Being Challenged in Life is Inevitable, Being Defeated is Optional…

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

― Anne Lamott 

Learning to appreciate the absence of some people or things in life that once we were so used to is definitely a heart-wrenching thing. The closer you were to that object, the more the pain when it’s taken away from you.

Sometimes when grief strikes, all we need is someone to just lend their shoulders for us to let the held back tears flow so that the burden of the heart, if not lessened, atleast stops us from flinching at a least expected moment. And SharingDard.com is providing just that- a shoulder to cry on, a handkerchief to wipe the tears, a rock when drowning in a sea of sorrow and a silver lining on a cloudy day!

Startoholics’ Team caught up with the team of SharingDard.com to know more about their brilliant concept and more.

SharingDard.com – Window to a Brighter World

We have been in that situation when we have something at the back of our minds, some confusing thoughts, some painful incidents, some bad memories which silently suffocate us from within. The only respite is to find someone who will listen to us without judging us and without knowing our identity. SharingDard is an online space for anyone and everyone to disclose their most confusing, personal and painful feelings, and to help others if you have already coped with a similar situation. All the while you may remain anonymous!

Fuel beneath the Fire

The idea was conceived when the team members were at IIM Lucknow. Although they did not right away start planning for it, once out of college, they became busy with their respective jobs, and they themselves started feeling that they needed that one listener who would just hear them out without judging them based on any perception or image. And even though they had a strong family and friends circle, they ended up not having anyone to share their problems/worries/confusions fearing that the others wouldn’t understand or plainly because they were not available. That is how SharingDard was born.

Tailor-made to Fit Well

Essentially anyone who needs a listening ear or space to vent out is their target audience. More specifically, people with access to internet and located in tier1 and tier 2 cities in India have been focussed upon by the team.

They intend to target the Indian subcontinent as of now and later expand to the entire world.

The Journey of a Thousand Steps

The site was launched in late May 2013, and within two months their Alexa rank had catapulted from a mere 9 lakh global ranking to 3.12 lakh and from >1 lakh Indian ranking to 22,000.

This growth was much more than what they had anticipated according to them. SharingDard received mixed feedbacks from across all age groups of people. A lot of feedback is positive and in the form of praise for providing people with a much needed service, while some others criticize on the user acceptance of the website.

Fundraising

They plan to seek Seedfund or angel investments in the coming future. Currently, their energies are focussed towards getting maximum user traction on SharingDard and establishing SharingDard’s offline tele-counselling model for adolescents called Your Candid Friend.

Monetizing

Monetizing is primarily done through online and offline counselling as well as through advertisements. They also work on a commission basis with psychologists and counsellors.

‘Setbacks and Coping with them’ by the Pioneers of that Field

Although it cannot be called a failure, but around two months back they had a revelation that their strategies needed to be revised if they wanted their business to run the way they foresaw it. This revelation came from a third person and was pretty shocking for them to accept at first but was a wake-up call that they desperately needed. After that they made it a point to get feedback from as many people as possible and not dismiss anyone’s suggestions without due diligence.

After all one never knows where the next big idea can come from!

The biggest hurdle that they still face is the fact that people still have a stigma attached to acknowledge that they need to share their burdens to make their hearts lighter. This inadvertently affects their conversion rates.

Marching Forward

Their main focus would be promotion through online channels.  They intend to use the other offline channels later to generate more awareness.

A lot has been planned to be included within SharingDard’s spectrum of services such as –

Ø  Tele-Counselling (currently started for adolescents),

Ø  Online/Web Counselling by psychologists

Ø  Integrated e-commerce portal.

Ø  An Intelligence System that can sense the users’ current mood/situation and provide them with comforting and apposite messages/services/solutions.

Importance of Social Media for success of any Start-up

According to SharingDard Team, the role of the social media will greatly depend on the industry of start-up and also on the customers and the consumers of the product or service that is being offered.

For example social media will play a more direct role in bringing customers and/or consumers if the service is provided online, where as a start-up providing a very high-end component part of an automobile will not benefit in bringing in new customers through. But invariable to the industry or the product, for a start-up social media definitely is crucial in creating an identity, spreading awareness, and making yourself noticed be it among the people or among investors.

Why SharingDard.com?

The calm that passes over you after letting out your most troubling thoughts to a patient ear– help someone feel it, be the shoulder to cry on and feel it for yourself too, find that empathizing listener at SharingDard.com.

Let’s do our bit in making the human race happier.

http://startoholics.in/2013/07/being-challenge-in-life-is-inevitable-being-defeated-is-optional/

Aurus Network: Revolutionizing the Way Distance/Online Education is Delivered.

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

― 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!

http://startoholics.in/2013/07/aurus-network-revolutionizing-the-way-distanceonline-education-is-delivered/

These two MICA students converted their Passion into Theatre Entrepreneurship

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

-Oscar Wilde

Maybe that’s what drove these two individuals towards a common goal, from two different paths to one destination that soon came to be known as ‘Evam’. Evam in Sanskrit means ‘thus’ or ‘in this manner’- what else could be a perfect summary for the entire journey that they embarked upon? Hats off !
Karthik Kumar and Sunil Vishnu dreamt of a theatre company. Karthik, a chemical engineer from Chennai and Sunil, a BCom graduate from Bhopal – how unusual one would say, but this can be called a perfect amalgamation of chemicals and calculations that led them both to this venture that now demands a hearing, a token of appreciation and that’s what we are doing at Startoholics today – honouring the bold decisions made by these two young men at a time when becoming an Engineer is considered to be the ultimate noble profession that there ever would be!

Karthik Kumar and Sunil Vishnu

 For both the classmates at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA), a joint thesis on the feasibility of an entertainment company with theatre as the core offering was just the first step towards becoming Entrepreneurs, successful ones at that! English theatre was not experimented with enough till then and that’s when they decided to dabble with it. And that’s when ‘evam’ was born.
A decade has passed. Today it is a successful business venture that has attracted Venture Capitalists too. It is perhaps the only art based entrepreneurship in India even today with two companies under it wings namely ‘evam’ Entertainment and Sideways Training.
‘evam’ today is a thriving business with a turnover of 1.2 Cr in 2008-09. With 10 full-time employees, a 25 member part-time team across Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, and addition of new business lines and new market launches nationwide, evam was expected  be a 3.5 Cr. business in 09-10.

What started in one room of Karthik’s parents’ house, with one computer and one mattress; has now grown to become an entertainment company, a Pvt. Ltd with a corporate office, full-time employees and a strong belief that “You Are Your Dream”.
After being featured as CNBC ‘Young Turks’ in 2007, they were amongst the top 25 Pepsi MTV ‘Youth Icons’ 2008 and also made it to the Top 30 finalists of Tata-NEN Hottest Startups, 2008. In June, 2009 Sunil Vishnu K. also became the Indian Finalist for the Young Performing Arts Entrepreneur Award given by the British Council.
For two young guys with blood and enthusiasm surging through their veins, success is but just a add-on to the destiny that led them till here.
Want to know more about ‘evam’ ? Here’s your opportunity to know more about this success story
http://www.evam.co.in/
http://www.thecompanytheatre.net/evamnew.htm

http://startoholics.in/2013/07/these-two-mica-students-converted-their-passion-into-theatre-entrepreneurship/

Some Dreams Never go for a Toss, Meet Mr. Amar Bose

The excitement level for me working on projects is really not a bit different from when I was 26.
- Amar Bose

Maybe that’s what drove him to greater heights each day and maybe that’s why obituaries have his picture highlighted and his name flashed in all papers when he breathed his last yesterday. Any person cannot achieve that kind of respect and condolences. It is the way one lives that makes his/ her final journey worth noticing, worth making people pause and reflect on the life that he/she led and sometimes even send a small silent prayer to make his soul rest in peace.

Mr. Bose is best known as the founder of Bose Corporation and for his pioneering work in the field of acoustics. Bose speakers are world-famous for giving high-end performance despite their modest size.

Born in 1929 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Amar Bose’s father Nani Gopal Bose was a revolutionary freedom fighter who emigrated from Calcutta to escape British prosecution.

 He was interested in electronics right from his childhood and used to make small electrical toys to supplement his family’s income. He did his schooling at Abington Senior High School and graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and his Ph.D. from MIT in the early 1950s.

It was during his days in MIT that he purchased a new stereo system. But disappointed with the performance of the speakers, despite their impressive technical specifications, he started working on stereo speaker. The speakers that he purchased failed to reproduce the realism of a live performance. He aimed to design a speaker that would emulate the concert hall experience in the home.
In 1968, he invented the 901(R) Direct/Reflecting(R) speaker system. They were one of the first stereo loudspeakers to utilize the space around them instead of reproducing sound as if in a vacuum.

Bose’s 901(R) speakers remained an industry benchmark for 25 years. He also captured the car stereo market, with systems that transformed the on-the-road listening experience.To do further research and begin production, he received financial support from MIT professor Y. W. Lee and in 1964 he founded Bose Corporation.

Today, Amar Bose has over two-dozen patents to his name. His products can be found in Olympics stadiums, the Sistine Chapel, NASA Space Shuttle, and the Japanese National Theatre. He was also a professor of electrical engineering at MIT for many years until he retired in 2000.

“As long as there are interesting problems to solve, I’ll stay active,” Bose said in a 2005 interview.
He featured on the 2006 Forbes Billionaires list with a personal wealth of $1.2 billion.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif called Bose “an extraordinarily gifted leader.” 

“He made quality mentoring and a joyful pursuit of excellence, ideas and possibilities the hallmark of his career in teaching, research and business,” Reif said in a statement.

“While my father is well known for his success as an inventor and businessman, he was first and foremost a teacher,” the son said. “I could not begin to count the number of people I’ve met who’ve told me that my father was the best professor they ever had.”

“Even our financial people were trying to get the engineers to discourage me, because they all saw money going into it,” said Bose, a lifelong tinkerer who began repairing radios as a teenager. “But some things you just believe in.”

Well it’s that belief that got you this far in life. It is worth commendation. Hats off to you and your achievements, sir!

http://startoholics.in/2013/07/some-dreams-never-go-for-a-toss-meet-mr-amar-bose/