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History of CIPL : From 'CITYNET' to 'iStalls and iBranches'... |
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The idea of CITYNET was born like many other ideas, during an informal chat. I (Raghu, founder CIPL) and my engineering classmate Devendra Gupta were debating over the traffic problem in cities sometime in 1999. When we were just about to formulate the most comprehensive road reforms policy ever, a question popped-up and disrupted everything – "Why do people commute?". The debate ended in a few seconds - "Why do people commute?"... "Mostly to exchange information"... "Why can’t it be done over a network?"...
We wrote a technical paper subsequently 'CITYNET: Decentralization Through Computer Networks'. It got published nowhere :) but the idea had already been taken a bit too seriously. |
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In August 2002 I went to USA to pursue MS in computer science at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Here too, CITYNET was on top of my mind and it forced me to choose computer networking as specialization. But the decision to pursue CITYNET as my own business - and that too in India - was made while I was leisurely reading a book 'The Fall and Rise of American Automobile Industry' (see the connection?). So I quit UMass Dartmouth after my 2nd semester and joined I2IT Pune in June 2003 for MS in advanced networking and telecommunication.
Here, Devendra also joined me in Sept 2003. Over the next 8 months, we together developed the idea of CITYNET into a comprehensive proposal on 'Local Content & Applications Over Broadband Networks'. During the same period broadband industry was experiencing a lot of optimism and activity. TRAI had just released (in April 2004) its 'Recommendations on Accelerating Growth of Internet and Broadband Penetration' which clearly stated "lack of locally relevant content and applications especially for broadband" as one of the hurdles in achieving the objective. CII also simultaneously released their study 'India’s Broadband Economy: Vision 2010' which too echoed the same point (See it here).
Motivated by the recognition of the 'need' we were working on, we pitched our proposal to some well known people in the Industry including Dr.Sam Pitroda, Dr.Vijay Bhatkar, Dr.Simon Willis (cisco) amongst others. Dr.Bhatkar introduced us to the business development team of DishnetDSL. We closely worked with them for 4 months to architect their 'triple play' services for RAMNet (the MAN technology developed by DiviNet Pune). But CITYNET was not seeming to take shape. Dev decided to go for a job and I decided to start afresh... |
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In March 2005 I started my own company in Bhopal. CITYNET was now Citywala.com and the company got formally incorporated in Oct'05 as Citywala Infotech Private limited (seed funded by my parents). My first priority was to have a portal solution in place for Citywala.com, which could also be sold as corporate intranet portal solution to SMBs for quick revenue. I brought on board Rahul Desai (my classmate in I2IT) as the networking guy and Lakhnesh Pandey (my cousin, then working as a software professional in Pune) as the Web development guy. Saurabh Mishra later joined us as the 'evangelist'.
Before Saurabh joined we had already adopted DotNetNuke as the portal framework, thus no development team was needed for a long time, however customization at each client's end still needed network and application configurations. It was Saurabh's market research and our past (bad) experiences of handling clients' infrastructure that led us to switch from product model to service model. We now had to manage just one server in the world – ours. Rahul was keen to pusue his networking career and joined a reputed MNC in Pune, and Lakhnesh assumed a part-time role of in-house consultant. It was now Feb'07 and CIPL had decided to completely focus on its new business model of hosting online extensions of SMBs - "for day-to-day interaction with local people" and "for day-to-day internal collaboration", respectively named as iStalls and iBranches...
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