Noel N O'Connor, 50, and Ajaya Singh, 35, took the plunge from aviation to education when they left jobs in Indian Airlines and CIS Aviation (a private charter service) respectively to set up The Technology Mission, a multimedia education company, in 1996 with an initial investment of Rs 10 lakh. Their cue came from an Intel advertisement that talked of "bringing the tutor home". O'Connor and Singh worked for two years from their basement office in Lajpat Nagar, creating their products. Last year, they introduced the first offering, the "One-up series" aimed at students from classes one to 10. The series uses multimedia to animate science and social science subjects based on the Central Board of Secondary Education syllabus. Last year, they sold 1,000 titles and claim to be the country's largest multimedia company in terms of number of titles.
O'Connor: We met in the aviation world four years ago and have been in the business now for three years. Since inception we have been totally focused on education. The Indian syllabus is quite good but the problem is in the delivery of that matter. Consumers (children and parents) are unable to do anything about the quality of the material. So we decided that instead of grumbling about the quality of education, we should do something about it.
Singh: While people in the multimedia industry focused on corporate presentations, we focused on education. The mission was to improve education and for two years we worked on creating the product. There are a lot of international titles in educational software available here and this is our actual competition since there is zero duty on software. About a year back