How a group of experienced entrepreneurs "Connovate-ed" to build India's own Tile App, Gecko
Connovate Technologies is a Bangalore-based IT product and services company. It is founded by people with over 25 years of experience in the IT industry. So experienced is the team, that the core team’s youngest member has about 15 years of experience. The company is the brainchild of Bahubali Shete, an electronics engineering graduate, a technocrat, who spearheads this startup as the MD and he was instrumental in bringing this great team together. Bahubali comes with 25+ years strong technical experience in CE and Industrial product designs and has worked in Europe, US and India before he ventured into this.
When they’re not serving clients like Titan Industries and Binatone, they’re building some interesting products. These are embedded systems products, with a device-software crossover. Of the 3 products they’ve built so far, the most interesting one is Gecko, which is the equivalent of the recent Kickstarter phenomenon, the Tile App.
The company’s founder Bahubali Shete says, “Losing stuff has been part of everyone's life. Just before the Gecko samples were manufactured and ready, one of founder member ended up losing his phone. The same day he was supposed to meet a client and sell him the concept of Gecko. Both client and him ended up discussing this incident and said, only if I had my Gecko in my pocket, I would have not lost my phone!”
The product is called Gecko. It was named so, because it clings on to almost anything which one would like to track, find and monitor, Bahubali said. “Gecko comes in various forms to suit different use cases. Gecko is powered by a coin cell battery and is engineered with Bluetooth low energy wireless technology. Gecko gets connected to your smart phone with a smart application that can help keep track of Gecko. Whenever Gecko moves out of the range set, both Phone and the Gecko alert the user. If the Gecko is tagged to the key chain, one can find the phone by shaking the key chain. Or even you can find your keys from the smart application on your phone.”
Check out this video to understand how the product works -
However, building products like Gecko comes at a cost. Bahubali shared, “The technology that Connovate is working is a cutting edge technology. While Connovate has the advantage of being ahead of the curve, it takes lot of experience, funding and dedicated efforts to make a stable world class products that are in the league of Apple/Samsung accessories.” The company is looking to raise funding. Connovate intends to keep the team same while continuing to develop innovative connected products. Also plans to expand operations in the US, the UK and other major markets.
There are many more products that Connovate has built for themselves and others, and they will build other such products as well. But they all stem from the same philosophy, “The motivation was to work on innovative Ideas that we had about connected products and the internet of things. We wanted to create innovative products that are interconnected and can bring great value by making them come alive and get on internet. The name Connovate was coined by the core team from the tag line - Connected Innovations.”
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