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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

March - 2008 - issue > Entrepreneurship

Young Technopreneurs with million dollar goals

Christo Jacob
Friday, February 29, 2008
Christo Jacob
The new breed of India’s young entrepreneurs is all set to take the world by storm. Today they are getting out of the safety cushions of the MNCs and are turning their backs on the array of opportunities in MNCs. Knowing the fact that entrepreneurship is not a cakewalk, the assiduous founders of Mobisy and TringMe plunged into the entrepreneurial world with some innovative ideas to coexist in the market along with the major players.

Unlike the Ambanis or Tatas they did not have a legacy in the game of business. Their thoughts about setting up the startups were born during informal sessions at their workplace. While the founders of Mobisy, Lalit Bhise, CEO, Chhavi Gupta, Director of Ecosystem, Bhupendar Singh, Director of Engineering, and Gurpreet Singh, Director of Engineering were at Infineon
Technologies, they witnessed the country’s mobile subscriber base continuing to explode and the telecom operators preferring to have some mobile VAS players who can offer the full gamut of services. Hence they thought, “Why not be in the driver’s seat within the mobile platform game?”

Recalling his days at Infineon Technlogies Gupta says, “Bhise and our group used to discuss the trends in the mobile space during our ‘smoking sessions’ and get excited about the opportunities in the mobile space.” In a market with 5,000 to 6,000 independent mobile applications (apps) developers Gupta and his friends found that the independent application developers were not getting much opportunity to test their applications. They left Infineon Technologies in 2007 to establish Mobisy, a platform developer.

TringMe’s founder Yusuf Motiwala has a different story to narrate about how he kicked off his entrepreneurial venture. Having had stints in Texas Instruments as program manager and as an architect at Lucent, Motiwala kept observing the attempts of a company called Rippit to connect friends through the Web in early 2006. However, when that company failed to make it, Motiwala accepted that as a challenge and started working on the idea.

Though the basic idea of their products was drawn from the existing players, Mobisy and TringMe made sure that their products were focused to address the niche areas, which the existing players had not addressed yet.

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