Bengaluru, KARNATAKA :

Soon after graduating from the National Institute of Design (NID), Syed Fawaz Ahmed and Nikhil Joshi started Digital Jalebi. One will wonder what the second name Jalebi is doing.

“It was Nikhil’s idea to name the company ‘Digital Jalebi’. Nikhil hails from Delhi where Jalebi is a famous sweet dish, and whenever Jalebi is prepared, it represents a joyful occasion like a festival, marriage or any other celebration. So, Jalebi represents a joy factor and whatever projects we do, it has a factor of joy in it. Hence, we thought the name would be appropriate. And also, the name was quite Indian. Hence, we kept the name as Digital Jalebi,” Ahmed tells DH.

The company, which embarked on its journey in September 2012, is engaged in designing interactive installations and software for spaces like museums, exhibitions and planetariums. With varied background of design, software engineering, electronics and multimedia, Digital Jalebi offers end-to-end delivery starting from research, conceptualisation and story-boarding; to content generation, graphic design, animation, 3D modelling; to development, fabrication and installation.

“The first project that we did was for Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum Bangalore. It was an exhibition based on the life of the great mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan. Digital Jalebi designed and developed the entire exhibition. That was our starting point,” Ahmed says.

“The journey has been exciting. We have learnt a lot of things. With every project we realise importance and need of good technology-aided design in India. Setting benchmark for quality has been a core pillar of Digital Jalebi’s belief, hence most of the clients who work with us, come back to us with more projects. We have made a place for ourselves in industry as a leading interactive studio,” he adds.

Till date, the firm has completed over 60 projects and its repeated customer base is around 20. In the next two years, Digital Jalebi plans to have an annual turnover of Rs 50 crore.

“Last year, our revenues were Rs 2 crore, and this year, we are touching around Rs 5 crore, and in the next two years, we are planning to scale up our operations and we are starting VRchef to get volume work from outside India, especially from the US and the UK. We are planning to start outsourcing model for VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). Hence, we are trying to scale up operations in terms of space and the number of people,” Ahmed added.

When asked as to how different the firm is from others, Ahmed explains, “We describe ourselves as a new media installation company. We are neither a core game development company, nor a traditional software development company. We aren’t bound to a single stream like virtual reality or augmented reality. We try to tag ourselves to the bigger umbrella which is new media, and that covers all these things. Hence, we feel that our services are quite diverse.”

source: http://www.deccanherald.com / Deccan Herald / Home> Supplements> Economy & Business / by Umesh M Avvannavar / DHNS – December 12th, 2016