This Week in Asia Episode 46: Pratyush Prasanna from Xerox & SMS Gupshup

Posted by admin on May 29, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

Following on our special interview series, we have Pratyush Prasanna (@pratyushp) from Xerox and also a former founder of SMS Gupshup, a well-known SMS and microblogging mobile service in India which have a total of 20M users. In our conversation with Pratyush, we chatted with him on how he started SMS Gupshup with his fellow co-founders and grew it to the state today. We also asked him on his new challenge as an open innovation manager for Xerox and get a sense of the India market on mobile applications. He will be speaking as a panelist on “Mobile Applications: The State of Play”.

About Pratyush Prasanna from Xerox & SMS Gupshup: Pratyush Prasanna presently looks at technology related investments for Xerox in India. Pratyush was on the founding team of SMS Gupshup, India’s largest social network on mobile and was responsible for growing the application from zero to its first million users (today about 20M users are on the Gupshup platform). Since then he has worked in Microsoft’s mobile strategy team with special focus on the mobile productivity applications and emerging markets. With his background in startups, he looks at promising new ideas and research projects for Xerox to invest in India. Pratyush has hands on experience in running startups as well as managing software development teams at Microsoft. Pratyush has a B.Tech degree from IIT Kharagpur and is an alumnus of IIM Calcutta. He also writes for Pluggd.in, an Indian tech blog.