Bloom Energy, Expensr, Vanu
Featured As Companies That Will Change The World

Bloom Energy, Expensr and Vanu, all startup companies founded by Non Resident Indians -- have been featured in "The Next Disruptors -- 10 companies that will change the world" list of Business 2.0, a magazine published by global media giant CNN-Time Warner group. In its introduction, TIME write, "We identify 10 businesses with the potential to rewrite the rules of existing industries or open up entirely new markets."

It went on to add, "Disruption is easy to spot - in hindsight. The railroads were always going to be better than canals and wagon trains. The telephone was bound to edge out the telegraph. The transistor was clearly superior to vacuum tubes. In recent years, digital cameras have stolen the market for film, the iPod has started to replace the CD and Google seems to be disrupting just about everything else. But many companies are still coming to terms with the flood of new technology. Even when it's right in front of your face, disruption can be hard to see."

While Vanu Inc has been founded by its NRI CEO Vanu Bose, Bloom Energy is the brain child of K R Sridhar. Vanu has developed software that enables individual base stations to simultaneously operate GSM, CDMA and other mobile platforms. The start-up specialises in a futuristic new technology called Software Radio that Vanu Bose worked on during his PhD days at MIT. This technology would take minimum four years to reach the consumers, the magazine said.

Bloom Energy wants to short-circuit electric utilities by building a power plant in every home. Bloom Energy is a utility company that aims to help households generate their own electricity; Expensr is a financial planning software solution provider; and Vanu is a radio wireless software solution that enables a base station to simultaneously operate through various platforms like GSM and CDMA.

Sridhar, a former aerospace engineering professor who developed a device for NASA to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars, is undaunted by big challenges. His plan for generating energy locally is to use solid-oxide fuel cells - a concept that has been kicking around since the 19th century but is now becoming practical with advances in the ceramics needed to build the things. Bloom's cells, still in development, are constructed around a ceramic core that acts as an electrode. At high temperatures, fuel on one side attracts oxygen ions on the other. As these ions are pulled through the solid core, the resulting electrochemical reaction creates electricity.

Such a fuel cell can run happily on almost any hydrocarbon fuel - ethanol, biodiesel, methane, natural gas. Though it consumes hydrocarbons, Bloom Energy's fuel cell does not require combustion and therefore produces half the greenhouse gas emissions of more conventional energy sources. One of its by-products, in fact, is hydrogen that could be used in a different type of fuel cell, the hydrogen-powered version imagined for propelling cars.

Bloom Energy's biggest hurdle is cost. The company needs to get the price of the machines below $10,000 apiece. At that level, they could pay for themselves in five years. (Solar panels take twice as long to recoup their capital expense.) "For it to reach mass-scale adoption, that has to be the goal," Sridhar says. "Otherwise, you are playing in a niche market." Ultimately, Sridhar sees his fuel cells as a leapfrog technology that could find a market in developing countries that haven't yet built an electrical grid. He imagines local entrepreneurs, armed with one or two of his machines, renting out electricity to a whole village.

Lighting up the world one village at a time - there's nothing niche about that ambition. Expensr, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a software aimed at helping people a fast and easy way to track their spending habits, has been co-founded by Indian-origin Shawn Gupta with his fellow programmer Reman Child. As working professionals, the two reportedly needed a fast and easy way to track their spending habits. Over lunch one day they were complaining to each other about not knowing where all their money went. They decided to do something about it and created Expensr, a free online service that tracks your budget and spending habits, then shows how you are doing compared to your peers, the magazine said.

Credit card debt in the United States has reached a total of $895 billion. And as anyone with plastic in his wallet knows, it's all too easy to help that figure grow - as it has annually for the past 20 years. Intuit's Quicken ($29 to $89) and Microsoft Money ($19 to $59) can help budget-conscious consumers get a handle on their expenses. Now Expensr, a San Francisco startup run by programmers Shawn Gupta and Reman Child, has taken aim not only at those software giants but at the demon of debt itself. "It's like a taboo subject," Child says. "We want to break down that barrier."

Expensr is a Web-based application that's both free and easy to use. With Quicken, Gupta says dismissively, you can often "get into the page and not know what the hell you're doing." Expensr strips it down to the basics, telling you in large, friendly numbers what you really want to know: how much you're spending and how many days it will take, at the rate you're going, to become a pauper or a millionaire.

Of course, Expensr wouldn't be a Web 2.0 company if it didn't have a social component. By adding tags and categories, such as location, occupation and income level, you can compare yourself with your peers. "You might see that you spend 30 percent of your income on food, but you have no idea if that's good or not," Gupta says. "That's the idea behind the social network, to help you do better by making you aware of what other people like you are doing."

Gupta was quoted as saying the idea behind the social network was to make people aware of what others were doing. The credit industry is fueled to some extent by our ignorance of our spending habits - and of their true cost. If we really knew how much interest we were paying on our debt, we'd be less inclined to incur it. With apps like Expensr, we might even learn how to save. Wireless carriers operate in a sea of acronyms: GSM, CDMA, iDen, Edge.

These systems are hard-wired into the equipment, and they don't interoperate. Your AT&T iPhone won't work on Verizon's (faster) network, and it would need to add different chips for future communication modes like Wi-Max. But with the right technology, all these standards could work on a single network. It's called software-defined radio, and it's being sold by Vanu Bose. "Wireless today isn't like the Internet," Bose says. "You can't plug in any device." To change that, he's created a Boston-based company called Vanu.

Vanu's system is already able to sup- port GSM, iDen and CDMA. Unlike network equipment that uses a specialized chip for each protocol, Vanu replicates different standards in software on servers running Linux. By connecting to these servers, devices built using different protocols could connect anywhere, anytime, regardless of the provider's network.

Other start-ups named in the list include PatientsLikeMe, an online community where patients discuss and track medical conditions; Blinkx, a Web video search and advertisement insertion, and Zipcar that supplies self-serve hourly car rental in urban neighbourhoods. Blinkx's founder and CEO, Suranga Chandratillake, said, the fastest growing segment of Internet advertising is video, and Blinkx's video search engine aims to capitalize on the trend. Blinkx indexes more than 14 million hours of video available on the Web, using software that turns speech into text and counts how many times a given word pops up in a video. That allows the company to target ads to video content, putting it a step ahead of big challengers like Google and Yahoo.

-by lalita aloor