FreeCharge, India’s leading digital payments platform, today announced that the company will adopt Aadhaar as the primary Know Your Customer (KYC) tool for opening & upgrading wallets.

Consumers who enrol for a FreeCharge wallet with Aadhaar authentication can have their balance limit enhanced from Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 Lakh. Also, there will be no monetary limit on transactions making the wallet truly versatile. FreeCharge, which has already hit the million wallets mark within a week of launch, believes that being Aadhaar enabled is key to mass adoption and ubiquitous usage.

FreeCharge

Consumers can link their FreeCharge Wallet to their Aadhaar number in multiple ways like–doorstep service available on demand, consumers can also authenticate by walking into any of the 30,000 banking correspondent points of FreeCharge partner YES bank or walk into any branch of YES Bank. In the future this service will also be available with FINO – the Payments bank licensee a strategic partner of FreeCharge.

Speaking about this, Govind Rajan, Chief Operating Officer, FreeCharge & Chief Strategy Officer, Snapdeal said

For consumers, convenience and speed of transaction are key considerations. We will leverage Aadhar ID authentication for paperless, secure KYC, to be completed in a few minutes. We are innovating to bring new models of go to market – for instance doorstep authentication, where customers can request for an agent to come to their home for a doorstep biometric authentication. Within a week we hit the 1 million mark and now leveraging Aadhaar enabled KYC gives us access to the pool of over 900 million KYC ready consumers

With lakhs of deliveries a day on Snapdeal, we have a huge and relevant customer connect opportunity for us to synergize with for doorstep KYC. We will soon launch the pilot in metros and then scale this nationwide.

FreeCharge wallet is powered by cutting edge technology. It is a robust and flexible platform that leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code & BLE to create a most intuitive consumer experience.

About FreeCharge

FreeCharge is India’s leading digital platform for recharge and utility payments which provides prepaid, post-paid, DTH and Electricity bill payment for almost all Indian service providers. FreeCharge was founded in 2010 by Kunal ShahSandeep Tandon and had received funding of over $120 million in the last 4 years. In the largest acquisition in the consumer Internet space yet, Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge in Apr’15 resulting in India’s largest m-commerce ecosystem.  For more details, please visit FreeCharge

Circle of Life Healthcare Private Limited has launched an app called myCOL to simplify the hospitalization experience for patients and their caretakers in India, starting first with NCR. myCOL app will provide exhaustive information of more than 1300 hospitals across the city, irrespective of size and facilities, through an easy to use map based search.

Shortly, the Company will also incorporate it’s flagship service whereby it will provide a free personal assistant to the user, who will take care of all procedural formalities at the time of hospitalization.

With the recent outbreak of an epidemic like Dengue or Malaria, even in a city like Delhi, which has the second highest number of hospital beds in the country, there was reportedly an acute shortage of hospital beds. myCOL’s endeavour is to remove the asymmetry of information regarding hospital facilities and assist the patient in his hour of need.

Talking about the app, Vaibhav Singh, Co-founder & CEO said

Our vision is to democratize healthcare and remove the fear which patients and caretakers feel when approaching a hospital for an In-patient Procedure. myCOL combines the benefits of technology and human touch, to deliver a unique product to the services-starved patient.

Salient Features of myCOL

Map Based Exhaustive Search

myCOL works as a veritable encyclopedia offering unbiased information on all medical facilities and practitioners in your region, a user-friendly map based listing & search functionality. The myCOL team has collected this data painstakingly by personally visiting each hospital irrespective of the size and location to ensure that you have access to all the information you require to make a better decision.

Personal Assistant

Long queues and waiting time at hospitals add to the stress of hospitalization. myCOL’s revolutionary service involves instant assignment of a personal assistant to the user who will handle all the administrative tasks like admission, insurance coordination and discharge. This will allow the caretaker to focus solely on the well-being of the patient rather than getting unnecessarily bogged down by the infamous 3 hour waits at admission and 6 hour discharge processes.  Like all other features, this service is absolutely Free.

myCOL App Snapshot

Health Records

myCOL provides a cloud-based facility to store all health records including prescriptions, invoices, insurance papers etc. for self and family members. With its unique share facility, you can share records with your doctors or your loved ones with ease.  Now do away with those archaic manual files and create an indexed online medical repository.

Reminder Facility

Never miss out on any medications or appointments.  The innovative reminder service allows the guardian to keep a tab on medicine compliance by the aged through an efficient notification facility.

myCOL App Snapshot

Take care of your family members

myCOL allows you to create groups for your loved ones through the unique myCircle feature and take complete charge of their health.

myCOL app for Android & iOS can be downloaded from here. myCOL for iOS would be released soon.

If you are in NCR region, do give myCOL app a spin & share your feedback in the comments section.

About myCOL

myCOL is a product of Circle of Life Healthcare Private Limited. It is promoted by Professor (Dr.) Mudit Kapoor, PhD Economics, University of Maryland & Vaibhav Singh, Fellow Chartered Accountant and MBA. It counts among its Advisory Board experts like Dr. Shamika Ravi, Fellow, Brookings Institution India and Dr. Ambuj Roy, Dept. of Cardiology, AIIMS. myCOL has launched services recently in the NCR region and is expected to reach your city shortly. More information on myCOL can be found here and here

HackerRank, the technical talent platform that ranks programmers based on their coding skills, announces the hiring of Grady Burnett as its president & Chief Operating Officer. Burnett’s experience in leading strategic operations and sales in every region of the world will be critical as HackerRank continues to streamline tech recruiting and build a meritocratic platform to unearth global talent.

Prior to HackerRank, Burnett served as Chief Operating Officer of app analytics company Flurry, which was acquired by Yahoo. In addition, Burnett served as vice president of global sales and operations at Facebook, during which time he helped Facebook set up the India operations. His association also included overseeing the majority of Facebook’s revenue, implementing the company’s advertising products in 45 countries including India and developing its Preferred Marketing Developer program, the platform that helps marketers advertise on Facebook.

A key Global Hire, Burnet will overlook Global Operations for HackerRank with special focus on India, which is an important market for the talent platform company.

HackerRank-GradyBurnett

Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and cofounder of HackerRank said

As we continue to help make the world flat by ranking programmers purely based on skill, it was crucial for us to bring on Grady, an expert in global sales and operations, to work with theHackerRank team and further accelerate our growth worldwide.

Burnett follows the recent hiring of Ahmed Aly, former senior Google engineer and world-renowned competitive coding champion, who is spearheading HackerRank’s digital hackathons CodeSprints

Speaking about HackerRank, Grady Burnett said

Having built high performing teams of thousands of people at Facebook, Google, DoubleClick and Flurry, I’ve personally seen the holes in the traditional hiring process. In the past, we used blunt credentials like GPA or school, to filter through high volume of candidates. But these filters consistently leave out diamonds in the rough.

Because HackerRank ranks programmers by coding skills, we democratize hiring and create opportunities for people from all walks of life. Customers such as VMware and Zenefits that report saving more than 70 percent of hiring costs are a testament to the innovation HackerRank is bringing to tech recruiting. I’m excited to partner with Vivek and team to take this growth to the next level.

This news comes on the heels of several other company milestones. In July 2015, HackerRank raised $7.5 million in strategic funding from Recruit Holding’s HR Technology Fund and was named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 List for its gamified solution to hiring tech talent.

About HackerRank

HackerRank is a technical talent platform that ranks programmers based on their coding skills. Co-founded in 2012 by Vivek Ravisankar & Harishankaran Karunanidhi, HackerRank is a Y Combinator graduate with over one million developers and over 1,000 companies as customers. Learn more at HackerRank

[Image Credit* – Vivek Ravisankar on Facebook]

Eywa Media, a leading digital signal processing technology startup, has raised a seed fund round of $1M+ through ah! Ventures, Viktor Koenig PE Fund & Mantra Ventures. The deal was supported and syndicated by ah! Ventures and led to closure on its investment platform, CLUBah.com

Founded in late 2013, incubated at the famous Kyron Accelerator and with operations launched in 2014, Eywa Media is a leading digital signal processing technology startup which leads audience interaction and engagement measurement along with deep analytics using sophisticated audio detection technology for Brands, Broadcasters, Retailers, Advertisers, Production Houses, Agencies etc across connected devices using its multi patent pending EYWAConnect TV+ cloud platform!. The company is headquartered in Singapore with offices in Mumbai and Bangalore.

eywa-logo

Ramsubramaniya Raja, Founder & CEO of Eywa Media said

Today traditional networks [TV, Radio, OOH, Cinema etc] along with digital networks function in silos whereas the consumer is still the same consuming content and ads across. Thus our EYWAConnect TV+ platform seamlessly connects with the ecosystem of connected devices using our Mobilesync SDK on one end and the cloud based enterprise software on the other end with broadcasters and advertisers allowing broadcasters, advertisers etc to embed consumer interactivity, engagement using our audio detection technology to reach out to the consumers which till now has not been fully possible.

Today our EYWAConnect TV+ platform has given rise to products like Mobilesync SDK, Tango, DSP, Analytics and in future we wish to build more which caters to higher functionalities for our clients, partners and consumers in the markets we serve. Thus adding tremendous value to the entire ad and content consumption value chain. The industry can now see more reach with consumers across networks, more meaningful engagement leading to more interactivity and precise analytics!

Anshuman Pratap Chaudhary, Co-founder & CSO of Eywa Media said

Over the course of next 12 months our focus is to build massive scale in embedding our Mobilesync SDK across Devices, SIM’s, 3rdParty Apps, Browsers etc. and install our EYWAConnect TV+ cloud platform with our clients in the focused countries which will catapult the disruption across the ecosystem.

Once this happens, the humongous amount of analytics that our platform will provide to our clients will pave way to higher choices on re-targeting, attribution, lead conversion, consumer demographics and add to the unlimited possibilities for multi-screen conversations. This round was oversubscribed and thus our sincere thanks to our investors who believe that our technology can be impactful globally.

Abhijeet Kumar, Founding Partner, ah! Ventures said

I have been always interested in technology startups and Eywa Media is definitely a promising one. Their technology of identifying the TV, Radio, OOH and Digital advertisements 7 programs on the basis of audio frequency and pushing notifications on mobile device in the real time is a stage apart. Their IP is much robust, scalable & privacy driven targeted to redefine the next level of advertiser, consumer and broadcaster ecosystem. On top of that, they have a smart, driven and dedicated team with Co-Founder, Anshuman already having done a venture exit, to take this company global.

Setup by ah! Ventures in 2012, CLUB ah! is India’s first full-spectrum startup investment network and platform comprising of over 500 investors, including some of the renowned angels and early-stage VCs. CLUB ah! platform today has over 3500+ startups, 450+ seed/angel investors and over 65 VCs & intuitional investors, making it one of the largest platform of investors and startups. The network also recently secured its first profitable exit from Harness Handitouch within 2 years of its investment. CLUB ah! has till date invested close to INR 48 crores in over 16 startups spread across varied industries and domains, including Eywa Media.

Vijay Kumar Raja from Viktor Koenig PE Fund said

We at Viktor Koenig AG have always been interested in high value ventures… however, since last year we have begun to focus on raging startups which will make a mark tomorrow. Eywa Media, with its high end technology, profound market plan and great team, caught our attention quite early and between two meetings we knew we wanted them to be in our portfolio. We wish to see this company grow globally and given our presence across the US, UK, Luxembourg, UAE, Singapore and Hong Kong, we would do all it takes to help this venture scale to newer heights of success!

Vishal Gupta, Managing Director, Mantra Ventures said

We are confident of the global potential of the technology which tends to evangelize and facilitate real time two way interactions with the audience through second screen. Eywa Media, with the help of its technology and global network tend to re-define the protocols for audience engagement and will mark the commencement of a new chapter in the world of media using digital signal processing technologies.

Lalit Ahuja, Founder, Kyron Accelerator said

Eywa Media’s product ushers a new wave of technological disruption for the media industry and Kyron is excited to partner with them and help them realize the full potential of their product. The power of strategic storytelling to consumers across all platforms from broadcasters to retailers will create a compelling environment for customer engagement and we’re confident of Ram and his team’s ability to execute this on a global scale.

Giving an investors’ perspective, Harshad Lahoti, Founder & CEO of ah! Ventures

As the world gets further connected through multiple devices, the ability to analyze data in real time and give actionable intelligence to marketers and broadcasters becomes super critical. Eywa Media’s patent-able audio detection technology algorithm opens up a whole new opportunity by allowing unlimited multi-screen conversations in real time across TV, Radio, Web TV, Cinema, OOH, Live Concert etc; this strategy is in line with where the world is moving towards – multiple screens, multiple networks and truly connected real time ecosystem! This, in my opinion, the future of consumer engagement. We at ah! Ventures had no second thoughts on wanting to be early investors in Eywa Media as we are confident or their technology and also their ability to create significant shareholder value.

About Eywa Media

Eywa Media is a leading digital signal processing technology startup which leads audience interaction and engagement measurement along with deep analytics using sophisticated audio detection technology for Brands, Broadcasters, Devices, SIM’s, Advertisers, Production Houses, Agencies etc across connected devices using its patent pending EywaConnect TV+ cloud platform! For more information, please visit Eywa Media

FreeCharge, India’s leading digital payments platform, announced that it now has 1 Million customers. Customer roll-out of the FreeCharge Wallet was initiated on 25th September, making this wallet the first in the country to achieve this milestone within 5 days of customer roll-out. The early used cases observed are for utility bill payments like mobile recharge, electricity bill payments and online shopping.

FreeCharge

Excited about the achievement, Govind Rajan, Chief Operating Officer, FreeCharge and Chief Strategy Officer, Snapdeal said

We have hit the 1 million mark, that too within a week of roll-out. This is the fastest not just for wallets but for any digital product! This milestone is a testimony to the trust that consumers have on FreeCharge. Speed and security are two pillars of the consumer experience.

With FreeCharge Wallet customers are able to make their transaction within 10 seconds. FreeCharge is compliant with leading industry standards like PCI DSS, making FreeCharge the quickest and most secure wallet.

We are focused on building habit commerce and through our focus on partnerships we believe that we will create the most compelling consumer experience.

FreeCharge wallet is powered by cutting edge technology. It is a robust and flexible platform that leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code & BLE to create a most intuitive consumer experience.

About FreeCharge

FreeCharge is India’s leading digital platform for recharge and utility payments which provides prepaid, post-paid, DTH and Electricity bill payment for almost all Indian service providers. FreeCharge was founded in 2010 by Kunal ShahSandeep Tandon and had received funding of over $120 million in the last 4 years. In the largest acquisition in the consumer Internet space yet, Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge in Apr’15 resulting in India’s largest m-commerce ecosystem.  For more details, please visit FreeCharge

All of us love the movie Taare Zameen Par, the movie touched our hearts because of the “Teacher Student” chemistry. The movie had a very interesting dialogue “Every kid has his/her own share of likes & dislikes. It is left up to us to capitalize on that passion by encouraging them”.

The teacher [Aamir Khan] could identify Ishan’s passion for drawing. He went an extra mile to maneuver his teaching style to suit Ishan’s needs [or a dyslexic kid] which helped the child a lot. In the end as we all know, Ishan excelled both in drawing & studies; thanks to his teacher 🙂

Every person has that one ‘Special Teacher’ in their life who has inspired and motivated them to follow their passion. Every child is unique and has his/her own talents. With changing times and fast moving life, parents/teachers find it difficult to locate a suitable activity hub to nurture their child’s talent.

KleverKid, an innovative after-school startup aims to bridge this connect between parents and the activity hubs by keeping the parents informed about the best after-school programs happening in the city. It plans to democratize learning by helping parents to find the best tutor, workshop, skating master, programs etc. to nurture child’s abilities.

Today we have a look at KleverKid which can be loosely termed as “Helping hand for parents to get the best out of their kids” 🙂

Hyper-local Education marketplace

The biggest problem parents face when they move to a new city or new apartment is “How do I find a suitable tutor for my kid”? KleverKid comes in very handy in this scenario. Being a resident of Bangalore [Whitefield area], we performed a search on KleverKid for “Academics & Sports” program-type and the results were encouraging.

The interesting aspect is that it also shows “The distance between your location & the selected institution/club”. This gives a feel-good factor for the parents [lesser the distance, better for them]. The information on the facilities provided by the selected institute was up-to-date & we could further filter out the options at micro-level.

Ratings, Reviews & more

Whether it is going for movies or ordering food online, reviews and ratings have played a pivotal role for driving user growth and ensuring transparency. The “Social” feature plays a crucial role in influencing the consumer behavior. This feature was very much required on KleverKid.

Instead of relying on Word-Of-Mouth, parents can now rely on the ratings/reviews given by others on the platform. We would love to see a “Verified” icon [similar to JD Verified on JustDial] to add another level of confidence for it’s users.

Social Sharing

With the increased penetration of WhatsApp, it is a medium that is hard to ignore. Parents using KleverKid can share details of a particular tutor/feedback to others via WhatsApp which would definitely prove beneficial for others.

Along with WhatsApp, users have options to share feedback on Facebook, LinkedIn & other social media channels.

Couple of features which we feel could have been incorporated:

  1. Actual photographs of the facilities shared by existing users. This would drive more user adoption.
  2. An option to compare services based on price/feedback/facilities.

If you are looking out for after-school programs or tutors for your kids, do give KleverKid a spin & share your feedback in the comments section.

When I started blogging around 10+ years back, the blog was hosted on blog-spot. There was no dependency about tracking utilized web space, down-time etc. since it was all taken care by none other than Google 🙂 But when we finally decided to move from blog-post to self-hosted blog, the critical search for good hosting provider begun. There are ocean of choices when it comes to hosting a website, which makes this search even more difficult.

When we had to narrow down on the choice of hosting company, we evaluated them on the following standard parameters:

Back-end Support is the most under-rated term but that plays a very crucial role in the long-term. If the hosting provider’s website did not have a Toll-Free number or Customer-Care’s email-id mentioned in the header, we did not even consider looking at other factors. It was also very important that hosting provider has “Dedicated Team” for Indian customers.

After committing initial mistakes in selection, this blog was finally hosted on HostGator. Now, we are considering to shift to a new provider – Hosting Raja since it offers a compelling proposition. Today, we have a look at Hosting Raja & how it can be your one-stop shop for web-hosting services 🙂

Bird’s eye view of Hosting Raja

Hosting Raja is a leading and reliable web hosting provider based out of India. It offers economical & sustainable services for web-hosting & domain registration.

It is a decade old-company specialized in web-development with headquarters in Bengaluru. They claim to provide 99.9% up-time which has resulted in 1000’s of satisfied customers.

Though they provide the cheapest hosting plans, their focus is on “Quality” rather than “Quantity”. Hosting Raja promises 30 days unconditional money-back guarantee since it aims to build a customer-focused brand.

Flexible Hosting Plans

Hosting Raja offers various web-hosting services i.e. WordPress hosting, Linux Hosting, Windows Hosting, Magento hosting for e-commerce customers etc. The complete list of their service’s can be found here

Whether you are a blogger or an e-commerce company, Hosting Raja has plans that suit your budget requirements. In fact, the flexibility to seamlessly shift from one plan to another is an added advantage !!

Features included in “Premium Unlimited”, “Premium Gold” & ” “Unlimited” Plans are as follows:

For newbie’s they offer the “Starter Plan” which costs around Rs. 69/month. The “Silver Plan” mainly caters to the Start-up & SME segment which costs around Rs. 99/month. The “Gold Plan” caters to corporate clients which costs around Rs. 29/month.

Reliability  and Customer Support

Hosting Raja offers a guaranteed 99.9% up-time using High Availability or Fail Over environment. Web outage can result in heavy-losses to a company & hence, reliability & continuous up-time plays a pivotal role.

As mentioned earlier, technical support is of prime importance & Hosting Raja provides 24*7 customer support. They are available on toll-free number 1800-258-8000. Customer can also get support via chat. Support is provided in Hindi, English, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu & other local languages.

If you do not get immediate support, you also have the flexibility of “Call-Back” where you just leave your number & Hosting Raja customer care team would get back to you.

Special Offers

Hosting Raja provides interesting offers which are hard to resist. Their hosting plans are built to suit the requirements from a small website to a large online store. You can find the complete list of offers here

Closing Comments

Hosting Raja provides range of plans to suit the needs of it’s varied clientele.  They have won Top Pick Web Hosts 2012 & Best Re-seller Hosting 2010 awards for their customer-centric approach.

Whether you are newbie blogger/Startup/corporate, Hosting Raja caters to all your web-hosting requirements!!

Isn’t it a common man’s problem to not keep the records straight associated with any product we buy?. Prodkt provides a quick and easy way to record product information and track warranty. Prodkt  App lets users add products, track warranty, receive deals and request service on a tap.

The product promo is below:

They have gathered information of close to 20,000 models across categories with the list growing rapidly. Their plan is to automate or verify warranty claims with deeper integration with dealers in upcoming releases.

Features of Prodkt

  • Add a product in 2 simple steps
  • Track Warranty duration and Receive Warranty Expiry Notifications
  • Maintain purchase information such as dealer info and invoice copy
  • View nearest authorized center
  • Read and Write reviews for a product
  • Receive Personalized deals based on the user products
  • Raise a Service request on a tap
  • Receive quotes, compare and Award
  • Track complete service history

Prodkt is a brainchild of Crayon’d, a product development studio with a track record of producing awesomeness over 3 years and worked with some of the promising start-ups in India.

Do give Prodkt a spin & leave your feedback in the comments section.