Sharat Potharaju, Co-Founder & CEO, MobStac
“MobStac -Internet for all”
The internet is the gateway to the world, from information to virtual marketplaces or just plain social networking. However access to the internet is not affordable or easy for all, what with the prices of laptops and desktops plus infrastructure. The mobile device has thus been touted as the instrument that all can use to connect to the internet. Sharat Potharaju, Co-Founder and CEO of MobStac believes that the “promise of the Internet will be realized through the mobile.”
With easy installation, faster loading and consistency over different device types MobStac is the business idea that has been forecast to dominate the mobile internet sector.
Yourstory learnt how MobStac will come to be the de rigueur for all mobile devices bringing the internet to all and sundry.
What is the market demand that your business idea MobStac is fulfilling?
MobStac makes it dead simple for publishers to reach their audience over mobile browsers across a wide-range of devices. Given the fragmented device market and widely differing capabilities across, MobStac solves a key challenge in reaching the widest audience across the world. This is especially important in emerging markets like India because PC penetration is low and the promise of the Internet will be realized through the mobile.
PS: if you don’t believe the mobile Internet story, just watch the ads on television!
What target audience is the MobStac technology aimed at?
MobStac's mission is to help people consume the Internet on any mobile device on the planet by accelerating the creation of mobile Internet content and delivering it to the widest possible audience.
The rapid proliferation of mobile devices (phones, tablets etc.) to all corners of the world has compounded the need to service a class of devices that will be the primary Internet access device for many. It is with the purpose of serving this global market that MobStac was started in June 2009 in Bangalore, India. Through our products, MobStac B! and MobStac E!, we are enabling enterprise publishers, long-tail publishers, and bloggers all over the world reach their mobile audiences.How is the MobStac publishing technology different from the competition?
For starters, we have two versions of the product, MobStac E! focused on enterprise publishers like The Hindu or New York Times and MobStac B! focused on bloggers and long-tail publishers. There are 3 ways MobStac B! differentiates itself from the competition:
1. Ease of Creation: The power of the MobStac product is in its ease in installing and using it. In 2 easy steps and in less than 5 minutes a publisher / blogger can have a mobile site up and running.
2. Speed of page-loads: Owing to its proprietary framework, MobStac can load pages at 400% faster in comparison to a regular page-load. This solves a major pain-point that readers have with respect to mobile Internet browsing
3. Device Agnostic: MobStac’s “Dynamic content adaptation” technology helps render a differentiated experience to over 5,000 devices. Now the publisher/blogger does not need to worry whether the reader is on an iPhone, Android or a Nokia
Do you have a strategy to take MobStac beyond our borders?
Short-term objective is to drive adoption and reach the widest possible audience. Current Geographies of interest apart from India are North America, South-East Asia and South Africa. We are actively looking to raise a new round of funding primarily for customer acquisition in the aforementioned geographies and continue product development.
You have an interesting background with many possibilities, why did you take up entrepreneurship?
"Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t." I am a chemical engineer by education, Investment Banker by experience and an entrepreneur by desire. Ravi (my co-founder) and I know each other for close to 20 yrs, since 5th grade, studied together in high school, college and then IIT Madras… Always dreamt of starting our own company and being entrepreneurs… For our backgrounds and past experience please visit http://mobstac.com/about.
How did you raise the necessary seed capital for your company? Any plans to raise money?
We raised a small seed round mostly from IIT Madras alumni the past year and are currently looking to raise a larger round of financing.
What would you like to tell our readers on the future for MobStac?
As an ardent follower of yourstory.in I have noticed that my consumption pattern has moved away from the rss reader to mobile (thanks to Twitter, Facebook etc.). We at MobStac believe that there will be a paradigm change in content consumption patterns from PC based destination sites (or rss readers) to social media based content discovery on mobile Internet. We intend to lead this change!
Yourstory wishes Sharat Potharaju and MobStac expeditious success in realizing their dreams and thank them for their time. We hope to see MobStac emerge as the leading creator of publishing tech in the near future bringing the internet to all. To know more have a look at their site www.mobstac.com
