All Posts in Technology

|In: Entrepreneurship|Last Updated:

EduKart, India’s leading education marketplace has raised US $1 Million from Holostik Group’s United Finsec (family office arm), Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan Ventures and prominent early stage fund 500 Startups.

Existing investors including Vijay Shekhar Sharma [Founder, PayTM], Manish Kheterpal [Ex Director of Providence Equity Partners], Amit Patni & Arihant Patni of Patni family and Stanford Business School’s alumni angels have also participated in the current round.

The total education sector of India is pegged over US $60 Billion, with approximately 50% in higher education sector, 40% in K12 sector and 10% in coaching, skilling and other non-formal areas with thousands of educational institutions and companies in each of these areas.

Edukart

Speaking about the funding, Ishan Gupta, CEO of EduKart.com, who is a Stanford University (USA) alumnus, ex Facebook employee & early Paytm team member said

Over the last year, EduKart has partnered with more than 90 course providers to promote and drive enrollments in more than 2000 courses in K12, entrance coaching, degrees, diplomas, short courses and industry relevant certifications through the marketplace. The incoming funds will be utilized for further upgrading the marketplace platform, increasing course portfolio and strengthening marketing efforts.

The list of course providers listed on EduKart is long and impressive including  Vidyamandir, Aakash, Jamboree, Toppr, Brilliant Tutorials, Indian School of Business, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, School Guru, Vskills, Copal Partners, Digital Vidya, Knowledge Woods who are all leading course providers in  their respective domains.

Ankit Gupta, head of strategy and investments for Holostik Group & alumnus of Harvard Business School said

While on one hand, EduKart has been successful in helping students and parents make informed education related decisions, on the other it has given various course providers a platform to expand their reach to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities across India. Through its services like dedicated counselling support and flexible payment options, EduKart is establishing itself as a go-to destination for figuring out one’s educational needs.

Commenting on the funding, Yuvraj Singh, ace cricketer & founder of YouWeCan Ventures said

I am really excited to be a part of the EduKart journey. I have always believed that following your passion is very important in life. At the same time, a focus on education is also a must in today’s cut throat competitive environment. EduKart can really become your trusted partner in making the right choices.

Pankaj Jain of 500 Startups added

Education spending is on the rise among the tech savvy Indian middle class. I believe that the online distribution of education products and services will have significant growth in the coming years. The highly effective EduKart team is ideally positioned to execute on this opportunity with a very strong course portfolio and mind-share amongst prospective students.

The company has attracted top tier talent from the likes of Google, Pearson PLC, Wiley, Monster Inc to join in leadership positions and build various functions of the company. In the next three years, EduKart is looking to drive gross enrolment sales of over $100 million for its course providers, by enrolling 100,000+ students annually.

For more information, please visit EduKart

|In: Funding|Last Updated:

Cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s investment fund YouWeCan Ventures has acquired a stake in online healthcare marketplace Healthians

Healthians.com helps users discover affordable healthcare, using quality and price transparency. It aggregates diagnostic labs, crowd sourced sample collectors and nearby doctors, as well as makes patients’ medical records available online.

In another industry first, apart from tying up with leading medical labs chains, it is creating Healthians branded lab network in association with labs that will offer standardised pricing, processes and user experience.

healthians-com
Speaking about the investment, Yuvraj Singh said

Having gone through life threatening medical condition, I’m extremely keen to promote preventive healthcare in India. While most of us today have an online social profile or an online professional profile, there’s a large need to use technology to create & track individual health profile. I’m excited to see Healthians trying to solve this problem.

Raj Airey, Founding Partner, Healthstart – an existing investor in Healthians said

We like Healthians’ founders’ vision and execution, and the fact that they’re receiving strong support from entire healthcare ecosystem. Best labs, top hospitals, leading chemists and doctors are tying up, which is a strong validation of the business model. Health tech space is of prime significance to us, and we expect Healthians to become a dominant player through organic and inorganic route over next few quarters.

Speaking about the funding, Deepak Sahni, Founder & CEO, Healthians said

For a healthcare brand, there can be no better partner that Yuvraj Singh, and we are delighted to have him on-board. We will do our best to achieve his dream of taking preventive healthcare to everyone across the entire country.

Healthians’ proprietary self-assessment software ‘Healthians PLUS’ has been created with the help of leading doctors along with software engineers. Users fill online questionnaire, followed by free personal visit by a Wellness Consultant for further screening. The software establishes user’s personal health score, recommends future health checks, and tracks each user’s health over his lifetime.

Diagnostic market in India is approximately $5bn industry, with over a million tests being conducted daily according to an IBEF 2015 study. While the scope of Healthians’ service is large, the business model is asset light.

The hyper local sample collectors and doctors are crowd sourced. Apart from preventive care, the site also caters to chronic patients and patients recommended tests by Doctors.

The portal has received good response from users, with huge savings over original lab prices. The initial growth has been 100 percent MOM and recently it won ‘eTailer of the year’ award for Healthcare category.

Future Plans

In an industry first, company is targeting to form a network of over 1000 Healthians’ branded labs & help them in enhancing capacity utilisation through demand aggregation and technology support, with the first ones slated to come up in over 20 cities including Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. It also plans to tie up with 2000 pharmacy stores to enable them to offer Diagnostic Tests along with medicine sales to their customers.

While currently focused in Delhi NCR, the company is already catering to customers in 22 cities in India and plans to expand this to over 50 cities. The company plans to profile over 1 million users for HealthiansPLUS, crowd source over 1000 mobile Health Advisor’s, and conduct more than 200,000 tests in next 8 to 12 months.

[Image Credit – Healthians]

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated:

ITC Infotech, a leading global IT services & solutions company and a fully owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd has announced the launch of iTech 2015, an annual technology conference platform to foster technology innovation.

The hackathon will provide participants with an opportunity to develop ideas to prototypes across a wide range of business challenges. This platform is also a testimony to ITC Infotech’s commitment towards accelerating innovation in disruptive technology areas.

ITC_Tech_Startup

Aimed at boosting talent amongst technology enthusiasts and providing an acceleration platform for entrepreneurs, ITC Infotech is seeking to engage with innovators and will partner with the winners to help them develop the solution, create a joint go-to market and provide market access. The programme is part of the company’s larger initiative to encourage and nurture start-ups.

About iTech 2015

An entry free competition, iTech 2015 IoT hackathon is a team-based event. Participation is open to students, professionals and developers and IoT start-ups, who will go through a short-listing and selection process. Teams can register on the iTech 2015 registration site and submit their IoT solution idea, post which ITC Infotech will notify the short-listed entries.

As part of the iTech 2015 platform this year, ITC Infotech will organise a 2-day IoT hackathon at its campus in Bengaluru on 4th & 5th July.

Competition categories at iTech 2015

Smart Retail – Retail is about continuously enhancing customer shopping experience. It is also about ensuring availability & visibility of stocks, specifically in Consumer Goods. Entries in this category can focus on anything from stock keeping and inventory management to in-store customer experience. Selected teams will be provided with actual retail display shelves, using which their solutions can be demonstrated to solve this real-world challenge.

Smart Manufacturing – Entrants should create a solution to constantly monitor and predict in real-time the health of machines and equipment to enable proactive servicing and avoid disruption of manufacturing units. Entries and solution ideas can also be shared on creating smart manufacturing units and assembly lines, which can utilise analytics to optimise the production process – a step towards realising the ‘Make in India’ drive.

Smart Supply Chains – Entries should have ideas on how IoT solutions can help create a smarter supply chain – warehouse, inventory management, transportation, planning and tracking, demand-planning, etc.

Smart Agriculture – Entries should have IoT solutions that provide feedback/recommend corrective action from remote farms to research laboratories for agriculture.

Open Category – For entries on IoT ideas that do not fall in the challenge areas mentioned above. ITC Infotech’s panel of experts will assess the submission on the strength of the business case presented and its viability for companies to adopt and implement.

Commenting on the event launch, Ms. Sushma Rajagopalan, CEO & MD, ITC Infotech, said

iTech 2015 is one of our multi-dimensional initiatives for encouraging innovation and boosting tech entrepreneurship. This year’s theme is the “connected world” and “Internet of Things”. We have created this platform to aid participants in developing prototypes of their ideas to address real-world business challenges. We will nurture some of the relevant ideas in our Innovation Lab to drive competitive advantage for ITC’s businesses or our clients’ businesses.

The winners and runners up will be awarded a cash prize of Rs. 2,00,000 & Rs. 1,00,000 respectively.

For more information on iTech 2015, please visit iTech 2015 official page

[Image Credit – iTech 2015]

|In: Android|Last Updated:

Zoho has launched Zoho ShowTime, a web and mobile app focused completely on making better presenters out of speakers. Presenters now can engage with their audience, drive self-improvement through feedback and showcase their work on a secure cloud platform.

With Zoho ShowTime running on computers or mobile devices, audiences can view and participate in presentations as they interact with presenters. Presenters, meanwhile, can view participant engagement, activity and appreciation—at the slide level—so they can improve their presentations like never before.

A video overview of Zoho ShowTime is below

Diving into the product, Vijay Sundaram says

Presentation software for decades has focused exclusively on creating pretty presentations,” said , chief strategy officer of Zoho. “The focus has been on graphics and special effects rather than on tools that engage. Who needs yet another twist-and-turn animation?

That traditional approach misses the goal of most presenters, who don’t just want to create presentations. They want to talk with their audiences—not at them. They want to understand the messages that worked and those that didn’t, so they can improve their material and tactics over time. However, the disconnect between vendor offerings and presenter objectives leaves audiences in a slideshow stupor and presenters in the dark.

During a presentation, attendees use Zoho ShowTime to ask questions, vote on slides, and even go back and revisit slides to cement their understanding. Presenters can step out from the confinement of the lecturn, roam the room, and connect with people. Later, they can examine audience activity, like ratings and questions, to assess what worked and what didn’t.

Zoho ShowTime: How It Works

To turn a presentation into a conversation, presenters upload their PowerPoint or PDF files into Zoho ShowTime. Presentations can also be created using Zoho Show, the cloud-based presentation software. At the start, the presenter assigns a key that audience members use for secure access from their computers or mobile phones.

During the presentation, Zoho ShowTime gives audiences many ways to remain engaged. They can go back slides, “like” individual slides, pose questions, and rate the presentation at the end of the session.

The speakers can leave the podium, interact with the audience, and control the presentations from a smart phone. Zoho ShowTime ensures that the speaker is always in control and not interrupted by all this engagement. Speakers, at their discretion, may select questions, project them on the screen and drive interaction whenever they choose.

After the presentation, Zoho ShowTime provides the speaker with a dashboard of detailed analysis of the presentation with insights into audience engagement. For example, speakers can observe the slides that received the most likes, those where audiences spent the most time, look at overall ratings, and more.

Zoho ShowTime is transformative presentation software. It restores the engagement between speakers and their audiences that robotic presentation technology has robbed.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho ShowTime is available immediately for free in desktop, iOS and Android versions. The Zoho ShowTime apps for presenters is available here [iOS] & here [Android]. The Zoho ShowTime apps for viewers are available here [iOS] & here [Android]

For more information on Zoho ShowTime, please visit official link

|In: Android|Last Updated:

Online and mobile ads are one of the biggest threats IT security this year, Trend Micro has revealed in its Q1 2015 round-up.

The company’s latest report, Bad Ads and Zero-Days: Re-emerging Threats Challenge Trust in Supply Chains and Best Practices, has revealed that ad-ware on mobile devices is the top threat in the mobile category – although Trend Micro has identified a mammoth five million Android threats to date. It is, however, predicting this will rise to eight million by the end of this year.

trend-micro-logo

Zero-day exploits are the biggest threat to desktop systems, but again, these are related to advertising and, in particular, are being used on adverts in Adobe software. This means victims don’t even need to head to a malicious site for their computer to be infected.

Dhanya Thakkar, Managing Director, APAC, Trend Micro says

It is clear 2015 is shaping up to be noteworthy in terms of volume, ingenuity and sophistication of attacks..It is clear businesses and individuals alike need to be proactive in protecting against threats. As a business, how would your IT-Security policies look like in a Zero Trust Environment? An aggressive and different security posture is critical to keep financial, personal and intellectual property safe.

In the enterprise space, Trend Micro said the healthcare sector was most at risk of cyber attacks, specifically in iOS and POS system applications. However, these types of threats have existed for the last few years and it would appear that their widespread nature is down to companies not being prepared for such assaults.

The question we have to ask is, ‘are we doing enough to protect ourselves from security threats? While we need to constantly update our systems to protect against new attacks, the first quarter of 2015 clearly showed we need to also watch out for older threats, and how no industry or system should feel exempt.

You can download the complete report from here

About Trend Micro

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in security software, strives to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Trend Micro enables the smart protection of information, with innovative security technology that is simple to deploy and manage, and fits an evolving ecosystem. Their solutions are powered by cloud-based global threat intelligence, the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ infrastructure & are supported by more than 1,200 threat experts around the globe.  For more information, visit TrendMicro

|In: Marketing|Last Updated:

When it comes to smartphone, I still own age old Samsung Galaxy Note-I. When I purchased the device, the App Ecosystem was not so mature but now, Fast-Forward 2015; my device is VERY low on memory & installing/updating existing apps is a hurricane task.

I used Any.Do for Task Management since the app works like a breeze. However due to memory issues, I had to uninstall the App.

AnyDo_Logo

As humans, we always appreciate if someone addresses us by name i.e. instead of writing “Hi” in email, “Hi Himanshu” sounds much better since it is more PERSONAL. Upon un-installation, I received an e-mail from the CEO of Any.Do requesting me to “Come back to Any.Do” & the message was innovative & personal 🙂

[Click on the image below]

Email from Any.Do for user retention

This email definitely created a LARGER impact since it was addressed to the “User” & might act as a catalyst for “User Retention” [Insightful discussion on User Retention here]

|In: Android|Last Updated:

HDFC Bank launched PayZapp, a payment solution that will revolutionize the way payments and purchases are done on-the-go today using mobile devices. You can pay with One Click for all your spends, from mobile phone top-ups, to instant money transfers, to bill payments, to groceries, to even big-ticket purchases such as foreign holidays and designer clothes.

Within PayZapp is Smart-Buy, a virtual mega marketplace that has every type of product available, from those that fulfill daily requirements to those that meet aspirational needs, just the way a mall has.

HDFC-PayZap

The launch of PayZapp & SmartBuy is the latest initiative in HDFC Bank’s digital banking offering christened #GoDigital. It aligns with the Bank’s core digital theme of ‘Bank aapki muthi mein’, which places the power of banking in the hands of the customer.

Features of PayZapp + SmartBuy

  • SmartBuy is a ONE-STOP shop on your mobile for all deals and offers by prominent e-commerce portals such as Flipkart, MakeMytrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, Big Basket, DTH & bill pay facilities.
  • PayZapp is the country’s first ONE CLICK payment solution that ensures fast and easy checkout using a single PIN.
  • In PayZapp, credit or debit card numbers and their security codes are not required to be entered with every purchase.
  • In addition, PayZapp maps the device with the card number to determine authenticity of a transaction, thus enhancing security.
  • With PayZapp, users can transfer money instantly to anybody using mobile number, email ids
  • In-app creation of NetSafe Virtual International Card
  • No restriction on daily / monthly limits as payments are done through linked cards

Speaking about the new launch, Parag Rao, Business Head, Payment Products & Merchant Acquiring Services said

PayZapp is path breaking. For the customer, whose world has now converged on his mobile device, this innovation will mean that he’ll be able to do every type of payment and purchase from a single App with a single PIN, whenever and wherever he wants, without worrying about prepayment and re-loading. Like all our innovations, the genesis of this platform is customer convenience.

As part of our Bank aap ki muththi mein initiative, this product is another major digital leap. In fact, the customer will find it is not only the #PowerofBanking which is in his muththi, but effectively the whole world.

As of FY 2014-15, 63% of all transactions at HDFC Bank are conducted through digital channels.

Do give PayZapp a spin & share your experience in the comments section…

|In: BigRock|Last Updated:

BigRock, one of India’s leading domain registrars, has announced the launch of their new marketing campaign in collaboration with the .ASIA registry. The campaign started with the launch of a brand new commercial to promote the .ASIA domain extension to small and medium businesses in the country.

The commercial conceptualized and produced by ideas@work, communicates the strong relevance of the .ASIA domain extension for businesses that wish to establish their digital footprint on a global scale and increase relevance amongst potential customers in Asia.

Using BigRock’s trademark tongue-in-cheek communication style, the film showcases the potential adoption of traditional Indian products in other Asian markets.

Shashank Mehrotra, General Manager and Business Head, BigRock India, commented

India is currently witnessing the dawn of a digital era through the combination of rapid internet penetration, government initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures. This means that a large number of businesses will seek to establish an online presence in an effort to reach a wider audience. Our latest campaign aims to reach out to consumers who wish for a more localized version of the internet medium.

With businesses constantly looking to strengthen and promote their brand, the .ASIA extension will help them towards targeting local markets and establishing their presence online to reach out to millions of potential customers in Asia.

With over 1 billion Internet users registered in Asia alone, statistics indicate that overall Internet penetration in the region is still at less than 35%.

Launched in 2007, .ASIA has grown substantially to become one of the leading domain extensions in the world with over 300,000 registered domains. Since its launch, BigRock has seen a steady growth in the demand for .ASIA domain names, and the new campaign is only expected to see this trend continue.

As part of the campaign, BigRock is offering .ASIA domains at just Rs. 99/- per year.

About BigRock

BigRock, an ICANN accredited registrar and hosting company, is a leading provider of web-presence solutions to small-businesses, professionals and individuals. It’s product portfolio includes – domain registration, web-hosting services, Personal email services & Business Email services, website builder products, Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and digital certificates