Find out if it’s a happy time for the start-ups this 2017
Text: Thenmozhi Shanmugam Images: Various Sources
2016 has been an intense year for everyone around the world of startups; from trying to get off the ground, raise follow-on funding, series A crunch, unprecedented US presidential election results, volatility of the market, stock prices of IPO’ed startup going down in such volatility, almost everything which could go down the drain went down. Personally one can say with relief thank god it’s over, every year brings an opportunity to turn a new leaf and look around us, embrace a fresh start. Happy New Year everyone! 2017 is going to be fantastic market timing to start anything worthwhile. It’s going to be a Hyper-Connecting World, we had 1.8 billion people connected in 2010, today we are about 3 Billion people & estimated by current rates by 2022-25, we are going to be about 8 billion almost every human on the planet will be on the internet & working. Global borders are coming off, Crosscultural talent is flowing, homes are getting automated, robots are taking over machine line jobs, artificial intelligence taking over conventional CRM solutions, thus technology is truly replacing every aspect of our connected lives. In this issue let’s paint the backdrop of overarching trends which will define some category defining companies which will be exciting to watch over the year. Let us define a few of them in simplest of terms for everyone to understand better.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is the new mobile, will be the most important technology we will ever develop as humans. AI is the ability of a computer to understand your question, to search its vast memory banks (data stored across various resources on the web), and gives you the best, most accurate answer. AI will essentially rewrite almost every aspect of our digital lives, strong belief is AI is a massive opportunity for humanity, not a threat as popularly believed so. AI will be believed to help solve fundamentally our grandest challenges on earth and even explore spaces. Call it an audacious opportunity, bigger than life opportunity, it sure is.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be able to do the administrative tasks which consumes much of manager’s time faster, better and at a lower cost. According to recent Forrester report, AI today includes a variety of technologies and tools, some time-tested and other relatively new trends of enterprises adopting Natural Language Generation, Speech Recognition, Virtual Agents, Machine Learning Platforms, AI optimized Hardware, Decision management, Deep learning Platforms, Biometrics, Robotic Process Automation, Text Analysis & NLP. The cycle showing the adoption rate of AI projects that in 5 years time, AI will hit a critical escape velocity phase growing at the present rate of 32% in enterprise to 68% growth in 2018, adding to a market size of $8 Billion dollars in 2016 to more than $47 Billion in 2020 according to IDC estimates.
Hardware is the new sexy
Software can eat the world so far, but a good aesthetically designed consumer tech hardware will eat software for breakfast. Consider Alexa from amazon, a home automation companion is essentially taken over Siri which runs & automates your home operation from doing your laundry, preparing your coffee and as we can imagine it will become as indispensable as the mobile device itself. There are dedicated accelerators like BoltVC, Alphagearlab, Shezhen Ventures SVV.io, and legendary likes of Harvard iLabs, Stanford Innovation labs, Berkeley’s. Also not forgetting to mention our homegrown IIT Madras, IIT Bombay research parks as they are scaling new heights from inventing stage 4 cancer cure, enhancing education by cognitive learning tools to literally turning silver to Gold (no kidding, its piloted, proven & patented by IIT Madras).
This should be interesting & important for Kerala startup ecosystem, because we have the country’s largest community of makers, tinkering all kind of innovation from Raspberry Pi’s to Drones to Connected cars screens & transportation devices. We have several of good hardware coming out from Kerala, Fin, Stagernd Bionic arm, Exploride, Biskolabs, Rideblock are few of the hardware startups to mention who successfully are into the next level. The launch of these products has shown a way forward to the aspiring entrepreneurs to be excited about this massive opportunity. What is absolutely heart-warming, is to see government intervention along with Kerala Startup mission’s efforts to promote TinkerHub innovation labs in schools & colleges. It will be amazing to see prodigal sons excelling in hardware as network effects of all the efforts of 4+ years of everyone who had started this startup revolution in the state.
Internet of Things ( IoT) as in Internet of Everything
The success of Amazon’s Echo, the voiceactivated speaker that can control many internet-of-things devices, has spurred many people to dip into the world of the connected home, cars, offices, retail store and pretty much every aspect of smart device communication can be connected, automated and hence controlled by voice or data or text. While 2016 was a big year for IoT, 2017 will be even bigger. By IDC estimates, the spending on IoT will be 1.2 Trillion Dollars, That’s ‘T’ as in trillions, not Billions. Positioning yourself early is everything when it comes to capitalising on the next evolution of the internet. Some of the key trends are Voice Based Assistants, Smart homes, Smart cities, Wearables to connect with all the above will be driving trends. When there is such huge market, major players in the industry will be bluechip companies like Cisco, IBM, Intel, GE will own the majority of industrial internet structure are stepping up the game in acquisition market to establish their market positioning further.
Cryptocurrency – Bitcoins, Blockchains& Something more
From India Stack, Cash demonetisation in November of 2016, the early 2015 Indian fintech space has been exploding & the exponential growth of home wins like Paytm has rewritten how we value physical money. 2017 will see more avenues of an app-based economy, ease of transaction. The point of sales system with street vendors that have been forced to accept digital currencies is opening up a whole new gamut of products and services. This paves a way to introduce new cryptocurrencies that are digital currencies which can be widely accepted, transacted without nation specific currency assets.
The first example of a growing category of cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, a form of digital currency created and held electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like Dollars or Rupees or Euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses, running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems. Bitcoin can be used to buy things electronically. It’s most important characteristic, and the thing that makes it different to conventional money is that it is decentralised. No single institution controls the bitcoin network. This puts some people at ease because it means that a large bank can’t control their money. Credit goes to noteworthy software developer Satoshi Nakamoto who proposed bitcoin and built a payment system on mathematical proof. Talk about Japanese leading the way forward controlling a power new currencies ahead.
Thenmozhi Shanmugham is a passionate Startup community builder. She is the founder of Fundcloud which is mentored by Arun Balachandran and bunch of other leading angels from the Kerala business community coming together to provide access to capital, legal and operating resources for startups to scale from early stage to growth stages of the startup.
Another widely used technology is blockchain, a data structure that makes it possible to create a digital ledger of transactions and share it among a distributed network of computers. The Blockchain is a shared database where the access to and integrity of the data is not controlled by any one central party. A database that no one controls and anyone can use has far reaching implications for everyone who has data stored in a traditional database today (think assets like money, equity and physical property and identities like personal IDs, unique IDs of physical objects, digital identities, etc.). Large companies and governments currently control all of this data, which is great for the companies and governments but bad for the users of these services from a security and privacy perspective. Blockchains fundamentally put control of security and privacy (and power as a result) in the hands of the people, however still remains in the experimental phase inside many large firms and there are few tested use cases.
Overall, it’s going to be a crazy year for new technologies going exponential, paving a wave for the new generation of products to emerge from home, local markets and go global. At fundcloud, I’m more than psyched to see who is going to win the exponential growth wave. Wishing everyone a fantastic New year again!