A user just needs to go to Attendify.com and register for a free account and the rest of the process of creating your event app is fully guided. There’s no guesswork at all, just follow the step-by-step flow and you’ll have a finished event app. Currently there are two types of apps available- A Guide app and a Social app. The Guide app is designed to replace your printed event guide.  It has features like scheduling, speaker, sponsor and exhibitor profiles, maps, and more. The Social app has all the features of the Guide App, but is also a private social network for events with features like photo sharing, messaging and profiles for attendees.  The Social app is designed to engage attendees in a different way and make the event much more interactive.

We had the pleasure to talk to Michael Balyasny (Co-Founder & CEO of Attendify) who shared some interesting details about his startup, here is it for you:

Michael Balyasny

Tell us a bit about your background and the path that ultimately led you towards Attendify.

I’ve been on an entrepreneurial path since my college days and I’ve always been drawn to startups and the challenge of creating something new.  My first serious venture was a software development/consulting company that I founded back in 2005. It was a great experience and exposed me to lots of different projects, taught me how to work with engineers, manage projects and more.  That gave me the confidence to work on my own products, and eventually led to Attendify.

How does Attendify differentiate from the rest?

Attendify’s role is to drive event app innovation which is what our Guide and Social apps are all about.  At the same time we’re working to make app technology much more accessible to events large and small, and that’s where our self-service app building model is really getting clients excited.  Other event app companies can’t come close to matching the value we offer.

How long did it take to put together Attendify?

It took around 6 months to get the first version out, but we were all working part time. 

What is one mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?

It’s hard to pick just one. Managing people is always one of the biggest and most important challenges entrepreneurs face. It’s rare to have a one person startup, so you’re always dealing with different personalities. 

I learned that it’s important to address any personnel issues right away, don’t ever hesitate or over think situations, just talk to people, be honest, and in almost every case you’ll get a positive outcome.

What do you wish you’d known when you became CEO?

There are constant distractions and lots of issues that aren’t fun to work like legal, accounting, etc.  Everyone likes to focus on design, engineering, sales, but there’s a lot of “boring” work, and the amount of that kind of work has increased quite a bit over time. 

How have you sustained your business? What are the revenue streams you rely on?

95% of our business is selling direct to event planners through Attendify.com.  We offer two packages, Guide & Social, that’s where all our revenue comes from.  We’ve also raised a bit of money from angel and venture investors.

Has Attendify got the feedback and growth you expected since launch?

Feedback has been very positive and we’ve worked with some great clients. That gives us a lot of confidence going forward, but we know that there’s still a very long way to go, we’re still at the very beginning of what we want to accomplish.

Do you have any new features in the pipeline?  

Yes, we’re working on a lot of new features and apps. There’s so much opportunity in the event industry and many more ways mobile apps can help improve the event experience.  We’ve only seen a tiny fraction of what’s possible, and Attendify’s role is to keep pushing forward, making the technology more accessible and powerful.

What one piece of advice would you like to give to soon to be startup founders?

There’s no shortage of advice for would-be entrepreneurs, but what I see over and over again is that people are hesitant as they wait for the perfect time, the perfect idea, the ideal investor, etc.  Just start working and learning from everything that happens during your journey. 

In 99% of cases, success as an entrepreneur is just about hard work, good timing, and a little luck. There’s no magic involved, and let’s not forget that being an entrepreneur isn’t right for everyone. Some days I’m not sure if it’s right for me, but if you get started and have the willpower to keep going after the numerous, inevitable setbacks you’ll encounter then maybe you are an entrepreneur!

So next time you have an event around the corner, give Attendify a try and we hope it helps you to manage the entire intricate process conveniently with just a tap on the screen!

Best wishes to Attendify!

You can even preview your event app on your phone using Attendify Studio, its a free download for iOS  & Android

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He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. 

–Harold Wilson

The world has changed drastically since we have entered the 21^st century. From shopping to socializing, everything has taken a digital turn. Our smartphones and tablets let us heave a sigh of relief as they have helped us to manage some of the most intricate tasks! But sadly, education in India has taken a backseat and apparently most of the conventional methods of learning are still followed in the country. The traditional way of learning- rote learning is still encouraged in schools, which leaves miniscule space for a creative and fun learning experience.

Stories are the best way to learn something and Mangoreader provides an interactive platform for story books to make learning an engaging and entertaining experience for children. It is an ebook reader that lets children learn with the help of music and animated characters. The app runs on every computer, tablet, phone and is available from the Chrome Web Store, as well as for Android, iOS and Amazon devices. Mangoreader is currently targeting the K12 and the preschool segment.

Mangoreader was founded by Jagdish Repaswal in the year 2011, who returned to India from the United States and decided to make learning an unusual and pleasant experience for kids. “While working in the USA, I realized that if learning is more like a game, it would be something interesting for the kids. Mangoreader is enabling publishers, teachers, authors, illustrators to create stories and make learning a fun experience.” added Jagdish.

The name Mangoreader was finalized as the word Mango means Aam (common) in Hindi and Jagdish wanted the app to be available to common people. Also, the fruit is very delicious and he wanted to provide a very delicious and engaging experience to the customers.

Mangoreader basically provides a licensing platform for publishers and schools to create stories and distribute stories. They even allows parents or anybody to download and purchase these stories through their apps and website. For a publisher, the licensing fee is anywhere from Rs.10-15 Lakh, depending on the number of books they create. Mangoreader has been receiving an overwhelming response and is making a monthly turnover of Rs 10-15 lakh. It has tied-up with 10 publishers, including Ratna Sagar publishers, Pratham books, Navneet to name a few. The app is currently used in about 1200 schools across India and is also growing pretty well in Southeast Asia.

According to Jagdish, the biggest hurdle he faced was in the process of building a good team as a team is the core of any product and is essential for the growth of any company. Educating the customers is also another challenge as many schools and publishers need a lot of education to know what products can help them to improve the way they are delivering knowledge.

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For promotion, they have a B2B strategy, where they reach out to schools and publishers. They are also trying to reach out to direct customers, giving them an option to customize the stories. So parents can take the stories and customize it for their own kids by changing the character names or recording their own voices.

Mangoreader also has a few ideas in the pipeline and is trying to make such stories a part of the school curriculum. “We are also trying to create a language learning program. We strongly believe that stories are the best way to learn something. For instance, if you have already read a story like Cindrella in English and if you read it again in Spanish, your familiarity with the characters and background will help you to relate more to a new language.”said Jagdish.

Mangoreader recently launched Mangoeditor, which is a platform that allows teachers, authors, illustrators, voice over artists to create stories and share them with each other and even sell them if they are good. Jagdish believes that everybody loves stories so they allow everyone to create stories.

If you want your child to opt for a more creative method of learning, you can always go to MangoStore where you can preview, buy and read such books and make learning more like a delightful game for your little one!

Do visit their website! Mangoreader

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With Gridle, you can manage everything on a single platform which helps in saving time and leads to efficient management. The platform targets medium sized enterprises in India with anywhere between 50- 500 employees and 3-4 offices across different locations.

Features:

As far as features are concerned, Gridle has very normal features that can be found on other sites such as File Sharing and commenting on each other’s posts, Messages, Events, Making Groups and assigning tasks, Announcements, Planner, Member dictionary etc. In a way it can be used as a social network for your enterprise which makes it a project and team management tool.

The visual of Gridle sets it apart from its competitors. It’s very intuitive, which makes it easier for a user to grasp how it functions and also provides pleasure to work with the software.

Story behind the Startup…

The father of one of the co-founders Abhishekh has a company that has about 100 employees. “They are facing a lot of problems as far as team and project management is concerned since everything is done on hardcopy of papers. We identified this problem and decided to work on it. However, we later found out that there are already such softwares available in the market. So we started using them but frankly speaking, we weren’t motivated to do so.” said Yash Shah, one of the founders of Gridle. According to him, a software that lacks intuitivity is a major problem. “When we checked the price of other softwares, they were priced around 5-8 $ for an employee per month. A company in U.S. may find such softwares feasible but currency conversion in India leads to problems for many medium sized companies.”

Gridle charges 20% of of what their US based competitors charge and is priced at Rs 50 (less than $1) per user per month.

Meet the Team!

Team Gridle

Gridle has been founded by Yash Shah, Abhishek Doshi and Anupama Panchal. There are 3 developers who are working full time with the team. The team also consists of a business mentor and a technical mentor. Gridle offers a winter and a summer internship every year.

At the initial stage, they wanted people to work with them but didn’t have sufficient money. So they went to local IT colleges and scouted interns. They go to 3-4 colleges and recruit 6-7 interns from each college which gives them 15-20 people to work with. From that batch, they select 1-2 people to work with them on a permanent basis and that’s how they have accumulated 3 developers from the last one and half years.

Feedback and Growth

Yash said that the software isn’t launched yet for public. They have 3 clients in Ahmedabad who are using it as of now. “The first version wasn’t as splendid as the current one and was extremely basic. At that point of time we were just focussing on the price factor. There was this one company where we convinced 20 people to use Yammer, free of cost as all the expenses were covered by us and at the same time we told those 20 people to use Gridle. We realized that people found both the softwares miserable. After that we tried making it visually appealing so that people could connect to the software and came up with some more advanced versions. The third version has received quite favourable feedback but there is still room for some improvement.” 

Before launching it for the general public, they want to make sure that everything is perfect without any flaws.

The Stumbling Block of the Journey

According to Yash, raising funds is the biggest hurdle they have faced. “When you tell an angel investor about your idea, they tell you to find a good team. If you have a good team and a good idea, they say they want to see a demo. After the demo, they tell you that you need to show them a paying customer. We have reached the paying customer part but I don’t know what will happen next as the entire process slows you down.”

Gridle’s advice to Budding Entrepreneurs

Give your best shot but never keep your hopes high. Don’t even think that you’re funded until you get the check in your hands!

Gridle won Rs 2.5 lakh, along with technology support, at the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge 2013 and that enabled them to speed up product development. They have been incubated at Indian Angel Network and are looking forward to a pitch at CIIE Ahmedabad very soon.

 Do visit their site! Gridle

The post Gridle, a Visually Appealing Cloud based Platform for Medium Sized Enterprises appeared first on .

― C.S. Lewis

Keeping up with technology and developing modern techniques in the field of education is not only a step forward into the development of the present generation but it also paves a more solid ground for the scholars of tomorrow to walk with their head held high without having to wait and trip at every loose stone. By scholar, we don’t mean just an engineer or a doctor but every child who grows up into a creative genius when the breeze sweetened with the fragrance of the flower he/she loves most invigorates the passion within that child to be something, reach somewhere in life.

And Aurus Network is one such organization that comes with a vision to make quality education accessible to the masses at affordable prices. Founded in 2010, it pioneered the use of internet-based, live 2-way HD classes which connected the best teachers with students across the country and eliminated the need for costly hardware-based video conferencing or VSAT (satellite based) equipments and networks.

To get into the details of such a wondrous initiative, Team Startoholics got in touch with Jaya Jha, Head of Marketing & Product team, Aurus Network. She gave us the following inputs.

How would you describe Aurus Network to a person who has just heard about it?

Aurus Network’s flagship product is CourseHub. It is a video creation, management and delivery product for education. It is used by educational institutes to deliver live classes online and also to make their lectures available to the students for the purpose of revising and reviewing after the class.

As such it may seem trivial, and for the different kinds of tasks that we do, there are alternatives available in the form of VSAT-based solutions, video and web conferencing, or some dedicated lecture capture solutions. But CourseHub triumphs over them by being a complete product for the requirements of educators and learners and by being optimized for them. The USP of the products are

• HD-quality video delivery at speeds as low as 100 Kbps (unlike any other alternative in the market)
• A complete solution for education with live and on-demand delivery of classes, as well as content and learning management systems (as opposed to generic video streaming, video conferencing and web-conferencing providers)
• Cloud-based, automated, non-intrusive and deployable at a fraction of cost of the existing lecture capture, video-conferencing and VSAT solutions

What motivated the idea of Aurus Network?

Piyush Agrawal, our founder, had used a lecture capture solution while he was doing his Masters at Stanford University. He and other students found the system to be extremely valuable. But the implementation at Stanford was high of cost and resources. Although many other institutes could benefit from a solution like this, most of them won’t have that kind of resources. His thesis was also related to video processing. Recognizing the market needs and seeing a technical fit with his interests, he decided to come back to India and start Aurus Network with a vision of making quality education accessible to all.

What differentiates Aurus Network from the other online/distance education portals?

We are not an education portal in the sense that we are not selling content. We believe that good teachers and educators are the best people to decide how and what to teach. We enable them to reach out to more students and to capture the valuable content they create while teaching a class and use it in various ways later. In serving this need, we have created a product that is complete, works out of the box, doesn’t need the teacher to change his natural style of teaching and delivers classes in high quality even at a bandwidth as low as 100 Kbps.

How is the response from the customers? Is the Indian market open for this new type of education?

We have about 30 customers and the number is increasing continuously. For test preparation and training institutes, this is the right technology to help them scale their business without establishing physical presence and hiring new faculty in every city they want to cater to. Instead of a teacher going to three to four centers within the city to take the same class repeatedly, they can deliver classes to hundreds of centers or students all over the country without the teacher having to travel anywhere and that too at one go. The sophisticated interaction features lets the students and teachers interact with each other to get full advantage of the teaching session.

We have customers like Career Point, Career Launcher, Academy of Commerce and Crack Verbal using us to deliver these classes. Corporate training segment is also picking up and the system has been used by people like Kemin India and TalentEdge for this purpose.

Apart from the test preparation and training, we are now also getting an encouraging response from higher education institutes. We have institutes like IIT Kanpur and IIT Patna onboard and many others in the pipeline.

Overall, it is clear that the market needs a solution like this, the response has been more than encouraging and we are very excited about the future.

What challenges have you faced in your entrepreneurial journey? What has been the toughest decision you have had to make lately, if any?

The company was bootstrapped for the first two years. It was good in a way, because not having external money makes you look hard into your business model and ensures that you focus on a sustainable, profitable business. Despite a glaring need for a product like this, selling technology is not easy in the market. Customer education has been another big challenge. But we also see this as an opportunity to do things right.

Team of Aurus Network

What are your plans for promoting Aurus Network? Also, do you have any tie-ups?

Currently we are doing most of our business development directly, because we have figured that a lot of what we are trying to do is concept selling. Finding and training partners for that kind of involved selling is difficult, especially for a startup. But we are open to partnership opportunities and might scout for them more actively in future.

How do you see Aurus Network as in the next 5 years?

We are looking to become leading players for delivering online classes and deploying lecture capture, not just in the Indian market, but in international markets too.

What more do you wish to include to take Aurus Network to the next level?

We wish to include more team members and some more money. 

What are you most excited about at this moment regarding Aurus Network?

What is exciting for us is that the customers are ahead of us! Once they get into the platform, they find creative usage and request new features all the time. We don’t have to push anything on them. The large market potential and high engagement of the customers with the product is gratifying and exciting.

So it seems like the days of drab black and white ‘teaching-learning’ sessions are nearly over. So on a day will come when education would be more than just rote-learning and instead it would become more and more interactive, interesting and every bit worth acquiring ( the easier way)!

Education has no end, so to all those who think – ‘Lord!  Why didn’t this happen when I was studying and slogging so much with my stuff’; do not lose heart, life is too short and yet we all have a long way to go! Tread on!

The post Aurus Network: Revolutionizing the Way Distance/Online Education is Delivered. appeared first on .

Micro business owners don’t need an intricate software program like Intuit or Tally and a CRM system to understand every minute detail about the customers. They just need something that helps them to do the basics. In short, they need a software that is simple to use, automates a lot of the time consuming tasks behind the scenes and helps them manage customers, sort out finances and introduce business to new customers.

Zoostr is designed to make all small business admin and marketing tasks as simple and as quick as possible so that business owners can concentrate on getting new clients and generating revenue. In this way a lot of valuable time can be saved and can be utilized for revenue generation by business owners.

Zoostr is a cloud based software which can be used by micro business owners like self-employed, freelancers, consultants, small scale businesses etc. Although there are various other business management tools, they don’t seem to be quite relevant to Microbusiness where the business is run only by a few people.

With just 3 clicks, the software helps you to create price quotations, invoices, supplier PO’s, manages your customer meetings and workflow and create SMS marketing campaigns. Its SMS marketing feature provides a simple to use SMS marketing tool that lets small business owners send bulk SMS messages for free to their customers to help drive new business.

That’s not all! The software is also mobile friendly and can be used on a Smartphone or a Tablet, which means you can perform work-related activities on the move and carry your business in your pocket. Most of the time spent on travelling is wasted and so the software provides an excellent opportunity to utilize this time for fulfilling tasks. For ex: If you are coming back from a meeting with a potential customer, you can create a price quotation on the go or record meeting notes, or look at who owes you money and call them directly from your phone or schedule the next meeting.

The startup was launched in India in May, 2013 and after two months, more than 15,000 small business owners in India are using Zoostr to manage work in a more organized and smarter way.

“Zoostr has been designed with Mobile in mind, while supporting PC. Although Smartphone penetration is still low in India it is growing at a breathtaking pace. Smartphones and Tablets represent a huge opportunity for small businesses in India to be more effective and more successful. Zoostr intends to help independent professionals and micro business owners take advantage of this in the coming months and years.” says Spencer Waldron, the CMO of Zoostr.

Such softwares not only help in saving time but also lead to productive results. Most of the small business owners are on a continuous hunt for a clutter free, simple to use software that can help them in managing work and in such a scenario, Zoostr can prove to be an imperative tool.

Do have a look at Zoostr!

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