A quarry that produces organic fruits

Those who visited the laterite quarries near the industrial park at Ganjimath in Mangalore taluk three decades ago would not have imagined that they would see an organic farm in the years to come.

Efforts by U Rajesh Naik, owner of this 100-acre Oddoor Farm, have made it an integrated self-sustaining organic farm.

Now most of the fruit-bearing trees such as mango, papaya, cashew, rambutan and commercial crops such as coconut and arecanut along with a man-made lake and a dairy are the main strengths of this farm.

 

Naik told BusinessLine that though he inherited family property, he wanted to do something on his ownand went ahead with buying dry land at Ganjimath 27 years ago. The quarries were levelled and a cultivation plan was made after that. He planted coconut, cashew, mango and arecanut.

Taking into consideration the immediate requirements such as irrigation and manure for farming, he began working on them simultaneously.

Water

Thankfully, there was a small well on the land he bought. Slowly and gradually he converted the water body into a lake. Now it is a 60-ft-deep two-acre water body. It sustains the entire operation of the farm and his house.

 

Even during the last summer, water level did not go below 25 ft, he said, adding that the water table has gone up in nearby areas in the recent years.

As he was determined to make the farm organic, he began rearing a few cows with an intention to provide manure to the farm.

Dairy

The total number of cows has crossed 200 now after 27 years. With pride, Naik said he is a major supplier of milk to the Karnataka Milk Federation’s dairy in Mangalore. His dairy supplies around 800-1,000 litres of milk a day to the federation.

 

Three veterinarians visit the dairy regularly to care of the health of cows. The green fodder for cows is grown in his farm only. Naik is getting multiple benefits from the water used in washing the cow sheds also. The slurry from the dairy, which contains cow dung and cow urine, is stored in a tank near the dairy. Fermentation in the tank leads to formation of methane, he said.

Power

One of the outlets from the tank collects the methane to run a 65-kv power generator. Power for farm operation and house is generated that way. The methane-free slurry is sent through two different outlets as liquid and semi-solid manure.

 

Naik claimed that he gets around one lakh litres of liquid manure a day. There is good demand for this in the nearby areas also. Semi-solid slurry is used for the production of solid manure through composting.

Learning from Alibaba

 

 

 

 

The most exciting event of last week was undoubtedly the listing of Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group Holding, on the New York Stock Exchange. The Alibaba share listed at $92.70, a whopping 36 per cent premium to the offer price, proving right analysts who felt that the IPO price was conservative.

 

The scale of Alibaba’s listing success should be evident from the following: the $21.8 billion it raised (could get close to $25 billion if the issue managers decide to accept the excess subscriptions) was the highest amount ever raised by an internet company in the U.S. It was much larger than Facebook’s $16 billion and Twitter’s $2 billion.

 

The valuation of $231 billion that it secured on listing day now makes it the 11{+t}{+h}most valuable listed company in the U.S. ahead of the bluest of blue chips such as Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, IBM and Coca Cola.

 

Jack Ma, who founded Alibaba with $60,000 in an apartment at Hangzhou, south-west of Shanghai, in 1999, is now the richest man in China with a net worth of close to $22 billion.

The 49-year old former school teacher has not only inspired a thriving start-up culture in China but has also created immense wealth for employees, a number of whom are vested with shares in the

company.

 

Scene in India

 

In the backdrop of Alibaba’s success, it is tempting to look at the scene in India. Admittedly, there is no comparison between China and India when you consider key numbers such as internet penetration, on-line buyers and e-commerce sales volumes.

 

Compared to China’s estimated $180 billion e-commerce market, India’s is a piffling $13 billion, according to a study by KPMG and Internet and Mobile Association of India. About 70 per cent of India’s market comes from online travel transactions.

 

India’s internet users number a little over 200 million: China has more than thrice that at 632 million and is projected to touch 850 million by 2015. India is projected to cross the 500-million mark by 2018. The number of on-line buyers in India is expected to cross the 39-million mark by end of this year; in contrast, Alibaba alone has 279 million active buyers in China!

 

There are two ways of looking at these numbers. The first is to fret over how far ahead China’s e-commerce market is and how Indian consumers are still in the brick-and-mortar shopping era. The other, more optimistic way, of looking at the comparative data is to realise the potential that India holds for growth in the e-commerce space. That is exactly the attitude and approach of those such as Flipkart, Jabong, Snapdeal, eBay and Amazon in India.

 

The optimism seems to have rubbed off on financiers as well — Flipkart bagged $1 billion in funding in July which valued the company at $7 billion. In barely three months since the previous funding round in May, Flipkart’s valuation had more than doubled prompting founder Sachin Bansal to dream of turning into a $100-billion company in the next five years.

 

Not just Flipkart, its much larger rival, Amazon, has also been stepping on the accelerator in India. Within a day of Flipkart announcing its $1 billion funding, the U.S. e-commerce giant said it would be investing $2 billion in India. Why this burst of optimism in the industry?

 

For one, the number of on-line buyers is projected to treble to 128 million by 2018 according to research firm Forrester. If the growth in mobile penetration is any indication, this is a conservative projection given that half of all internet users in India are based on mobile platforms. The competition is to grab as much of the new users as possible.

 

Yet, where the players could be going wrong in India is on their revenue-first strategy unmindful of profitability. While the likes of Amazon and eBay may have deep pockets, the same cannot be said about their domestic counterparts, the large funding rounds notwithstanding.

 

Alibaba was smart in its business strategy which ensured that it would be profitable. For instance, with millions of products vying for customer attention on its portal, Alibaba devised options for sellers to advertise on its site and also set up attractive online storefronts for a fee.

 

It also leveraged on its massive size in terms of registered customers by blocking search engines such as Baidu from trawling its e-commerce portals when users search for shopping options. Perforce, Alibaba forced buyers to approach it directly and thus made its portals attractive for advertisers. Alibaba thus captured the advertisement revenue that would have gone to Baidu otherwise.

 

While it is understandable that the Flipkarts and the Jabongs may be eyeing Alibaba’s success longingly the fact is that they need to devise similar innovative strategies to turn profitable. Flipkart already boasts of 27 million registered buyers — two-thirds of total online buyers in the country — which can be leveraged to attract advertisers in a bigger way. The Indian e-commerce industry is obviously beginning to take-off.

 

It will be interesting to watch whether it will eventually spawn a local Alibaba or will it be consumed by giants such as Amazon or eBay. Or who knows, even Alibaba.

Why India’s best tech schools produce more entrepreneurs than the Ivy League

If you need one more reason to justify why it’s so incredibly difficult to get into an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), then consider this—IITs are among the world’s most entrepreneurial undergraduate universities, even ahead of storied Ivy League institutions such as Princeton, Yale and Cornell.

 

IITs are ranked fourth (just ahead of Harvard) in a new ranking of the top 50 universities that have produced venture capital (VC)-backed founders. The study, compiled by PitchBook Data, a US-based private equity and VC research firm, took into account funding data between 2009 to July 2014, and sifted through educational backgrounds of over 13,000 founders globally.

 

Compared to their peers in US, Europe, and even China, Indian universities and colleges have never impressed academically. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-2014—that takes into account teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook—IIT- Delhi, IIT-Kanpur, IIT- Kharagpur and IIT- Roorkee, are ranked between 351-400.

That’s where the PitchBook ranking methodology differs. The primary ranking criteria is the total number of founders, followed by number of startups and total capital raised. In the study, the IITs had a total of 264 entrepreneurs, who have founded 205 companies and cumulatively raised $3.15 billion.

In terms of total capital raised, they are just behind Stanford ($3.51 billion) and Harvard ($3.23 billion). Stanford, situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, tops the list. The others in the Top 10 include the usual suspects, like the University of California, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard University,    the University of Pennsylvania   and Cornell . Given Israel’s tech powerhouse status, the only other non-US college is Tel Aviv University, which comes in at number 9.

 

One big reason why the IITs have pipped their globally well-known peers is because the report views all 16 IITs as one university. “The study does not exactly compare apples to apples by clubbing all IITs together, helping them rank higher purely by virtue of the fact that they collectively cast a wider net than any other university mentioned,” says Sangeet Paul Choudary, an IIT-Kanpur and IIM- Bangalore alumnus and director of Singapore-based Platform Thinking Labs, a senior executive advisory firm.

 

So, does the matter of size take anything away from the fact that the IITians are a potent force in the world of entrepreneurship? Clearly not. “Less than 2 percent of the applicants get selected, and less than 0.1 percent make it to a top rated branch like computer science or electrical engineering, which is where most of tech-related entrepreneurship and VC activity takes place,” adds Choudary.

 

Last year, IITs came in at number 10, when only companies that were founded in the US were taken into account. They have jumped six places this year as companies founded in India are also taken into account. These include e-commerce superstars such as Flipkart and Snapdeal. This reflects the fact that Indian startups now have the maturity to attract large amounts of capital.

 

The reasons IIT undergrads are so successful in securing institutional investment are not hard to gauge. They have one of the toughest entrances exams in the world and possess a close alumni network. Their top tech talent has been emigrating to the US for over three decades, they have a globally recognised brand name, and their students are entrepreneurial and risk-takers.

 

The difficulty of the joint entrance exam (JEE) , which replaced the IIT-JEE in 2013, ensures only the cream get in. This means that only the brightest of the 1.4 million who took the test in 2014 snagged the 10,000-odd seats available.

 

“JEE picks some of the best who are willing to work hard on one specific problem—JEE itself—for many years. We are looking at a special segment that aligns with entrepreneurship. In addition the folks from IIT frequently come from middle class families and are keen to succeed,” says Ashish Gupta, managing director of India-based VC firm, Helion Advisors.

 

33.2 percent of all companies founded by immigrants in the US had an Indian co-founder, according to a study by Kauffman Foundation  with Indians founding more technology and engineering firms than the next nine immigrant groups combined.

 

IITian founders include the likes of Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), Bharat Desai (Syntel) and Gururaj Deshpande (Sycamore Networks). Some have become VC investors themselves, including Khosla (SKS Microfinance and Square) and Mayfield’s Naveen Chadha (Akamai, Makemytrip and Persistent Systems).

 

Andy White, lead research analyst for PitchBook, says one reason India has become a hot-bed of entrepreneurship is international companies moving jobs to India. “Large corporations such as Microsoft and Google hire a larger number of employees from India. After building a resume at one of these major companies, employees are connected enough to make a foray into the world of startups,” says White.

  

Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT, a think-tank that champions the causes of startups, thinks the strong IIT alumni network is key. “This helps the entrepreneur be better prepared for VC fund raising. I think the better preparation makes a big difference.”

From Kerala to France: Brainwaves emailed

Here's a story that sounds like science fiction but actually happened. A man in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, thought the words `hola' and `ciao' (hello or goodbye in Italian) and another man in Strasbourg, France, received the two greetings in his brain. No hands, no speaking, no typing, no gestures -just mind-tomind communication.

Researchers from the University of Barcelona, Harvard Medical School and three companies making brain stimulation equipment and robotics, carried out these experiments in March and April this year.Their findings are detailed in a paper published last week in the online journal PLOS-ONE.

This is how it worked. The person in Kerala was connected to a wearable EEG system plugged into a laptop. An EEG (electro-encephalograph) measures tiny electric currents in the brain. To do so, small electrodes are put on the scalp, much like wearing a tight cap. This set up is called the Brain Computer Interface (BCI).

"Setting up the BCI system is very easy and can be set up anywhere," Giulio Ruffini, lead researcher and CEO of Starlabs, Barcelona, said.After training in imagining certain movements that are associated with specific words, the sender thinks `hola' or `ciao'. This gets translated into an electronic signal that is sent through the internet to Strasbourg, nearly 8,000 kilometres away .

In Strasbourg, another person is wearing the reverse system in which electronic signals are transmitted to the brain from a machine. The electronic `hola' and `ciao' get translated back and flash in the receiver's brain. So, how did our man in Kerala figure in all this? The company Neuroelectrics that supplied the BCI has a representative there and they thought a distant location would be good "to show that distance was irrelevant". A similar experiment was done between Barcelona and Strasbourg with similar results.

Last year, scientists at Harvard had made a rat's tail twitch while its brain was connected electronically to a man who merely thought it. In August, scientists at the University of Washington established the first human brain-to-brain interface when a man moved another man's hand simply by thinking about it.Both were connected electronically .

The Kerala-France experiment is the first time that communication of words has been accomplished. The experiment is still rudimentary and requires training for the sender. Ruffini said that the Kerala man had to concentrate so hard that he needed breaks to relax. The system is still a far cry from seamless telepathic communication often seen in sci-fi movies.But it's a big step forward.