Showing posts with label Micromax. Show all posts
Cube26 brings gesture control technology for Indian SmartPhone makers.
Gesture control is a buzzword on the tips of everyone’s tongues these days, and after Samsung debuted a number of touch-free control features with the Galaxy S4, it’s natural that other OEMs are looking to integrated the same kind of tech into their devices. That tendency has played out well for Cube26, a Santa Clara-based startup.
Cube26 co-founders Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain have found some interested buyers, starting with six of India’s leading OEMs, including number two smartphone provider Micromax, Intex, Celkon, Zen, iBerry and Lemon Mobile. All told, Cube26 says this represents 25 percent of the Indian smartphone market, which according to recent data, is one of the fastest growing on the planet.
Kumar says
OEMs around the world are looking for new ways to stand out from the crowd, which is what motivated Samsung to come up with its own gesture features to begin with. Cube26 offers a way to do this via licensed software, rather than having to develop it in-house, giving any OEM access to tech perceived as at the cutting edge of mobile products. And unlike Samsung’s version, it doesn’t require specialized hardware; the Galaxy S4 contains two IR cameras to make Air Gesture features work, whereas Cube26′s tech is designed to be used with standard smartphone cameras, as well as other connected devices like smart TVs.
Cube26 offers up a number of gesture features including “Look away to Pause,” “Auto-call” (call starts when phone moved to ear), and “Touch-less Swipe to answer,” which is demoed in the embedded video. All of these need only a front-facing camera to work, and if you’re curious about how the look away feature performs, you can download the startup’s dedicated video player for iOS, a tech demo which Cube26 says has received over 150,000 downloads since its launch in April.
To reflect its increased efforts to sell to mobile companies, Cube26 has also brought on Kunal Ahooja, former CEO of Indian mobile OEM S Mobility as an advisor. Smartphones packing its tech have already rolled out from Micromax (the Canvas 4) and iBerry (the Auxus Nuclea N1), and devices from the remaining new partners will follow shortly, per Kumar.
Others including Israeli startup Umoove and Leap Motion are attempting to capitalize on the newfound interest in gesture tech via partnerships with OEMs, so expect a lot of activity from this space as the land grab continues. Whether or not anyone will actually use hand-waving to control their smartphones long-term, instead of just as a product differentiation gimmick, remains far more uncertain, however.
Micromax is in race with Samsung to become 1st in Indian Market.
India’s currency may be floundering, but its smartphone market is on fire. Sales have nearly tripled in the last year, led by the local upstart Micromax, which is nipping at the heels of Samsung for market share dominance. Micromax now commands a 22% market share, up from 18.8% in the first quarter. Samsung’s share has slipped to 26% from 32.7%.
The scenario that is playing out in India — initial dominance by foreign brands like Samsung and Sony, which is quickly eroded by homegrown manufacturers like Micromax and Karbonn — is eerily similar to the dynamic seen in China, where Samsung and Apple had an early advantage that is being steadily erased by Huawei and Lenovo.
Other companies that fit a similar mold include Coolpad in China, Smartfren in Indonesia, Ninetology in Malaysia, Cherry Mobile in the Philippines, i-Mobile in Thailand, and Q-Smart in Vietnam, as IDC noted earlier this month. There is plenty of money on the table: emerging-market sales are expected to surge from 400 million units in 2013 to 749 million in 2017.
In India’s case, the trend will be accelerated by the country’s currency woes, which are making foreign imports much more expensive — the rupee has declined by nearly a third in the last six months. But even without foreign exchange fluctuations it could spell bad news for companies like Samsung and Apple, which derive huge portions of their profits from smartphones, yet have largely saturated their existing markets and are facing increasingly intense domestic competition in new ones.
Micromax, now within shouting distance of becoming the top smartphone maker in the world’s largest market after the United States and China, at first glance bears some similarities to Xiaomi, the Chinese firm that drew attention this week by poaching a top executive from Google’s Android division, which makes the operating system used by some 80% of the world’s smartphones, including Samsung and Micromax.
Like Xiaomi, Micromax’s top-of-the-line phones are significantly cheaper than the premium-priced handsets from Apple and Samsung; its newly launched Canvas Doodle 2 phablet sells for 19,990 rupees ($300). (It also has a gimmicky “blow-to-unlock” feature.) The company has bet heavily on the super-size phones known as phablets, which now make up 30% of the Indian smartphone market. “[G]iven the growth we are seeing in the phablet category (Canvas series), we are aiming to be the top player by Diwali, which is Q3,” Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharmatold the PTI news agency.
Market research firm IDC said that India’s second-quarter smartphone sales nearly tripled to 9.3 million, from 3.5 million a year earlier, led by devices with super-sized screens of five inches and bigger. These so-called phablets now make up 30% of the Indian smartphone market.
If there’s anything standing in the way of Micromax’s march to dominance in India, it might be the lack of a charismatic executive at the helm, a la Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, often called “China’s Steve Jobs.” Rajesh Agarwal, co-founder and managing director of Micromax, was forced to resign at the beginning of August after he was arrested for attempting to bribe municipal engineers to obtain approval for the construction of a banquet hall. The incident could derail the company’s anticipated IPO; it is backed by private equity firms Sequoia Capital, Sandstone Capital and Madison India Capital.
