March 2019

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iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

iit TECHNOLOGY AMBIT

IIT Technology Ambit tries to identify emerging technologies, contemporary research, and start-ups born out of the IIT ecosystem. The analysis of the impact of these developments is done to assist the Tech Sphere of India and beyond to keep pace with the latest.

We actively look forward to contributions from all stakeholders of all IITs. By stakeholders, we refer to the trinity of alumni, professors, and students of IITs.

about this edition The March issue focusses on the interviews and perspectives of a lot of mavericks on their respective fields of excellence.

Firstly, we have Shail Daswani explaining Uniphore, which is a global Conversational AI technology company. It was started by IIT Madras alumni in 2008 and has secured up to Series B funding in October 2017 led by John Chambers, IIFL and other existing investors.

Then we have Aritra’s interview article with Prof. Suman Chakraborty, the Head of School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT KGP. The necessity of the confluence of medicine and technology and its realization in IIT KGP is discussed in detail. SMST falls into the grander plan of IIT KGP as a University as well.

Next, we have Suraj’s interview article with Dr. Aloknath De. Dr. Aloknath De is the CTO and Corporate Vice President of Samsung R&D Institute, India. The article talks in depth about his views on technology, industry-academic collaborations and the importance of solving multi-disciplinary problems.

Next up, we have Astha’s interesting research piece discussing the issues faced by the Electric Vehicle industry in India. These issues are going to come in the spotlight even more with the entry of Tesla Motors later this year.

Lastly, we have Samruddhi’s interview article with Mr. Abhinav Mittoo. Abhinav Mittoo has a career spanning a decade in sales. He is currently the Country Head for ‘Uber for Business’ leading the expansion for the Enterprise Business of Uber India. He has previously served as the Director of Sales for American Express in India. The article explains the involvement of technology in sales and also takes many discursive steps to reflect on a wide variety of issues.

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From the tech GOSPEL Aye, I’m the Tech Gospel, a magnanimous preacher of the Philosophy of Technology. Magnanimity is personified in me by the fact that I will ignore your ineptitude towards ruminating on the Philosophy of Technology or rather in the concept of philosophy itself.

In the last issue, we had looked at ancient India’s contributions to mathematics. We had specifically looked at the invention of 0, the invention of the decimal system, and the invention of the Arabic numerals. We’ll continue this exploration furthermore.

In the next few issues as well, I would like to let the readers know about some significant science and technology discoveries that ancient Indians have given to this world.

One of the important mathematical inventions of the Binary system is owed to India. Binary numbers are the basic language in which computer programs are written. Binary basically refers to a set of two numbers, 1 and 0, the combinations of which are called bits and bytes. The binary number system was first described by the Vedic scholar Pingala, in his book Chandahśāstra, which is the earliest known Sanskrit treatise on prosody ( the study of poetic meters and verse).

Next in line comes the discovery of the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci numbers and their sequence first appear in Indian mathematics as mātrāmeru, mentioned by Pingala in connection with the Sanskrit tradition of prosody. Later on, the methods for the formation of these numbers were given by mathematicians Virahanka, Gopala and Hemacandra, much before the Italian mathematician Fibonacci introduced the fascinating sequence to Western European mathematics.

Ruler measurements can also be traced back to India.

Excavations at Harappans sites have also yielded rulers or linear measures made from ivory and shell. Marked out in minute subdivisions with amazing accuracy, the calibrations correspond closely with the hasta increments of 1 3/8 inches, traditionally used in the ancient architecture of South India.

Ancient bricks found at the excavation sites have dimensions that correspond to the units on these rulers.

No wonder, Albert Einstein himself said: “We owe a lot to the ancient Indians, teaching us how to count. Without which most modern scientific discoveries would have been impossible.”

That’s all for this issue. Tune in next month to know more about ancient India’s contributions to science and technology.

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iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

Uniphore: Conversational AI -Shail Daswani, 3rd year UG, AGFE, IIT Kharagpur Uniphore is a global Conversational AI technology company. Started by IIT Madras alumni in 2008, it enables businesses globally to deliver transformational customer service by providing an integrated suite of software products for Conversational Analytics, Conversational Assistant and Conversational Security. Uniphore secured Series B funding in October 2017 led by John Chambers, IIFL and other existing investors.

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iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

A lot of articles today on various startup blogs contain a point of connecting “Bharat” to India.

“The Next Billion” is also one of those phrases that are usually accompanied in these articles.

Undoubtedly, the Jio effect has fueled this entire “Bharat” connectivity in a manner such that internet usage in India can be bifurcated into the pre and post Jio era. Reliance Jio held 42.02 percent share of the internet subscriber base with 215.25 million consumers as of June 2018. And this is where the key to Bharat lies, reports suggest Jio’s subscriber base is likely to touch over 400 million in the next two years.

Over the last one year, as internet connectivity has become cheaper and data speeds have increased, almost every B2C company is excited over the prospects of capturing this new audience, popularly called as “The Next Billion”. Although this new set of customers who are logging in on the Internet for the first time come from very diversified backgrounds, there still is one thing common amongst them, they do not speak English!

A quick Google search reveals that there are 22 major languages in India, written in 13 different scripts, with over 720 dialects! 70% of India’s population is not living in Tier I cities but in small towns and villages. They face a huge communication gap as they are not able to participate in the digital revolution because of the challenges of literacy and language.

Language is the first step to break into a market like India. Once that is broken in, you have at least 700 to 800 million users. The purchasing power is a different matter altogether, but having such a huge base excites every founder who desires to start-up in India. The 450 million Hindi speakers are twice as big a market compared to India’s 220 million English speakers.

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Every company that wants to scale in a country like India needs to make sure that its services are also accessible to people who do not speak English.

Then how do you reach out to this population which might not be able to use SMS services nor understand English?

This is where the Speech analytics and deep learning market comes into the picture. Using artificial intelligence and automation to understand the voice can be a great solution to bridging the problem of digital divide. The speech Analytics market share has seen exponential growth in recent years – with just 24 implementations in 2004 to a market valuation of $0.81 billion in 2017. It is expected to clock a CAGR of 28.3 percent in the coming decade.

Uniphore:Leveraging AI automation to understand “India”

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Realizing that almost 70 percent of the population in India was disconnected from the so-called digital revolution, Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi set on a path of solving this large-scale problem. The duo quickly realized that not only was there a lack of connectivity but there also existed a pervasive lack of English literacy, and people did not know how to use technology as simple as sending SMS or making calls.

“Everyone knows how to talk in the local language.

So, we thought if we can make computers and phones talk in all local languages, then a mass of people can start using these digital devices to connect to the Internet and do a variety of things like banking, healthcare, and e-commerce,” said Umesh.

In 2008, the startup was initially incubated at IIT Madras and was supported by Prof Jhunjhunwala (IIT Madras), with the idea of using speech iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

analytics software to bridge the digital divide.

auMina- Uniphore’s Speech Analytics Technology Customer conversations are a gold mine of

information. Such conversations provide great insight to customers’ satisfaction, their loyalty, or their likelihood to recommend a company and its products. At a time when this digital generation has very high expectations for customer service, companies need to pay attention to what their customers are telling them. auMina, a technology by Uniphore extracts the true voice of the customer. This is achieved through its sophisticated language model which detects keyphrases along with multiple variants, accents, and pronunciations in the calls. In combination with pitch/voice modulation and positive or negative spoken keyphrases in the calls, auMina captures the emotion of the customer which is categorized as happy, angry, frustrated, or irate. The emotions of the customer, agent’s interaction on the call and call metadata with varied weights can be configured and aggregated to form a comprehensive score to measure business outcomes.

It also identifies upselling, cross-selling opportunities and drives revenue through better collections and point areas where the agents need to improve. The best-of-breed core speech engines are used to ensure widest language coverage (100+ languages) globally including 17 Indian languages. “auMina is offered in SaaS model (subscription model) on cloud infrastructure to make it cost effective, yielding superior performance with high scalability,” explains Umesh.

amVoice- The Voice Biometrics Play The company is also venturing into voice biometrics with the earliest implementations in the rural areas where smartphone penetration is quite low. It saw early use cases around micropayments and daily wages issued with voice print authentication. It has since then been adopted in BFSI sector across the globe as a unique and secure authentication method.

Like fingerprints, every individual has a unique vocal cavity that makes every voice unique. Uniphore’s amVoice™ delivers a 99.5 percent accuracy of

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identifying an individual by doing a spectral analysis of the voice stream and comparing it with the stored print. The voice cannot be mimicked or stored and played back as the liveliness of the voice is checked along with 18 other parameters to ensure there is no vulnerability.

Virtual Assistant ‘Akeira’ By Uniphore Uniphore’s akeira™ is a virtual voice assistant that provides omnichannel touch points (IVR, mobile, web and more) for the enterprise customers to get in touch with the customer care centres 24/7.

At the backend, akeira™ provides a middleware platform that leverages best-of-breed speech and NLP (Natural Language Processing) engines to understand the purpose and intent of voice interactions and responds intelligently to the customer. akeira™ caters to the query or request or complaints raised by the customers by integrating with various enterprise knowledge base systems and CRM systems in the backend.

Umesh gives an example of its use, “For instance, an insurance company could use akeira for answering customer queries. Say a consumer has a query that he is retiring in five years, he intimates the amount of money he has saved, and is now asking for a recommendation for the best way to invest. Akeira can find the right answers for him.”

It is much like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.

Since it is AI- and deep recognition-enabled, it can speak 80 languages including 17 Indian vernacular languages. It basically allows consumers to have intelligent conversations with brands/enterprises.

AI and machine learning are integral to all their solutions whether it is in the patented core speech tech layer or the product layer. “At the core tech layer, AI and deep ML are used in our speech recognition engines, noise reduction, speaker separation & identification, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, and NLU/NLG components,” one of the founders said in an interview.

At the Product Layer AI and ML drives faster, smarter product provisioning, configuration and faster extraction of insights using advanced pattern recognition, anomaly detection and automated root cause analysis. iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

Traction and Growth Uniphore serves in the medium-to-large enterprises segment, with an average ticket size ranging in a few thousand dollars per month.

Hence, it has not yet focussed on SMBs. Large banks, airlines, telecom companies, hospitals are the ones who use Uniphore. Prominent among these are American Express, Axis Bank, SBI, Airbus, and ITC. Globally, it services close to 70 enterprises with active customers. It now has a presence in eight countries and four geographies, which include India, Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Philippines), Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia), and North America.

Uniphore gains an edge over its competitors because of its ability to process a number of languages. Coupled with a SaaS model, deep use of AI for automating many services, a short time to market, and the lower cost of ownership is what he thinks make for a unique proposition.

will get automated because machines are getting smart enough to do that. But that same mass of the working population will re-skill and tend to other jobs. I am not worried or panicked, as this has happened throughout the history of the human race.” This indeed stands for an optimistic outlook on AI driving humans to progress!

Uniphore received an undisclosed amount as its first funding by a network of Angel investors including Nagaraja Prakasam, M.V Subramanian, Ray Stata, and Yournest Angel Fund. Uniphore then raised series A funding in April 2015, which was led by Kris Gopalakrishnan (co-founder of Infosys) and then received a new investment the same year in June from IDG Ventures. The company raised Series B in October 2017 led by John Chambers, IIFL and other existing investors.

Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India identified Uniphore as the 17th fastest growing technology company in India and one of the top 500 fastest growing companies in the Asia Pacific.

Uniphore’s products have the potential to take over the jobs of thousands of employees in the call center industry. But Umesh is not worried. “They

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iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

SMST, IIT KGP: A confluence of technology with the medical world

-Aritra Biswas, 3rd year UG, Mech. Engg, IIT Kharagpur

IIT Technology Ambit had the opportunity to meet Prof. Suman Chakraborty, who is the Head of School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT KGP and is also the Associate Dean at SRIC, IIT KGP. He spoke extensively about the necessity of having an inclusive approach to medicine and technology and how SMST is actually doing that. This article has been born out of an exclusive interview with him. The article also talks about some current products developed at SMST that are making the wonders of medical technology reach out to a lot of people.

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iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

Collaborations have quite often been the stepping stones towards the creation of top-notch products and groundbreaking discoveries. The idea of bringing the best of different facets for out of the box creations have always been fascinating.

Similarly engineering and medical may seem quite exclusive from each other in technical science terms but the prospects of meshing them together for the greater good is envied although seldom discussed.

Development of the School of Medical Science and Technology (SMST) in IIT Kharagpur may raise a few doubts in the tech community as to how this equation makes sense in a technical way. In this read, you will see how the prospects of such collaboration are not just promising for technology but vital for medicine too.

The department started its journey in 2001 against a background where technology was progressively coming into the domain of the medical world. It was felt that a unique school or department should be established that would work at the interface between medicine and technology. A medical

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school would be bothered about the clinical aspects of the study, not necessarily on the technology that goes behind medical devices. On the other hand, an engineering school classically is not equipped to take up that responsibility. An interdisciplinary department was thus created and, in fact, required.

This is how SMST came to existence in 2001.

To see how engineering and medical science potentially go hand in hand, let’s consider a frequently tackled problem. A full-fledged portable medical system has long been desired in the medical industry for various demographic and geographic reasons. For instance, if a person staying in the outskirts needs to get a blood test for assurance, he has to travel to the nearest health center. This is a tedious and daunting task for people living in rural or remote areas. The travel costs, travails of a long journey, irregularity of the health center are just a few problems to mention.

This calls for the need of a portable blood tester which can be navigated locally to reach out to the concerned patient. Now the problem shifts from a macro to a micro level as the system that worked perfectly in the lab now has to work flawlessly on iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

the field. Power management is one of the biggest issues here as this is a portable system. Specialized movement of blood within the system through microchannels for further analysis requires indepth analysis of micro fluids. Color-specific computation of blood requires advanced image processing. Plus a real-time interface with a doctor might be essential in some cases for the final verdict. An exponential rise in reach is one of the perks as with a huge chunk of data collected from a wide range of patients, big data can be used pry out deeper insights and develop a better understanding.

As we can see challenges are enormous, but so is the scope of enhancement in medical reach out and research.

The flagship programme of this school is MMST or the three-year Masters in Medical Science and Technology, an interdisciplinary program, which is first of its kind in India. This is a unique program where medical graduates, i.e. MBBS, take up a course in medical technology. Subsequently, an MTech programme started in medical imaging and informatics as a number of Faculty members were working in that area. Over the years, it was felt that medical technology-based work is not complete unless you have a clinical connection.

Technological development should go from bench to bedside, that is, from the laboratory to the hospital. We also have to learn a lot from the needs of the clinicians who are actually serving the patients.

This year students were selected for the MMST program through a highly competitive entrance exam. These students are from a wide background encompassing chemistry, physics, and biology. They are not necessarily doctors. We have to understand that the entire support system in the medical world is heavily dependent on medical scientists who may not always be medical doctors by training.

For qualified doctors, a special programme has been started with Tata Medical Centre – a highly advanced certification programme on clinical oncology. 10 junior doctors have been selected from TMC this year who will be participating in an advanced research program. Doctors usually do MD, DM, etc. after graduating. But they can now undertake super-specialization in the niche topic of clinical oncology research with at least one supervisor from IIT KGP and the other from Tata

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Medical Centre. They are not required to stay on campus. There is a designated time during which they have to visit IIT KGP and interact with the faculty member and team supervisors.

Medical Science and technology is such an interdisciplinary area that people from all backgrounds can contribute. Even for MTech in Biomedical Engineering, there are no restrictions on the UG programme. Someone who has done mechanical engineering can take up biomechanics as a scope of research/Masters programme.

Someone who has done Computer Science can use big data analytics and machine learning to solve problems in the clinical setting. The thrust areas are Microfluidics and Point of Care Diagnostics, Multimodal Medical Imaging & Image Processing, Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine, Stem cells and Biomaterials, and Signal Transduction, Proteomics and reproductive health, and Cancer Biology & Public Health.

There are already two notable affordable healthcare products developed by SMST. One is a paper-based microfluidic device which has small channels in the paper. Blood dropped in this device will go through the channels and react with reagents. A change of color will happen if there is a particular disease. The change of the color signal is recorded by a camera and this information is digitally processed. In the case of blood glucose level, haemoglobin, bilirubin, these are calibrated against the image data and the information is transferred to a smartphone. These are inexpensive devices. Anyone with a pricking device can do this.

This is called as ‘colorimetric detection’. The other product also uses similar technology. It is called a Lab on a CD. By centrifugal force, the sample of blood, saliva or urine, whichever is being tested, will go radially outwards and react with certain chemicals. Here we are using electrochemical detection. The change in electrical signals or impedance will signal the result of the test. This is aimed to be implemented in extreme rural settings – places where there is no power supply or refrigeration. This will be a profound mark on care diagnostics.

iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

Research and Technology: Samsung and beyond -An interview with Dr. Aloknath De, CTO Samsung R&D, India

-Suraj Iyyengar, 3rd year UG, Aerospace Engineering, IIT KGP

Dr. Aloknath De is the CTO and Corporate Vice President of Samsung R&D Institute, India. During this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Suraj Iyyengar from IIT Technology Ambit had the opportunity to interact with Dr. Aloknath De and had an interesting conversation about his views on technology, industry-academic collaborations and the importance of solving multi-disciplinary problems.

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Dr. Aloknath De finished his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Indian Insitute of Technology, Kharagpur, M.Eng in Computer Communication from Indian Institute of Science and a Ph.D. in Signal Processing and Communication from McGill University, Canada.

He has also been an AICTE-INAE Distinguished Visiting Professor at IIT Roorkee and an Adjunct Professor at IIT Delhi. Before Samsung, he has also held the position of Director at ST-Ericsson and Hughes Network Systems.

On the collaboration of academia and industry: While recognizing that collaborations between industry and academia have been sparse in India, he states that contrast in the two approach builds value and needs to be celebrated. The industry approach is to first create solutions followed by patents and publishing, while in an academic setting it is almost the reverse with a major focus on publishing papers, sometimes patents with solutions not really coming under the gambit. For educational institutions, he advocates for collaborations between faculties to solve multi-disciplinary problems and anchoring of student projects so that ideas aren’t lost when they graduate.

An industry tie-up will also help in solving some of the massive country-level problems which need multi-directional approaches. He quotes the cleaning of Ganges as a problem which could be solved with such an approach. Breaking this problem into actionable plans, finding the right stakeholders, arranging for funds, building sustainable solutions and monitoring systems should help in solving this problem. In areas of development such as infrastructure, pollution, maritime & port and solar power proliferation there need to be priorities set within the space.

He classifies these more of a policy issue than a technology issue.

On product development and product ideation:

“Any organization that starts afresh will initially have a lot more ideas and can expect only a low percentage of it to go into fruition”, says Dr. Aloknath De, CTO, Samsung R&D Institute, India.

Talking about the time lag between ideation and its

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application into product development Dr. Aloknath feels that a significant lag is only natural. In any fresh research institute, the birth of new ideas would be 10-20 times greater than the success rate of those ideas. An idea encounters many hurdles during its development, say monetary issues, testing for safety and efficacy, product-market fit and sometimes even policy interventions. However, as the setup matures, its aim should be to optimize these lags so as to reduce wastage of resources and provide a vivid picture for investors. Dr. Aloknath believes that most initial projects will only get partial success (unless you are the best in the world) and maintains that solving a deep problem or a multi-disciplinary problem is a much better strategy.

On the pervasive patenting at Samsung R&D: Having been the CTO of Samsung for over 7 years now, he reflects on how they have shifted from designing and developing passive technology to active technology. With the advent of AI and the cognitive drive, technology has started to respond and react, thereby creating a more challenging task for the developers. With regard to the research output in India, Samsung R&D boasts of the highest number of patents filed with about 300 patent applications per year. With the mindset of improving the quality of inventions in Bengaluru R&D center, Samsung conducts basic invention creation training, advanced inventive step training, and training for top-quality invention creation.

Since 2012, over 90 patents have been filed which fall under the category of high technical complexity and business impact.

On his philosophy of leadership: While upholding Samsung’s philosophy of “Inspire the World, Create the future”, Dr. Aloknath leads with his own philosophy of “Technology on SciArt, Technology of Value, Technology for All”.

He believes that everybody should be empowered with technology that is based on the fundamentals of science and beauties of art and the value for which is given by the recipient.

As a CTO of a huge company like Samsung, Dr. Aloknath is at the intersection of the crossroads of business, technology, and research. He appreciates the roles of fundamental science as an exploration of nature, applied science in transforming these iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

natural understandings into technology, and business in innovating this technology to meet our needs. Nature-based learning is translated into technology and this technology, in turn, is transformed into a pragmatic use case solving human needs. Development of robots, for example, is a multi-faceted problem. One part of it is an engineering problem and the rest, a natural science problem. With the knowledge available, engineers can build a robot which moves in a certain way and does certain tasks but a deeper problem

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like collaborative robots needs a psychological understanding of interactions where participation of researchers from that field is necessary.

To end it all, Dr. Aloknath shares with us an aphorism in which he truly believes. He firmly agrees that with technological advancements we have taken long strides towards prosperity and community building. However, he calls for wisdom in knowing when and how to use the technology we develop!

iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

The Indian problems for Electric Vehicles

Astha Jakher, 2nd year student, HSS Department, IIT Kharagpur

Tesla, Electric Vehicles, Elon Musk, Green Technology - These are the common buzzwords surrounding the Electric Vehicle industry today. But the introduction of Electric Vehicles to a seemingly precarious Indian market is fraught with a multitude of problems. Will India be inimical to this new technology, and even if the Indian market is not hostile, will the introduction of EVs actually solve the environmental problems that they posit? Astha Jakher from IIT Technology Ambit explores these questions with and mentions some concrete facts based on her background research.

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As the emission rates startled the leaders in several Paris Conferences and as the climate change set out to kill our favorite character from We Bare Bears, concerns started emerging. In the phases where the entire world considered electric cars as some time machine joke, a revolution was building up in the politically turmoiled areas of Israel. Shai Agassi, heading the tech company, ironically named ‘Better Place’ in the middle of the warzone of Israel had a vision. They designed and developed the engines and models of these vehicles and sold battery-charging and battery-switching services for electric cars. The company opened its first functional charging station the first week of December 2008 at Cinema City in Pi-Glilot near Tel Aviv, Israel. The first customer deliveries of Renault Fluence Z.E. electric cars enabled with battery switching technology began in Israel in the second quarter of 2012,and at the peak in mid-September 2012, there were 21 operational battery-swap stations open to the public in Israel.

Simultaneously, Tesla came out with its first model of an electric car and finally the idea looked more executable.

Why Alicia still wouldn’t want to get electric?

Alicia plans on a road trip with her pals. The western coast is replete with breathtaking sceneries and smooth roads and local eateries, and what else? Petrol Pumps.

At any point when the car runs out of fuel or the plan extends for more than scheduled previously, she could pull over at a petrol pump and get her car refueled. After getting to know about how wholesome electric vehicles are for the environment, even if she decided to switch, could she go on these rides with it?

As long as we don’t have battery-charging and battery-switching services for electric cars as commonly available as the petrol pumps, investing in EVs isn’t the best buy option for most people.

If Alicia can’t stop on the way to the office to get her car refueled or expect some charging place on her drive back home, she wouldn’t take the risk of giving away her diesel car and switch to something else. What about environmental hazards then?

Well, she either wouldn’t care or would explain herself that she’s just one of the billion people

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who drive diesel cars on thousands of western coasts and her giving up of anything won’t make a difference in the ozone hole that’s killing us.

Why does Sanchez thinks that the EV is still a Rick’s time machine thing in India?

One thing is more than clear - Proper policy decisions are the first steps in creating an environment where people can take the risk of shifting to electric vehicles. Government of India’s national electric vehicle policy, however, just doesn’t suffice. Recent reports suggest that the government may put a cess on fossil fuel vehicles to coax buyers to opt for electric vehicles. In a country that is power deficit, the current EV plan is moot, and its ever-changing goalposts can easily suscept to failure.

Another area where we haven’t done the math right is about the major source of emissions for our country and how far should we stretch our EV plans. India’s EV policy aims to cut emissions, even though more than 70% of electricity is generated from dirty sources such as coal. With thermal power as the mainstay, more will be needed to seamlessly charge the batteries for electric vehicles, thereby denting the credibility of India’s emissionreduction goals. That notwithstanding, the plan envisages 30% EVs on India’s roads by 2030.

With an existing vehicular population of more than 210 million and swelling, it’s hard to see how this transformation will happen in about a decade.

India’s planned EV journey, on the other hand, has many dead ends. Instead of developing EVs, automakers in India have been busy recalibrating vehicles to meet the Bharat Standard-VI (BS-VI) emission norms. By 2020, India will switch to BSVI standards to cut vehicular emissions. A lot of manufacturers and people who are a part of this incentive have pumped in a lots of money into this already and have little interest left in putting more effort on EVs, which needs billions more in investment and thousands of engineering hours, despite no assured demand.

Keeping aside our constraints of budget and deadlines, the next question that arises is - How profitable is this business?

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Should my Uncle stop shop and invest in the EV business?

The costs are huge and the profits are less. There is every reason why. Existing standard lithium-ion batteries use expensive materials such as cobalt, bumping up the price. In an electric car, battery performance is mostly it. Cutting corners on the battery is not an option and this research is capital extensive.

This is not to say carmakers from Toyota to General Motors aren’t chasing electric dreams. They are, but mostly by targeting developed countries with higher incomes and sophisticated infrastructure capabilities. India, though, is a value-conscious market and the bulk of the vehicles on its roads are entry-level ones where price is everything.

Our government is seriously mistaken in believing that subsidies and offers can cover up the costs and mental hindrances of people. It’s not possible to race past inadequate infrastructure. For EVs to run smoothly, India will need assured excess power supply that can be fed to charging stations throughout the country. Even tiny metropolitan areas in Delhi’s hinterland struggle with outages.

Outside urban areas, power can be scatty. And in vast swathes of rural India, electrification means a supply line and an hour of power a day. Given the infrastructure bottlenecks, the Government will witness the EV use circumscribed within the radius of charging stations, which would hardly be acceptable to most buyers. To penalize buyers for fossil fuel vehicles, while failing to guarantee

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power for electric vehicles, lacks wheels.

The result of all of this will likely be very low takeup, despite the carrot and stick, or subsidy and cess, policy. Poor demand will damp even those automakers willing to put in the investment for building EVs, thus creating a vicious circle.

How about charging it like my mobile phone?

Infrastructural hindrances can be an issue so the short term solutions could be making it individualistic. The power ministry earlier last year issued a notification clarifying that setting up charging stations for electric vehicles will not require a separate license under the Electricity Act of 2003. Further, ET reported that the government has asked public charging stations to install both Japanese and Chinese charging technologies for electric vehicles since they have been unable to select one. The tariff for supply of electricity to electric vehicle public charging station shall not be more than the average cost of supply plus 15%.

iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

Technology, Sales, and Marketing -An interview with Abhinav

Mittoo, Country Head, Uber for Business, India

-Samruddhi Pataskar, 3rd year UG, Chemistry, IIT KGP

Abhinav Mittoo has a career spanning a decade in sales. He has previously served as the Director of Sales for American Express in India. He is currently the Country Head for ‘Uber for Business’ leading the expansion for the Enterprise Business of Uber India. Samruddhi from IIT Technology Ambit had a nice time picking his brain about the confluence of sales and technology. The following interview delineates his experiences and perspectives 18

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Q. What were the major technologies that you encountered in your role at Uber?

A: When it comes to Uber, let me talk about safety and the role technology plays in it. It is important to collect data points first. We can actually reach a driver’s phone and know how he’s driving because of the Uber technology. We can know if he’s driving fast or slow, accelerometers tell whether he’s braking hard, etc. We measure customer feedback and what makes a customer feel unsafe.

We figure out what the problem is: Has the general perspective of safety gone wrong? Or is it really the aspect of driving that customers are talking about?

Secondly, we make it more reliable. If you click the SOS button available during the ride if you feel unsafe, Uber can take action accordingly. The notification goes to the police station and the Uber contact center, getting you immediate help. The law enforcement agency intervenes if required.

Drivers have no access to mass data so they do not know the address of the place where the customer was dropped off, which is especially good in the case of female riders.

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Let me take a discursive course from the proposed question here. Prevention is better than cure. We are also working to create awareness about why drivers should not act a certain way and what impact it has. We’re training drivers: we have a diverse country where people aren’t culturally exposed to how they should treat women or what women may consider unsafe. We are investing in institutions that conduct these classes for us to make drivers aware of how they should behave, give examples of what they might do that can come across as threatening to the female passengers, etc. The next thing is to measure the impact of the training. We haven’t seen many cases come up. We’re creating a market equilibrium and also suspending riders now if we repeatedly get negative feedback of them from drivers, just the way action can be taken against drivers.

Q. Can you mention some problems

that are still not solved by technology but have a good scope for working on?

A: When you solve a problem, there are new problems that come up and that’s how the world iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

functions. Tech will always solve something but will give birth to more problems to mull over, which is, in fact, something productive for humankind.

Sometimes new subproblems are about timing, cost, the requirement at the moment, etc.

Q. You have work experience in the

Take digital wallets for example. Customers may start losing value on their money because it’s not in a bank bringing returns but stagnant in a digital wallet. This is one new problem that can be studied and solved!

A: Your product must be scalable and represent a lot of opportunities for other markets as well as your own internal system. Also, core values must stay intact. The way a product is perceived should have pretty much a similar construct. For example, language needs to change in different markets.

These are basic things for products to work in other markets: accessibility, pricing, segmentation available in that market, etc. India has many more companies than rest of Asia Pacific. Every country has a different people culture and how people buy products, i.e., what they buy for, what they do with the product and so on. In India, a lot of people have a trust deficit. They want products that micromanage and intervene at every level. Elsewhere, a general sense of awareness and responsibility exists among everyone to take care of things made available to them. It’s about civic sense. In a broader aspect, negotiation pricing. Products sold in India for a premium are generally tried to be monetized by people. Customers should focus on value rather than price because the value will ultimately bring them better returns on investment than a cheaper product, which may not even work. In the USA, companies like to have open policy programs, they like to offer things and their employees make choices. In India, those choices are controlled, examined, decided why they’re being made and judged whether they should be made or not. That completely changes the scenario.

Q.

You have worked at ITC and American Express as well before joining Uber. Can you tell us about the technology used in Sales over there?

A: Sales are functions of mathematics, not great determination, grit or perseverance. Those are the things that you need to perform, not how to perform. When I started working at ITC, we would use Excel sheets to perform calculations about complex scenarios and to obtain an analysis of complex data. Data crunching and filling in information was done manually on Excel sheets, which made it prone to errors and which can consequently cause data to be stolen. It was not scalable or reliable. It did not integrate into the product or talk of its payment modes. All this led to the development of CRM tools, which encapsulated everything we needed but could not find in Excel sheets. We could now measure sales velocity, the impact of sales we require etc. CRM replaced Excel sheets. The best CRM available is salesforce.com. An understanding of salesforce is now a requirement for a sales job. To be a leader, you have to know how to use it, make decisions, draw analysis to put you in the right direction of what the market needs and so on. Considering input and output, CRM has come a long way.

I was introduced to another tech advancement at American Express. It uses a closed loop network that drives all credit transactions. The sort of value a closed network can build for consumers or stakeholders over open networks is phenomenal.

An idea perceived many years ago is still relevant and path-breaking because it was thought of with the future in mind.

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Asia-Pacific region as well. How do you think the sales scenario in India differs from that in other countries?

Q.With a career spanning a decade

in sales, what do you think is the single most important strategy in marketing a product?

A: The first step is to understand where your product stands among other benchmarked products. You need to understand the aspirations of the customers and what gaps your product might be able to fill, such as what market segment you wish to sell your product to and what price. The next part is the means of doing so. Advertisements may target the emotions, feelings, thoughts of customers but it also needs to be made crystal iit Technology Ambit / MARCH 2019

clear whether the product is a one-time-buy on an occasion or repeatable. If it falls under the latter category, the mechanism to market it works on trust. For example, the insurance industry works on fear and immediate buying. It targets not the people who will die but their families. The families act on the fear of the future and what loopholes will have to be filled when the loved one exit, how they would replace the dependability they had on the loved one and so on.

Another phenomenon is impulsive buying. Mobile apps are the best example. We barely use 9 of the 10 apps on our smartphones. If you still have a subscription to them, it is a scam. How do they land up in our phones then in the first place? Swanky ads are pushed through a self-serve channel like social media because your data is tracked. Convincing short videos or animated clips are generated that make the customer click the app. That’s the first job of the ad that is served. Next is the GUI of the app. The customer may see a five-star rating but most users don’t take the effort to check other ratings. Usually, five-star ratings are at the top.

Your product needs to solve what is required and what the system allows for.

Q.

Excessively advertising your product can have a reverse impact on the consumer. What is the threshold where one needs to stop marketing his/ her product?

A: That’s a very good question. There is a lot of competition in the market. Low-quality products with very good marketing also do quite well. Let’s take cosmetics as an example. The market has both branded cosmetics and local cosmetics. Branded products are expensive and justify their prices by claiming the very high quality of their products but there is no real way to test their quality. It won’t

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give a bad result very quickly. It’s all about how it smells, feels, what feedback you receive on it, etc.

Even low-end cosmetic brands end up competing with premium brands because of good marketing.

They are efficient in maintaining their customer segment who are paying their price and buying the product. It also gives u enough cash to afford a better marketing planning in the future. Good marketing begins with research. This is an important starting point of many major league companies. There is research carried out on how to make a product look better, what emotional values of the customer that needs to be met and of course, how to market it. You need to realize what gap you have to fill to reach a certain output. The power of this is seen in ads. A metric I usually use to gauge this is from how the ad made me feel at the first instant and how it made me feel when I revisited it. Did it make me feel different or the same? There is a specific model in marketing addressing challenges. We all want aesthetically pleasing products to replace our old, bulky, cumbersome ones. As far as the tech info is concerned, there is only so much you can do about tech. For example, geysers require filaments and maybe a regulator at the most to control temperature. That’s as simple as it gets.

You may talk about add-on features demanding excessive expenditure on R&D such as being able to switch the geyser on from your office itself etc but they are not really required. Nor are they at the heart of the problem or the crux of the product in consideration. In a country like ours with an acute shortage of drinking water and a real, existential problem of the lack of quality potable water, geysers would definitely sell very well. If I replace my old geyser with a new one from a different brand and don’t even remember what the brand of the previous one was, it is a red flag that goes to show that it has lost its marketing touch. Marketing is not a one-time task but a continual process.

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