How To Make Your Office Space Energy Efficient

Commercial buildings waste up to 30 per cent of the energy they consume. BW Businessworld caught up with Amarjeet Singh, co-founder and CTO of Gurgaon-based energy analytics startup Zenatix on five simple ways to make your office space energy efficient.1.    If there are “deferrable” loads, for instance the water motor that can be operated at any point of the day, then ensure that they operate during off-peak hours so you pay less for these loads.2.    Ensure that your air conditioning starts in the morning at the right time so as to precool the building to the right temperature by the time office starts. If the air conditioning is started much earlier than office start time it is a waste of energy and precooling later than start time compromises on the comfort factor of the employees.3.    Have a flexible seating plan in the office so that during weekends or late evenings when there are a relatively less number of people working in the office they can sit in the same area, using light and air conditioning only around that space and not of the whole building or office floor.4.    Switch off your appliances from the plug when not in use. Desktops/printers running in sleep mode during night time, TV/set-top boxes plugged in and not switched off from the plug consume significant energy.5.    Quickly shift from diesel generator to grid supply as soon as the electricity supply is restored after a power cut. Running your diesel generator for even a few extra minutes can cost you a lot to your company.

Let There Be Light

A june afternoon in New Delhi can’t be anything but sizzling hot. Yet, Sashwati has a fleece jacket handy in her office drawer. Reason: It gets so chilly indoors that she gets goose bumps.  At around six in the evening, when it’s time to go home, Sashwati quickly puts her desktop in sleep mode and leaves, as do the 125 employees in her office.This scenario is replicated in millions of offices every day, resulting in a massive wastage of electricity from air conditioners and computers. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), commercial buildings waste up to 30 per cent of the energy they consume.Now, there is help available for such companies from Zenatix, a Gurgaon-based startup that helps commercial buildings save on the their energy bills, by understanding their power consumption patterns and providing insights.“The main reason for this wastage is that people are not able to measure their energy consumption,” says Rahul Bhalla, co-founder and CEO of Zenatix. “Unlike the mobile bill that lists the cost incurred from calls, messages, and use of other services, the electricity bill just mentions the units of electricity consumed. It doesn’t brief how much energy is consumed by ACs, or UPS. If one knows how much energy is being consumed by which appliance in real time, one can take corrective measures,” he adds.Zenatix installs energy monitoring equipments, smart meters and controllers on different appliances such as ACs, lighting, UPS, etc. to monitor the energy consumed by them through their cloud-based software. Then it analyses the data and sends information on energy-saving measures to customers via SMS or email.ZENATIXYEAR OF FOUNDING: December 2013 WHAT IT DOES: Enable commercial buildings become energy-efficient USP: Provides actionable insights driven by energy analyticsFUNDING: $1,61,000COMPETITION: Boston-based EnerNOCREVENUE (BOOKED): Over Rs 1 crore NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 12PATENTS: NoneThis energy-efficiency model was a part of the research done by Amarjeet Singh, co-founder and CTO, who was a faculty member at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in New Delhi. During his research (2010 to 2013), he deployed energy sensors on campus to collect over five million data points every day. Insights developed from the data collected over the years helped in reducing energy consumption by 15-20 per cent at the institute.In December 2013, he took entrepreneurial leave from IIIT Delhi to start Zenatix with his IIT Delhi batchmates Rahul Bhalla and Vishal Bansal. He launched this model commercially for large consumers of energy like office spaces, hospitals, schools, manufacturing units.As they were doing their market research, the partners came to know of several companies that were engaged in gathering data and informing building managers about their energy usage using graphs and trend charts. But then, the building managers did not have the know-how to interpret this data and take corrective action. “So, instead of providing the information on energy consumption, we decided to interpret the data and give recommendations to customers by email alerts and messages to trigger action in real time”, says Singh.This, according to Singh, is Zenatix’s biggest differentiating factor. “We have not seen any company in India that analyses the data and delivers solutions to customers to reduce their energy consumption and link all this to cost savings.”Globally, Boston-based EnerNOC is helping commercial buildings automate energy operations.The partners launched their first product in May 2014. But they are still working on building different algorithms and use case studies, so that this system can be deployed across a variety of customers with varying infrastructural support systems in various circumstances, such as factories, for instance, where the Internet connection might not be stable.The biggest challenge for them initially, says Singh, was sales. The customers wanted to know how much they would save in costs. This meant installing their system and getting the data. But clients were unwilling to pay a huge amount upfront for this product. It was a chicken and egg situation, says Singh. So, they refined the business model and transformed it into a SaaS model, where companies pay a monthly subscription fee proportional to the area over which the sensors are installed. And, there is also a guarantee: if the client doesn’t make cost savings, Zenatix would remove the software without any  charge. This proved to be a game changer for them. Within one year, they had 32 clients with sensor installations at over 100 sites. Some of their large clients include Google, Mother Diary, NIIT, United Health Group, and IIT Delhi. In fact, they recently raised $1,61,000 from Google’s India  chief Rajan Anandan, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal and Trifecta Capital’s Rahul Khanna, along with a bunch of other individuals.Gaurav Bhatnagar, National Head of Infrastructure & Facilities at NIIT says, “We commissioned the project in April 2015 and in just two months we have been able to make energy savings of 5 per cent with just the low hanging fruits. For instance, Zenatix  suggested starting the chiller at 7 am instead of 6 am, so the building reaches the optimal temperature just before people arrive. The best thing is they don’t suggest any retrofits but give deep insights about performance of electrical equipments and how the building reacts to them.”The company is now focusing on getting more customers and also making its technology seamless and plug-and-play.  (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 27-07-2015)

Will E-visas Help India Attract More Foreign Tourists?

Last year, the number of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India was 7.46 million, about half the number of international visitors (15.1 million) to travel to the small island city state of Singapore. To boost tourism in the country, Indian government recently announced that citizens from 43 countries can avail the e-visa facility at seven more airports. Last year in November, Indian government allowed the e-visa facility at nine international airports in India, namely, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Goa.Such moves have been expected to give a big boost to the tourism industry as the tourists are not required to go through the long process of visiting the embassy and getting the visa approved much before the travel date.In this current format, to get an e-visa, tourists can upload the documents and pay the required fees from the designated website and can get the electronic version of the visa within 96 hours.Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder of web and mobile travel search app ixigo.com informs, “The volume of queries and visits at their search engine have increased by 25 per cent by foreign tourists if you compare the data of January to June from 2014 to 2015. In fact we are already seeing a lot of inbound queries for October and November when the tourist season will begin again this year.”  But, the FTAs during the period January- April 2015 were 28.21 lakh with a growth of 2.7 per cent, as compared to the FTAs of 27.47 lakh in January- April 2014. The numbers don’t show a great increase as one would have expected.Bajpai adds: “Last year, when the government announced this facility, we saw some cases where people took a flight to India presuming they will get a visa on arrival and were flown back to their country. There was a lot of miscommunication in the earlier days. Though it has been simplified now, but still a lot more can be done to communicate the new process and make it smoother.”Maahesh Aiyer, Chief Operating Officer- South, The Lemon Tree Hotel Company sees it as a overall positive step, “This move will not affect group travel because they are planned much ahead of schedule, but it will boost the last minute travel. In fact, this will be good for the travel and hospitality industry as one gets a higher realisation from customers on last minute bookings.Bajpai suggests, and rightly so “The government should think about offering visa on arrival to a smaller subset of countries as it allows for a more spontaneous travel. South East Asia is an attractive travel destination for Indians because you can plan immediately and get visa on arrival after landing in the country, without worrying about it beforehand. In the current format, collating documents and uploading still takes time, though it is better than before, but it hasn’t changed the behaviour of travellers much.”What India can do is focus on countries only a few hours away by flight. Tourists from China contribute to the highest number of foreign travellers in most of the countries today. “In Sri Lanka, China contributes to 70 per cent of tourist year on year. In India they are contributing only 2-3 per cent in terms of tourist composition and there is a lot of scope for growth here,” says Aiyer.

CyberChef: Not Your Usual Dabbawalla

CyberChef offers middle eastern, continental, south east Asian and even regional cuisine from all over India, cooked by home chefs  Raghav who lives alone in Gurgaon has asked his cook to not come on evenings from Friday to Sundays. For, these are the times when he craves for that special ghar ka khana.  It is not that his parents have started parcelling him the food from his hometown in Himachal but it is the new startup in Gurgaon, CyberChef that delivers homemade continental or Lebanese to his house.  Neha Puri, co-founder of CyberChef, got the idea of starting this virtual marketplace for home cooked meals when she was doing her Masters in Marketing and Strategy from Warwick Business School, UK. There she saw how a lot of women of Indian origin would cook and sell Indian food to the students in the university. As a student, she absolutely loved it and it made her life so much easier. When she returned and saw the increasing cosmopolitan crowd in the metros, she put the two together to tap on the business opportunity and started the company along with her brother Anuj Puri in February 2015.  From the very beginning she was sure she doesn’t want to hire professional chefs. “Home chefs offer the novelty of changing the menu every day which lets us offer more variety to our customers on a daily basis.” Another thing, she adds, is these women keep trying new recipes, and some are their family recipes passed on from generation to generation. “We would never get a chance to try such heirloom recipes if it wasn’t for these home cooks.”  This is essentially why their business shouldn’t be compared with the Indian dabbawallas. For, they don’t offer dal, roti and sabzi but middle eastern, continental, south east Asian and even regional cuisine from all over India.  She started with 25 home chefs, all housewives, in Gurgaon. In two months they have got 30 more chefs and expanded their base to Mumbai. They do more than 1,000 orders on a monthly basis, wherein the price range for a meal is between ₹150-275.  The advantage of this business model is it doesn’t only offer affordable and home cooked food to the customers but also gives an opportunity to the housewives to become entrepreneurs, with whom they work on a revenue sharing agreement.  Anjali Adya, a Gurgaon-based home chef, who has been with CyberChef since its beginning says, “This has been a great opportunity because they encourage me to try different recipes and master my skill. This has also helped me get market access and my kids are proud that their mother has now become a ‘professional’.”  The responsibility of the home chefs is to cook the best meals and try innovative recipes, packaging, delivery, marketing and logistics is taken care by CyberChef.  It is these women who act as brand ambassadors for CyberChef and spread the word in their social circles. “If they grow, we grow with them,” says Adya.  One of the main concerns of being in this business, shares Puri, is the problem of time. People don’t want to wait for too long for their food. They should get it within 30-40 minutes of ordering. So, getting the right logistics can make or break this business.  Moving on, Puri wants to focus on expanding their base to Pune, Bangalore and South Delhi and get 150-200 chefs at each location by end of this year.   

Giving A Desi Twist To Fashion

Rahul Narvekar, former co-founder of Fashionandyou, talks about the NDTV-backed Indian fashion portal Indianroots, his new venture. He tells BW Businessworld what it takes to make the e-commerce site profitable. What was the rationale behind starting another e-commerce portal on fashion out of India?We observed an Indian lady would be willing to pay a couple of lakhs or more for a handcrafted bag from Italy but would not pay Rs 26,000 for a hand-painted sari from India. This is because the Italian government has made their products flauntable. We haven't done that yet. Our aim is to make Indian fashion a premium product and sell it like a luxury. Another reason is the profit margins in fashion are very high, almost 50 per cent. In the first year itself we did revenue of Rs 5 crore and next year it jumped to Rs 61 crore. In fact, we created history by selling one of the most expensive shawl worth Rs 19 lakh on an ecommerce website. It was a restored heirloom piece by designer Pranavi Kapoor. Why Indianroots targets Indian diaspora as its customer when the Indian market is itself huge?We were targeting the market outside India initially because of the huge marketing cost required for customer acquisition. NDTV, who is a majority shareholder, gave us a media inventory of 36 crore on dot-com and television outside India. This amount of money wasn't enough to compete with companies like Flipkart and Jabong. So, we decided to target the market outside India because it is largely unexplored and there is a huge demand for Indian fashion. The plan was to enter India after two years when we would have made substantial revenue. But after one year itself we realised we are getting 33 per cent of our traffic from India from organic word-of-mouth. That has made us divert our attention now to India which will be our main focus for this year. What are your future plans apart from focusing on IndiaWe have 100 designers and 700-plus brands on our portal. We are now dropping the ethnic tag and extending the category to Indian fashion - fusion stuff and a lot more of westernised clothes with Indian sensibilities. We will add more categories, regional brands, and bring in more affordable products. The idea is to bring down our average order value from Rs 17,000-Rs 25,000, which is maximum in Indian fashion space, to Rs 6,000-7,000.

Work, Play, Share...

In may 2015, Sushanto Mitra, founder and CEO of Lead Angels Network, an angel investment firm, decided to bet on the business prospects of MyCuteOffice, a Mumbai-based online portal that connects users to shared office spaces in six cities across the country. Mitra’s company invested an undisclosed sum in the marketplace for co-working spaces for one specific reason, its asset-light model, which he says provides opportunities to grow and scale the business much faster.Though Mitra’s investment was in the digital platform, MyCuteOffice derives its core value from the brick and mortar business of the fast-growing co-working space. The cities — Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai — which the portal covers are all startup hubs, where there is an ever-increasing demand for cost-effective office space for budding entrepreneurs.MyCuteOffice is adding one new city to its portfolio every two months, a clear indication of the growing presence and demand for shared office spaces all over the country including in tier-two and tier-three pockets such as in Barauni, Bihar and Nagpur.Roaming WorkersWorld over, the concept of co-working places, where different companies or individuals share working space, gained steam with the increase in the number of individual workers and freelancers. According to a survey done by online co-working magazine Deskmag in February 2013, there was an increase of 83 per cent in co-working spaces in just one year serving a total of 117 per cent more members.Unlike globally, there is no concrete data on co-working spaces in India, perhaps because it is still in its nascence. A broad indication though, comes from the number of people who are opting to freelance. The Global Online Work Report 2014, published by California-based online staffing platform Elance-oDesk, says there are 1.9 million Indian freelancers (or potential co-working space hunters) registered on the site and this number has been increasing at 62 per cent for the past three years. The report lists India among the top 10 freelancer-earning countries globally with a growth rate in these earnings of 22 per cent year on year.Success FormulaOne of the main benefits of co-working spaces is that they provide the infrastructure which otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive. Aakriti Bhargava, co-founder of startup marketing firm Boring Brands says: “I used to work out of Gurgaon-based co-working space 91Springboard for a year. What helped is the easy access to facilities such as a meeting room and the fully-equipped, 24/7 corporate canteen which is difficult to afford in a rented office. Also, there is absolutely no hassle of handling the administrative work and one can focus on getting the work done. The place also helps to attract good talent as they expect a certain quality of workplace hygiene in addition to a decent pay and benefits.”The presence of like-minded people under one roof also helps with opportunities to exchange ideas, barter services or boost each others’ morale, which comes in handy especially in the startup culture that is otherwise replete with ups and downs, say people who have used co-working spaces in their entrepreneurial journey.Bang For The Buck: (Left): Sharin Bhatti (sitting)and Sudeip Nair (standing) of Mumbai-based The Hive convert their co-working space into an events venue in the evening for additional revenue (below): an event at The Hive. (Photographs by Umesh Goswami)While customers find co-working spaces convenient, providers of these services are yet to find a sure-shot formula for success. Says Pranav Bhatia of Stirring Minds, an 8,000 sq. ft co-working space in central Delhi, “We keep the margins low to ensure full occupancy of the space and sometimes give the space at half price or even less to social enterprises.” Bhatia, in fact, started a co-working space in August 2013 because he wanted to create a ready pool of talent to outsource projects for his California-based tech startup Lemon Interactive Inc. But as he grew more involved with the co-working space startup, VCs and individual investors began contacting him for steady advice. Now he too has become an investor with equity in four startups.Most of these spaces charge per workstation and one can rent a place on a day-to-day, monthly or an yearly basis. Pranay Gupta, co-founder of 91Springboard says the payment model of co-working spaces can be compared with that of Amazon’s Web Services — pay only for what you use.The Side ViewIt isn’t just service providers who are experimenting with different models but developers who own the real estate as well. One basic model involves earning more cumulative rental income from different clients than what one would have got from just one customer.  “As a developer if one can get better rent from the property by renting it as a co-working space then it’s a no brainer. Another way to rent out the property is through revenue sharing so the co-working space provider pays the property owner a certain amount as the base rent component and the remainder in revenue share. Co-working space providers prefer this method as it saves them from paying large rents upfront, especially when they are starting out the business,” says Ankush Johar, partner, Lloyd Venture, a multinational investment company that has recently invested in a 10,000 sq. ft co-working space in Gurgaon. Full House: Pranav Bhatia of Stirring Minds, a co-working space in Delhi, keeps the margins low to ensure full occupancy, sometimes even giving the space at half price to social enterprisesThe revenue share percentage depends on the negotiation between the two parties. Usually, there is a base rent to be paid and the revenue sharing can be in 50:50, 70:30 or 80:20 ratios. The terms of the negotiation are based on the risk appetite of the real estate owner and also on the trust and goodwill of the operator.Topping UpLloyd Ventures may have invested in the co-working spaces business, but the fact remains that building and managing space is capital-intensive and not many investors are willing to fund the developers. “The returns one can expect in this business aren’t as high as one can get from successful exits from a mobile business, where it can go as high as 100x. The returns usually vary 20-40 times depending on investment made in the co-working space,” explains Stirring Minds’ Bhatia.To meet the high cost of investment this business requires, these entrepreneurs have come out with alternative streams of revenue in addition to the fees they charge their users.One way is to collect a finder’s fee by connecting freelancers to companies who want to outsource projects or by helping the VCs identify potential startups for funding. Sobin Thomas, founder of Geek Out, a co-working space for techies, with two locations in Mumbai, says most of the revenue that they earn is from the finder fees alone. “In this industry, the finder’s fee varies from anywhere between 5 to 10 per cent depending on the project. There are companies who contact us on a weekly basis for outsourcing the projects. The average cost of these projects is around $4,000 which the developer gets. We charge 5 per cent of the total project’s cost,” he explains.What makes it easy for space providers is their ready access to the community of freelancers and startsup and also the insider’s information they have about their products and services, talent, etc., information that would interest the venture capitalists intensely. Being able to connect these dots is a win-win for all the entities — more revenue for the operator, the VCs and for the users who get greater exposure and recognition.Another source of revenue for co-working spaces is through events to provide mentorship, technical skills and networking opportunities to these young companies. The promoters of The Hive see their co-working space as a place that metamorphoses into an events arena in the evening for performance artists, stand-up comedians, or music groups. “What we are trying to do is build the business model focused on where the maximum returns are. So, we have divided this place into a co-working space during the day and for hosting events at night for full utilisation,” says Sharin Bhatti, co-promoter of The Hive. In fact they designed their three-storied bungalow into a co-working space, a workshop and a cafeteria so there is enough space for all kinds of events — founder-dating events, hackathons, bookkeeping or taxation workshops.Co-working spaces are trying every trick in the book to create a sustainable business for themselves and a self-sufficient ecosystem for startups. The investment Mitra’s Lead Angel Network made in MyCuteOffice could just be the beginning. If the new approaches enhance the business prospects for these co-working space providers, the target of future investments could well be these brick and mortar co-working space entities themselves instead of online portals. If WeWork, a New York based shared office space provider can raise its fourth round of funding of $355 million in December 2014, can Indian players be far behind? sonal@businessworld.in,  @sonalkhetarpal7(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 13-07-2015)

Brave New World

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that amidst all the controversies between the different ideologies of faith, it is the religion of entrepreneurship that has engulfed and unified the country. Stable, highly-paid jobs at bluechip companies no longer seem as attractive. Young people today want to step out and start up on their own. They want to create value, make an impact and solve a pain point.

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