Personally Tech with MobiKwik Founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh

Our weekly series on the apps and gadgets people from various walks of life love and can't live without. This week, we got to talk to Bipin Preet Singh, the founder and CEO of Mobikwik - an Indian mobile wallet. Here are the apps and gadgets that Singh can't live without.

Describe your technology setup - what computer/ phone/ tablet/ camera/ gaming console/ other gadgets do you use?
I currently use iPhone 4, iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G 32GB, iPad Mini Wi-Fi + Cellular 16GB, Sony VAIO laptop, Xbox 360 with Kinect, and JBL Onbeat Rumble Bluetooth speakers. I use both the iPads for personal entertainment. I love iTunes on iOS devices which allows me to find all my favourite international music [such as] 80s and rock music. I also explore a lot of games and videos on my iPads and iPhone. The iPad also acts as my backup device after my iPhone on business trips to Bangalore and Mumbai. I play a lot of games on iPhone and iPad not only [for] fun but also to learn about new features and new ways of user engagement. This helps me with new product ideas and new user experiences as we work on improving MobiKwik apps.

What are three apps (mobile/ tablet or PC/ Mac) you couldn't live without?
Facebook, WhatsApp, TestFlight and MobiKwik are the apps I cannot live without. Facebook and Whatsapp are my eyes and ears to my social life. Being an entrepreneur, my life is very chaotic at times. With these two apps, I am able to especially keep in touch with my family and friends living in the US and Australia. I am also able to quickly make last minute plans on the weekends using these apps. At work, TestFlight allows us to test various apps before they go live. This helps in debugging issues on specific OS versions/ devices.

I obviously use MobiKwik, and for me, it is useful to pay my monthly household bills (postpaid mobile, broadband, TV, electricity), for my driver's and cook's mobile recharge, and for purchases on Domino's and other services.

What is the one gadget (other than your phone) you never travel without?
I never travel without my 12,000 mAH iHave powerbank. This monster keeps my iOS devices going when I am on the road for meetings. I wish Apple (https://www.gadgets360.com/apple) would do something about improving battery life on iOS devices.

What is your dream gadget/ technology setup?

My dream tech setup is actually around the intelligent home concept. I want to setup a fully automated system in my home for all the electronic systems include TV, audio, refrigerator, lighting, AC and security. As an engineer who spent seven years in hardware design, I am always exploring to see if I can get/ build a universal home remote to control everything.

How has technology changed the way in which you work?

When I first joined IIT-Delhi back in 1998, I touched a computer for the first time at the institute's computer centre. This was a Celeron machine on Windows 98. I used Altavista as a search engine before Google (https://www.gadgets360.com/google) became popular. I built my own webpage on Geocities.

My first phone was a Nokia 110 (https://www.gadgets360.com/nokia-110-479). From then, I fell in love with the mobile device - my first smartphone was actually a Windows Mobile 6 device from HTC (https://www.gadgets360.com/tags/htc). Though it was a "fix" job (by Microsoft (https://www.gadgets360.com/microsoft)) - porting a desktop OS (Windows) to a mobile phone, I figured out quickly that smartphone would become a lifeline for me going forward.

I cannot describe how happy I was to use PowerPoint on that small screen HTC device - it finally meant liberation from the clunky laptops, although the software was not easy to use at all back in 2008. After that, I bought a BlackBerry 8520 and the email service just blew me away. Sadly, the other aspects of the BlackBerry did not scale as fast as Android or iOS and I eventually switched to iPhone.

I am not a gaming freak but when I was younger we used to rent those SEGA consoles which had games like Contra, Street Fighter, Mario and many more in a famous 64 in one package. I never forgot that experience staying up the entire night to play all the games because we had to return the console in the morning. That's why I bought an Xbox Kinect especially to explore the motion sensing experience especially for sports-based games. It's a light workout which I do in the morning while skating down a snow slope in the comforts of my entertainment room.

The Xbox is also my de facto DVD player and I have a decent collection of Blu-rays, DVD's for my favourite movies. HDMI is one technology which has changed my life since I can now hook up YouTube (on laptop) to my big screen TV.

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