PUDUCHERRY: Technology entrepreneur and founder of LINQS Raghvendra Saboo, 37, had his eureka moment when a water purifier servicing personnel had come home for a routine service check. As details of the previous service checks were not available with them, it got him thinking. To put it in his words, “I wondered what if those documents were in digital format and in the purifier itself, and they somehow opened up on a smartphone? I started seeing hyperlinks on physical world objects. I started wanting the bus stand to tell me the bus schedules. I started wanting a dining table at a friend’s place to tell me its brand and connect me to its webpage.”
An Mtech graduate from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, Raghvendra, who has 12 years of software experience in technology majors such as Oracle, GXS, GE Global Research and Tata Infotech, started LINQS on February 20, 2013. Working in the software industry with lean teams, he found it was an advantage and followed the pattern, starting up LINQS with only two employees, one of them being his wife, Roopal, who acts as the Designer cum Logistics Manager, and two freelancers. LINQS brought out its products for the first time in June this year, since when they have sold more than 800 products.
LINQS has some interesting products which they sell online. 1Card is a digital business card, which, on tapping an NFC enabled phone or a QR scanner, stores details automatically on the recipient’s phone. Cloudbook is a sticky note that can store an unlimited number of notes and pictures on cloud storage. Add notes or pictures of your grocery list, the recipe of a dish and so on. To retrieve the notes, just tap/scan the Cloudbook. Lost & Found tags come in the form of stickers, key tags and bag tags and it is the easiest way to find your lost valuables. Linqup tags and Linqs Hub are marketing solutions targeted at brands and retail stores. “On tapping or scanning the tag, the customer is directed to the product’s digital information like a YouTube video, specs, ratings, etc. The brand or retailer gets to know who, how, when and from where the customers are engaging with their products,” he says. They are also planning to launch ICE (In Case of Emergency) tags soon, a product that would help the elderly in case of an emergency.
A mobile-only product, there is no native LINQS app that a user needs to download. The entire process happens on a user’s mobile browser. LINQS products use Near Field Communication (NFC) tags and QR code to hyperlink objects.
A bootstrapped company, LINQS is expected to break even within one year. They have not tied up with any consumer durable company as of now, but they are in talks and hope to see this reach fruition at some point.
Raghavendra advises people to be a keen observer of human behaviour to learn of real problems and propose a solution for the same. He dreams of a day when LINQS will connect a billion objects to their web identity and handle 10 million physical to digital transitions a month and become the number one NFC application company in the world. Visit www.linqs.in for details.
— mathew.maniamkot@gmail.com