Muckati Aims To Make Design Alive and Devices Living!

Anjan’s decision to take up a career in art and creativity was probably in the 2nd or 3rd grade. Add to this, a passion for technology, be it electronics or automobiles, and he had a winning combination. From creating and distributing comics and flip books in primary school to assembling pocket transistor radios during cricket season in high school, he had an entrepreneurial streak in him.Branded as extremely creative by everyone he interacted with, he started his career in animation while still in college. His career growth was very quick and by the age of 26, he was heading a team of more than 2000 artists and animators and went on to direct two animated feature films that qualified for Oscar nominations. He also bagged many other prestigious awards during his career span. Reaching a pinnacle and not seeing the kind of growth that he desired, he decided to quit his job and started his company Muckati. Being an early adapter, he made good use of technology to create innovative and interactive content, the latest being a (patent pending) GPS system for off-roaders and a support website to display these recorded trails.

Muckati Sentient Design and Devices was started with a vision to use creativity without boundaries. Currently their work spans across Interactive, Design and Screen. Muckati is an amalgamation of art and technology. They develop pioneering concepts and ideas that include intellectual property such as media content, design and inventions. They have contributed so far to media (original animation, game and other interactive content), automobiles (life-saving active safety systems and proprietary web enabled GPS systems), computers and packaging industries. In the three years of its existence, Muckati has seven patent pending products to its credit. As a business model, Muckati focuses on leveraging these IP through licensing.

The biggest challenge that Anjan Cariappa faced on the interactive front is from mediocre work that comes out of some organizations that end up portraying all Indian work as sub-standard, he notes. “Add to this, organizations that fail to deliver client projects up to standard and in time and we have a grim scenario.”

Muckati strives to change this perspective by trying to be an example of high standard and creativity.

“Muckati targets niche markets in which we personally have a passion.” says Anjan “While I was climbing the ladder of success in animation, my passion for automobiles which was latent for long, surfaced. We developed an Active Safety System for automobiles called PACA-brake, which broadly is a driver to driver interactive system. Very simple and innovative, PACA-brake when implemented can save millions of lives on the road. The system was showcased at the prestigious “International Transport Forum” held last year at Leipzig, Germany, to an overwhelming response. We are currently in talks with safety organizations and automobile OE manufacturers around the world to bring this system into the mainstream.”

Seeing the simple yet very effective concept of PACA, they were approached by the director of European Rail to design a customized safety system to monitor rail lines and level crossings. This led them to invent a revolutionary safety system dubbed “3rd i”, which currently is being prototyped.Being an ardent off-road enthusiast, Anjan founded the first and only Jeep and off-road club in India, “Jeep Thrills”. Driving his World War II Jeep to work, he noticed that there was immense interest in people to know more about Jeeps and Jeep owners themselves did not know the true potential of their vehicles. This made him start Jeep Thrills initially as an online group to give enthusiasts a common platform to interact. This in turn created a revolution in automobile sports in the country. The club which is six years old now has more than 800 members. Jeep Thrills now boasts of chapters all over the country and conducts off-road events on a regular basis.

Seeing great potential in this niche market, Anjan developed a first in the world concept, Incline Data GPS or ID-GPS for short. Regular GPS devices display flat maps that don’t help off-roaders much. Their patent pending ID-GPS on the other hand records each and every climb, descend and banking that an off-road vehicle tackles and this data can be uploaded to a dedicated support portal for off-roaders. The trail is displayed on the world map.

Currently, ID-GPS is offered as a free app for the iPhone and iPad as “Trail Ranger”. Trail Ranger crossed 1500 downloads in the first few weeks of its launch. Revenue generation would be through advertisements, in-game sales on the device and the web portal. They are also working on developing a dedicated device to be fitted on off-road vehicles.

Other projects in the pipeline include games and applications targeted at specific user groups. “I have not restricted my creativity to any particular field and have 6 more patent pending products that range from active safety systems for automobiles to innovative packaging techniques.”

Anjan Cariappa was the finalist of British Council’s Young Interactive Entrepreneur Awards, 2011. To know more about the Young Interactive Entrepreneur Awards, click here. Follow the Young Creative Entrepreneur Awards (YCE) on Facebook