Cloud & Startups; A Next To Perfect Match
Most startups are leveraging the AWS Cloud Computing Models for their growth
The cloud computing model offers cost and flexibility advantages for startups. In the competitive technology world, time is money. The cloud and startups are a perfect fit because the cloud provides startups with lower expenses and greater flexibilities.
The cloud enable startups to battle head to head with established and mature IT companies, as well as with other startups.
Today cloud computing has come everywhere and one of the major player in the game is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS currently own the bulk of the market and the usage appears to be growing dramatically and this we realized after encountering some startups in the recently held AWS Mumbai Summit.
AWS cloud services are being used by many of the startups in the market. Startups are now interested in the offering technology that makes cloud computing faster, easier and more secure which they believe that AWS is very much able to provide them.
In this encounter at the summit, we focused on startups to know more about the unusual and interesting technology approaches on which they are working using AWS as the biggest support.
Here’s our list of some startups to watch. Each is turning mark able ideas into reality.
TEAMINDUS
Team Indus: Moon Mission, that’s what they say. In the encounter with Teamindus at the AWS summit.
We got to know that the team plans to be the first private company to land on the Moon.
In talking to Teamindus we realized that it’s the only Indian team competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE is a global competition to challenge and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration.
The Launch: The TeamIndus Spacecraft will be launched aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, popularly known by its acronym, PSLV.
The TeamIndus spacecraft is designed to nestle inside the nosecone of a PSLV and is slated to be launched from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in late 2017.
The PSLV, in just 12 minutes from launch, will inject the spacecraft into an orbit of 880 km x 70,000 km around the Earth.
The spacecraft will then orbit the earth two and half times, raising our apogee – the greatest distance from the Earth in an elliptical Earth orbit – by 10,000 km each time by firing its thrusters.
A manoeuvre called Trans lunar injection – TLI – follows, which will help the spacecraft escape the Earth’s
gravity and set it in the direction of our closest celestial neighbor.
The spacecraft will reach a peak speed of 10.3 km/ second and will take seven and half days after Tran’s lunar injection to reach a distance 100 km from the Moon.
Technology: The most critical part of Teamindus’s mission is that they are taking a `technology leap’ as no Indian space agency has (private) done this earlier. If they will be able to do this, they will be the only private company to do the soft landing on the Moon. The technology part will be taken care of from the ground only.
The technology which will be used will be autonomous and automated. It’s just like artificial intelligence. The computer will take its self decisions, as per what needs to be done, at what altitude and at what attitude. Altitudes is basically at what height and attitude is what how it’s oriented out there. It will be using the altitude and attitude information, so this is totally autonomous.
Cloud Contribution: Fund raising is one the biggest challenge right now for Teamindus. In a mission like this, it’s really important and needed to raise a huge amount.
The team is looking for raising money from different platforms. One of the majorly used platforms is the usage of cloud fund raising strategy.
Here every Indian can contribute by registering at back.teamindus.in. People can register and actually can send their names for 500 INR that is just Rs.500.
INTANGLES
Intangles(IOT :Connected Vehicle): An IOT company based out of Pune with its expertise in Advance Telemetry and Operations Automation.
Intangles has developed its own set of proprietary algorithms which allows fleet operators to monitor the performance of the vehicle in real time.
Intangles has developed connected vehicles solution. It is being used by large fleet operators to track their vehicles and understand driver behavior.
Features
a. PREDICTIVE/ REALTIME VEHICLE HEALTH MONITORING Improve the uptime of vehicles. Intangles proprietary predictive health monitoring system allows fleet operators to take action which helps in doing preventive maintenance thus increasing the up time of the vehicles.
This helps fleet operators to increase the life of the asset by significant margins.
Fleet owners get one click access to the health of the entire fleet and take informed decision on the maintenance scheduling of the vehicles. b. DRIVING BEHAVIOUR Ensure a safe driving environment. Intangles scientific Driving Behavior Scorecard allows fleet operators to identify Good and Bad Drivers.
The fleet owners can create a reward and incentive program using Driving Scorecard.
It also allows Operators to take action on Bad Drivers. Fleet Operators can customize the rules based on their business needs. c. REAL TIME FUEL MONITORING Monitor fuel consumption and pilferages. Fleet operators can monitor Diesel filled, consumed and pilferage/theft.
It shows liters of diesel in the vehicle at any given time. Fleet operators have access to the fuel in the vehicle at one click.
Real time fuel monitoring also gives summary of fuel consumed per trip and per month. This gives good handle of running cost of the vehicle per KM. d. MAINTENANCE AUTOMATION Automate maintenance schedule and tyre replacement. Fleet supervisors can automate vehicle maintenance.
Ingenious gives alerts about the schedule maintenance to be done along with the issues identified by the Vehicle Health Monitoring System.
Fleet operators can set the alerts for Tire usage and replacement alerts.
They get summarized reports of Tire and Maintenance expenditure and thus giving accurate cost per KM of running operations.
e. MANAGEMENT TOOLS AND REPORTS Get reports that drive operational efficiency and help in making better business decisions.
Monthly reports for the management on Trips completed, Number of kilometers driven, Driving Exceptions, Maintenance Cost and Fuel consumption report.
This gives good insight to the management to take informed decisions on reducing the fleet running cost. f. ACTIONABLE ALERTS Get real time alerts for critical events. With mobile app, fleet operators can get alerts for Delays, Route Deviation, Fuel Theft, Fuel Remaining, Maintenance Alerts and Load Optimization details.
Intangles Technology: Intangles through its completely homegrown technology allows end users to monitor the performance of the Vehicles,
Automate scheduled maintenance, Track Tire’s wear, and tear and increase the life of tires.
It allows fleet operators to monitor the fleet performance.
Cloud Support: Intangles as a smart hardware which is connected to the ODB port of the vehicle that continuously streams data to their backend on AWS Cloud. The customers get nice
Dashboards to track their vehicles, understand diver behavior and maintenance requirements. Intangles greatly benefits from high availability, security and flexibility offered by AWS Cloud.
CHAIPOINT
Chaipoint has re-imagined the vending machine business. Their simple looking vending machines have advanced IoT technologies inside that allow them to track machines’ usage and performance remotely. Chaipoint is using technology to solve the issues of accessibility and convenience, while ensuring taste and excellent quality of the Chai it serves.
Working: They offer all the information to their clients through a very simple to use dashboard, so that they can track the usage of the machines themselves. This builds trust between vending machine providers and the client, by avoiding payment disputes. Chaipoint Technology: a. SHARK: A cloud-based platform, SHARK allows for fast and seamless integration of billing and tracking across all Chai Point outlets, through mobile payment and Wi-Fi based setups.
The software integrates warehouse and suppliers with the point of sales (POS) so that future demands can be predicted.
This also enables real-time monitoring of the performance of a retail outlet in any region or location. SHARK offers a delivery management platform that is integrated seamlessly with its POS and SCM service layers. SHARK also has a device management layer to manage IoT-enabled dispensers.
A dynamic reporting platform built into SHARK allows for a truly omni-channel view of the Chai Point business.
b. boxC.in: boxC.in is a cloud based beverages service platform. boxC.in is powered by IoT-enabled freshly brewed Chai and coffee dispensers.
This platform allows for superior service levels and a high degree of billing and consumption transparency to corporate customers.
Combining quality and taste, Chai Point’s boxC.in is intelligent, connected, and easy to use and guarantees a perfect cup of Chai designed to fuel a workday.
Each cup of Chai is freshly brewed with completely natural ingredients.
c. AWS Cloud: They greatly benefit from high avaiability, flexibility of AWS cloud as well as its managed services such as DynamoDB. They have also decided to migrate their back end serverless technology stack based around Lambda. They will also be using
AWS Greengrass to remotely push software changes to their IoT devices in the field.
Having got IoT to work perfectly, Chaipoint is now going for advanced features such as per user customization in beverages, advanced payment options and order placing before reaching the store so that one don’t have to ever wait in line for your favorite coffee cup!
GupShup
GupShup (AI Chatbots): GupShup has built a platform that allows companies to build chat bots with “Design once, and deploy everywhere” approach.
GupShup Technology: GupShup has built its platform using “Serverless Technology Stack” from AWS(Amazon Web Series), what it means is that they do not have to manage servers, plus they pay by number of actual requests/messages processed by the system not by number of servers. This results in substantial cost reduction which GupShup can pass on to their customers. From the infrastructure point of view GupShup is built on java at the back end.
GupShup has normalized all the design principles followed by a particular channel without having the need to code those designs. GupShup converts the button’s structure, looks based on where this button is going to be displayed. Also since GupShup is on AWS, the scaling is absolutely easy because of Lambda and developers now only need to create the logic, everything else of hosting, monitoring, analytics will be taken care of by the platform, GupShup.
AWS Cloud support: In talking to the GupShup team, we observed that scaling was the biggest problem for GupShup which was solved by AWS.
GupShup always wanted to be a lean and highly productive company so to have physical services, but this was easy as more reasearch, more time and more space were needed. And this was greatly solved by going on cloud in 2013.
Arya.ai
Arya.ai (Artificial Intelligence): a company started by a team of IITians. In 2013, they started with a vision to build `intelligence’ that can help humans in solving complex problems at a much faster pace.
The team’s goal is to democratize Artificial Intelligence by building tools for enterprises to use it with ease. They have a web platform to design & train what known as Deep Neural Nets (DNN) - emulation of human brain.
They have seen great success with financial sector customers in the areas of Fraud Analytics.
Web based Platform: The web based platform to design DNNs runs on AWS. They use a special type of server called GPU server available on AWS Cloud for DNN training. They offer option of training DNNs in customers’ own data centers.