Made in India: Featuring Mooga from Iken Solutions
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The section features emerging player Iken Solutions, whose flagship product ‘Mooga’ is a hybrid AI framework that uses a holistic approach to personalize the end user experience across online, mobile, and other platforms.
Quick Facts
Overview
From the Iken stables comes ‘Mooga’, a comprehensive consumer 3.0 analytics framework, based on hybrid Artificial Intelligence (AI). Mooga, meaning ‘wave’ in Arabic, is essentially a business intelligence system – a recommendation, matching, discovery and personalization framework supporting many kinds of products, structured content and generic transactions. The algorithm of Mooga incorporates various methodologies that are all the rage today, including ‘the long tail’, wisdom of crowds, and C K Prahalad’s N=1.
Founder CEO Siddharth Goel believes that the Mooga platform is the future of customer analytics. It offers extreme personalization of the end-user experience, and can be used across a spectrum of areas (online, mobile, ipTV, DTH) and across verticals like Retail and BFSI.
Mooga offers the following functionalities:
- Collaborative (social) filtering
- Content filtering and clustering
- Understanding of user-specific personal tastes
- Flexible modeling and automated learning
- Flexibility in business logic
End –User scoring point
Mooga’s focus area is really personalization of the customer experience; consequently the enterprise concern it addresses is CRM. According to the company, Mooga creates an end-user experience that is so personalized that the customer believes that he is really being serviced on a one-to-one basis. In an age of information overload, Mooga goes beyond the basic ‘search’ functionality, allowing the end user to ‘discover’ information that you did not know you needed. The Mooga framework can be used on the internet, as well as through a mobile network, allowing for optimal use of these technologies. In effect, it offers real-time CRM, enhancing customer retention, and collapsing the whole discovery cost of an organization.
Competitive Positioning
Mooga is based on hybrid AI, using a combination of 4 major techniques to solve the discovery problem (where the end user goes beyond merely searching for information to actually discovering knowledge that he did not know he needed): expert systems, case-based reasoning, genetic algorithms, and neural networks. Mooga’s expert system controls the case-based reasoning engine, combined with collaborative filtering and content filtering modules.
There are around 5-6 companies who also offer products in this area, but using different techniques. In contrast to Mooga that uses a holistic approach, combining almost all components required for true personalization, recommendation and discovery, Iken says maintains that other products tend to use a particular technology or method, which often gives an incomplete picture: For instance, one of weaknesses of using solely a technique like neural network is it works like a black box, configured for particular kinds of datasets and types of problems. Also neural networks generalize broader patterns and do not understand individual user patterns, according to Iken.
Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Mooga can be modeled, configured and customized for different types of content and products (like movies, music, books, electronic gadgets, customer profiles, and so on). Peer products model the products and contents in a generic way (i.e., uniformly) through catalogs etc, says Iken.
Go-To-Market
Currently, Iken is focusing on the mobile content discovery area, where there is an enormous amount of content available, but display area is not sufficient. Using a product like Mooga can provide a solution. Initially Iken spoke to carriers, and the company is still pursuing alliances in this field. Simultaneously, they have realized that it would be a lot quicker to go through content owners, as these companies are likely to make decisions faster. Accordingly they have signed a on a number of clients like Sony and Warner Music.
Iken’s initial GTM strategy for Mooga was to work in the mobile area, but since this framework has shown good potential everywhere else, the field of application has been extended. Accordingly, Iken has just signed a deal with an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) company in India, which will use Mooga to personalize TV guides. Iken is looking at taking this to cable TV and set-top box companies as well.
Where Iken does not have a complete understanding of the domain, the strategy is to work with alliance partners.
The Big Challenges
- To find the right partner and then figure out how you to add real value to these companies: the challenge lies in dealing effectively with partners like carriers and big IT companies. These are interesting channel partners, but are often demanding to work with, as opposed to smaller companies that are more agile.
- To scale up the Iken team: Iken Solutions is currently looking for funding to scale the business
- Customer acquisition is challenging with sales cycles being long.
Success Quotient
The management team has the right mix of what the company and Mooga really needs. This 7-person team (4 based in Latin America, 3 in India) consists of serial entrepreneurs with combined expertise in operations and strategy, execution and technology.
Mooga is only around 6-months old and already has 4-5 big customers, and about 4-5 alliances in the bag. The seeds of success have already been sown; they only seem to need a little time to blossom.
My Word! A one2one take with Siddharth Goel
NASSCOM EMERGE: What if you could go back in time – would you change product strategy or go-to-market?
Goel: Definitely! In terms of product strategy, we would re-look at our technology alliances, and focus more on the longtails of customers. In terms of GTM as well, I suppose we would focus more on alliances on a horizontal basis. Focusing on carriers has cost us a lot of time and effort, since sales cycles are painfully long here, even though we add great value to them. So if we could go back in time, this is the main area we would tweak.
NASSCOM EMERGE: Does India offer strategic advantages or even disadvantages when it comes to a product focused business?
Goel: Well, yes, a mix of both really. From a product perspective, we see a noticeable change in the international market. Trust in the Indian software market has helped us as well. On the other hand, Indian companies will not purchase Indian products; they prefer foreign products. So for us, probably, market access would be better in some other markets; however, from a cost perspective, the cost base there would be appreciably higher. India is much better on the cost basis. Initiatives by NASSCOM are helping us, we see innovation on this area and globally we are beginning to get recognition.
NASSCOM EMERGE: How difficult was it to raise capital? Was this a growth issue?
Goel: We are seed-funded; capital is not an issue as of today. Now we are looking at funding. If we are not able to raise capital in the next 6 months, it could affect our growth plans. But we believe that we have a great product and have the traction now to obtain funding.
Interview by Anita Maini, Prayag Consulting for NASSCOM EMERGE Newsletter
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