Forbes India - Tech Conversations

Our guests today are Rohit Grover, Pradeep T, and their professor at IIT-Madras Satya Chakravarthy. They are co-founders of Aerostrovilos Energy. The name is made of two Greek words, one for air and the other that comes close to describing a turbine. The four-year-old venture has raised half a million dollars in funding and the founders hope to have their first commercial product ready in 2023

Our guest today is Awais Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of Pixxel, a space startup looking to launch a constellation of satellites. Awais and co-founder Kshitij Khandelwal are building micro-satellites at their company, to be placed in low-earth orbits. One day they hope to get into deep-space exploration as well. To begin with, their first satellite, named Anand, could be launched as early as next month.

Our guest today is Nitin Mittal, president for technology and data at Zee Entertainment Enterprises. The rise of the OTT segment of entertainment in India is prompting every major business in the industry to accelerate its digitalisation plan and find ways of engaging its consumer base more effectively. In today’s conversation, Nitin discusses Zee’s plans for a comprehensive digital platform to personalise entertainment and shopping — all rolled into one experience.

Our guest today is Omer Basith, co-founder and CEO of Virtual Forest. It is an electronics design and manufacturing services provider to home appliances OEMs. In today’s conversation, Omer talks about how he and his co-founders have innovated their business model with a platform approach to serve large customers for their two-year-old venture. In the process, they are helping to replace imports of electronic motor controls with made-in-India products.

Our guest today is Leonard Langsdorf, CTO of Digital Innovation Labs at Capco, a Wipro company. Low-code and no-code software development has been around for several years. So has the idea of the 'citizen developer', a term which the business technology consultancy Gartner is said to have coined. After the Covid-19 pandemic, however, they have become truly relevant. In today's conversation, Langsdorf talks about why the time has come for both low-code and no-code applications, and the rise of the citizen developer.

Our guest today is Vishwastam Shukla, chief technology officer at HackerEarth, a Bangalore and Silicon Valley company that offers a tech platform for developers and companies to find each other. In today’s conversation, Vishy discusses HackerEarth’s ‘state of developer recruitment 2021’ report — how it’s a candidate’s market out there right now; what might happen to diversity in the short term; and what companies are doing with tech to hire techies.

HackerEarth started as a software tool to help developers prepare for interviews — It was the brainchild of a group of IIT Roorkee engineers, back in 2012-13. Today it has a developer community of over six million and some of the world’s largest companies as customers, using its platform to identify, assess, interview, recruit and retain developers — using its products for everything from coding interviews to internal hackathons.

Our guest today is Vikas Gopal, global managing partner, finance and shared services consulting lead at Tata Consultancy Services. TCS, one of the world’s biggest IT services companies, found that many finance leaders in companies around the world relied more on instinct than on data, in a survey of 750 such senior executives. In today’s conversation, Vikas discusses some of these findings and the imperatives facing global CFOs

Our guest today is Mike Proulx, VP and Research Director at Forrester, which advises enterprises around the world on their business technology strategies. Mike offers his analysis of Jack Dorsey’s somewhat abrupt departure from Twitter, and the choice of Parag Agrawal, the company’s CTO, as the new CEO. Crypto, metaverse, and bringing GenZ to the platform are going to be some of the challenges Twitter's full-time CEO will have to solve. Parag represents Twitter’s switch to a full-time dedicated CEO, at a time when the company faces both product and policy challenges, according to Mike

Our guests today are Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal of Meesho. Their unicorn company is in the news for all the right reasons. They are taking social commerce to small-town India and in the process, are helping millions of women turn into micro-entrepreneurs. Investors love them and privately value their company at $5 billion. Today, Vidit and Sanjeev talk about the work ahead and how they are already paying it forward