The Hindu : Front Page : An Indian summer in Palo Alto

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Sunday, Apr 24, 2011
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An Indian summer in Palo Alto

Karthik Subramanian

Akshay Kothari and Ankit Sharma are founders of a $1-million firm

Akshay Kothari and Ankit Sharma

CHENNAI: It started with a challenge. Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta were doing their Masters at Stanford University, California, when they enrolled in a students' programme called ‘Launchpad' in their last quarter.

The Institute of Design at Stanford runs the programme as a means of getting its students to experience the ‘design thinking process' on their own entrepreneurial ventures.

In an email interview with The Hindu, Akshay Kothari, now co-founder of Alphonso Labs in Palo Alto with Ankit, recalls: “The whole point of the class was to launch your product. No business plan stuff, no pitch, nothing. Build a product, launch it. Learn from it. So, we bought an iPad the first week of class, and went about building the product. Because of the constraints of the class, we were almost forced to build the whole thing in 4-5 weeks. The iPad was the only investment we made — we had our laptops to code, and that was it.”

News junkies

Their product was Pulse, a news reader application for mobile devices (it is available as free download for iPhone, iPad and Android devices). Both of them are “news junkies” who wanted to design a new type of news aggregator that would take care of two problems news readers face on mobile devices — the difficulty in opening multiple windows, and the utter drabness of RSS (really simple syndication) readers.

So the Pulse news reader app was more visual in its approach; its design, innovative and hip. And there was finally a non-geeky way to add news sources. No copy pasting of codes or scary jargons like XML feeds. The app was a quickfix for anyone who wanted to follow multiple sources of various kinds — newspaper sites, tech blogs, Facebook links — all in one place.

In building the app, both Akshay and Ankit kept their expectations rather low. If they made enough money out of it to recover the cost of the iPad they bought for testing the app, they would have settled for that.

That, however, was not to be. Within six weeks of launching their app, their idol and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, personally recommended the Pulse news App during a public demo of the iPad. There has been no turning back since then. Pulse is today one of the most downloaded news applications in mobile platforms. Since its debut on the iPad and the iPhone, it has also moved to the Android platform. Almost all the leading U.S. news sites and tech blogs are available as feeds.

Akshay and Ankit today have their own office in Palo Alto area rubbing shoulders with the who's who of Silicon Valley.

All the leading technology blogs — from Engadget to Techcrunch — have paid kudos to the two.

Akshay and Ankit still remain close to their roots. Akshay hails from Churu, Rajasthan and his family lives in Ahmedabad. He did his Bachelor's in Purdue University in Electrical Engineering. Ankit was born in Ajmer and grew up in Mumbai. He graduated from IIT, Bombay.

Today, the duo has been able to raise close to a million dollars through venture firms and angel investors. Akshay says they feel “blessed.” He attributes the success of Alphonso Labs and Pulse news readers to their homes and parents.

To download Pulse and learn more about Alphonso Labs, visit http://www.alphonsolabs.com. The full email interview is available along with this article on www.thehindu.com.

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