Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar (Part 3)

Luke Schneider: The whole point behind this company and why it’s relevant specifically to the Internet of Things is that personal transportation is not your toaster talking to your coffee maker. This is actually you getting access to a vital utility you need as a human being on Earth in 2015. You need cars for different reasons. Sometimes, you need to get a car for a few hours. Sometimes you need it for six months to a year. Our point is simply how that gets delivered should be through technology and specifically through mobile devices. It also requires physical world operations models to deliver the customer experience the way you want to. Silvercar is really the first manifestation of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have described the user experience from the consumer’s point of view. Can you explain the engineering of this? What’s going on where?

Luke Schneider: What seems simple on the surface is complex on the inside. It required us to solve a lot of problems. One of the reasons why we chose Audi is that each vehicle has a controller area network in it. There is literally, in case of an A4, about seven controller area networks running everything from the power train to the entertainment system. With a simple piece of hardware that plugs into a 10-pin connector, we tap into that network. It communicates with that car through a phone. At the same time, we’re communicating with cloud servers over wireless. Essentially, that’s how that customer is able to access their vehicle. That’s the iceberg analogy. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Luke Schneider, CEO of Silvercar (Part 1)

This is a discussion with Luke Schneider, the former CTO of Zipcar, on the future of transportation, and how IoT will be playing into that universe.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about Silvercar as well as yourself.

Luke Schneider: I’m the CEO of Silvercar. Silvercar is about three years old now. We were founded in 2012 with a pretty straightforward mission. The mission statement was to change the way the world hits the road. We are, in the way customers experience us, an airport car rental company. We are not traditional or conventional in any way in that the concept was born of one too many frustrations at the airline car rental counter. You just never seem to know what you’re going to get. There are very long lines and inconsistencies in the process. There are redundancies and a constant upsell of everything from GPS devices to different kinds of cars. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that? What’s your algorithm for doing that?

Gaurav Rewari: Sometimes, it just comes from within. Sometimes, it’s through talking to people who’re willing to tell you things you don’t want to hear. For us, one of those was, “Make sure we crack this product market fit.” All too often, you have a situation where you fall in love with a product that you built and that you think people are going to need , but they don’t. Then it becomes execution.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not easy but it’s a little bit easier when you’re doing a B2B product or service. At this point, there is a tried and true process where you go talk to a hundred customers especially if you are a senior enough person. You can go sit down with a whole bunch of lead customers. You know how to listen to them and you know how to extract the nuggets out of that. You can pretty much validate an opportunity in the enterprise reasonably well. I’ve talked to many founders who have used that process and built very sizeable companies.
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Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have to deploy any kind of professional services to do that?

Gaurav Rewari: Just upfront for that period of three to five weeks. After that, the customer generally becomes self-sufficient unless there are some new modules that they want to start.

Sramana Mitra: Each deal is what? Several million dollars?

Gaurav Rewari: We can’t publicly disclose the pricing.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size are we talking about?
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Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: IT service desk, from a software point of view, it’s ServiceNow. Now you’re talking about agents. Isn’t that being done by these BPO service providers?

Gaurav Rewari: That’s a very good question. It’s still being put into ServiceNow. The need for analytics, I would argue, is even greater when you have outsourced part of that body of work to a BPO or some other MSP. Typically, what you do is you set out service level agreements but you want to understand how you’re doing against those service level agreements. These are not resources that you manage directly. >>>

Salesforce Becomes Fastest Enterprise Software Company to Reach $5 Billion

The global cloud computing market continues to grow forth at stellar rates. In a recent report by Market Research Media, the global cloud computing market is projected to grow 30% annually to $270 billion by the year 2020. One company that is seeing similar growth rates in their annual revenues despite their size is Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).

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Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to what timeframe?

Praful Saklani: That brings us to probably mid to late 2007. There’s a second piece that I’d like to add to this. As we were developing this, it wasn’t just about a technology product model that we built. We actually built a whole service and delivery model around it. One of the things that we identified in our discussions with potential customers was that their issue was only partially a technological problem. Yes, they didn’t have tools that allowed them to get at this data. A lot of it was around data integrity and data accuracy. Where is the data coming from? >>>