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Are Sponsored Tweets Really the Way Forward for Twitter?

by Paul Joseph April 4, 2012 Featured

Unlike some of its competitors, Twitter has so far treaded extremely cautiously in the matters of advertising. The management team behind the microblogging site has maintained that traditional online advertising does not interest them . They have been trying to ascertain innovative ways of commercial usage of the Twitter platform. Twitter introduced the concepts of ‘ Promoted Tweets ’ and ‘ Promoted Trends ’ in the first-half of 2010. In the second half of 2010 ‘ Promoted Accounts ’ was introduced, which basically meant that brands or individuals could pay to be featured in the “ Suggested for You ” section. They had also announced plans of launching an advertising platform on Twitter, which would enable just about anyone to advertise through the ‘Promoted Products’ concept. This self-serve advertising platform was finally made live this year, in the first week of December. There were concerns among social media experts that the concept of ‘Promoted Tweets’ or sponsored tweets will not go down well with the users. Users may not be thrilled with the idea of getting their Twitter feed flooded with ads. Not every brand has the expertise to utilize this concept to promote with subtlety . There is no dearth of annoying marketers shouting ‘look at me’ through their ads. So, ‘Promoted Tweets’ was like a double-edged sword for Twitter. At concept-level, ‘Promoted Tweets’ is great, but does it translate effectively into a viable advertising vehicle ? If you go by what US Twitter users feel, then sponsored tweets do have a promising future. Lab42, a market research firm, conducted a survey of US Twitter users and found out that, a significantly large, 24.8% of the respondents have seen sponsored tweets from brands relevant to them. What will encourage Twitter more is that only 10.9% of the respondents said that they found ‘Promoted Tweets’ annoying or that it had a negative impact on the Twitter experience. A healthy 21.6% of the respondents said that they got a discount of some sort through Promoted Tweets and 21.2% discovered a new brand through these sponsored tweets. Twitter has not yet become a household name in India, like Facebook. It is estimated that there are about 6 million Twitter users in India, which is significantly lower than the number of Facebook users. Keeping in mind that the total number of users on Twitter is much lower than that of Facebook, 6 million is quite a big number. Indian brands are rapidly adapting to the social media space and have realized its potential. UTV Interactive have associated themselves with a well-known social media sponsorships company, Izea, and launched www.sponsoredtweets.com , an advertising platform to exploit the advertising potential of Twitter. The number of Indian brands on Twitter is slowly picking up and some of the early adopters have met with a degree of success. Tata DoCoMo is one such brand. The brand has been on Twitter for quite some time now, but only recently they designed Twitter-specific campaigns and have been rewarded with more than 5000 new followers in the first month itself. Like in US Indians brands can also utilize the popularity of celebrities on the microblogging site to reach out to their consumers. There are a number of Indian celebrities who could become the next Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen. Twitter is committed to Promoted Tweets and as of now it seems to be paying off. But the real success of this platform can be determined only after a longer period has passed. Emerging markets like India, Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia is where Twitter needs to concentrate on. Have you come across any sponsored tweets by Indian brands or celebrities? What did you think of it?

Tagged as: apache, budget, enterprise, Featured, guest-columns, india, lose-something, password, research & analysis

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Launch of the New Season of The Next Big Idea Announced by NSRCEL

by Paul Joseph March 15, 2012 Featured

The launch of the 2012 session of the Next Big Idea was announced yesterday by the Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL). The Next Big Idea is an integrated entrepreneur training and business plan competition. It is sponsored by the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB) under the aegis of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India and Intel. The aim of the Next Big Idea session is to encourage innovation and create a structured business plan process for leading academic institutions across the country. The dream is to see these innovative ideas turn into real businesses. The programme is also a platform for any individual or team to showcase their ideas and seek mentoring, access to incubation and angel funds. The Next Big Idea’s other objective is to ensure that academic institutions are better equipped to conduct business plan competitions and improve the quality of business ideas originating from these competitions. NSRCEL offers financial support to such competitions and even conducts a two day fully paid conference at IIM Bangalore to enable sharing of information and training on best practices to conduct competitions. Speaking about the objective of the Next Big Idea, Professor K Kumar , Chairman , NSRCEL said, “The Next Big Idea seeks to provide a perfect opportunity for entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas and have their attractiveness and viability evaluated by experts in an extremely competitive setting.” The Next Big Idea now invites entries from winners of B-Plan competitions across India during the year 1st April, 2011 to 31st March, 2012 to register and send their executive summaries at www.nextbigidea.in. The last date for receiving entries is March 31, 2012. The incentives for the participating teams include a chance to be incubated and raise seed fund up to Rs 50 Lakh from NSRCEL, three days of fully-paid workshop at IIM-Bangalore with intensive mentoring and an opportunity to interact with VCs. There are 10 cash prizes in the range of Rs 25,000 to Rs 1, 50,000 and a sponsorship to participate in University of California, Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge for the two best teams. For more information on the Next Big Idea, visit http://nextbigidea.in/

Tagged as: business, employee, guest-columns, india, lose-something, password, personal, Sponsored

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An Open Letter to the Finance Minister of India From anEntrepreneur Prior to Budget 2012

by Paul Joseph March 9, 2012 Featured

Dear Shri Pranabh Mukherjee, Greetings! I am glad to be writing to you and it would be a privilege if you were to read this, preferably before you decide on 2012 budget. I am the Founder of Moolya Software Testing Private Limited which I founded in December 2010 through bootstrapping and with my colleague Santhosh Tuppad. In our first year of operations, we scaled our business to an extent where we had a break even in 9 months and started making good enough profits towards the financial year end. We have customers from India, United States and United Kingdom. While technical strengths and skills have been important for our success, we recognize that an environment being conducive to do good business is very important. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and ex-ministers in your capacity for the foreign policies and export policies that have permitted us to start and perform good business without restrictions. I am also sure that it is not just me but there are quite a few entrepreneurs who are successful due to the environment and government policies favoring them. Just that somewhere some government officials require a bribe to do their work doesn’t mean we can call the system as bad and forget the brighter side of what the government of the past and present has done to us. My goal of writing this letter to you is three fold. One – I already accomplished – to thank you for making the environment conducive for business growth. Two and Three – are to put humble requests that can help India scale further heights in economy. Tax exemptions / discounts for our initial years If we make a profit of let’s say X lakhs , the tax on it is 0.3 X. We understand that tax does help the nation to support a lot of activities that include infrastructure, public health, public transport, helping the poor get food, funding new machinery for the army and other important things needed to support a country. We understand why we pay tax and what we get in turn. Our country’s growth could directly be proportional to our business growth and our business growth could be an indication of how the country is developing. We want more good to happen – to our country and to our business. With that view in mind, I have some humble requests to you and the government. I think that providing tax exemption for start-ups for the first three years could be largely helpful. Although it appears to be a one-sided proposition, I would like to help in describing that it is not one-sided and is of of mutual value. The first three years is critical for a company’s growth. This is a time that determines the future of the company. With that in mind, here are some pointers: We could have hired more people for our organization instead of paying so much tax during our initial years – thereby creating more employment within country – which in turn would help our economy grow. We could use that money to buy more equipment we need to attract more customers to our organization – thereby bringing in more foreign money to India – which I am assuming would help our economy grow. We could have helped ourselves move to a better infrastructure – thereby expanding our capabilities to get more projects running within our organization – which again I am assuming would help in increased revenues for the company and future potential for more tax liability. If we were to grow at a rate of 300% for the first three years, the tax we pay at the fourth year could be more than that of combined tax of the three years if we didn’t grow at 300% every year. If exempting tax completely appears one-sided, we could appreciate discounts or tax payments for the first three years spread over a period of 5 years. Of course, I am aware of tax holidays if we were to sign up for SEZ or a 100% EOU but our business probably doesn’t demand it. Moreover, I am not just speaking for Moolya but for plenty of other start-ups in India. With the little financial understanding I gained from having been in business, this is what I can think of, to help our country bloom and boom with entrepreneurs creating more job opportunities and making India stronger towards the future. There hasn’t been a new Infosys, a new Wipro, a new Tata or a new Reliance in making over the last 10 years, or at least I am not aware of it. I just hope Moolya could be that. There are plenty of other companies who could do that too. With the increased government support, we could make it possible. The other humble request, is tax exemptions for donation to social causes Our company decided to sponsor a child’s education for every new customer we add with an on-going project. We sponsored a child through an NGO, got the invoice and submitted to our auditor. We thought this was exempted for tax and could be counted as expenditure but I was shocked to learn that there is no exemption for supporting social causes as a company. I could do that as an individual and avail exemption on tax but as a company when my capability to do more in helping poor children in India get education, I am denied from the exemption. There is no doubt that every one of us understand the value of education in India and the support the public needs to bring in to help India do better in education. We are who we are because of our education. As a company, sponsoring poor children for their education is indirectly helping the government save some cost (a very minute fraction though). We hope the government considers such spending as expenditure by the company. Again, if giving 100% exemption looks to be impossible or one-sided, a 50% would still do a lot of good. I want to thank you for the time you may have taken to read this and hoping you would consider some of my humble requests before processing the upcoming budget. We hope to add more customers, bring more revenues to the company, make more profits, pay more tax and help more children who can’t afford education, get education without having to think about poverty. With the government support increasing, I guess we entrepreneurs can help you budget peacefully without having to make you add taxes to daily used commodities like petrol and food products. We are committed to help in building a reputation for the country and the government that runs it. If a rookie businessman can think these ways, I am sure; you can do a lot better thinking for the improvement of the country. Kindly forgive my ignorance, if any. Jai Hind! Sincerely, On behalf of all entrepreneurs, Pradeep Soundararajan Managing Director Moolya Software Testing Private Limited Bangalore 8 th March 2012 Image Courtesy: Reuters

Tagged as: budget, gadget, guest-columns, india, kiran-kumar, manage-cash, podcast, popular-on-cloudstory-in

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University Courses on Social Enterprise Need to Improve says Social Entrepreneur Survey

by Paul Joseph March 1, 2012 Featured

Universities came under the spotlight in i-genius’ exclusive survey of social entrepreneurs across Asia with only 19% of respondents saying University courses on social enterprise were of high quality (42% said they were poor with the remainder unsure). The results of the survey form the backdrop to the i-genius Asia Summit in Bangkok, 1st – 2nd March, which sees social entrepreneurs meeting government officials, business leaders, NGO and academics. The two-day gathering aims to explore how to improve the practical and policy framework for social entrepreneurship throughout the region. Key findings of the survey: – 70% said Universities were slow to provide courses on social entrepreneurship or social businesses – Less than one-in-ten people (9%) felt Universities were offering sufficient number of courses – Courses which do exist tended to be too academic – Two thirds of social businesses expect to increase the number of employees in the next 12 months – 59% expect to seek investment finance over the next two years – Sourcing finance and marketing skills featured highest in skills social entrepreneurs most needed – Whilst more felt governments were supportive than those who did not, 52% felt their government did not grasp the significant benefits social entrepreneurship can bring to sustainable growth, job creation and community cohesion. Full results of the survey will be unveiled at the i-genius Asia Summit ( http://www.regonline.co.uk/i- geniusasiasummit ). The event is sponsored by the British Council. i-genius founder, Tommy Hutchinson said, “A new generation of social entrepreneurs has emerged and Universities have been slow to respond to their needs. Many feel University courses do not provide them with the practical skills they need to grow their business.” i-genius’ own training arm, i-genius Academy, is launching a new service at the Summit to assist Universities in developing relevant high quality courses. Participants at the Summit include Thailand’s Dr. Kriengsak and Singaporean MP, Penny Low. Attendees will include social entrepreneurs from across Asia including Myanmar, China, Indonesia, Korea, Lao, Nepal and Singapore.

Tagged as: application, bangalore, business, challenges, enterprise, financial, guest-columns, india, microsoft, Sponsored, windows

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Flickr and Hunch Cofounder Caterina Fake Launches Pinwheel : Flickr for Places

by Paul Joseph February 17, 2012 Featured

“Find and leave notes around the world” says the Pinwheel beta website about their platform. Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr and Hunch which were bought by Yahoo and eBay respectively has launched her new location-photo sharing startup Pinwheel. “On Pinwheel you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group or everyone. They can be organized into sets, such as, say, the “Tales from the Road: KISS’s 1974 Hotter Than Hell Tour”, “Best Spots for Butterfly Hunting”, “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008″ or “Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW”. You can follow people, places and sets. And in the future, you will get notifications on your phone from who and what you choose” said Caterina in a blog post . They are opening it up in private beta on the web and mobile web. An iOS version is coming next. You can sign up to be a beta tester/contributor at Pinwheel.com. “Part of why making Pinwheel is so fun, is so exploding with possibility, is that a note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object. Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists and manifestoes can all be put into a note. It is the perfectly constrained, perfectly open thing that you can make into what you want” said Caterina calling Pinwheel a ‘Flickr for places’ They plan to monetize the platform through sponsored notes. People and businesses will be able to drop notes around the world, highlighted for all to open and see. As an example Caterina talks about Alex Clark, a realtor with Zephyr Real Estate who is leaving sponsored notes of his properties for sale, things coming on the market, notable things in neighborhoods his clients should notice, and general area knowledge to promote his real estate business. Click here to visit their website and participate in their private beta.

Tagged as: guest-columns, india, marketing, microsoft, network, social-network, startups, statement, windows

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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

Tagged as: accounting, entrepreneurs, guest columnists, guest-columns, patents, popular-on-cloudstory-in, random-member, technology

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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.

Tagged as: business, database, investment, learning, microsoft, mobile, paas, Sponsored, technology

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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

Tagged as: Sponsored

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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

Tagged as: education, education entrepreneurs, Sponsored

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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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