[Techie Tuesdays] 11 techies who've paved the way for internet revolution

For the past two years, we have profiled the best of geeks and techies around the country and world through our Techie Tuesdays column. Here’s a roundup of 11 Techie Tuesdays in the second quarter of 2015. These include the likes of CTO of ACT Broadband (Prasanna Gokhale) to India’s first professional blogger (Amit Agarwal, Labnol) to a 22-year old behind the ‘Save the Internet campaign’, and torch bearers of Android community in India. Read on to find out what makes them tick.

1. The 22-year-old engineering student behind ‘Save The Internet’ campaign

If you are one among the million plus Indians who have sent an email to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) supporting net neutrality, you might want to thank Karthik Balakrishnan. The 22-year-old final year student at Vellore Institute of Technology was one of three techies who coded their way to save the internet.

1. From making games to tinkering with Teewe

Shubham Malhotra always wanted to be an engineer though he never knew why. He attributes it to his love for “tinkering with machines”. Choosing between becoming a doctor or an engineer, he preferred the latter: being a doctor involved dealing with people but engineers dealt with machines. He worked with Capillary Technologies and Bharti Soft Bank, and is now the co-Founder of Teewe, a hardware for smart televisions.

1. The Android flag bearer from Dharwad behind Redbus and Flatchat app

If you’re an Android developer living in Bangalore, there is a very high probability that you’d know Badrinath Kulkarni. He was featured as our 100^th Techie Tuesday. Badrinath is the co-founder of Bangalore Android User Group and GDG Bangalore. An ardent chess enthusiast who aims to get a FIDE rating in the near future.

1. Journey of two startups, three acquisitions and a 14-year-old friendship

When it comes to persistence, stability and perseverance, Amit Bhor leads the pack. CEO and co-founder of Walnut, Amit has contributed to the development of technology for the greater good in his own way, but he remains silent when it comes to talking about his own future. Where can one find a better example of humility than him?

1. The man who leads technology at ACT Broadband

As the CTO of ACT Group (Atria Convergence Technologies), Prasanna Gokhale plays a pivotal role in network planning, implementation and maintenance of the internet and video network for one of the biggest network provider in South India. He is an expert in system architecture and product design for networking and telecom products, and an entrepreneur who successfully exited from his venture to explore bigger markets.

1. The lifehacker who built ‘Slack’, ‘Quikr’ and ‘BookMyShow’ equivalents years ago

Harish Krishnan has been a life hacker since his childhood. His talent could have been ruined by the pressure of competition and entrance examinations. But Harish made sure that this did not happen by remaining an average student with his above-average aptitude. He was chosen to be our Techie Tuesdays, not because of what he did in his childhood, but for what he did in the coming years.

1. That 80s kid who owns 11 patents, built InMobi’s mobile SDK and co-founded two startups

After finishing his graduation, he worked for TCS and then switched to Samsung where he filed 11 patents. Post that he built InMobi’s mobile SDK on different platforms, and co-founded an enterprise messaging app startup which was later acquired by Paytm. He didn’t rest, started working on another idea, and for the past two years has been on it. I expected Lohith Vrushabendrappa to be a sorted middle aged person to greet me. Sorted he is, but he has achieved all this at the age of 35 years only.

1. The 26-year-old traveler techie building intelligent data systems

Vivek Padmanabhan is a 26-year-old CTO of Bengaluru-based online marketplace startup LocalOye. More than his incredible work in voice-based systems at Netcore and the intelligent data system he’s building at Localoye, it’s his attitude which most definitely defines the extraordinary techie in him. It’s the same attitude which led him to make the voice gateway for outbound calls which powered the missed call awareness campaign of Aamir Khan’s ‘Satyameva Jayate’.

1. What took Riyaz Ahemed Walikar to the hall of fame at Google, Facebook, Adobe, Mozilla and Twitter

Security is no more a luxury, it’s a necessity. Riyaz Ahmed Walikar spends most of his time understanding, breaking and fixing products and other security related research. He’s on the Hall of Fame for security research at Google, Facebook, Adobe, Mozilla and Twitter by winning their bug-bounty programs. He is a web application security professional and a penetration testing engineer i.e. he is responsible for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in Web sites and digital entities.

1. Why this woman CEO does not miss a beat when it comes to technology

If not a techie or an entrepreneur, Sreepriya Koppula would have been a classical dancer. Though the arts missed out on a talented dancer, it is technology which gained because of the contributions of this young, ambitious girl from IIT-Kharagpur. She is the founder and CEO of Turnaround Systems, which offers a robust technology automating image editing.

1. The man who brought professional tech blogging to India

Amit Agarwal is a common name in India, Labnol is not. But in the last 11 years, this equation has changed considerably. Labnol.org is a technology blog started in 2004 by Amit Agarwal, India’s first professional blogger. A techie at heart and a writer by virtue of his profession, Amit has a lot more to offer. In this Techie Tuesday, Amit shares his journey so far, his success story and the decisions which have brought him where he is today.