Carlos Nicholas Fernandes

Carlos Nicholas Fernandes (born 1976) is an inventor, founder and CEO of InstantTV, a service that offers Cloud DVR.

Early life
Fernandes was born in Mumbai. 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, and completed an MBA from Chicago University.

Initial years
Fernandes moved to Singapore 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. Later, the service was renamed to InstantTV and launched its own app.

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

RecordTV vs MediaCorp litigation
Fernandes got into legal trouble in 2008 after MediaCorp 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.