Read Ink
 |
Thomas O Binford
chairman and CTO,
Read Ink
| | |
At 70, most people prefer to put their feet up, relax and
fade into retirement. That just won't do for Thomas O.
Binford. A professor in Stanford University's computer science
department for 30 years, Binford decided to commercialise
nearly four decades of research in image analysis, artificial
intelligence and computer vision by launching his own company,
Read Ink.
He shifted lock, stock and barrel to Bangalore in 2002 and
set up R&D operations there. Till now, Binford has sunk
close to $8 million of his own money into the venture. Read
Ink is building document analysis and handwriting recognition
technologies, using complex algorithms based on systems
analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence and signal
analysis. Binford has recruited about 20 engineers (mostly
from the IITs and other premier engineering institutions) to
engineer the products. The first two products are scheduled to
be out in a month.
Binford is gung-ho about the sales prospects of his
offerings. �Our products are significantly better that what
the competition is offering at present. Read-Ink's product is
more accurate, has a lower error rate, by a factor of 10. In
automating forms processing, it lowers cost by a factor of 10.
For mobile devices, its accuracy passes the threshold
for user acceptance, � he says.
In an environment where pen input based devices are
ubiquitous, highly accurate handwriting recognition has become
the most important element of the user experience. That's
where Binford's creations come in handy. The automated systems
work on varied writing styles and still manage to maintain
very high levels of accuracy. Read-Ink's products recognise
handprint and cursive handwriting for mobile
devices and
paper forms.
The company is already in talks with a few customers. These
include mobile devices firms, third party vertical market
developers, hardware vendors, enterprises and BPOs (data
capture, health care claims, financial, records).
So
far, he has had a good experience of doing business in India.
The cost of starting a business here is 50 per cent cheaper
than in the US, and talent at the entry levels is relatively
easy to find, he says. �Retention was a problem initially
because not everybody believes in a startup story. We seem to
have that under control, but there are still issues with
finding talent at mid and senior levels.�
Read Ink's primary target market will be the US, but
Binford would be happy to get a few customers in India as
well. Having sunk in all the seed and early stage investment,
he would like the company to reach critical mass before
seeking VC investments. Considering the pace he's keeping,
cash should be around the corner.
Atlantis Computing
 |
Chetan Venkatesh
founder and CEO,
Atlantis
Computing | | |
Chetan Venkatesh was top geek in his hometown Bangalore's
Army School. And after multiple cities, three startups and
many failed attempts to work for a company, Venkatesh is back
in his hometown with another startup in the SaaS
(software-as-a-service) space. His management team consists of
another geek from his school Martin DeMello; the technical
team is manned by Kartikeya Iyer, Bernard Kerckaenaere and
K.P. Krishnamoorthy.
At 30, Venkatesh is already a startup veteran, having
dropped out of college to start his first company. He has big
ambitions for his latest venture, Atlantis Computing, which
aims to deliver cost effective on-demand computing (or
hosted application model) on a global scale.
In the traditional application service provider model, the
user or enterprise pays a one-time fee for software licences
and forks extra money for upgrades later. In the on-demand
model, customers pay a monthly fee to access software
applications with no initial investments. In this case,
applications are accessed via a web browser and do not rest on
the customers' desktops or servers. �We believe that the way
we compute (technologically and economically) is ripe for
disruption simply because computing today is not inclusive,�
says Venkatesh. �The benefits of IT don't reach
everybody.�
Atlantis' grand mission: To develop the planet's leading
computing fabric and leverage it to deliver software
applications, storage, connectivity and collaboration via the
Internet to everyone, everywhere.
To achieve the goal, Atlantis will deliver two things: In
early 2007, an on-demand computing service for the consumer
and SOHO (small office home office) sectors. This will have a
stack of desktop, work group and personal productivity
applications, accessible over a web browser integrated with
storage and collaboration. Two, in late 2007, it will
introduce application delivery network (ADN) which will
provide an end-to-end software hosting platform that can
transform and deliver any software application developed for
any technology platform into a web consumable service.
The ADN will be designed to support millions of con-current
(simultaneous) users at any given time. The ADN is similar to
AppExchange, a model introduced early this year by Salesforce,
the world's leading ADN. The platform allows for independent
software vendors to post their applications online and market
to prospective customers.
Helped by angel funding and
early stage investors, Atlantis Computing developed the
infrastructure for its two services and deployed its SaaS ADN
globally.
Atlantis is banking on the networking power of its board
and advisory members for partnerships in the US and the
Europe. It is also betting on Mentor Partners, a
Bangalore-based startup advisory outfit, to help shape its
technology and market development efforts. In India, Mentor
Partners is led by Ravi Narayan (founder of startups such as
Nextone, American Systems International (ASI) and Astuto
Networks) and Prabhakar Valivetti (co-founder of RelQ
Software). The US team is headed by Rosen Sharma (co-founder
of VxTreme, which was acquired by Microsoft, Ensim, Teros,
which was acquired by Citrix, Green Border, Teneros and
Solidcore).
Atlantis is also in the process of appointing a senior
executive as president to spearhead its marketing and business
development efforts.
Atlantis' SaaS stack for the consumer and SOHO space is
ready for tests and validation. �In the next quarter, we would
go to trials with 2 leading global telecommunication players,
each with substantial SMB customer bases in the US and
Europe,� says Venkatesh.
If its offerings can deliver what they are promising,
Atlantis could be competing with SaaS giants such as
Salesforce.com and Webex for a global market worth $6 billion
and growing at a furious pace.
Cosmic Circuits
In the semiconductor industry, the most rarified space
belongs to that of analog design. Even in a hi-tech driven
country like the US, only 500 engineers are estimated to have
specialisation in this area. Sensing the big opportunity in
this edge-of-the-wedge realm, Ganapathy Subramaniam along with
C.Srinivasan, Krishnan, Prakash and Nagaraj quit Texas
Instruments India (TII) and co-founded Cosmic Circuits in
2005.
Subramaniam, who is now CEO of Cosmic Circuits, was earlier
director for mixed signal technology products at TII. Before
he moved to India, Subramaniam headed the WLAN (wireless local
area network) silicon development division at Texas
Instruments, US and managed five global centres.
Cosmic Circuits' leadership team has a cumulative
experience of 65 man years and has developed 40 analog design
products till date. These include critical circuits required
to drive the power management chip for a cell phone or an MP3
player. The company has intellectual property (IP) in products
such as battery chargers, white led drivers, switching
converters, linear regulators and precision references. It has
also developed an analog front end for video and graphics ICs
(integrated circuits).
So far, Cosmic has not had a problem finding customers. The
first customer signed a large business deal without even
meeting anybody from Cosmic in person, says Subramaniam.
Cosmic also has been lucky to snag clients in Bangalore itself
rather than scouring for them in the US. �Many of our
potential customers visit India for several reasons and hence
the opportunity to meet them is very high in a city like
Bangalore,� adds Subramaniam. �We have a local sales partner
who works with us closely to promote our IPs.� Currently,
Cosmic's 12 customers are in the US and Asia, ranging from big
semiconductor companies to startups in California.
Since Cosmic relies heavily on IP and licensing
technologies, innovation forms an important part of its
business. The company has filed four provisional patents till
now and aims to end the year with 12. Claims Subramaniam: �We
are the only analog IP company which has the full set of power
management IPs in 0.13um technology. Our power and die area
(performance metrics in the semiconductor industry) are
usually 60 � 70 per cent of our competition. Most of the
customers are coming to us for differentiated IPs. On video
AFE (analog front-end), our power is the bench mark in the
industry.�
Having seen a good first year of operations, Cosmic is now
creating analog front end products for the Wimax and WLAN
markets . � Cosmic wants to be known as best in class analog
design company in the world,� says Subramaniam. �Currently,
the products we have created are creating attention
worldwide�even top semiconductor companies in the world are
licensing our IPs. In the pipe, we have a total of 10 IPs
which are ready to be licensed.�
As funding, Cosmic got a term sheet from a VC in Silicon
Valley in the initial stages. The founders decided against
taking the money and instead ran the company with their own
funds. As of now, they see no reason to look for funding and
seem happy to manage the company with internal accruals. But
with a revenue target of $25 million by 2010, it might be
difficult for Cosmic to push ahead at full steam without a bit
of VC-funding.
