Carlos Nicholas Fernandes (born 1976) is an inventor, founder and

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...

of InstantTV, a service that offers Cloud DVR.

Early life

Fernandes was born in

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the secon ...

. Fernandes started his first business when he was 12, selling water purifiers door-to-door. He went on to study Electrical Engineering from

Bombay University The University of Mumbai is a collegiate, state-owned, public research university in Mumbai. The University of Mumbai is one of the largest universities in the world. , the university had 711 affiliated colleges. Ratan Tata is the appointed ...

, and completed an MBA from Chicago University.

Career

Initial years

Fernandes moved to

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

in 1998 and joined the Information Technology Institute (ITI) (later known as Kent Ridge Digital Labs and currently known as the Institute of Infocomm Research), which is a government research institute run by Singapore's Agency for Science Technology and Research. In 1999, he joined a startup called Ecquaria Technologies, where he developed and marketed software. Ecquaria had been founded by people who had previously been associated with Kent Ridge Digital Labs.

PerceptiveI

Fernandes founded PerceptiveI, a company that offered enterprise software solutions, in 2000. The technology used in this company won many awards, both for Fernandes and the company. For his work, Fernandes was recognized by David Lim, the then Singaporean Minister for Information, Communications, and the Arts in 2003.

RecordTV

Fernandes purchased the assets of RecordTV.com, and added in technology that he had invented and patented in 2006 (along with Varsha Jagdale)'','' in a way that would not violate the rights of copyright owners. This allowed RecordTV users to legally record TV shows, something which the original company had been sued for by the

MPAA The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, as well as the video streaming service Netflix. Founded in 1922 as the Motion Picture Producers and Distribu ...

. Later, the service was renamed to InstantTV and launched its own app.

Current pursuits

Blaze

In 2017, Fernandes launched Blaze, an AI-based conversational news bot (chatbot) that was enhanced through human curation, in India. It is accessible through

Facebook Messenger Messenger is a proprietary instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and ...

. As of 2018, he was working on the fake news problem.

RecordTV vs MediaCorp litigation

Fernandes got into legal trouble in 2008 after

MediaCorp Mediacorp Pte. Ltd., doing business as Mediacorp and stylised as mediacorp, is a media conglomerate in Singapore. Owned by Temasek Holdings—the holding company of the Government of Singapore—it owns television, radio, and digital media prope ...

alleged that RecordTV was using technology that violated copyright laws. Fernandes refused to shut down his company, and instead preemptively sued MediaCorp for groundless threats. He then claimed millions in damages and continued to operate its website. He even won the appeal, after MediaCorp decided to take the case further.Alt URL
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fernandes, Carlos Nicholas 21st-century Singaporean businesspeople Singaporean inventors Living people 1976 births