In Udupi, India, an app development company has made millions | Hacker News Reader

In Udupi, India, an app development company has made millions

techinasia.com

92 pointsmeghnarao24 comments

Offtopic tangent – Udupi is the city after which Udupi cuisine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udupi_cuisine) is named. This was fast food in India in the 80s and 90s, and is still reasonably popular, though I would say it has been supplanted to some extent by fast food chains.

At most Udupi restaurants/cafés in India, you can get a pretty good meal for the equivalent of a dollar or two.

I frequent a Udupi restaurant and didn't know this :)

They haven't been supplanted; its just that there are lot more people in urban areas now than in 90s and they aren't going to eat idlis all 7 days. In fact there are a lot more Udupi restaurants now than earlier. Some restaurants are inherently udupi flavoured although people may not know it, for example Vasudev Adiga's or for that matter even MTR and Maiya's.

I almost guessed the name of the company by looking at the headline, but I didn't know the background story and the structure of it. I had assumed the article was about Global Delight, an arm of Robosoft.

Global Delight seems to have been a bit disingenuous from the beginning. In 2009, it released an app called Voila, which was a straight out copy of Realmacsoftware's LittleSnapper. [1][2] When GlobalDelight started iOS apps, it copied Camera+ (made by tap tap tap - John Casasanta of MacHeist, Lisa Bettany and others) and released "Camera Plus" (this app was made the free app of the week this week). Why they had to also use a similar sounding makes me wonder if they really wanted to trick people and get some sales away from Camera+.

As for the Boom volume booster on the Mac, it has the same potential to damage your speakers as VLC could if you boost the volume beyond 100%. It's useful in certain cases, but I wouldn't recommend prolonged use of such apps. It's not like Apple and other notebook manufacturers (on the Windows PC side) and OS makers intentionally cap the volume output of the speakers for no good reason.

Overall, every time I hear the Global Delight name, I feel bad that the company could have been a lot more without having to plagiarize so much if it had wanted to.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20090708143947/http://www.realmac...

[2]: http://macheist.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=15395

As someone who has worked there I'd like to set the record straight.

What's wrong with copying someone else's features ?

AFAIK Camera Plus was released BEFORE Camera+. But it was easily beaten by the other and it became so popular that now it seems like it was the other way around.

But yeah Boom is a bit over hyped. It doesn't increase your speaker output beyond the permitted maximum and so it can't really do any damage. Its just applying a limiter / compressor to your audio output. The thing is that noone has bothered to make something cheaper or free.

Robosoft was working on Apple Tech way before it was cool (from 1995..). A lot of the experienced Apple developers in India may have had their origins at Robosoft.

One minor but important aspect missing in the PR of the essay is about how they treat their employees. Anyone joining them fresh out of college has to deposit an amount equivalent to half their starting salary in a bank account for which you surrender the papers to the company.

If you leave within 3 years , the amount is forfeited. Now this is an incredibly shabby way to treat your developers. They claim it's to recover training expenses , but yeah 3 years !? Gimme a break.

Not exactly the "global" startup they claim to be. If you think I'm lying just go go to glass door and read their reviews. Remember to sort by date.

I didn't write this to crib on my employer but to add some perspective. Sometimes devs on places like HN forget how lucky and privileged they are to be treated so well. This is how Indian developers are treated even at some companies doing good work that is globally competitive.

But all in all it's still a pretty impressive achievement. I admire what they have done. However the building mentioned in the article is only half full even after the company has been in operation for 15 years.

I'd like to think that one of the reasons they've never reached their true potential because of the high attrition resulting from how they treat their developers.

But then that's how Indian IT consulting works. Keep a small skeleton crew of experienced "managers" or "lead developers",while most of the actual work is done by fresh grads , who are then billed to the client as "experienced senior developers". By the time they get actually experienced and start demanding more , replace them with another set of grads , chain them to the company , rinse and repeat.

Don't hate the player , hate the game and all that.

Guess there's always some criticism to be made about apps, but the bit about depositing half your salary is horrible. Some aggressive retention tactics.

Not half your salary. An amount equivalent to that. But some people have to take a loan to cover that amount. So it effectively becomes like that.

> What's wrong with copying someone else's features ?

Nothing wrong at all in getting inspiration, but the copy was a bit too much like an exact replica. The threads I linked to have more details. Global Delight also posted a short rebuttal after that.

I'm not saying that creating a copy is very simple and does not take effort, but it results in being seen as "unimaginative" or as a "copy cat". Those are not terms that someone would usually want attached to their reputation.

Udupi has a strong academic background because its a center of Dwaita philosophy as well as a major Univeristy Town (it has Manipal University, I study here).

Tidbit: Satya Nadela is a Manipal alumnus. So is Rajiv Suri of Nokia.

I have often wondered about this coming of age of Manipal university. In my times it was primarily a place for those students who could not find admission anywhere else in India through merit, as measured by board examinations of course, but had parents who could buy a seat for the kid with a fantastic sum of money.

> students who could not find admission anywhere else in India through merit, as measured by board examinations of course, but had parents who could buy a seat for the kid with a fantastic sum of money.

Well, I don't know much about the past but that is certainly not so much the case now. Sure, everybody still wants to get into the IITs, and the peer quality here is not a match for say, IIT Bombay, but there are some very good people here. I myself could have gotten myself into a public school, but chose Manipal because of it's exposure life quality. I suspect that is the major driving factor for students.

There are no bought seats now. And there are heavy scholarships for meritorious students too. And this is just talking about the engineering school.

The Med School here, KMC, is one of the best in the country without a doubt (even though shit expensive).

It doesn't really matter how you get an education. What's important is you get it. I still don't understand why its still such a big deal between paid and government seats; merit or non-merit. As long as education is being provided, its great.

We have to understand the nature of Private universities in India. Their primary source of revenue is either some generous patron/family (Tata/Birla etc.) or, more commonly, the students themselves. Its very different from the US, where alumni connections are strong and alums often make sizeable donations to their alma mater.

Are you not romanticizing it and projecting your own beliefs? There are other lots of smaller places but having good institutions which don't get to have a good Startup ecosystem, or even a single startup, unless somebody chooses to.

I would proffer this happened because the founder Rohith Bhat settled down there (probably his home town) after having stints in Japan and lot of experience developing for Apple. And he got the advantage of hiring cheap from the Manipal University, with a mix of 3 year bond which throwaway43 has explained, to keep people from running away to lucrative places like Bangalore very near by.

This company also reminds me of Zoho for some reason. Which has a back office in Chennai, started by a Bay area veteran Sridhar Vembu. I guess, thats a better run Startup in terms of HR at least, in comparison.

The Udupi-Manglore region has traditionally been the region of entrepreneurs, bankers and educational entreprenuers largely driven by Saraswat community.

Udupi is called "cradle of banking" in India. Large number of private banks started in this region until the socialist government forcibly took over all of them.

Canara Bank, Syndicate Bank, Corporation Bank, Vijaya Bank, Karnataka Bank, Vysya Bank and the State Bank of Mysore started in this region.

Manipal city which is close to Udupi played a major role in spreading computer education in India through a franchise model of Manipal Private university. I touched a Windows computer for the first time through one such franchises. The course which taught me basic Office, Internet, my first email address, accounting software Tally etc. cost $100 in 1999 and took around 3 weeks.

TMA Pai was the the first Indian to start fully privately funded Medical, Dental and Engineering college. TMA Pai foundation was the one to successfully fight against the Indian Government which started putting arbitrary admission,fee criteria even on 100% privately funded Hindu run educational institutes. (Indian government by law interferes only in educational institutes run by Hindus while giving 100% exemption to others thus creating an uneven field to compete).

TMA Pai won the court case and Indian government with great urgency passed constitutional amendment to override the court's decision.

Food: In my childhood it was a common joke that Americans found an Udupi restaurant on Moon when they sent their men on it.

That was the Indian fastfood during those times mostly run by Saraswat community spread across the country. The three colleges I attended all had canteens run by someone from this town.

P.S.

I always feel connected to Udupi because as a child I faced a life threatening issue and my parents traveled hundreds of miles to take me to Manipal hospital where I got excellent healthcare at reasonable price. Now Manipal hospital has many branches.

Cool. NITK is also close by in Surathkal, which doesn't hurt.

yes and no doubt it has played a role in recent times but some of the institutions like Canara Bank were started in 1906. (NITK in 1960s).

There are hundreds of companies like this in India. And the media is full of writeups like this

What I don't see being said is every 6 months they need a hit. If they don't get one they downsize.

A good metric to evaluate them is the number of employees besides the founders who have stuck around for longer than two-three years.

I don't recall any other Indian app companies which have done well on App store. Can you list down a few ? Please note that this is completely different than Olas, Flipkarts. It is a pure play app company which makes money by selling apps on app store

What are the other companies you know of? The 6 months stat is an interesting one.

anecdotal tidbit: almost every mac developer I met in Bangalore started their career in Robosoft :)

small by india standards?

We'll just put the name of the town in the title and then we won't need to worry about how small it is.

You are on to something. But a similar company in say, Ames, Iowa would also command similar attention, I think. Like Ames, the median education of people of Udupi and the region around it are actually much better than national medians. Seen in light of this, it is hardly surprising. Just down the highway 10 miles is the birthplace and HQ of an international private university chain of some repute. Several now-nationalized banks also started around Udupi and the town 30 miles away, Mangalore. There is also an unusually dense cluster of good universities in and around Udupi. Udupi also ranks at the top in school performance in the state of Karnataka.

Check my comment where I have given more details.

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