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Tuesday 28 February 2012

Croak.it! ; IIT Kharagpur grads bring ‘voice’ to an online platform, literally!

So if you have watched the Oscar nominated movie King’s Speech, you’d know how the whole movie came down to this one scene when King George VI screams “Because I have a voice!” and realizing that in his heat and anger he has forgotten his stammer, the proud teacher Lionel Logue pauses, smiles and says softly “Yes, you do.”

Yes, we do. We all have a voice. We all have a say. We all have our two cents to give, but what we don’t have is a platform to voice it on. So just like Lionel Logue does in the movie, two young IIT Kharagpur graduates, Srinivasa Teja and Protik Roychowdhury, decided to give us our voice. They decided to make communication online much more personal. Creating a platform for bathroom singers of their campus kicked it off. This platform allowed students to put up their songs and others would rate it, all anonymously. That’s where the idea found its seed and from there it snowballed into Croak.it (which they have recently launched). It is an online platform where one can express oneself using their voice instead of text, which is quite boring. Every unique voice stamp is called a croak on the platform.

So why croak? You may ask. Because croaks have a wide variety of uses, depending on the user! From personal messages to picture tagging to holiday wishes, a croak can allow you to make it that much more personal than a text box and 26 alphabets. The most awesome feature being you can croak anywhere on the internet!

“When you give something to people over the internet, you can’t imagine what all awesome things they do with it. It’s like they’ve gone all the way to show you the capacity of your product”, croaks Srinivasa himself. In just the three day testing that they did with a “Try it here” croak feature on the website, they got more than 10000 unique pageviews, and more than 1000 croaks tried and many thousands through their extensions. The feedback that they got was quite encouraging in the sense that people liked the fact that they could use their voice to berate, say hello to, and comment at friends, among others. One of the users had this to say, “Something much better than email!” The best reaction was “You’re doing something that is actually useful” Aah! Satisfaction! But what made their day was when they actually received a croak from a very elderly person wishing someone a happy birthday in Hindi!

When you factor in that there was no publicity and advertising involved, but just the two of them croaking on websites like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. the numbers exceeded everyone’s expectations, including theirs. A two member team at present working full time, looking after the technical and business issues, both Protik and Srinivasa are still working towards making the product as smooth and easy to use as possible. Monetization is the next logical step after they have the perfect product. They have concrete plans for the monetization stage; however, right now they are focused on building a great product. It’s been 4 months since they became operational, though they’ve been working on it for about 6 months and are to launch a few novel and innovative features after www.Croak.it/ is public.

The market size is huge when you consider what Croak.it! has to offer. Obviously the major users will be in the range of 15-35 years, but considering that croaking allows you to express yourself in your own language (which is what text CANNOT do), the potential is huge. You can croak in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi et cetera. Also, the product aims at making online communication much easier for people who don’t know English well, handicapped individuals and kids as well! Croaking is easier than typing, that you won’t deny!

But obviously, to make thing easy for the others, one has to make things difficult for oneself. Needless to say, Srinivasa and Protik too had their share of challenges in this entrepreneurial space. For starters, they bootstrapped and put in all the savings that they had to get this kick-started, although now they’re being incubated at iAccelerator, in IIM Ahmedabad.

They are now looking at funding opportunities as they feel they are at a stage where funding could help them reach the next level. However, one of the main challenges that they face now is finding good investment deals. Deals have to be good for both parties concerned, for them and the investors!

The investment scene in Technology startups is a bit different inIndiaas compared to US. The market is still nascent and developing. But then that is to be expected in a country such as ours.

“However, a shout out to iAccelerator for providing the platform and wherewithal to tech startups such as us!” croaks Protik. “iA is definitely the best available inIndia(in our opinion). More important than the incubation money are the things that you learn here & your experiences here. We can’t stress this enough. You often don’t realize it, but it is the people you have the opportunity to meet and interact with and the environment where you are working that is most valuable.”

So let’s add to the croaks and all be heard!

money on Votodo, an action network

A pidgin play on the words, “What to do”, Votodo is an action network that helps people share, discover and do what they want to do. Vacations or weekends many a time induce loathing wails proclaiming that there’s nothing interesting to do or sometimes in cases, there’s an urge to do what one loves to but it remains at that; things one would want to do.

Filling this very void, Votodo tries to include a new dimension to social networking, the “todo’s”. People can discover things to do and connect with like-minded people based on their location and interests. Votodo is deeply integrated with Facebook and Twitter to make it easy for Votodo users to share their todos and connect with people they already know.

All this seems pretty hunky dory but what does one do with these todos? “Well, todos help people keep track of the things they’d want to do” replies co-founder, Nirav, with a chuckle. He further adds, “If status updates, check-ins or tweets tell you what’s happening, todos on Votodo give a fair idea of what’s going to happen. Votodo community also inspires, help and join each other to do interesting things and make stuff actually happen” and this is what Votodo is at heart.

MakeHappy.in: Germany based Christian W. Atz merges E-commerce with Social Entrepreneurship!

Chris (27) is a law school graduate from Germany, participating at the iAccelerator program right now to kick-start their web project in India. His startup runs some cash-back portals with the difference that the commission money is not given partially back to the user, but is forwarded to charitable NGOs to support good causes. This product for the US and European markets is called “bioddicted”, from the Greek word “bios”, meaning life, and the English word addicted. Bioddicted helps user to offset their carbon emissions by forwarding commission money to NGOs, who plant trees, build water or solar power plants to reduce their carbon footprints.

Coming to the Indian side of things, the project is called ‘makehappy’ and uses affiliate commissions, which are forwarded to multiple NGOs, who care about the major causes in India.

Makehappy.in is a website that features online partner shops, who signed an affiliate contract with them. So when they link customers from their website to the website of their affiliate partner, they receive a certain commission, a fixed amount or a certain percentage of the transaction done by the user. This commission is split and largely forwarded to a single NGO until Rs. 50,000 has been “donated”. Afterwards a different NGO comes in and gets a similar amount and so on and so forth. And how does the NGO get chosen? Users decide that via a Facebook voting.

Ready to Buy Vegetables Online

Shopping has a new destination -from jewelleries to books, today everything is just a click away. Even our everyday groceries have joined the bandwagon as urban middle class Indians explore their newly found approach to consumerism.

According to a report published by Research and Markets, the e-commerce industry in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 40%, from US $ 5.9 billion in 2010 to US $ 34.2 billion in 2015. Many e-commerce start-ups are tapping into this window of opportunity. They are procuring vegetables directly from the farmers and delivering them right to your doorsteps.

Veggibazaar.com

Started in 2009, Chennai –based Veggibazaar.com is one of India’s first online vegetables and fruit store. The startup is valued at about Rs 2 crores and has over 14,500 registered customers. Veggibazaar’s founder RK Venkatesan said the startup is now gearing up for the launch of its Coimbatore operation, scheduled in March, and is looking to start business in Bangalore, Gurgaon and Pune by April.

Veggibazaar sources most of their products from various farms in and around Chennai and uses packaging materials imported from US.

Veggiebazaar has monthly sales of about Rs20-25 lakhs and their cut vegetables are a rage with customers


Vegwala.com

Started by Mitera Agrotech, Vegwala.com went live in December 2010. Coming from an agricultural background, its founder Santosh Patil said they procure most of their vegetables directly from farmers and depend on the market for items such as onion, tomato and gourds that are sold at a bulk. Based in Bangalore, the startup caters mostly to the IT crowd in areas such as Marathalli, Brookfield and is planning for a pan-Bangalore service in the coming months.

NamasteHollywood.com: India’s First Hollywood Entertainment Website

Whenever we want to search for the latest Hollywood releases or watch the trailer of an eagerly awaited film, we end up searching on Google or YouTube.

Now an Indian startup, NamasteHollywood.com, plans to become the one-stop shop for our ‘Hollywood Fix’. This website will cover complete information on Hollywood movies and all action related to Hollywood in India

E-commerce Logistics Enabler Chhotu.in Raises Half A Million Dollars

Delhi based startup Chhotu.in raised half a million dollars from Super Angels, a group of angel investors consisting of marquee technology entrepreneurs like Deep Kalra, Naveen Tewari and well-known angel investors like Sasha Mirchandani.

The investment shall be used for geographical expansion. Currently, Chhotu.in, with a 100 people strong team, is operational in 8 Indian cities and plans to add 5 cities in the next 3 months.

With 30 e-commerce customers already, Navneet Singh, co-founder, Chhotu.in says that they are looking to acquire top 5 e-commerce companies as customers soon.

Chhotu.in offers delivery and COD along with warehouse services for e-commerce companies. By next month, they plan to launch their packaging services as well.

“We plan to raise Series A by Quarter 2”, says Navneet confidently.