CEO

Harish founded Smile Interactive, the company that incubated Quasar, one of India’s top digital advertising agencies. It’s also behind Tyroo, an advertising network that Yahoo recently bought a substantial part of. It also built the technology behind MakeMyTrip, India’s biggest travel portal.

In this podcast, Harish talks about what it takes to incubate small companies internally.

Harish, an engineering graduate in Computer Sciences, is a serial entrepreneur. prior to getting into Internet business, he built bullet proof cars.

Harish is considered a thought leader on the subjects of digital technology, interactive advertising, online travel, and entrepreneurship and is a regular speaker at various forums for the same.

He is an active member of NASSCOM and IAMAI and proactively represents the Indian internet community for addressing issues related to the growth and smooth functioning of the industry with various regulatory bodies.

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Traffic Jams are a curse to city life. Finally, a startup has found a solution to overcome some of the problems.

When I was in Bangalore recently, a city notorious for its atrocious traffic jams, I was pleasantly surprised to see a sign at a traffic signal which told me how much time it would take me to reach the airport.

And that’s dynamic data based on traffic situatinos along the route I’m taking. Now, that’s useful information, I thought. I wondered who is behind this and I finally found out.

Mapunity Information Services has partnered with the Bangalore City Police and Airtel Karnataka, the city’s largest mobile operator, to provide a comprehensive urban traffic information system for Bangalore city.

With BTIS, real-time traffic information is deduced from the cell phone tower logs of Airtel’s city-wide network, and made available to commuters to see live congestion hotspots, find directions and plan their travel routes.

The entire information system is available through SMS to Airtel customers using a shortcode, and to others by dialling a ten-digit number. During the next few weeks, the system will remain free to users, while the product is rolled out to cover all neighbourhoods. This live traffic information system is the first of its kind in India. It addresses the growing need of traffic administrators for centralized traffic monitoring and control infrastructure.

Mapunity was cofounded by three persons, Ashwin Mahesh,an atmospheric scientist, D Alagesa Pandian, a botanist and B V Pradeep, an engineer.

Ashwin is a consultant for the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, Govt of India. He was earlier Director of GIS, Egovernments Foundation, Bangalore. Ashwin holds a Ph. D. from University of Washington in Geophysics and an M.S. from Vanderbilt University in Astronomy.

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KB Chandrasekhar helped set up a research centre in 1999 at the Madras Institute of Technology Campus of the Anna University. He infuses $1 million every year into the research centre. It underlined his strong belief in research as a passage to entrepreneurship.

The vision of the centre is to become a research institution of international repute. In pursuit of this mission, the AU-KBC Research Centre initiates research in new and emerging thrust areas such as nano-sciences, and expands research in established areas such as communications and biology.

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Kallol Borah is the founder and CEO of Aumega Networks, a software infrastructure company with a presence in India, UK and Japan. Aumega Networks licenses software development kits for software-as-a-service computing (SaaS) — especially peer-to-peer software services.

The company’s technology enables implementation of application services that are network and device neutral and are more commonly used in the domains of industrial and personal area networking, mobility and supply chain management.

Kallol has 8 years of industry experience and has played roles from selling services to managing products for Aumega Networks and managing its transition from a software services provider to a technology and enterprise product licensing business. Prior to that, he worked at Reliance Industries Limited in business development and project finance functions.

Kallol did his post-graduation in Economics from the London School of Economics.

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Sekar Vembu is the founder & CEO of Vembu Techologies, a company that focuses on the online storage backup market.

Sekar is a serial entrepreneur with over 11 years of experience in the IT industry. He was a co-founder, the CTO and a Business Unit head for AdventNet, a leading player in the network management domain, albeit better known these days for the Zoho suite of products. He had helped AdventNet grow to a 300-person organization without raising any venture capital funding.

After Adventnet, he founded SwissSQL, a database migration solution that helps save over 90 percent of the migration effort and over 80 percent of the costs typically involved in database migration projects; SwissSQL was later acquired by Adventnet in 2004. Thereafter, Sekar founded Vembu Technologies and has played the pivotal role in growing Vembu to its current position.

Sekar holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a masters degree in Operations Research – both from IIT-Madras.

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