture-based devices, so a user can interact with an interface by just waving their hands in the air or through body movements. We also plan to develop surfaces which have 3D display.”

The current focus of the company is the auto industry. They also participated in Auto Expo in 2013. “We count Hero Motors among our clients. We also worked with Audi during the launch of its SUV Q3 in India. The next industry we would target is telecommunications, for which we are in talks with Nokia. Apart from building clients in India, we are also negotiating a few contracts with clients in Europe.”

The next goal for the young venture is to secure venture capital funding.

“Initially, my parents helped with the funds. Later, the grants that I secured saw us through. I did not know anything about incorporating or running a company, but some of my friends, who are chartered accountants, came to the rescue. While filing patents too, I depended largely on my friends who had worked at MNCs specializing in providing services related to intellectual property rights. Through most of the development phase, we had very few employees. Now that the products are ready and we have potential clients, we need to secure some external funding in order to scale up.”

The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global non-profit dedicated to nurturing entrepreneurship, has conferred an award on Invoxel for its technology. Faced with competitors like Microsoft, there is definitely a tough battle ahead for Invoxel, but the confidence that this bespectacled 28-year- old possesses is worth appreciating.

“In 1975, Microsoft was a small and unknown start-up, much like ours. In fact, they took five years to develop the first MS-DOS, which they released in 1980. Nobody knew what the future of computers or of Microsoft would be, but the rest, as they say, is history.”

This statement is a perfect example of the iconoclastic exuberance the current generation of young Indians displays – a spirit which is so essential for any kind of change, whether technological or otherwise.

Sriram Kannan

Location Tracking without GPS

Sriram was born and brought up in Chennai in a Tamil Brahmin family. His father, an engineer by profession, had strong literary interests. Thus, Sriram grew up in a very scholarly environment. After completing his BSc degree in Physics at Madras University, Sriram moved to Bengaluru for a four-year integrated master’s degree in Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

The four years at IISc were full of excitement, as he interacted with some of the brightest people in the country and was introduced to a very enriching academic culture. He also excelled at sports and became the captain of the cricket team at IISc.

After completing his master’s degree in 2000, he was hired as a software developer by Texas Instruments (TI) via the campus interview process. His task was to develop software for mobile chipset security.

After five years with TI, an opportunity came up in the R&D center in Japan and he was sent to Tokyo as he knew Japanese. (His father runs a Japanese language institute in Chennai.) In Japan, he worked on hardware design for Open Multimedia Applications Platform (OMAP), a system on chips (SoCs) for mobile multimedia applications, which eventually became quite successful.

The experience in Japan proved to be a turning point.

“OMAP, at that time, was an evolving technology, and as can be guessed, Japan was way ahead. I worked on customized solutions for clients, and for the first time, I was exposed to the process behind conceptualizing and designing a product. I also learned about marketing and product positioning. In contrast, when I used to work in software development, all I got to know was the release date. Sometimes, I did not even know the scope or impact of my work.”

After two years in Japan, TI had to scale down its OMAP operations, because it faced stiff competition from local players and the government regulations favored domestic companies (TI is an American company). However, the competence TI had already developed in OMAP was useful for its operations worldwide. Thus, TI offered Sriram the option of setting up an independent consulting practice of his own and ensured him global TI clients.

“I never planned to start a company and knew very little about it. However, this choice was made for me by someone else. I could not continue working at TI, Japan; if I wanted to continue working on the same technology, this was the only route available to me. It was like a golden parachute (an agreement between a company and an employee, specifying that the employee will receive certain benefits if employment is terminated, usually due to change in control).

I took up the challenge and moved back to Bengaluru in 2007.”

Sriram named his consulting firm Nivaata, which means “infinite armor” in Sanskrit. Proving to be true to its name, the firm did an infinite amount of work on a variety of mobile technologies over the next two years.

“One of the most memorable experiences was working with i2i Telesource, a company that focuses on integrated solutions in the wireless domain and offers content management services for mobile advertisements, mobile entertainment and mobile commerce. We worked with them to develop telemedicine applications, especially tele-ophthalmology. In short, it means technology that can help people consult a virtual doctor by using their phone. It was during this time that I came across the idea of using cellphone towers for location tracking.

In those days, my father used to travel every fortnight from Chennai to Bengaluru to meet me. I used to pick him up at Whitefield station. The train usually reached the station around 3 AM, but given the nature of the Indian rail system, nothing could be said with certainty. The train would abruptly halt for long periods at stations or crossings. So, if my father set an alarm, he may wake up too early, in case the train was late. If he took the usual delay into account (which, in any case, was difficult to predict), he may miss the station if the train had not been delayed en route. As a result of this anxiety, he stayed awake all night, so that he could call me up in time for me to reach the station to pick him up.

I thought that for someone who is supposedly solving problems for several big mobile companies, why couldn’t I solve my own problem? It occurred to me that if I could set up a piece of software on my father’s phone that would let me track his position and also automatically message me when he reached a certain place, our problem would be solved. Neither of us would need to be up all night. I could then wake up a little before 2 AM, check his current position and prepare accordingly. If he was on time, I would proceed to the station. If not, then I could simply go back to bed and wait for the wake-up SMS. My father could also sleep peacefully, as I would be able to call him to wake him up when I left for the station. He would not need to be awake to see where the train had reached.

I had a Nokia E72 phone that ran on the Symbian operating system (OS). So, I wrote the code for a piece of software and installed it on my phone. I then took a trip from Bengaluru to Chennai. Every time I reached a station, I prompted the software to save its name and the location (based on the nearby cellular towers).

I then installed the same piece of software on my father’s Symbian phone, and now, my father’s cellphone immediately sent me a message as soon as it reached a certain station. Moreover, the software let me monitor the current location of my dad’s cellphone via my cellphone and the server installed at my home.”

So far, the project was only for personal use and Sriram had not thought about its commercial potential. However, he soon realized that several people were facing a lot of problems with GPS. “GPS drains the battery very quickly, because it consumes a lot of power. Moreover, not all phones are GPS-enabled, and even if they are, reliable GPS coverage may not be available at all places. Attempts to achieve non-GPS based tracking have been made across the world, with differing technologies, goals and degrees of success.”

In late 2008, the Android OS was introduced and became a success. The smartphone market started to grow rapidly.

“The introduction of Android seemed like a very good opportunity. Smartphones were now much more capable and affordable. In 2009, I stopped doing consulting work, in order to focus on developing an improved smartphone application for cell towers-based tracking.

Initially, it was difficult to say no to the consulting income. However, it was clear that if I wanted to make a fine product, I had to devote all my time and energy to it. I was confident that there was a real need for it, and thus, was fully committed to taking the product to the market and not giving up easily.”

Sriram hired four people, and several revisions later, the final application was ready by mid-2010.

“When you switch on the application installed on your phone, it connects your phone to a cloud server, which can then communicate with your phone. An authorized person can log into the cloud-based server and track the current position of the phone at any time. So, it is a “where-are- you”, not a “where-am-I” system, because another person can monitor your location. That is why it was named Verayu (a distorted version of “where-are-you”).

The system makes use of Path Adaptive Cell Clustering Technology (PACCT), a patented technology for tracking cellphones using cell towers. As opposed to the traditional triangulation-based tracking techniques, PACCT works on a large database of self-learning cell tower transitions to estimate the location and path taken by a mobile phone.”

The system estimates your position based on the cell towers in your vicinity that are interacting with your cellphone and your approximate distance from each of them.

“In order to convince customers about the potential of the technology, I made them use it, rather than giving them a PowerPoint presentation. I had a representative go to the customer a day before my meeting with them and tell them how they could use the server to track my position. The next day, I would have them monitor my movement as I was on my way to their office. They would know exactly when to open the door.”

Sriram describes the other useful features of Verayu. “The communication between the server and the phone is not continuous. It is only when the person tracking you wants to know your current position and performs a specified action (sends a request via SMS or logs into the user interface of the server via the internet) that the server establishes contact with the phone to know the current location. So, it is an on-demand system.” This saves power, which would otherwise have been wasted if the system tracked the phone continuously.

Because there is no user interface on the cellphone, it further reduces power consumption, as the display is not activated.

Also, you could set up a schedule, for instance, to be tracked from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays only. Then, you cannot be tracked when you are off work.”

The first few customers for Verayu were companies who were interested in tracking their sales force. “They wanted to use the system to effectively monitor the activities of their salespeople. Using the system, the manager could monitor if the salespeople were actually visiting the client location and at what time.

“Moreover, the data analytics built into the software enabled managers to analyze information such as how much time a particular salesperson spent on servicing a client. This allowed him to judge the performance of the salesperson. Many managers discovered that, for the first time, they could monitor which customers were not being served well enough.

Also, the salespeople could no longer claim expenses they did not incur (for instance, they could not eat at a cheaper place and get bills from a more expensive restaurant for reimbursement, for the manager could track them any time and may already know where they had lunch).

Moreover, the manager could send an SMS to any salesperson on the field via the server. So, if a new service request is generated in the system, the manager could track all the salespeople to see who was the nearest, and then send him a message to service this new request as soon as possible.

If the salesperson switches off the cellphone (which he is not supposed to do), that would also be reported into the system. If the battery is running low, the user is automatically notified of this and is asked to charge it.

In fact, you can even take a picture by using the cellphone, but without pressing any button on the cellphone. Since the cellphone’s functions have been teleported to the server, the manager can direct the salesperson to position the phone in a certain way (via an SMS) and then push a button on the user interface on the server. The picture would be taken and immediately received by the manager.

You can also geo-tag your comments and photos on social networking sites via the Verayu application, without using GPS.

The application was so popular with the sales teams of several companies that we struck a partnership with RIM (the makers of Blackberry phones) to provide the application bundled with the phones that these companies purchased for their sales staff.

With software that had the ability to track as well as present performance analytics, we positioned ourselves as Mobile Workforce Management solution providers. Unlike the traditional systems, our system required no training and very cheap hardware (only a smartphone which is as cheap as
4,000 these days), and yet it delivered superior results. Thus, it was a huge hit.”

Sriram then started focusing on providing cheap fleet management systems to the cab companies that served BPOs. The software was enhanced for this purpose.

“The software could now automatically SMS a waiting customer about the current cab location and the estimated time of arrival (ETA), as soon as the cab entered a certain radius from the customer location. Since a call-center cab would take the same route daily, the ETA is automatically calculated based on the average time the cab took to cover the same distance over the last few days. Thus, the software keeps learning.

The system can also be programmed to send out text alerts to an employee’s family about his/her whereabouts.”

This system, too, was a success. Many call centers now demand fleet owners to compulsorily have Verayu installed in their cabs if they want the contract. Fleet owners can also check if their employees are misusing the vehicle. Moreover, the cost of the system is a fraction of what GPS would cost them. Like the sales managers in companies, fleet owners can also send messages to guide the cab driver. The fleet owners just need to pay a fixed monthly amount for every cab they install the system on.