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Dezains : Zinging it up with caricatures

by Paul Joseph February 10, 2012 Featured

Dezains prints hand-made caricatures on mugs and tees from the photos you provide Lazing in his chair at a job after his engineering, living the life of a sinecure, Ankit was toying with the idea of starting up. As is usually the case, Ankit and his group had a zillion b-plans but thanks to the size of the group, each idea was repressed. Nevertheless, while at his job, Ankit setup a website for selling printed tee shirts but he soon realized that these kind of websites are present at a dime a dozen and would be hard to capitalize. Cofounder, Ankit He didn’t have to look far for something unique as his brother Amrit, the creative guy, was seeing huge traffic for his caricature making service (free at that point). Taking the cue, armored with his business acumen, Ankit took over from where Amrit left it. This was how Dezains took birth. The stage was set but Dezains needed someone to orchestrate the show. Step in Prannoy. Having worked in Bangalore for a year, Prannoy shifted base to Mumbai to get the show going. They invested a lot of time in designing the layout of the website and building the website in-house. Ankit was responsible for building the website while Prannoy set in place the processes. Dezains officially launched on the 23 rd  of August, 2011 and with a  little buzz created pre-launch, Dezains saw 1600 visitors on the first day. They have been growing steadily ever since and process 25-30 orders each day now. Having served over 3000 customers by now, Dezains employs 3 fulltime and 6 part-time caricature artists. Cofunder, Prannoy All the caricatures are hand drawn using a tablet so that it directly comes in a digital format which saves a lot of time over the traditional methods. Dezains has a huge fan base in the online space with more than 50,000 fans on the Facebook page. They have also teamed up with seal sites like Groupon and Anapdeal to accelerate sales apart from running google and facebook ads. In an interesting marketing campaign, Dezains allowed you to send a free gift card on New Year’s day to the person you wanted to by entering his details on the website. Offline, Dezains has sponsored a few college fests which goes a long way in creating a loyal customer base in the college crowd as this is the audience most likely to buy caricature products. In what has been a very interesting journey till now, we’d sure be looking forward for more from the Dezain stable. In a recent post, we had a look at Graphicurry , who’re also doing interesting things in the graphics arena. – Jubin Mehta

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Startup Clk2C.com Makes Mobile Video Advertising Personalized and Innovative

by Paul Joseph February 1, 2012 Featured

Mobile is slowly but surely becoming the “go to” medium for most marketing and branding activities. Advancement in mobile technology has made it possible for users to access multimedia content and browse the internet even on a sub-Rs. 5000 phone. According to the latest report from Analysys Mason the number of mobile connections in India is expected to increase from 812 million (end 2011) to 1.36 billion (in 2020). We carry our mobile phone (or mobile devices) wherever we go. So, for a brand it is the most accessible medium to communicate with their target market. Ghaziabad based startup, Clk2C.com , is making the most of this opportunity. For a startup like Clk2C.com this opens up great opportunities. Clk2C.com is a mobile video advertising platform. “The main USP of a medium like Clk2C.com is the fact that it is a ‘Me & You’ kind of medium”, says Suresh Kabra, Founder, Samadhan Systems, which is the parent company. Unlike television or outdoor advertising mediums, a mobile video advertising medium is more personal and interactive. It allows brands to engage with their target customers in a more personalized manner. Samadhan Systems, which was founded in 2007, first entered the mobile video content sector in 2009 through mobile video greetings. The response to it was very encouraging and that led to the birth of Clk2C.com in April 2010. Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics was one of the first brands to like this innovative medium and approached Clk2C.com to create a viral mobile commercial. In the past year and a half they have worked with some of the biggest brands (across industry) in the Indian market, including Mercedes-Benz , Domino’s Pizza , Punjab National Bank , etc. One of the major projects Clk2C.com is working on currently is BJP’s mobile video campaign for the UP elections. They have also done major mobile video campaigns for HDFC (a pan-India lead generation campaign) and GNIIT (campaign to promote their cloud program). Clk2C.com is quite a flexible medium. It is not necessary to deliver only video content; it could also be a presentation or something else. “As any other new media format or medium we faced certain challenges pertaining to acceptance”, says Suresh. According to him it was particularly acute for Clk2C.com as brand managers and marketing professionals took some time to get accustomed to the possibilities of a mobile video advertising campaign. Samadhan Systems was completely bootstrapped. They are currently in discussion with a few VC’s and hope to complete a deal within 2012. The customer base for Clk2C.com is steadily increasing and a number of innovative campaigns are in the pipeline. Their video greeting site ifeelclub.com has also been recording 100% month-on-month increase in downloads. The beginning of 2012 has seen a 400% increase in revenue over the same period last year. Speaking about Clk2C.com’s plan for the next 12 months Suresh said, “We plan to work closely with major advertising agencies and integrate mobile video advertising with the brands entire campaign.” Exploring new verticals in terms of industry is another goal. They also want to aggressively market their mobile video invitation services, which has already attracted some traction. “This year we want to increase the number of active customers to one lakh per month”, adds Suresh. Last year for Valentine’s Day MAAC had sponsored the greetings and it was downloaded across 73 cities in India. Similar plans are in place for this year and they are in talks with some companies for possible sponsorship. “Mobile video advertising and mobile greetings are at one level connected to each other. So, a Haldiram’s can utilize mobile video greetings to send out Diwali greetings to its customers and use mobile video advertising to engage with them”, Suresh points out.

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Battigul.org – Where The World Unites For Environment And Climate Change

by Paul Joseph January 20, 2012 Featured

The idea was to provide a support system to  all the crusaders fighting to save the environment, with a bundle of features and equipping them enough to not let lack of resources and communication dampen their spirits. Battigul.org allows people to collaborate, share and explore opportunities; blogs, photos, videos, events and a lot more. In conversation with Abhilasha Dafria for YourStory.in, Ankit Gupta tells us how his website Battigul.org aims to not only solve a greater problem of engaging people and having a mass sourcing of solutions to the problems, but also bringing awareness of problems less known. Read further how the team wishes to create an impact by being a one stop platform and make it a green Facebook+Wikipedia!   Please introduce yourself and Battigul to our readers. We are a couple of greenhorns teamed up together to bring something innovative and more collaborative to the table for the good of the environment. Battigul is essentially an exclusive social network built to connect people working for the environment and users seeking information in this field. We provide you people and opportunities. Share your requirements, or search for one. We have a pool of information for fellowships, internships, organizations, team requirements and much more. And the pool comes from you- your sharing the opportunities you come across. We provide you with tools or sharing. Sharing your experiences, ideas, thoughts, or just random ramblings. Post in your blog, upload an image, share a video and reach out to many like minded people with just one click. We provide you with promotion. Create a group for your cause or project. Invite people to join. Or create an event and spread it all over the world wide web by sharing the link. And by people here, we mean the right, like minded target audience. So how did you come up this idea? battigul.org  was born out of a personal experience. It was initially started out as a blog ( battigul.in )- one with very interesting and stimulating means of visual communication to present information and facts about environment and climate change. The means here would be interesting infographics, fun videos, presentations, and so on. Now this theme had a niche, and had to involve creative people from a graphic design background who were concerned about the cause as well. And this, proved to be a really tough job, and we really could not find the right people and resources to take it forward. So we thought, why not create something that shall enable people to do what we were not able to for a long time- Find the right people and resources. Social Networking excites people, and rightly so! And hence, battigul. Content will be a key element in your business. How do you plan to create/source content? Since battigul is a social network- a people’s community, most of the content shall be generated and shared by the members themselves. We plan to make battigul a self-sustained community for content and information sharing. For the initial momentum to the community, we with a few interns would be contributing majorly with interesting content, designs, events. Also we’re launching our Battigul Bulletin to engage people off the site too. The content for the news letter would be a compilation of the best content and resource shared by the users coupled with the indigenously written articles. Do you monetize? Could you tell us a little about your tie-ups? battigul is born out of pure passion, and hence no monetizing to happen immediately. We aim to create a real value to the community. In the long term, we plan to raise admin money, through sponsored events, workshops and merchandise selling. We have initiated tie-ups with a few organizations and projects like  youthkiawaaz.com ,  thegreenmantra . com  and  minusoneproject . com and we look forward to working and connecting with many more initiatives and organisations working in the same domain. What has the response been so far? battigul saw a traffic of 10,000+ visitors from 28 countries across the world within just 2 weeks of its launch.  battigul.org  is receiving motivating feedback from organizations and popular blogs and media over the internet. battigul is growing at a rate faster than we imagined and this gives us that satisfaction which an achievement is meant to push into you. With our offline initiatives now gearing up, we hope to make it an engaging and most importantly, an active community working towards the environment. We also have had a lot of responses for collaboration from various initiatives and we look forward to working with them. This includes working closely with some major NGOs in their offline campaigns. Where and how do you plan to scale? With word of mouth and online marketing, we ultimately plan to take battigul to a global platform, where activist from different parts of the world can contribute their works and can fire discussion on important and alarming topics related to environmental sustainability. Second concern for scaling is to make the website self-sustainable, which would initially require a lot of off-site traction too, through events and on-site presentations and workshops. Lastly, a planned campaign for battigul has been designed to take it in to the schools, through interesting posters, and seminars for school students and then post that capturing them to the site, so that they are engaged even after on-school events. What were the challenges you faced while starting up? Tell me about your initial hurdles. We’re a pretty new platform, and still have to take up a stable phase. With the team itself consisting of a strong tech-guy, setting up battigul faced less challenges. One of the main challenges that we see coming next, is to create a quality engaging environment for the users to motivate (or may be in some cases incentivize) them to explore the site and add their valuable contribution. We have strategized to face it by adding articles and interesting content ourselves, which would be source for information to the passing by users. We really want to give the users things which they desire or are interested in. Hence, we’re even planning to hold online competitions with exciting rewards to gather activity for the site. Since when are you operational? How big is your team? Are you looking at hiring? battigul has been operational for a month and a half now. We launched it on 1st December 2011. We are small 2 people team looking after it right now. The response from a few organisations and the potential of battigul to be a one stop platform has motivated me enough to quit my job and take this up full time. We are surely looking at hiring. Or rather volunteers initially. We are launching our campus ambassador program from next month and are also creating a buzz in the blogger community to blog for battigul. Did you fund-raise to start up? If not, are you looking at getting funded now? battigul . org  as of now is a bootstrapped initiative. The best thing with internet based initiatives is that they need little funding. However, now in order to expand our team and move into offline operations, we shall be requiring monetary in-kind funding. We plan to allocate the funding majorly in the expansion of the website, which would include hiring team-members and interns. As battigul plans for a detailed campaign to move into schools and get school going students on board; we would be conducting events both online and on-site to attract their attention. Some fraction of the funds would be a great help in fuelling these events in terms of publicity marketing and other logistics including prizes for the same. We are lucky to be in a time where youth initiatives are given much praise and attention. So we are hopeful of getting funded soon. Are there other players in the market doing similar things? What is your USP? As we see it, when your aim is social good. You don’t have competitors, you just have people doing things with a similar motive and they don’t pose a competition rather they’re fellow collaboraters or potential partner. TreeHugger,  good.is , earthtangle are a few websites aiming to engage and create an online community like battigul.  None of these are people centric. You don’t come to know about people’s profiles, work, projects etc. battigul comes as a platform with great engaging potential, and its exclusivity is what makes it different. With a handsome number of active members on the site, we want it to be a self-driven community of people, where users learn effective habits and experiences from their peers. Share content which would help impact a larger part of the society and focus their attentions to the grave issue of environment and climate change. Let your thoughts go green at  Battigul   and do share them with us by dropping a comment here! – Abhilasha Dafria  

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YourStory and Accel Partners launch Edustars : A platform for education entrepreneurs

by Paul Joseph January 16, 2012 Featured

We at YourStory are delighted to announce the launch of Edustars, an initiative in partnership with Accel Partners to recognize Indian education startups. EduStars aims to recognize, facilitate and provide meaningful support to emerging startups in the education space.The program will recognize 1-3 outstanding education startups on a monthly basis and pair them with appropriate industry experts for mentorship. Edustars mentors include Alok Lahoti, Executive Vice President, Macmillan Publishing; Meena Ganesh, CEO and MD, Pearson Education Services and Vijay Shukla, Managing Partner, Eduvisors. At a high level, Edustars aims to: Provide an online platform for information sharing Provide access to a world class mentoring team with deep domain expertise Periodically recognize outstanding startups with an “Edustar” award, thereby providing nationwide visibility Provide information from similar startups around the world with regard to their challenges and triumphs. says Anand Daniel from Accel Partners. “We welcome suggestions from education startups regarding any other venues wherein Edustars can add value and contribute towards your overall success” he adds. The top edustars will also each win a ‘Ultrabook’ sponsored by Intel AppUp Developer Program. To find out more and apply click here

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Five Hidden Heroes Unveiled at the First ever Award to recognize Nepalese Social Entrepreneurs

by Paul Joseph November 22, 2011 Featured

The Surya Nepal Asha Social Entrepreneurship Award (SNASEA) has awarded 5 social entrepreneurs in a ceremony at Yak & Yeti Hotel on 21st November 2011. There are many ordinary people doing extraordinary work to create social, environmental and economic value. Often we do not even know about their great achievements. The five winners have been recognized for their achievements and should encourage others to follow these examples of individuals creating value for the people, planet and profit. The vision of the award was not only to celebrate the hidden heroes for their great initiatives but also to showcase their ventures and the impact they have made. After an intense process of short listing amongst 66 applicants, to narrow it down to the winners, ventures were physically visited to verify all relevant information and documents. The winners are: 1. Ram Sapkota (Mountain Delights Treks and Expedition and Tukee Nepal, Jyamrung) for the impact that has been made in Jyamrung, Dhading. The projects range from eco toilets, micro hydro electricity, and health to education. 2. Sabita Maharjan (Kirtipur Hosiery, Kirtipur) – Sabita has been impacting women through the cooperative that she started along with Kirtipur Hosiery. The cooperative which is only for women currently has approx 375 members with 130 shareholders. Overall, she has impacted women by providing them with employment as well as making them financially independent. 3. Shyam Badan Yadav (Kalash Milk Industry, Dhorey Village, Parsa) provides income generating sources through the milk collection centre he has established and by distributing free livestock (39 to start with and increasing to 100 in 1.5 months) to poor people in the village of Dhorey and neighbouring villages. 4. Vijaya Development Resource Centre (VDRC, Nawalparasi) has mainstreamed different dimensions of development under one umbrella encompassing education, media, microfinance and various other thematic areas following its vision of an equitable, affluent and self reliant society. 5. Chhahari Services (Kathmandu) caters to women with no skills to generate income by empowering them through capacity building and income generating trainings. These women when empowered go back to their respective communities to start their own entrepreneurship and others look for employment in reputable industries. The winners will each get a package which includes a cash prize of Rs. 1 Lakh from Surya Nepal Private Limited along with the opportunity of networking through ChangeFusion Nepal. Each of the winners will have to disclose how the funds will be used and the money will be handed over by ChangeFusion Nepal. Updates on each of the winning ventures will be regularly posted on the ChangeFusion Nepal Social Media sites as well as the website. Surya Nepal Asha Social Entrepreneurship Award 2011 is sponsored by Surya Nepal Private Limited, organised by ChangeFusion Nepal and supported by NBI. You may also like to read: Call for proposal for Surya Nepal Asha Social Entrepreneurship Award Jubilant Bhartia Foundation and Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship ‘Social Entrepreneur of The Year’ Award for 2011 for India TATA JAGRITI YATRA – Social Entrepreneurs like Chittup Lama onboard

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Fill your tummy with Yummybay.com

by Paul Joseph November 8, 2011 Featured

Consider this. On a Saturday night, you get ready and are all geared up to savour some scrumptious Greek salad from your favourite restaurant in town. You drive down a long distance only to find that the place is completely booked and return home dejected. Why go through the hassle when you can just a table online? Also, are you tired of eating at the same burger and fries at your friendly, neighbourhood café all the time? Need to explore more eating options? Worry not as Yummybay will come to your rescue! An online food ordering portal, it enables customers to order food from over 1500 restaurants in Bangalore, Chennai and Kerala, book tables and cakes for free. It also deals in corporate bookings. In a conversation with Anisha Mehta from YourStory.in, Ketty Cherian, CEO of Yummybay, shares more. Why get into the online food business? I was completing my MBA degree in UK and took notice of the thriving online food enterprise industry there. When I returned to India, I ventured into the software business until 2009 when I started conducting surveys to understand the feasibility of an online food ordering portal. When I deduced that a market for a business idea like this existed, I took the plunge and established Yummybay in 2010. We first launched the venture in Kerala and later moved to Bangalore and Chennai. The e-commerce industry in India is registering a steady growth with respect to the ever-growing internet population in the country. We believe in tapping the market potential. Therefore, we are looking at targetting people living in big cities like Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Jaipur, Kolkata and Ahmedabad. People who love eating out are our target consumers. Through Yummybay people can also avail gift vouchers, earn points with every order and redeem them to get discounts and free dishes. As an entrepreneur in the e-commerce space, it must be challenging to sustain a business and compete with similar enterprises? Availability and promptness of delivery is a major challenge. As an e-commerce venture, it is essential that we instill trust among our consumers, be it the quality of food that is offered or payment option they use. In the online food ordering segment, we do have strong competitors but what gives us an edge is that we have a huge database of restaurants. We have covered restaurants from almost all major cities in south India and we are in the process of adding more restaurants to our database from cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Pune. Yummybay is growing exponentially since its launch in Bangalore. On an average, 20 per cent of our traction rate is converted into sales and we are expecting that this figure will grow since we are expanding to Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. Tell us something about your revenue model. Our revenue model is formulated in such a way that it is generated from three streams. Firstly, we earn a commission from restaurants for every order placed and from sponsored listings on the site. Advertisements on the site also generate revenue. What are your expansion plans? Over the past one year, Yummybay has grown exponentially. Yummybay plans to launch in all major cities across India and we want to expand our services to countries in Middle East and Europe in the coming years. Venture capitalists from US and Europe have shown interest in investing in Yummybay. Also, as mobile internet users in India are growing by the day we are planning to launch a mobile application soon. Go to  www.yummybay.com  for more details! You may also like to read: From Desktop to Doorstep, Ordering Food Online has Never Been So Easy for Mumbaikars – The DeliveryChef Story Txt to Go Indian Angel Network portfolio company Just-Eat and Hungry Zone announces Business Partnership

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10 things that made my Startup Profitable in the first year of Inception

by Paul Joseph October 28, 2011 Featured

First person account from Entrepreneur Pradeep Soundararajan, Moolya Software Testing Private Limited As an entrepreneur, I am very happy of where we are today and where we seem to be heading towards. Break even and profits within our first year of incorporation is one among the many sweetest things we could achieve. Other sweet things are our customers and the kind of help we could offer them in testing their software. Our business is focused towards helping our customers grow their businesses. We are a good combination of business analysts and testers. We understand where our customers could lose money and help them plug the hole. How do we do that? Simple, we understand what their customers want and don’t want. We are users of many hundreds of software products ourselves. We ask ourselves, whenever we encounter a bug, what is the loss due to this for the company that developed the software. For instance, I was trying to buy travel medical insurance for a foreign trip from a leading insurance company in India. I had registered with them last year and I tried providing the same credentials for buying insurance to avoid re-entering all fields about my date of birth, address and a whole bunch of other details. The website put me in a loop. I had to enter all details again. This is a pain. Why did I register with them? One of their competing website has a simple UI flow and I could purchase the same insurance for the same cost in fewer clicks. Assuming there are a 1000 people as frustrated as me, running away from that insurance company website to their competitor; the loss is huge. Most importantly, they are losing customers, who would never want to return. We specialize in testing and hence our clients appear to gain by hiring us because we care for their customers. Most IT services companies would just care for their immediate customers and would want to do everything that their customer says, for the sake of business, even if they are aware that the end users are likely to not benefit from it. We think of that as a dis-service. By doing that, they are sinking their future and that of their customers. I would like to tell you 10 important things that might have made Moolya Software Testing Private Limited to achieve profits in the first year itself: 1. Passion for what we do – Testing : We love to test. We love testing. We love testing so much that we don’t feel we are “working”. Moolya came into existence because of this passion and we wanted to build an organization that fosters such passion amongst other testers. Right from day one, we tried building a culture where there will be no separate “Learning & Development” department in our company. All teams are into Learning & Development all the time, and if they need any external help, they take care of bringing the kind of trainer / mentor they want. As a leader of this company, my job is to just facilitate. There is so much of information that our colleagues know, and we can benefit a lot from it.  Only passionate people can do that. My partner Santhosh Tuppad and I have been able to inflict people who joined us with that kind of passion. 2. Our values & protecting them from erosion: Before we started this company, we were sure of what not to do and what to do. One of them is we won’t lie to get business. We’d be honest and do well. It is going to help us in the long run. May be there is no immediate benefit for it. However, we aren’t doing it for benefit per se, we are doing it because that is a true reflection of who we are. We at least lost one big business because we said, “No, we don’t have that many testers available immediately”. What if we had lied? We would have got the business, tried hiring whoever is available and make our customer unhappy and lose them forever. This UK based MNC appreciated our honesty and have signed on a NDA with us and asked our rate cards. They are likely to come back to us. Meanwhile, we have grown in size and can help them going forward. There are more such stories. 3. People who want to make a difference to this world joining us  - We have talked to a lot of testers prior to starting this company as a part of our consulting and other community activities in testing. We know there is only a small percentage of them who want to make it big and are working hard to reach their goals. Our goal was to get them to be a part of this company. As they have seen us do what they consider to be /good/ testing, they too wanted to join us. Now, to join a startup whose future is unknown, they need more than just passion for testing to quit their high paying so called /permanent/ jobs at MNC’s. That was the test they passed with us. That’s a test we passed too. Dhanasekar Subramanian, one of the top testers from India is an avid learner, blogger, reader of good books, practitioner and an aggressive tester. He joined us 6 months ago. Dhanasekar is an ardent AR Rahman fan & AR Rahman being his role model, he wants to grow to be the Rahman of software testing. The goal for Moolya will be to facilitate him in doing that. Parimala Shankaraiah is another example. She joined us as a test manager after working at top organizations. She is recognized as a women leader in the software testing space and her blog on testing is a favorite to many international readers. Her goal is to mentor hundreds of testers as she grows along with them. She is a mother of two kids and yet she manages to do so much of work at home, office and beyond all this. The energy she has is amazing and inspiring. There are more examples but I can’t use this space to cover about all. In just a couple of years, Moolya will be the destination for all top testers of India. 4.   What we are offering makes us a winner : Traditional testing is boring. I don’t quite get why so many companies are still stuck to methods that were in use in 1970′s. There is so much of advancement that has happened to all fields but many companies don’t appear to care about advancing their testing. That is why software testing isn’t a top priority to many college graduates. We offer testing that is focused towards helping a tester control the tests based on the mission to be accomplished. We try to treat our testers as commandos who are given a mission to accomplish and they just are focused towards achieving it.  Our approach to testing is context driven & exploratory. If you don’t get it, no problem, here is what we do – we do testing as it was supposed to be done with freedom and focus on solving a problem. We are the first company from India to offer context driven testing and exploratory testing services and hence our USP. 5. Clear differentiators from other services companies from India : This is funny. Every services company website tells you the same story. Here is what you see, “We saved so much money for our customer”. The question we ask is, “Are our customers making progress? Is saving cost the progress our customer wants to make or they want to grow their business much bigger? We are in the business of helping our customers grow bigger with their customers. For instance, if we were to be testing an e-commerce web product and our customer thinks a lot of people visiting their website are not actually making a sale, we would investigate and inform the reason. We would help them fix such problems. So, they grow in their business of making more sales and we help their customers buy what they want to buy in simpler steps while having a delightful experience of shopping online. Did we save costs? Maybe. Did we help them grow larger? Hell, yes! 6. Treating humans as humans and not as resources: Once our customer sent us an email, “We need two resources, do you have them?”. We replied, “We do not know what kind of resources you need. We have humans with us who can test well. Is there any testing help you require? We will be glad to assist you with it” and the customer wasn’t offended. Instead, he wrote back saying, “I see the problem. Thanks for helping me out. We have a need for two testers who are skilled at testing web applications”. Oh yeah, we can help you. I am personally annoyed at companies counting heads, treating people as resources and working hard to make a process that makes people replaceable commodities. With all companies I worked in the past, I didn’t expect them to treat me like a king but I expected them to treat me as a human. I think there are some good companies who treat their employees like human beings and they are going to go a long way. 7. Providing the world with visibility of our work, thoughts & ideas:   We have been putting up our work on our company blog and in other places for the world to taste the kind of work we do. This gives us the best opportunity for our potential customers to sample us out against their needs. We also want to share our ideas to test to the world. As a matter of fact, at least a thousand testers of a large size IT services organization have read about the browser add-ons we use to test and we know of at least 5 projects that they started to use after that. They hired Moolya to help them in doing better testing. So, we have benefited customers who they work for and it is a great feeling. We also use our blog as a platform to tell the world who in Moolya is doing what kind of cool stuff and thus providing our testers visibility and help them gain recognition for their work. 8. Innovation & Publicity : We are innovative. One of the latest advancement in the software testing is usage of mind-maps for brainstorming and documenting test ideas. It makes life easier and better. We are great fans of mind-maps for testing and have been practicing it for quite a while. We were wondering what is the best way to tell the world that we are pioneers of using mind-maps for testing? We thought why not have our website home page with a mind-map  on it? After we posted a mind-map of Moolya on our homepage, we got quite a number of people appreciating the idea. We are building a brand, not a money vending machine. We realize this and also realize this needs publicity. It is important that many potential customers need to know that valuable services exist. So, we do good publicity of our work. We sponsored a couple of conferences and gave away books and T-shirts of Moolya. We are active on Facebook with about 200 plus fans there, 300 plus followers on Twitter and many leading testers of India have posted our logo linking to our home page on their blogs. We didn’t pay any of those testers but they do because they love us and the cause we are working towards. Our own blogs are a good publicity medium. My Tester Tested! blog is one of the most widely read blogs by testers in India. Some people did surveys and rated my blog as the Top 5 in the world for software testing. So, there it goes. 9. Humor at work: We have had some tough times, too. So, you aren’t reading a script of a Bollywood movie where the hero starts a company and the next day he owns an Audi and flies a helicopter to attend a meeting. For the tough times we faced, humor helped us paddle through it. Humor is such a lateral thinking concept that we love each other for the jokes we crack. If you take a look at one of our post, you’d get to know how much we love it and how much others love us for it : http://moolya.com/blog/2011/07/15/the-last-big-thing-in-software-testing-has-emerged/ 10. What others think about why Moolya is successful: After I wrote 9 points, I thought I’d tweet and ask what the 10th point should be. I tweeted and asked my Twitter followers what they think about why Moolya is successful. Here are some of the responses: The people involved I believe number one on the list would be you! Without you, there would not have been a Moolya. Reputation blended well with efforts. You and your team. Sticking to your *thing*, not bending too much to the “existing way” of the market..? Brainual testers, lots of goodwill, even more hard work, God’s grace and a bit of luck! Moolya has unique values that the world needs. As a businessman, you have not fallen to the trap of traditional thinking. Don’t be stuck trying to save costs. Make more customers happy, and hence gain more business. Eventually, you will have to take that route if you want to make progress. You may also like to read: Startup testing firm from Bangalore, Prakat Solutions partners with Mitra Jyothi to set up Accessibility Lab The Story of Moolya Technologies by Pradeep Soundararajan “Crowdsourced testing helps software companies launch products quicker.” – Praveen Singh, Founder & CEO, 99Tests

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Social Enterprise Incubator Villgro Launches Uncovention 2011

by Paul Joseph October 14, 2011 Featured

Social enterprise incubator, Villgro Innovations Foundation, has launched Unconvention 2011, its annual, Innovation & Social Entrepreneurship conference. Unconvention 2011, offers value based events, workshops and panels for the stakeholders of the Innovation & Social Entrepreneurship ecosystem, primarily, social entrepreneurs, social investors, social incubators, policy makers, innovators, academicians and students. The event is scheduled for December 2 & 3, 2011, at IIT Madras Research Park, the support partner of Unconvention 2011. Unconvention 2011 is sponsored by The Lemelson Foundation, USA. The components of this action packed event would be: Plenary: The foremost panel would be on the topic of Social Entrepreneurship 2020. The panel discussion will peek into the next 10 years and will provide insights on patterns which will emerge in the next decade. The panel representation will be from a variety of ecosystem players like Mr. Vineet Rai, CEO – Aavishkaar, Ms. Sushmita Ghosh, President emeritus Ashoka – Innovators for the Public and others. The panel composition will highlight movement in areas of research, talent, impact investing, governance, corporate involvement & entrepreneurship. Summit: The Summit 2011 is aimed at addressing the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs and will constitute panels & workshops around the theme of ‘Attracting & Retaining Talent in the SocEnt space’. Partners such as ThirdSector Partners, iVolunteer and MentorEgde have been roped in. The other sessions of the Summit include Roundtable Session on Growing the Incubation Movement, Roundtable Session to present Research in the Sector, to be organized by CSIE-IITM (Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship, IIT Madras) Impact Law Ventures would present a Legal Clinic for the benefit of social enterprises. A session on ‘Leveraging Media for Social Enterprises’ will be driven by television partner, ET NOW. Summit will also include a showcase of successful social enterprises who have been able to mainstream in the sectors of Energy, Health & ICT, being presented by Innovation Alchemy Villgro Awards: Villgro Awards will felicitate deserving individuals, enterprises and institutions in the Innovation & Social Entrepreneurship ecosystem. The categories include, Lifetime Achievement, Social Enterprise, Social Incubator, Social Investor, Grass root Innovator, Academic Contribution, Journalist and Media House. Dr.Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Chairman, RTBI & Professor, Electrical Engineering, IITM, Mr.Harish Hande, Magsaysay Awardee, Founder & CEO, SELCO India, Mr.K.Ananth Krishnan, CTO, Tata Consultancy Services will constitute the panel. Investor Forum: Villgro will be partnering with Sankalp, an initiative of Intellecap & IITM’s Rural Technology & Business Incubator (RTBI-IITM) to organize an Investor Forum, which will serve to be a connecting platform for social investors and growth stage entrepreneurs. Wantrapreneur: The finals of the social business plan competition will see the shortlisted enterprises from startup and early growth stages, presenting their companies to a jury constituting Mr. P.V.Ramachandran, GM(retd), NABARD, Consultant, Ministry of Agriculture, Ajay Maniar from Aavishkaar and others will constitute the jury. The winners stand a chance to win cash prizes up to Rs.10 lakhs. For tickets log on to: http://www.unconvention.co.i n You may also like to read: India’s only social enterprise innovation awards calls for nominations – VILLGRO AWARDS Last date to Apply for Villgro Awards, October 31, 2011 Villgro Unconvention: the Ecosystem Connection for Social Entrepreneurs

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Bangalore based cloud startup disrupting the real-estate and home buyers market with technology – HomeBuy360 and HomeFind360

by Paul Joseph September 26, 2011 Featured

With the booming Indian real estate market and increasing purchase power of the common man, buyers have little information to help them judge and choose their dream home and builders have bigger worries on how to manage the inventory effectively. Bangalore based startup Sadanika Solutions is trying to address this problem. Imagine buying an apartment or house, with not only a click of a button, but also then getting updates at every stage of the buying and construction process.YourStory.in caught up with Kshitij Minglani and Rajat Kothari from Sadanika Solutions ( TECH30 Company ) to know more about their venture. Briefly tell us about Sadanika Solutions and your products and offerings We are a Bangalore based start-up, dedicated towards building smarter technology solutions for the real estate sector. Sadanika means Home in Sanskrit. Our first flagship product is India’s first online application  www.homebuy360.com  that provides a login/user interface to the buyers. And this month we are launching another revolutionary concept around property search  www.homefind360.com Homebuy360  is a simple and intuitive to use internet application specifically designed for the real estate industry to make Builders and Buyers win. Builders can efficiently manage marketing, sales and customer connect operations – CRM – Leads – Booking – Documents – Collections – Customizations – Handover. Buyers can login to their Home Account and monitor progress and information relating to their dream home. Homefind360  has Google like Simplicity, provides Information that Matters to property finders with proprietary Technical Superiority of search and property ranking algorithm. It is slated to change how people search property in India. How did the idea for H360 come about? During our journey at Infosys, we interacted with a lot of our-colleagues (prospective buyers) and also with various real estate builders/developers in and around Bangalore. The biggest gap that stared at us was the lack of smart technology that would help buyers find the “right” home as well as connect them with a segment of builders suitable for their specific needs. We began exploring the “buy” process, while discussing the same with property buyers. What came out during those conversations was the idea of having a “home account” that was similar to a personal bank account, this sounded really exciting to them and they envisaged it would be very helpful. Most of them didn’t mind paying a small fee to get this. At the other end of the spectrum, we also met new upcoming builders and excited them with a thought of having a simplistic application to efficiently manage their operations over the web. The application would have features such as Customer relation management (CRM), booking, documentation, collection, issue management and reporting. The promising part of the application would be, that it was going to be hosted on the Cloud and therefore would operate on the “pay-per-use” or “pay-over-time” model and with no upfront investment in hardware, installation etc. Based on all this research, we validated our idea and got to the task of creating a simplistic, effective and efficient tool. We worked for several months tirelessly to bring homebuy360 to markets in Feb 2011. During the development phase we interacted with over 300 builders in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune. While there was a willingness to adopt technology for operational efficiency and for better customer care; their biggest demand was a neat clear approach in selling. The commercials for such a proposal were never a hindrance.  This is where the idea of homefind360 came into being. Aren’t there already many players in this space, how are your offerings different from them? There are 2-3 Existing ERP players in the market who have similar offering as our Homebuy360. But, they require huge upfront investment in servers, training & cost of running, are based on license/user based model, highly complex to use and takes time to implement. Whereas what we have is cloud based technology with simplistic UI, requires no training and low cost of ownership over time. We have created a new/niche value for buyers through providing a login (something that didn’t exist). Our market-brand campaign addresses the buyer community as well. The pressure will soon kick in from the buyer’s side for builders to adopt homebuy360. We are challenging the existing competitor pricing model which is based on license fee. With Homefind360 – there are few existing banner sites like – 99acres, Magicbricks, etc. and few listing sites like – CraigsList, HDFC Red, Sulekha, etc and potentially other banks might come up with a similar site as of HDFC Red. Most of them have a cluttered landing page which is confusing. They might have a good volume/traffic, but the search relevance and effectiveness are questionable. We have created a Google like interface which provides relevant search results in a flash. We have emphasized on simplistic display so that the users can make have a better and engaging interaction with the system. At the backend, we focus heavily on information that matters with logic behind every search display. We have built intelligent profiling that suggest builders how to increase their visibility. Our current offering is based on outcome based pricing options (pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale) can disrupt the existing banner advertisement based pricing model. Tell us about your background  Kshitij Minglani (Co-Founder and Director) Kshitij has held leadership positions in areas such as Corporate Planning, Business Growth Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions. Has successfully lead teams’, comprising of different nationalities. Kshitij has worked very closely with the senior management at Infosys. His love for travel and food has taken him places and his passion towards making business ideas work to perfection gives him an adrenaline rush. Rajat Kothari (Co-Founder and Director) An avid reader and an ardent gaming enthusiast with more than 11 years of Infosys experience in Project Management, Technology Architecture, Cloud Application Development and Maintenance & Support Services. Rajat has worked with several fortune 100 clients that are leaders in the area of e-commerce and pioneers in web technology innovation. Rajat brings the technology-core competency to the team. We founded the company in Feb 2010, but the founders came full time into it in Oct 2010. We are a self-funded company and our major capital investment till now has been on technology. How many customers do you have currently? Homebuy360 was launched in Feb 2011, since then we have roped in 12 paying clients (builders) and have expanded our operations to Bangalore, Mumbai/Navi Mumbai and Pune. We are very well received in the market and our unique concepts help builders increase sales, reduce admin costs and delight customers. Typically the ROI for them is 3-4 times with/over the lifecycle of a residential project. With both Homebuy360 and Homefind306 we would impact about 80K-100K home buyers in the coming year. What are the advantages you have over your competitors? We have created a new/niche value for Buyers through providing a login (something that didn’t exist). Homefind360 is set to re-define the way people search property today. Our market-brand campaign addresses the buyer community as well. The pressure will soon kick in from the buyer’s side for builders to adopt homebuy360. We are challenging the existing competitor pricing model which is based on license fee. We also have capital commitment and mentorship from few Infosys Senior Managers. We have also kept in mind that for us to obtain a decent market share, we would need to disrupt the revenue model of existing players which is primarily “banner” ads based. We would soon be launching homefind360, where the pricing would be similar to Google sponsored ads, pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead and pay-per-conversion. The site would also have new ideas like “Group Home Buying”, “Rental Assist” etc for a very large moving population in India. With two complimenting products (homebuy360 and homefind360), we can use the same channel to sell our both the products. It also creates high entry barrier for new competitors who would look to join homebuy360 bandwagon. Thus our business model is extremely tied up and very well knit and we strongly believe our cost structure, pricing model and marketing strategy are all market killers for us. How are you generating revenues currently? With Homebuy360 we generate revenue from Builders and Providers. We offer Pay per Use model with low cost of ownership over time. Pricing models vary from pay as you sell, pay over time, per project to one time annual charge etc. We encourage builders can charge back the fees they pay us to their buyers given the value created and provided to buyers through the online login. This essentially means, builders can use the application for free by transferring our fees to the buyers. We also generate revenues based on advertisements – usually when any project is nearing completion, there are several providers of electronics, furniture, furnishing, electrical appliances that need to reach to the home buyers. With Homefind360 our source of revenue is from Builders, Brokers, Providers and Banks. Here we offer Pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale and few banner ads. Where do you see the home buying market in India and H360 in five years from now? Next 5 years are going to be transformational years for real estate industry as it continues to grow leap and bounds. With large number of buyers coming from IT and High tech industry along with increased adoption of internet usage technology is bound to take center stage. Technology is also essential for industry to sustain its growth, increase its productivity and to serve the customers better. This is a perfect opportunity for new breed of entrepreneurs to develop path-breaking technology innovation for real estate industry. Tell us about the team behind H360 Apart from the two Co-founders with a combined experience of 20 yrs, we have a core Technology team comprising of two head strong individuals who bring a combined experience of 17 yrs and a team of young Business Development guys who have previous worked at HDFC, 99acres, etc. We currently have operations in Bangalore and Mumbai/Navi Mumbai and soon plan to expand to Pune and Chennai this quarter. By the end of 2011 we plan to have our operations setup in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad. We are currently looking to build a strong Business Development team in Pune, Mumbai and Chennai, and recruit head strong IT and SEO profiles in Bangalore.   YourStory.in wishes Kshitij, Rajat and the entire Sadanika team all the best with their startup journey. To know more about their products and services, please visit www.homebuy360.com or mail them at contact@homebuy360.com Chandan Raj | Bengaluru You may also like to read: Mumbai considered as the second most preferred investment destination for real estate in 2010 – Says Makaan.com survey Indian Angel Network invests in Real Estate Group Buying Pioneer, GrOffr.com First Student Run Real Estate Brokerage Creates a Reality Web Series to Inspire Entrepreneurs to keep “Making Moves”

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We plan to be in at least 60 locations in India by 2011, entrepreneurs at MyCityWay

by Paul Joseph September 21, 2011 Featured

In a tete-a-tete with YourStory.in, co-founders of MyCityWay, Archana Patchirajan, Sonpreet Bhatia and Puneet Mehta talk about their plans for MyCityWay in India. MyCityWay is the winner of TechSparks 2011 App4India. Edited excerpts: Tell us in detail about the much talked about MyCityWay India app ? MyCityWay India is a real-time, user driven, geo-aware urban reference app for mobile devices. Users can find local restaurants, shopping malls, hospitals, events, parking locations, utility services, WiFi locations, book movie tickets and much more – all from a single, easy to use application. As an all-inclusive mobile app, MyCityWay India also offers users the ability to interact with business locations or services, read or write consumer reviews. The app is currently available for 5 major Indian cities Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and we will be adding 11 other major Indian cities to our platform by end of 2011. MyCityWay, based in NYC and founded by three Indians, has launched apps for 50 plus international cities. The NYC version of the app was the winner of the New York BIG apps contest in 3 categories. The platform has around 3 million users across the world and the Indian version of the app was launched in late May 2011 and has already crossed 1,50,000 downloads in two months. Are there any similar apps in Indian market? What differentiates you from other players? In India we don’t find any other similar free app that promises to have such versatile features. From the user experience point of view, we are known for making products that the common person can really “use” and integrate in their lifestyle. Our apps have proven to be the one stop solution for the needs of a city dweller as well as a tourist. MyCityWay is an app that is used by users of all demographics. We have the ability to marry location, intent, time of the day and other decision making factors with user profile to come up with the most suitable suggestions for our users. Can you please tell us in detail about the features of the app? Which feature are you most excited about? We are currently present on iPhone, Android and Blackberry and are planning to roll out a version in Nokia very soon. MyCityWay India is an app with all the Indian cities built within it. So, it’s both personalized for your own city as well as it gives a platform to plan out trips to various cities across the nation. A few strong features of our app include; more than 40 different categories which help the user to drill down into what he exactly wants, detailed pages for the businesses/places from where the user could navigate further to the website of the respective business, contact them via phone/email or even find the shortest route to that place from his current location. We are extremely excited about the social aspect that we are planning to introduce. It’s going to be a fresh, new and loving look of MyCityWay and I’m sure our users would just love it. We say this with gusto because we don’t believe in out dated reviews. Only reviews from trusted sources, say a friend’s social graph would help the user to better determine from the choices he has. And this social feature with the power of MyCityWay’s exploration capabilities is bound to attract some genuine user generated content. How much time did it take to build the app? MyCityWay’s first app NYC Way took just 40 days to build. Of course it was 20 hours a day of work for the entire team, but because of their engineering backgrounds and of course the spirit of entrepreneurship led them to design a platform where new cities could be added, and the end to end process along with testing was completed within anywhere from a  week to 10 days. But India was a very special experience, because unlike in the US, the availability of rich and reliable content was scarce. Though we had partnered with some of the major players within various information domains in India, the raw data which was procured required a marathon of data mining activities and after few levels of filtering and verification we were able to provide the Indian user with the quality data he deserves. Are you planning to expose APIs to build apps into MyCityWay? Yes, we are already working on that. How did the idea come about? Any personal experience that triggered you to start MyCityWay? Necessity is the mother of invention(smiles). I have lived in NYC and having been able to fully utilize the potential of smart phones and the apps built for it, I felt that “app” was a very viable medium to enhance everyday lives of New Yorkers. We wanted to build an app which will give users the power to choose what he wants to do next. It’ll make his every decision, right from the simplest of “What time is the next subway train?” to “Where do I take her for that very special date?”. It gives you everything that you could possibly require from your city. It’s about exploring your city, the easy way. On which platform was the app first launched? Apple iPhone was the first platform we launched MyCityWay on. Between Android, iPhone & Blackberry, which platform leads to highest number of downloads? Our iPhone apps are the ones which drive the highest number of downloads across the world. In India, it is a healthy mix of iOS and Android, followed by Blackberry. When is the Symbian version of MyCityWay expected to be launched? We are planning to come out with a Symbian version of MyCityWay by November 2011. Are all your multi-platform releases synchronized (in terms of features, releases dates etc)? Have you explored the possibility of using cross-platform toolkits such as Appcelerator or PhoneGap? It is not synchronized at the moment, but soon will be. We have tested PhoneGap and Appcelerator, but nothing compares to the native code in terms of user experience, so we are planning to stick with that. Any new interesting features around the corner? We’ll transform MyCityWay into a platform where all the social features we are planning to introduce will integrate. The user will be given all the options, his want for exploration and navigation would be powered by the rich data of MyCityWay and his need for geo-social gaming would be complemented by Clingle ! We are planning to be in at least 60 locations in India by 2011. Clingle along with the existing MyCityWay apps would change the way the user connects to people and places. So, how many downloads so far for the Indian version? With all the three platforms together (iPhone, Android and Blackberry) we have crossed over 1, 60, 000 downloads for MyCityWay India as of July 2011. The app is free for users to download. How do you monetize currently? Monetization is through fee based revenue via our strategic partners for the bookings and reservations done via our app. Any plans to monetize other than through the existing channel? The future monetizing plans do include revenue generation by promoting ads in the app and by partnering with businesses for promoting city based deals. We are planning to build a smart hyper local recommendation engine which will combine the user’s intent plus location and the most important of all, timing. We believe that it’s about targeting the right people at right place and at right time. This will also serve as a “least effort and maximum hit” platform for businesses to attract new customers as well as retain their loyal ones. We see MyCityWay India to be the wallet in your phone. We’ll allow you to book railway, movie and even air tickets from within the app. Did you put in any efforts to market the app? Till date we have not had to spend much on marketing – all the growth has been organic and driven by the MyCityWay user community. The popularity and usage that our app has earned is through sheer word of mouth. People all throughout the world have been using our app and recommending it to their friends via various social media channels like FB and Twitter. There was this instance when a particular user had used our NYC Way and immediately wrote to us requesting to cover London, her home town. MyCityWay has been creating evangelists all over the globe – from the first week of launch. Having started off with MyCityWay in NYC and then moving on to India, what are the challenges you face as a mobile app entrepreneur in India? In India, our major challenge was data. As a startup, at times the resources at disposal both monetary and human are extremely limited. Our team had to put in a lot of efforts to mine and tailor the data to maintain MyCityWay standards in India. We wanted to give the same seamless experience that a New Yorker gets, to the Indian user. In an entrepreneur’s pursuit of perfection, one has to face a lot of new challenges when entering new markets. That too in a young market in app space like India where the smartphone usage and the knowledge of applications is just catching up, one is bound to be bounced off a lot. But when all those are taken by one’s stride and proceeded, India has a lot of opportunities! Tell us about the kind of feedback that you received from users so far. Any interesting instances that you would like to share with our readers? The responses that we’ve been receiving have been overwhelming! MyCityWay’s NYC Way iPhone app already has 80 detailed reviews and over 8000 ratings on the app store. Considering an extremely small percentage of active users leave reviews or ratings – that’s a big number. We constantly receive e-mails from users requesting a similar app for their cities. Such emails and requests fuel us to expand further. Users find it hard to believe that we are giving such features for free, but like Twitter and Facebook we’ll always be free for the user(smiles). Why don’t you want to come up with a paid version of the app? We have planned for various other ways to monetize the app by bypassing the option of taxing the end user. We might work with partners where we could jointly monetize the platform in creative ways. If any of the telcos or OEM companies have interesting ideas around this, we would love to hear from them. Do you think privacy concerns will play a role in deploying your local-social offering? How do you plan to address that? We don’t think so, because we have given the entire control to the users via privacy settings Anything else that you want to share with the readers of YourStory.in? TechSparks and Yourstory.in give entrepreneurs the essential boost that he requires to proceed and pursue his dreams. We really adore the way YourStory.in has conducted TechSparks and your recognition of technology. Like a Mashable and TechCrunch, Yourstory.in is the platform for entrepreneurs in India to showcase their dream to the world. Way to go! YourStory.in’s Technology Editor Sriram. V. Iyer’s Take My City Way India, is not just a simple app. It is a kind of ‘Super-App’, which provides functionalities of over 30 apps within itself, and more features are getting added! Opening the app presents a desktop kind of view with a lot of functionalities embedded as mini-apps/widgets. (Apple banned a lot of apps, in early 2010 for having their own desktop within their apps) There are tons of useful things like events, deals, movies, shops, coffee places that a user can search for based on his location. The data has been quite accurate as far as we have used (in Bangalore). We appreciate their eye-to-detail and also a very consistent interface across various facilities provided. They have plans to tackle the BIG problem of going local and social, and they have all the right capabilities to address the challenge. We wish them all the very best, and we highly recommend this app to everyone! Check out MyCityWay’s website for further details on the app! Also, share your thoughts on MyCityWay by writing to us at feedback@yourstory.in MyCityWay is the winner of TechSparks 2011 App4India. You may also like to read: BMWi’s MyCityWay mobile app launched in India Archana Patchirajan & Sonpreet Bhatia, MyCityWay: Mobile platform for urban exploration and discovery MyCityWay is the winner of the TechSparks App4India contest, sponsored by Intel

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