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Notion Ink's Rohan Shravan is back, with Adam's progeny Cain [India Business] [Times of India](Times of India Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) BANGALORE: This is an amazing story of perseverance. The youngster behind the Adam tablet - which was the toast of global geekdom in 2010-11 in the run up to its launch, but which then disastrously failed to stand up to the hype - is back. And this time with yet another 'Made in India' product. Rohan Shravan, now 29, has designed what in PC parlance is called a two-in-one - a laptop that can be turned into a tablet. Called Cain (that's Adam's son in Biblical history), it has been developed with the support of Intel and Microsoft, and Shravan was on Tuesday at the Microsoft office in Bangalore showcasing the product, together with Vineet Durani, director of the Windows business group in Microsoft India. "We are selling 40-50 units every day on Snapdeal (the e-commerce site that is the exclusive retailer), and the average rating on the site is now 4.5 on 5," he said. Two-in-ones is an emerging category in PCs, and is one of the fastest growing. Shravan's product looks good - he has always been focused on design - you can hold it very comfortably in one hand, and is priced attractively at under Rs 20,000. But this story is not about his latest product. For that, you should look at some proper reviews and test it yourself. This story is about Shravan, and his comeback from what looked like near business-death. Shravan, who was born in Mumbai and then moved to Delhi, lost his father when he was 13 and was then raised by his mother who ran a job placement consultancy. Shravan says he was always good at building models. "You could ask me to model a car and I would do it very well," he says. That interest got him into IIT-Kharagpur for an engineering degree. In his third year at IIT, he started thinking of developing a different kind of PC, and began writing to graphics processor company Nvidia for its reference designs. After months of perseverance, Nvidia and National Institute of Design (NID) agreed to support him in building a tablet. And Shravan established his company Notion Ink Design Labs in Bangalore. Adam's early prototype based on Android and displayed at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES), as also the final product were met with rave reviews around the world, and favourable comparisons with the Apple iPad that had been launched a little earlier in 2010. But then came massive disappointment. Shravan insists the major complaints had nothing to do with the product quality. "The display supplier said they couldn't supply more than 800 units a month, and that was a time when we had seen some million unique hits on our website. ICICI Bank blocked our account when they saw massive amounts of foreign money coming into it. Some Rs 5 crore had come in just one hour. They said a startup could not possibly be receiving so much money. And that also created problems for us in refunding money to those whose orders we could not quickly honour," he says. Worse, Nvidia withdrew its support in order to focus on the Motorola Xoom; and Google made Honeycomb - the open source Android version for tablets that Adam used - a closed source product restricted to certain OEMs and developers. Adam is now dead. But Shravan pulled himself out from the depths and did some rethinking. He figured that if he has to make a success of a consumer electronics product, he has to be on a platform that would give him ecosystem support, as also be faster than competition. He thinks he will get the required support from Intel and Microsoft. He also figured that tablets are giving way to smartphones as a data consumption product. So he's tapping Microsoft Windows' strengths in the enterprise to focus on a computing product. Hence the two-in-one that's focused on students, small businesses, and work that is not heavy-duty. And he's thinking way ahead. "We have a roadmap set up to 2022. We'll have %Eve, Abel, Godin and Seth. Eve will be a robotic mobile, a device that will need no instructions from you, but will understand what you need and act accordingly. She'll understand, for instance, that you are in a meeting and you need to record the proceedings, or that you are going to a particular place and you need the directions. She'll be the mother of all devices. We'll launch it in 2016," Shravan says confidently. (c) 2014 Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited |