Interview with Sunder Mani of I-Flapp Technologies

A few months ago, we reviewed I-Flapp Technologies‘ flagship product, I-Mtop (check out how you might Hold Your PC In The Palm Of Your Hand). This time, we managed to grab some time from its CEO and learnt that this was his first startup after working for others for 20 years, of which the last 18 were spent in Singapore, after having come from India. We find out Sunder Mani’s story.

Hi Sunder, thanks for joining us here at SGE. What’s your background and what were you doing before setting up I-Flapp?

I’m an Electronics Engineer from India. Came to Singapore in 1992 and worked for different companies in the Semiconductor Industry. Companies worked for earlier are Data Fusion Pte Ltd, Avi-tech Electronics Pte Ltd, Arcus Technology Pte Ltd, Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL, is a Research Institute in Singapore), Nano Storage Pte Ltd (Storage Industry), CM Innovations Pte Ltd (Storage Industry) and then started I-Flapp Technologies Pte Ltd.

What motivated you to set up I-Flapp?

I always wanted to start my own company and I thought it was the right time after 20 years of working in other companies. Since I had fair bit of knowledge in the storage space I wanted to something related to storage. I struck upon the idea of making the external storage devices like USB Flash drives, Ext. HDD, SD, MSD cards smart.

The current usage of external storage devices are “dumb”, in that they carry data written on to it. Even if a software application was installed into it, it could only run off from that particular computer due the configuration of the registries and operating system coding. The idea was then born of developing a software for storage devices which will help in installing applications directly onto the drive and making it different from normal drives.

I had envisioned to redefine the paradigm of truly portable computing, allowing users to carry all their software applications and familiar computing environment at the tips of their finger; while leveraging upon the processing power of any computer, anywhere. I knew how to go about designing, developing etc.. and hence got the confidence of going ahead with the idea.

Can you tell us more about the technology and intelligence that goes into i-Mtop?

Now we have re-named our first flagship product as I-Mapp (earlier I-Mtop). What we can do with I-Mapp is – A) carry all your mail clients and mail profiles for ex. MS Outlook, Outlook express, Lotus Notes and Windows mail. You need not carry a laptop anymore to just check your emails. B) carry all your IE and Fire fox profiles, favorites, history, bookmarks and cookies. C) carry your desktop settings D) carry applications like MS Office, MS Project, MS Visio, Lotus Notes, I-Tunes etc….

How would this be different from normal drives? In normal drives you carry only data files and always dependant on host computer to have the applications. Our future product will be more robust as it would allow a user to install any windows based applications. We will be one of the first in the world to do so. Our main USPs are the ability to
• carry ALL windows applications
• curb software Piracy as its unique configuration process prevents replication of software.

This will be one of our sales models to get to market. We will be working with application developers like PC games developers. We will tell them to sell their games in the form of USB drives or thumb drives. This way no one can pirate the game as they could do now by making copies from the CD.

Senior management team.