All Posts in Technology

|In: Food-Commerce|Last Updated:

With an intention of solving the million dollar question of ‘what’s for lunch or dinner today’ for professionals and metro families, Bite Club, a Gurgaon-based chef-designed virtual restaurant is offering affordable home-style wholesome meals handmade by an expert community of chefs using the freshest ingredients. The guilt-free meals, desserts, and drinks are delivered straight from the kitchens of home chefs, recipe bloggers, ex- restaurateurs, professional chefs and many more.

BiteClub

The unique concept of Bite Club was initiated and implemented by three young engineers Prateek Agarwal, Aushim Krishan and Siddharth Sharma who during their bachelor days had no access to fresh and high-quality food. This prompted them to introduce an exclusive ‘restaurant in the cloud’: a virtual restaurant.

Prateek Agarwal, the CEO and Founder, Bite Club commented

A majority of times, people in metro cities have no access to good food and are left with an unpleasant experience when they order from restaurants. They also end up spending exorbitant amounts for the food they consume, which is mostly unhealthy with no guarantee of freshness or novelty. We at Bite Club celebrate good food and cater to those who are fans of variety and taste. We understand our patrons very well and our purpose is to fix their dilemma of access to delectable and appetizing food made with fresh produce. What’s more! We make sure that there is no minimum value to place an order.

Carrying certain traits of both a restaurant and a Tiffin service, Bite Club is not conventionally one or the other. Instead, it can be termed as a technology and logistics platform that efficiently connects the chefs to the consumers.

Within one year of its dawn, Bite Club has remarkably served over 25000 meals to 2000+ customers. Aiming to take its services beyond Gurgaon, it envisages delivering its sumptuous lunch and dinner boxes to every city of India and possibly even beyond.

Bite Club Android App can be downloaded from here

About Bite Club

Bite Club is a Gurgaon-based chef designed virtual restaurant which facilitates its native presence through android, iOS and web apps. It was brought into existence in November 2014 by three young engineers Prateek Agarwal, Aushim Krishan, merely a year after graduating from IIT alongwith Siddharth Sharma from NTU (Singapore). Bite Club was galvanized to fix the dilemma of access to delectable and appetizing food made with fresh produce. Sticking to their mantra of serving “Wholesome meals handmade by an expert community of chefs using the freshest ingredients,” it veers from regular restaurant fare. Bite Club lauds good and interesting food featuring a daily rotating lunch and dinner menu of sumptuous meals, desserts and drinks designed and prepared by chefs who promise innovation and variety with every meal.

[Image Credit – Bite Club]

|In: SocialMedia|Last Updated:

In the past, there have been several articles on this blog where we mentioned how important “Digital Media” has become to anyone’s business. Social Media is now playing an important role in “customer buying behavior” & customer-sentiment echoes about your brand and might affect “buying behavior of prospective customers”.

Social media marketing is hailed as one of the best ways to promote a start up. It is cheap, relatively easy and pretty effective in helping a company establish its own identity and brand. While there are certainly many benefits to social media marketing, truly benefiting from your efforts requires a certain level of skill and dedication. With the wrong approach, your social media presence could even harm your fledgling business.

How many times have we deleted an item from a cart on e-commerce websites after reading customer reviews or seller reviews etc ? Social Media has become an important tool for ensuring that you get repeat/new customers, solving customer pain-points & getting useful feedback from them. In a nutshell – “Listening to customers & Monitoring your brand on Social Media channels would directly/indirectly affect sales“. It is also a channel to WoW your customers 🙂

social_media_monitoring

In this article, we share some of the tips which would help your start-up in making most of Social Media & maximizing results in Monitoring.

Choose,Focus & Focus

Social Media has evolved rapidly due to which daily we see startups claiming to be the next Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This indicates that there are options however, choosing the right platform for your brand & it’s nature of business [B2B or B2C] is of prime importance. It would be better to start small, listen, track and than spread your wings. If you are a startup dealing with Jewellery or any product dealing with aesthetics, than instagram is a great platform in which case, instagram analytics would be of prime importance.

Interact, Build relations & increase business

In many cases, the ultimate goal of social media marketing is to increase exposure, drive traffic and create leads. This leads to some misconceptions on how to use the platform. Simply promoting yourself everywhere you can will only find a small level of success. The true power in social media lies in building relationships, establishing authority & offering benefits to subscribers. Monitoring what is being said about your brand & interacting with your subscribers creates a very positive influence. Social Media monitoring tools like ThoughtBuzz can come in very handy in this case. The tool gives detailed analysis & insights into the reach, engagement hence, RoI for different social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Monitor Influencers

Opening a social media account is just the first step for your startup. As a startup, there should be responsible, timely & active participation on the channel. A great way to do this is to find other relevant social media accounts, blogs, sites and services and mention them on your social media feeds. You need to identify the social media influencers – A i.e. identify relevant social media accounts, blogs & services and mention them on your social media feeds.

ThoughtBuzz has a good feature that helps you identify the “social media stalwarts” who matter the most for your brand based on the interactions of the fans with the community.

In a nutshell, Social Media cannot be ignored and at the same time, it needs to be monitored with the right set of tools. In this article, we have a look at ThoughtBuzz which suffices all our requirements.

ThoughtBuzz is an interactive social media management tool which has been launched by ThoughtBuzz, a Singapore based creative digital agency, with office in Delhi, Mumbai in India. We review the tool & mention some of the salient features which would make Social Media Management easier for professionals.

Dashboard

Once we login to ThoughtBuzz it prompts you to enter details about the presence of the brand on different social media channels. Users have the options to add profiles for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Once added, user can monitor them at periodic basis.

User Feed

The latest ThoughtBuzz interface focusses on “Real Time Communication” where it would give you real-time notifications on the latest user activities across your social profiles on Facebook and Twitter. This can help the brand manager to filter the important messages & also ensure that there is timely communication.

ThoughtBuzz_2_1

Influencers identification & Content Insights

As mentioned before, “Influencers” are the one’s that matter the most for the brand. It could be a positive or negative sentiment that might be generated by the user on Social Media channels. But it becomes necessary to have key insights of your content available on people who are helping taking your content viral on these channels.

ThoughtBuzz_2_1

Conclusion

Just to summarize, there is no special Mantra to achieve success on Social Media. Certain tactics might work for the competitors however, might not work for your startup. Identify the right hash tags, make timely announcements, identify the influencers & convert passive audience into active audience so that you get the most of your social media channels. At every point, use Social Media Monitoring tools to track & re-iterate your online strategy.

Image Source – Web-Live.it

|In: Management|Last Updated:

EdX, the online learning initiative founded by Harvard and MIT, had earlier announced its association with IIM Bangalore as the first Indian B-school member in its distinguished group of xConsortium members across the globe. As a result of this partnership, IIM Bangalore has now launched an exciting range of courses aimed at leveraging new technologies and delivering education via MOOCs with edX.

IIMB

Speaking about the association, Anant Agarwal, CEO, edX said

We are excited to announce the launch of these exciting and innovative courses by IIM Bangalore on the edX platform. India is an important market for us, and is home to the largest population of edX learners outside of the United States. We are pleased that IIM Bangalore has launched their courses on our platform. With this partnership, we aim to expand the learning horizon for our learners in India and around the world.

IIMBx is starting with four courses as its first offerings on edX, out of which two courses will be launching in July 2015 followed by one in August 2015 and one in October 2015. All courses are now open for enrolment. The courses will help students learn and acquire different skills for Business, IT, Statistics and Operations Management.

Courses offered via IIMBx

Innovation and IT Management, a 6-week course, will start in July 2015 and will teach key decision-making skills to better manage and implement IT and innovation in workplace. This course will cover basic concepts of information technology management and would be useful for anyone who is using IT in their organization, building or is planning to build IT-enabled products or services. Dr. Rahul De would be the instructor for this course, who is the Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor in ICT for Sustainable Economic Development at IIM Bangalore.

Statistics for Business, a 5-week course, starting in July, 2015 will be an introductory course to statistics and will examine data from the perspective of business scenarios and will demonstrate how to apply that data to make better decisions. It will be Part 1 of a 4-part series on Business Statistics, and would be ideal for learners who wish to enroll in business programs. This course will be taught by three instructors: Shankar Venkatagiri, Ishita Kumar and Sunil Kunduru.

Part-2 of this series, Statistics for Business – II, will be a 6-week course to examine data drawn from allied fields of business such as Finance and HR, and will teach how to simulate data to follow a specified distribution. It will launch later this year.

Apart from this, there is going to be another course, on Introduction to Operations Management, which will be a 7-week course starting in August, 2015 and will teach key aspects of business operations and lean management, including capacity, productivity, quality, and supply chain and will be taught by B. Mahadevan.

Students who register for these courses, will have the option to either pursue an honour code for free (with complete access to all course material, tests, and online discussion forum), or pursue a Verified Certificate of Achievement for about Rs. 1,500.

EdX offers more than 500 courses in many areas of study, including the arts and humanities, public health, law, maths & computer science. Faculty and staff from more than 70 partner institutions teach on the edX platform, and over 400,000 certificates have been earned by edX students.

More details about IIMBx are available here

About edX

EdX is a non-profit, open-source enterprise offering online courses from more than 60 member institutions, composed of both leading global universities and colleges and a diverse group of prominent organizations from around the world. Founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edX is focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through ground breaking methodologies, game-like experiences and cutting-edge research on an open-source platform

[Image Credit – IIMB]

|In: General|Last Updated:

CompuBrain, an India based company dealing with Technology Consultancy and a Social Media Marketer, today announced its new venture, a domain name firm called BrandingSquare

BrandingSquareBrandingSquare specializes in representation and acquisition of premium domain names that offers the service of buying the Internet domains to established companies as well as entrepreneurs. The site gives the web entrepreneurs an economical and an easy way to get the right web address for the right price.

It is a site for the domain industry where users can buy the domain name as well as get the corporate identity and the website designed at a reasonable price.

Speaking about the launch, founder Bijoy Patel said

We are excited to launch BrandingSquare, because the market has immense potential. In this extremely cluttered market, BrandingSquare helps you in searching for some premium domain names that best suits your business; it helps you personalize your web address by giving credibility and an easy access for people to find you on the website.

As they say that .coms are never going to extinct, hence, we have been constantly thinking of various words, sounds and characteristics which led to many interesting domain names. The random five letter domain name increases the chances of a good domain name and produces pronounceable and memorable domain names.

There is a vast importance of domain names as it helps build your reputation and gives further boost to your brand value and your business.

For more information please visit BrandingSquare

About CompuBrain 

CompuBrain is an India based company dealing with Technology Consultancy, Domain Registration, Website Designing, Website Hosting, Email Hosting, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Information Systems Security.

As a company, we are widely perceived to be dedicatedly people oriented. Founder, Bijoy Patel calls this source of inspiration “Focus on winning people, Awards, Certificates & money, are by products”. In his own words: “This decade is not about how good we WORK, it is about how good we NETWORK”. We practice this philosophy by not only driving each of our businesses towards competitiveness but by also consciously contributing to enhancing the ambitiousness of the larger value chain of which it is a part.

[Image Credit – BrandingSquare]

|In: Education|Last Updated:

Akosha, a messaging platform for all consumer-to-business interactions, is now extending its services to students who are seeking admission in Delhi University. Through the Akosha app, they can chat with experts and have all their queries and doubts regarding the DU admission process answered within minutes.

At present, Akosha is receiving 500 queries per day and its Facebook page for the initiative already has over 10,000 likes.

Akosha

The idea behind the initiative is to save students some anxiety and trouble that has become a common feature of getting admissions into the most popular and prestigious university of the country. Now, instead of running around in the heat from pillar to post, trying to get clarity on their basic doubts, they can sit in the comfort of their homes and just ask the Akosha experts through their mobile apps.

The questions that students ask range from basic queries about important dates, admission tests etc. to more vital and oft-confusing questions such as eligibility for various courses and impact of not studying a subject in school on the cut-off.

Speaking on the initiative, Ankur Singla, CEO & Founder, Akosha said

The vision behind the initiative is to leverage the benefits of technology to solve regular pain points of the common man. On the Akosha chat app, we have 7 channels at the moment and this initiative falls into the category of education. This is one domain that is extremely crucial but is often replete with complex procedures and unclear stipulations in our country. Going forward, we will introduce more such campaigns to solve the basic needs of our users.

The experts that Akosha has enlisted are second year students of the University who are well acquainted with all the nitty-gritties involved and are also interacting with heads of departments and attending Open Sessions on campus to be on top of all the happenings. They are therefore in a position to help out students with ready access to all vital information in a few clicks.

Akosha app on Android can be downloaded from here

About Akosha

Akosha is a horizontal platform for all consumers to business interactions. Customers can connect with any businesses using an Akosha mobile app, dedicated customer care helpline and website.

Akosha has received over 40,00,000 consumer queries across sectors, including telecom, consumer appliances, ecommerce, mobile, banking and insurance in 2014. The company has 350+ employees and 3 offices in India.

On the B2B side, Akosha OneDirect is a social CRM platform that helps brands in managing their customer experience across all online channels. In May 2015, Akosha secured $16 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital.

|In: Entrepreneurship|Last Updated:

Taxiforsure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna has invested an undisclosed amount in Mobile Beauty and Wellness Platform Vyomo in its seed funding. This is less than a month after his last day at TaxiForSure, the cab aggregator he and Raghunandan G sold to bigger rival Ola for a neat $200 million.

Vyomo

Vyomo is  his maiden investment. Explaining his excitement, Radhakrishna said

The Beauty & wellness Industry is a large market, ripe for disruption. I decided to invest in Vyomo based on the extremely focused & effective core team led by Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah – they have built an intuitively smooth mobile platform that is way ahead of the competition. Such a high organizational maturity is quite rare for a start-up of this phase.

Vyomo is simplifying Beauty and Wellness Industry by providing the complete fulfillment technology stack for customers and beauty professionals. We have built a curated platform. Thus, despite having more than 1500 Salons on-board, we have opened our platform only to 25% of the verified Salons and Spa in the first phase. Remaining salons are still going through product and process training by our dedicated Account Managers

According to KPMG report, Beauty and Wellness Industry in India will be US$13 billion by 2017 and within MENA region it was US$25.5 billion in 2014 as per the global market intelligence firm Euromonitor International.

Commenting on the development, Yuvraj Singh, an existing investor in Vyomo through his recently founded Youwecan VC fund said

At Vyomo our aim is to create a complete end to end solution for Beauty & Wellness, a mobile platform that is lacking so far within the industry and ultimately repeat the success story of tech startups within Cab industry. Thus having Aprameya on-board is priceless

The Vyomo Mobile App for Salons, Spas and Stylists was made available in May 2015. The Customer App is also being launched ahead of its schedule today. Within the first 4 weeks, Vyomo has already brought 1500 Salons and Spa on on-board.

Abhinav Khare, Founder & CEO Vyomo added

For us, the quality and customer experience is more important than to bringing short term traction. We are spending a fair amount of time with each of our salons on training and hand-holding for Beauty Professionals, before they start accepting bookings through Vyomo. We want our customers to receive exceptional experiences. Our team is working extremely hard to bring more than 1M stylists on the platform by 2018

Having Aprameya as our investor and a member of advisory board is a great validation for our Mobile only strategy. We are looking to replicate the success of the on-demand cab industry and thus having him will only enhance our execution even further. He will be involved very closely in advising me on the Strategy, business model and leadership hiring decisions. His presence in our team, will allow us to scale and expand quickly.

About Vyomo

Vyomo is a Mobile Beauty and Wellness Platform that is backed by Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to simplify the way beauty & wellness services are requested offered and rendered. It was founded by the London Business School classmates Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah.

  • Abhinav Khare Founder-CEO is Strategy and Corporate Development Expert with 10 years’ experience in 3 continents and 32 countries in the domain of Market Entry, Strategy Execution and Building Analytics products. He has an MBA London Business School and MSc in Technology Management from ETH Zurich.
  • Poonam Marwah Co-founder-COO has got 16 years Operations, Internet Marketing & Technology. Successfully lead 3 new ventures, growing organizations and managed complex projects. She holds MBA from London Business School, Masters in Computer Application, PMP, she is also a US Patent Holder.

[Image Credit – Vyomo]

|In: startups|Last Updated:

From this month on-wards, we start a new edition named “Startup Spotlight” where we would feature journey of a startup or have a Q&A with their founders or share details about their journey. This week we have a look at a Coupon & deals website – GrabOn.

A start-up which has achieved so much in an year, so it is best to not put it in words. All you need to know is that it is a unique, fast-growing and interactive coupons and deals website. It was started with an aim to help online shoppers save more on the products and services that can be already discounted or not. And it is still thriving to accomplish the same by multiplying its network. Today, GrabOn offers exclusive deals for a wide range of online stores such as Paytm, Freecharge, Flipkart, Snapdeal and more.

Today we share exciting journey & details about GrabOn in an effective infographic

GrabOn

Do give GrabOn a spin& do not forget to use their coupons and enjoy all the extra discounts to its maximum.

If you want any startup to be featured on this blog, please shoot a mail to himanshu.sheth@gmail.com

|In: Incubators|Last Updated:

PayPal announced the graduation of three startups incubated at its Start Tank Incubation Center in Chennai. The three companies — DoPartTime, Fantain & Kobster — started their incubation at Start Tank between 2013-14. The occasion marks another milestone for Start Tank, which is located within PayPal’s Technology Center in Chennai.

PayPal

PayPal’s Start Tank aims to identify and incubate the country’s next generation tech startups. These startups receive technology mentorship and infrastructure support from PayPal, as well as business mentorship from charter members of The Indus Entrepreneurs [TiE] Chennai.

Speaking about the graduation, Anupam Pahuja, General Manager, Technology, Asia-Pacific, PayPal said

As one of the world’s largest startups, we at PayPal are proud to see the graduating startups benefit from our mentorship and expand their teams and businesses while at Start Tank. This occasion is another major step in our commitment to the development of a strong technology ecosystem in India. We wish the three companies the best in their entrepreneurial endeavors.

Details about the Graduating Startups

Do_Part_Time_1DoPartTime, founded by Mohankumar Swaminathan and Arun David, is a marketplace for bringing together part-time job seekers and job providers. The portal facilitates the finding and hiring of flexible and temporary jobs through a technology-led web and mobile platform. The company was selected through the Start Tank Incubation Challenge startup selection event in Chennai.

Talking about the experince, Mohankumar Swaminathan, Co-founder & CEO, DoPartTime said

This tenure at PayPal has helped us with a myriad of opportunities. The periodic review meetings and regular technology guidance gave us the necessary direction to grow our company. We also made our first sale through the incubator when we helped fellow-incubatee – Kobster hire 15 candidates. We are aiming to become the country’s “hyperlocal job marketplace”.

Fantain_1Fantain, founded by Anand Ramachandran & Vivek Venugopalan, helps sports companies use ‘Fan Data’ to increase revenue and predictability. Through its ‘Fan Data Management Platform,’ it engages, collects, and analyzes ‘Fan Data’ from various sources and provides actionable insights to customers.

During its stint at Start Tank, Fantain expanded its headcount to 15 and won 3 clients, including the Indian Premier League T20 cricket team Sunrisers Hyderabad. Fantain was the recipient of the ‘Promising Startup Award’ at the Confederation of Indian Industry [CII] Startupreneurs Conference & Expo 2014.

Talking about their stint, Aravind Ramachandran, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Fantain

Sports fan engagement is a niche business, yet a highly potential space in India. PayPal’s fantastic support enabled us to take risks and achieve our targets in a relatively short period of time. We currently have more than one-third market share in our area of focus.

Kobster_1Kobster.com, founded by Vineet Neeraj, Karthik Ramaiah & Mohan Gayam, is a web-based, B2B e-commerce player that helps corporate buyers, retailers, SMEs, home offices, hotels, etc. to purchase office supplies in bulk at wholesale rates.

Kobster recently raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Splice Advisors and has seen its revenues grow from INR 40 lakhs to INR 6.5 crores by April 2015 while at Start Tank. The company aims to become the largest B2B provider in the space by creating an online platform for buyers and wholesale sellers from across the country.

Talking about their experience at PayPal, Karthik Ramaiah said

When we joined Start Tank, we were a four-member team. We’ve now become a 23-member strong enterprise and expanded our revenues tenfold. PayPal has been like a fourth co-founder, helping us build our company through their technological expertise and a great professional network including lawyers and chartered accountants.

About PayPal Start Tank

PayPal India formally launched its startup incubator in association with TiE Chennai in November 2013. The exclusive facility in PayPal’s Chennai technology center provides an obligation-free environment as well as technology and business mentorship for select startups to evolve. It has an office area of more than 11,000 square feet with a world-class incubation space, state-of-the-art conference rooms and other amenities.

Start Tank is located globally across PayPal offices in London and Chennai and provides access to global mentors, angel investors and venture capitalists. Start Tank Chennai currently hosts two other startups: Konotor and PiQube. PiQube recently secured $500,000 in funding from The HR Fund. More information about Start Tank here