My startup Journey Part1
Right out of college ,I wanted to start my own technology company.This was in late 90s. I got a job designing network switches and book readers (yeah amazon kindle kind of device,but it was way ahead of time).
In about 8 months ,I was all ready to launch,got few folks with lot of experience,an investor and we planned to start a VOIP based product.It was the craziest of times,the internet boom and such.But somehow the plan fell apart ,it started out as an issue with location and I guess everyone didn't connect well.
Due to my financial situation,I was forced to take a job as software engineer and started working
Few years later I still want to involve in the startup world and came across bunch of Engineering students from India.They didnot even graduate yet and already had developed few products.
This is in 2008, They came to me with a product called SMSSEARCH, the idea was to connect the offline world with online.
See at the time places like India donot have smart phone and many had dump phones with sms
These guys developed software which allows the user to send an SMS query and them it finds the answer and text back results within few seconds. They had software as well as data center doing this job. The product was called SMSGYAN and company INNOZ
SMSGyan
This was kind of like Google's ‘I'm Feeling Lucky' option, ideal for mobile customers on the go. Customers just need to send a query to SMSGyan (to 55444) and it will provide the optimal answer based on verticals such as encyclopedias, acronyms, weather information, dictionaries, cricket scores, stock market, lyrics, movie reviews, and so on. Innoz tied up with telecom giant Airtel and had some 10 million users across India, answering around 1, 00,000 questions daily.
Trendsetter
Innoz, was soon valued over 20 million dollars!
“For the foreseeable future at least, the mobile industry will continue to flourish in India. And that's simply because internet penetration is still comparatively quite low when compared to the number of mobile users – 100 million to the 700 million mobile users." That was the thought
They raised 3 million from VC, as angel investors, we all existed from the company.But smartphone revolution soon took over the world, and founders moved on and created other successful companies.
The product is open source now and is still used in parts of Africa and other developing worlds. There is more stories to this how we all work together to develop the product together,achieve success in market.
There s also stories about how mistrust happened and our relation sored .Will discuss those in next part
Innoz link http://www.innoz.in/, the product is open source and is available in github.You could create SMS messaging services with this as well
Cool! What an experience. But I'd put spaces after a comma and period, it makes it easier to read, the characters not being so crowded. Spacing matters much for reading. Maybe if you're familiar with UNIX you can used
sedor search and replace,with,and the same for.Thank you. I will update the blog with your suggestions thank you
Your content is great! Btw are you familiar with GNU UNIX tools like
grepandsed?I do use grep and sed but blogs are usually from mobile phone
Ahaa : ) I'm sure it is great for notes and ideas but if you have a lot of references... I'd piece it together on a computer. I've just written an awesome technical post about Hansa darkmarket's downfall, just wondering what the best time is for publishing. When I did put so much effort in it.
EST 9 AM, seems like when people hit work
Yup we'll see, here it is btw
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Great post, Anees! Thank you for introducing me to Steemit.
Great post. Entrepreneurship is the way to go.
I was lucky because I went to some good schools and had an affinity for languages, also studied it at university. So I started making money with my laptop doing translations from German to English for some international translation agencies.
Thank you. Its always great to be your own boss
Where are you from?
Adopted country is usa originally from india
What do you do?
I am a software developer
What kind of software?
Embedded software and now block chain as well
This is really cool! I can't wait to hear more about your experience in the statrtup world. What are you up to now that I assume this venture has concluded, or you have moved onto bigger/better things? Maybe you're still involved...? I will read your next post to find out!
This was concluded in 2012 . Then we have invested and advised many companies . Will do a blog on that later
I am following for your awesome content and your analysis :) great man, keep up the good work.
Thank you
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