Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about the other different use cases that you’re seeing for the solution you’re offering. You took off through the investment banking use case. Are we talking more of a sales kind of scenario? Do you want people who are in sales situations to have access to their colleagues and information to interact with clients?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 1)

This interview explores how enterprises are using composite mobile apps that bring various cloud and mobile services together on a device.

Sramana Mitra: Yaacov, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Harmon.ie.

Yaacov Cohen: Thank you for having me, Sramana. My name is Yaacov Cohen and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Harmon.ie. I am a global entrepreneur. I grew up in France but I lived 25 years in Israel and 5 years in Silicon Valley. Harmon.ie is an enterprise mobile vendor and our mission is to define the business consumer experience in the mobile enterprise. >>>

A Tablet App from Invention Labs Helps Kids with Speech Disabilities

The field of educational technologies is going through an exciting period. From massively open online courses (MOOCs) like MIT’s OCW or edX and Khan Academy to a range of tablet and smartphone applications, the field is rife with exciting innovations that have dramatically changed the face of education. There is a higher degree of self-learning and from a ‘sage on the stage’ model, education has evolved to a ‘guide on the side’ model. And in niche areas of education like special education where the ‘guide on the side’ models are the norm, there is a revolution happening, aided by the tablet and the various applications.

In the 1M/1M program, I came across one such innovative company, India-based Invention Labs, in the field of special education. With its latest innovation, called FreeSpeech, it addresses a growing problem encountered by children with special needs. For every 88 children in the US, one child is diagnosed with autism. The incidence of dyslexia is 15 percent of children in the US educational system. There are about 6 million kids with special needs in the US and a total of 24 million in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea, and West Asia. There is a growing need to help kids with speech disabilities develop communication and language.
>>>

Trend Spotting: Serial Entrepreneurs Are Self-Financing Ventures

As you know, we have an extensive coverage of entrepreneurs and their business strategies on the 1Mby1M blog. This coverage has been going on since 2006, so today, this is where you will find the most comprehensive selection of entrepreneur case studies.

This steadfast tracking of entrepreneurship gives us a unique view into the trends shaping our industry. One of them, and I have noticed this trend developing over a period of time now, not just in 2013, is that serial entrepreneurs with success under their belts are self-financing companies a lot more than they did before.

Our recent story, Bootstrapping an App to $10M in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe, highlights this trend in yet another wonderful case study.

TextMe is Christophe’s third venture. He and his cofounder put in $1M into the company, and has raised no outside financing thus far. The company has monetized its free TextMe communication app right from the get go, and is now doing $10M in profitable revenue.

I love the story, because it is perfectly aligned with our philosophy: entrepreneurs should work hard so that the negotiating leverage in fund-raising is with them, not with investors.

Of course, what drives this trend is that it is much cheaper now to build a company. TextMe has only 12 employees, and with that, they have scaled to $10M. Lean startup at its best, I would say.

And, hold your breath, they achieved this amazing feat in less than two years.

I believe, this trend is here to stay.

Of course, $1M is not an insignificant amount of capital, and unless you’re a successful serial entrepreneur team, you cannot pull this kind of money together from your own resources. However, a small friends-and-family round of financing, or even an angel round can provide just enough capital such that you won’t need to raise gobs of venture capital to scale a business.

And once you have found the inflection point, if it makes sense, you can raise a larger VC round with minimum dilution, maximum negotiating leverage.

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Invention Labs, Chennai, India

Invention Labs develops augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solutions like Avaz that help children with speech disabilities develop communication and language skills. Avaz represents ideas visually, as picture symbols that can then be sequenced together to create sentences that are spoken out. Unlike its competitors, Avaz is not English-specific and not only helps in communication but also in building language skills. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Insane Logic, United Kingdom

The educational technology sector, or “edutech,” is seeing both advances in and greater attention to niche markets. The growing integration of technology into people’s daily lives has provided a great opportunity for better learning and developmental apps. One such product comes from Zoe Peden, a co-founder of Insane Logic, a 1M/1M premium member company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 3)

SM: OK. Give me some examples of things that can be automated. Let’s say even 40%, 50%, 60% who knows, whatever is needed that can be automated, what is that piece?

CR: A lot of it has to do with how you manage the data that’s being transported to the device, whether it’s rich media like audio and video and things like that, those are very transportable across all of the areas. In our platform that we use for native development, we have our own Java scripting engine built into it. In that way, our application engine allows us to many of the Java script types of things that you could do in a website. We’re able to then pour our client framework over to all the different devices. So, what we’re able to do is say that pressing a button is abstracted from the Java script code. The native button push down into our client framework and so we’re just driving the behavior. It’ll look native just like an iPhone app, but it’s driven off of a simpler cross-platform way to think about designing it.  >>>

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

>>>