IIM Lucknow students Arun Tangri and Shobhit Kumar with their tablet product

At a time when people with some spare cash and in need of a portable computer can’t decide whether they should spend on a netbook or a tablet, this second-year MBA duo from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow have decided to make their living out of producing and selling a hybrid of the two devices — which they call a ‘LapTab’ — for college and university use.

Shaped like a fatter version of an Apple iPad and weighing 780 grams, the ‘MapleGraph Verve’ — as its designers Arun Tangri and Shobhit Kumar have decided to name it — is essentially a remodelled netbook with a touchscreen surface and without the physical keyboard. Designed by providing incremental design and feature specifications over a base product offered by a vendor in China, the device runs Windows 7 Ultimate and has an HDMI port, a SIM card slot and a rotating camera besides USB ports and Bluetooth connectivity.

“While scouting for ideas in which we could start a business, we observed that the education sector was growing very fast. There were many companies providing a lot of education services but as far as computing devices were concerned, the market had very few tablets that could be used for everyday work. There were the iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but both these products had to be used as a supplement to the laptop, not for your daily work,” says Arun, an Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University computer science graduate who worked for four years in Microsoft at Hyderabad before joining IIM Lucknow, recalling his summer internship period in 2011 when he started intensifying his efforts to be an entrepreneur.

“There came the idea of this device which could be useful for students as well as faculty at universities. Based on that idea we started to look out for available device designs in the market. There, from a very vague starting, we decided to work on the educational market and see how we could create and sell a tablet for use in colleges,” adds his partner Shobhit, who worked with Maruti Udyog Limited after graduating as a mechanical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

The tablet comes equipped with a leather-case attachment with an in-built keyboard, which instantly converts the tablet into a netbook-like device. But when used without the attachment as a tablet, it provides the full functionality of Windows 7 with an on-screen keyboard and the applications that can run on it, all in a portable format.

“We will add a touchpad to the leather attachment in the next version. Students can use it as a laptop when in class, and a browsing or reading device when they are travelling,” explains Shobhit.

A prototype of Verve, the ‘LapTab’.

Jumping into the tablet market however isn’t the first idea that struck them.

“We were in the same section at IIM, and started thinking about doing something on our own after graduation. We worked on many ideas before finalising one,” says Arun.

“Initially we thought of doing something in the IT domain, since the initial investment required there is lesser and we too had an IT background,” Shobhit adds.

It was really the summer internship period in 2011 that they started racing towards finalising an idea. While Shobhit was interning with Kellogg’s, Arun signed out of the placement process to figure out the business he wanted to start after graduation.

“The idea was there to start a business. We could have continued with something like an IT services or web development business, but we wanted to find a product or a service that was really required out there and then form a really big company out of it. We started considering ideas such as web analytics, or products for the hospitality and automobile sectors. We talked to some people in the industry to see if there was some product that was required but was not being made,” recounts Arun.

“Most of these ideas were being examined then but they were either not clicking at all or people were not interested. That was a period when we were exploring ideas to the level where we were actually meeting our contacts in universities or the industry,” says Shobhit.

After the duo decided to take a leap into the tablets business and invested some money in getting the prototypes made, help started coming from IIM Lucknow in terms of office space at the institute’s incubation center. A company was incorporated in November 2011.

“We are hoping that the institute will help us get funding for the company, after which the incubation center will probably get some equity in exchange. We have also managed to get office space at the Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) incubation center, from where we will engage interns to develop software and educational content for the tablet,” says Arun. Arun’s brother Varun, who is a DCE graduate, has been instrumental in getting support from his alma mater. “Prof PB Sharma, vice chancellor of the Delhi Technological University has been hugely supportive of our venture,” Arun adds.

A few prototypes of the tablet have been given to students of IIM Lucknow for use and the feedback has been good, says Arun who has himself been using it for his own daily work since some time.

Moving forward, although neither of Arun or Shobhit have signed out of the final placements process, both say that they are committed to pursuing the venture but want to honour family expectations along too. Two old friends of the duo, including an IIT Kharagpur graduate and another friend from the insurance industry too have joined the venture, and everyone plans to quit their jobs and work on the tablet fulltime as soon as there are enough bulk deals for the product.

“We are looking for both institutional level sales as well as retail sales, for which we are in talks with distributors in the Delhi region,” informs Arun.

As excited as they seem about their venture, do news stories about the failure of companies such as Blackberry, Motorola or Hewlett Packard failing in the tablet market discourage them?

“There are two reasons we will succeed. First, because we are offering a daily-use device running Windows that nobody else is. Secondly, we plan to make most of our money through the institutional sales channel, so we are not really even competing in the same market as the Apple iPads,” concludes Arun confidently.