HERALD: What is your field of speciality?
AMARSH CHATURVEDI: Transerve is a hyperlocal information company and deals with geographic data to help ease decision making across sectors. Our flagship product, launched in 2014, helps cities make their revenue management smarter. This product has been scaled across India with 7 cities signed up till date. In order to enhance our offering to a wider customer base, we have recently launched the beta version of our new product, Transerve Data Collector, which is a customizable and collaborative data collection and management platform. The solution leverages the power of a smart phone by making transforming it to a smart data collection device and also enables geographic data collection, which has been quite a cumbersome and expensive affair so far.
HERALD: Managing data is cumbersome and time taking. How does your product help ease it?
AC: I will cite an example of a case to answer this question.
Imagine a situation when a market research (MR) agency is hired to study the response of a new consumer product. Face-to-face interviews still dominate this sector and a pen-paper based survey is time consuming, brings in inefficiencies and quality of data also can be questioned. Now just think of a platform, where the MR agency manager quickly designs a form on web, adds photograph/signature/geolocation component to the form and assigns to her team of scores of survey agents, who download the form immediately on their smartphones and record the details in a structured and efficient manner. The data gets synced immediately and the manager quickly gets all forms on a click of a button sitting in her office. Not only that, she can locate all survey entries on a digital map too.
HERALD: What made you come up with this product. What inspired you?
AC: Coming from a background of working in infrastructure industry, we always used to see that project status reporting used to be such a pain. There were tens of reporting formats to be filled every week and it would take immense effort to accurately report the progress. In addition, when we launched our smart city revenue management solution, we found that city administrations were literally struggling with data collection exercises for social/infrastructure schemes. Moreover, we found that a smart democratized way of data collection was always missing and geographic data collection was always a humungous task. With this understanding when we tried to evaluate existing solutions, we found that they were either very cumbersome to use or very expensive, requiring specialized GPS handheld devices. Hence, we came up with this easy-to-use light-weight solution for data collection.
HERALD: What measures have you undertaken to secure the data?
AC: Data Security is a prime concern in this whole exercise, which has been tackled diligently. The product is a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering which allows and end-to-end office-to-field data collection and management platform. The data, once collected, is accessible only to the data administrator (who creates the forms) and the respective data collectors (who access it on their smart phones in the field). Data resides on a server on cloud and there is provision on automatic backup as well.
HERALD: How do you price your product? What are your future plans of enhancing the offering?
AC: Since the vision of the product is to democratize data collection, we have kept quite nominal prices for the platform. In some cases, the package price even comes out to be less than a regular monthly 3G data plan for your smart phone.
Our future plans are to include a host of data types and functions in the application and our development team is working tirelessly on it. We also wish to empower our business and enterprise users with a strong data management platform. We are also building data analysis capabilities and have built basic data visualization and statistical platform to analyse the data your team has collected.
HERALD: Who are your major clients? How is Goa going to be benefitted by your product?
AC: Soon after the launch, we bagged our first customer, Samagra Waste Management Solutions, in Pune. Our next target is market research and FMCG sector nationally as well as internationally.
In Goa, we can think of numerous uses of this solution. Real estate agents can use it to map out spaces, collect digital photos and show the premises to their prospective customers on web with location. Meter readers can use it to record electrical/water meter readings. Public health practitioners can use it to record patient information and run statistical analysis. Logistics companies can use it for proof of deliveries. We were even approached by a shack owner to register food orders on our platform. Public Works Department can use it for monitoring and reporting project progress. Police can use it to report crime location and details.
HERALD: What made you work as an entrepreneur in Goa?
AC: I always cherish working in Goa as an entrepreneur. I advise the younger breed of entrepreneurs to take benefit of low costs, great connectivity, fabulous support structure and talent pool here. Starting in Goa helped us rapidly prototype and get early traction. Goa houses a closely-knit ecosystem and this helps us immensely when we start-up. It certainly is a crowd puller and you can also attract talent from far flung places here. Work life balance is amazing and helps you think more.
