Author Archives: Rakesh Patel

About Rakesh Patel

Rakesh Patel is the CEO of Space-O Technologies, having 21 years of experience, leadership in: business strategies, operations & information technology also he is an author of book “Enterprise Mobility Strategy & Solutions” that will be published in September 2014.

Free Brand Ambassadors and Endorsements Companies Must Care For

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You must wonder where you can possibly get brand ambassadors for free. Or why would anyone endorse your brand, business, product, or service for nothing?

Let me tell you that you are thinking right. But there are some things that money can’t buy and even MasterCard will agree on this (Pun Intended).

Anyway the point is that Free Brand Ambassadors are no other people but your employees who are more likely to live for their jobs when they really like their workplace. The key lies in creating and offering a strong corporate culture where employees WANT to work by WILL and NOT ONLY for NEED. Continue reading →

Are you an Entrepreneur Breed?

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Have you ever thought what makes an entrepreneur?

Personally I didn’t think much about it though I still wondered “What separates Successful Entrepreneurs from other human beings?”

The best answer that I always get from my within is “The Actions”. Think about this what good our Aspirations can do for ourselves if we don’t take Actions.

Do aspirations have any meaning without actions? Isn’t ability to act (regardless of failure or success) what sets successful entrepreneurs different from others? Doesn’t that keep them going no matter what? Continue reading →

SEXINESS – An Entrepreneur Attribute

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Do you have the Entrepreneur Sexiness?

What???? What does that mean? It’s insane to even think that way. (You must be wondering, aren’t you?)

I was baffled too initially when I read “The Sexiest CEOs in the World”. But, I guess it’s not the idea that is wild or weird, it is the conventional interpretation.

An entrepreneur’s sexiness can be his/her ability to attract amass of entities (customers, stakeholders, and others) towards the business or brand through his/her work and thought leadership.

As per Entrepreneur.com, sexiness is more about the success, power, ambition, charisma, altruism, fashion sense, and style; and less about the looks.

What’s your sexiness as an entrepreneur?

Will People Get Something Better Out of Microsoft – Nokia Deal?

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Everyone is talking about it. The $7bn Microsoft – Nokia deal.

As it turns out, only Nokia is offering note making Windows Phone Devices so it is obvious for Microsoft to eat the whole pie.

What could be the sense of it, or does it even matter?

To me, the deal is not extremely exciting. Yes, I have had used Nokia devices in the infancy of mobile a decade ago but today we live in 2013 and the war of Smartphone is already won. The winners, as it appears, are not one but two.

Both of them claim that they are the winner and in their own ways, that is true.

If I talk about my perspective of the whole phenomena of Smartphone and Apps thing, I have been using and leveraging software from Apple to establish, play with and nurture my Mobile Apps Development company.

After delivering over 1200 iOS Projects, I feel so close to Apple that I am tempted to ignore other things that are happening in other areas. However being a Business Owner, I don’t subordinate to that temptation of mine.

But the point is, anyone who is fighting is for third place and many people would like to ignore that.

The reason is simple – the two winners are planning for their next flight so who takes the third place is relatively less important.

But given the context, I wonder how many innovative ideas $7bn could have bought. May be many. May be not. But still the most important question remains, could $7bn buy a whole new dimension that is innovative, next big thing and something that people look forward to?

I don’t have the answer and I doubt if anyone has it but I feel little excitement about the Microsoft – Nokia deal whatsoever. Perhaps I am biased but I still hope that in the mobile revolution era, people would get better products, services and experiences from this deal.

Pledged US $10,000 for “Park: On the Go” and “Radius” at Startup 20-20

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Recently NASSCOM along with GESIA and Dewang Mehta Foundation Trust organized a 3-day event “Startup 20-20” in partnership with M. S. University in Baroda. The program was geared for entrepreneurs to get a great experience of launching startups simulating NASSCOM’s 10,000 Start-ups initiative goal – fostering collaboration between the larger industry players and young software product firms.

I was also invited to mentor the teams and motivate the participants, who seemed no short of capabilities or creativity either. The addition we mentors can make was to offer our experience that could help participants resolve their problems related with the ideas.

I mentored and reviewed mock presentations of over 8 teams and suggested necessary improvements. Out of all the concepts presented, 2 were very interesting offering solutions for common problems.

The 1st one was “Park: On the Go”

Rakesh Patel in Conversation with Team Engipreneurs

Concept: This is one of the most practical and potential ideas one can come up with. The mobile app solution was conceptualized to address the parking problems by enabling motorists to find out parking spaces through real time information of the spare parking capacity at the venues.On-the-Go will employ crowd-sourcing model (like Wikipedia) to gather the data and build a database of parking and no parking zones.
Not only did everyone admire the idea but it won the first prize too.
Team: The team behind the concept called itself “Engipreneurs” and had
7 Members: Juie Talavia, Bhargav Mehta, Hardik Bagdi, Himanshu Chetwani, Smit Shah, Hardik Patel and Rishabh Shah
Funds Pledged by Me: I promised and pledged to fund US $5,000 for this project.

So what’s next with “Park: On the Go”?

Another Project, “Radius” also seemed promising though it did not win any prize.

Concept: What magnetized me towards the idea was its uniqueness and usefulness. The project enables recruiters to short list candidates in no time on the basis of credibility scores of the candidates which will be the aggregate of ratings based on parameters like skills, expertise, attitude, leadership qualities amongst others.Not only this will curtail the hassles of employers but it will also empower employees who can use their credibility scores as a “Badge” to be put on their CVs or profiles.
Team Members: The team working on Radius had 5 members including Naeem G Shaikh, Ronak Gohil, Dhrumil Pathak, Amit Anand and Ankit Agrawal.
Funds Pledged by Me: I pledged a funding of US $5,000 for this project too.

Read the coverage of Startup20-20 by Times of India.

Image Courtesy: Dhruv Saidava, Source: BuddyBits.com

Park: On the Go – Discovery Phase

The viability of the idea can be deemed as tested since app concept received the tremendous response at Startup 20-20 and won the 1st prize. Needless to say, that it did not require feasibility study further.

I had been in touch with Engipreneurs and we had a meeting on Tuesday, 13th August.

Now Engipreneurs are heading to the next level (Discovery Phase) and have already begun their work for collating the data they would need for “Park: On the Go”. The team had been pursuing local authorities in Vadodara to schedule a meeting with the government officials who could lend their insights on how administration plans for Parking and Systems.

I am eager about this rendezvous and how things are turning ahead.

Attended Interactive Session with British Deputy High Commissioner Kumar Iyer

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I had been to CII through Yi Interactive for attending an interactive session with Mr. Kumar Iyer, British Deputy High Commissioner to India & Director General, UK Trade & Industry.

Along with Mr. Iyer we had Mr. Milind Godbole, Sr. Trade & Investment Adviser, British Deputy High Commission Mumbai.

The objective of the interactive is to facilitate trade relationship between UK and India based Small and Medium sized businesses. Mr. Sukbir hosted the event and began with asking questions. He asked questions about visa, taxations and so on.

It was an informative Questions and Answer session and the insights we got are valuable.

I got a chance to chance to interact with Mr. Iyer who is responsible for UK & India relations with commercial background and prior experience into Management Consulting.

Mr. Godbole heads office in Gujarat and had been key person for collaboration between Gujarat based companies and UK for sectors like Energy, Environment, Construction and Education. He said, “Out of 1250+ projects that where looking to expand in Europe, 900+ landed in UK.”

It was pretty interesting to learn about Mr. Godbole’s background. He has helped several Gujarat based companies to setup there office and operations in UK, so if any small and startup company like us is wanting to expand there marketed in UK he is the person to contact.

Mr. Iyer addressed all new young entrepreneurs as “TATA’s and BIRLA’s of tomorrow!” and that brought a lot of energy on floor.

Mr. Iyer talked over several topics:

Current challenges in terms of need of growth of Infrastructure
Openness of policy
Stability
Current Taxation System
UK continues to focus on Financial & Retail
UK look forward exploring opportunities in field of Life Science and Reusable Energy

For me, take home point was how the UK thinks about products and services, which was “If you need to grow your business in UK you need to focus on Quality, Relationship and Trust” and for getting those in place they are okay to pay and charge a premium price.

It Was Hackathon and Team Space-O Literary Hacked The Show

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Yes, it was indeed a marathon but for coding – coding continuously for 24 hours to create and complete an app in a day, requiring a lot of diligence and pre-planning.

Over 50 Teams of 250 Developers from all over India including Coimbatore, Chennai, Surat and Rajkot participated in Hackathon.

We were also attending AppFest2013 with 20 Space-O Team Members divided in 2 Groups – KickAss iPhone Developers and Ninja Android Developers. And this was the first time we were participating in any such event and we won it.

Here is what we did:

App Feasibility – To ascertain the feasibility of our idea, we conducted a survey of 106 users and discovered the fact that there are over 6200 books available for Barter Exchange (which was the core idea of our app) in the IIM itself right now! Commercial value of those books is more than 18 lakhs.
Branding – Believe it or not but this is how audiences connect with the organization. It was not a requirement or rule though we were wearing our brand “Space-O” with our company logo imprinted on our Tee Shirts. People acknowledged brand “Space-O”.
Teamwork – This is the prerequisite for any team’s success. And we worked as a team without assuming responsibilities by our titles of CEO, Project Manager or Developer. Our aim was to execute for which we were never hesitant to undertake anything beyond our individual roles.
For example, when our mobile app developers and designers were working on applications, we (CEO and managers) provided them with everything they needed from refreshments to resources.
Sportsmanship – We believe in true sportsmanship and put it in our practice. We volunteered during the event and offered our technical and administrative help to participants other than our team as well as to event organizers wherever they needed our aid.

Result:
Among 40 different apps which were developed overnight “Book Barter” by Space-O was pronounced and chosen as a winner at Hackathon. Read more about Book Barter and Space-O Developers who won Hackathon.

The competition was tough though I guess we already hacked the show. One of the jury members considered Space-O as the IBM and Microsoft of the AppFest2013.

Hackathon Victory covered by Times of India and BuddyBits.

Attending Appfest With 20 Space-O Team Members

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Appfest, App Conference and Hackathon, is now coming to Ahmedabad during 26-28 July 2013.The conference would address key components of app development, marketing and revenue on mobile devices and tablets/ Internet.

The event would provide key insight for developers and business professionals, both.

How can I let my wonderful Mobile App Development team miss an event like this?

We’re attending Appfest with almost 20 Space-O Team Members. We have two teams that will be participating in Hackathon. Our teams are charged to take on this challenge.