Showcase of 8 Innovative companies for #IndiaInternetDay – A TiE event

It’s here! The India Internet Day(a TiE event) celebration is beginning, and you’re all a part of it. You may be an outelier, an insider, a veteran, an investor, a trend spotter, an experimentor or an industry driver, but this is your go-to event this year.

Why? We’re looking at the long-term horizon and paradigm shifts in the internet industry globally and translating that in the Indian context. We will debate and discuss strategic drivers of the industry and will attract the top players.

Eight Indian startups get their “4 minutes of fame” at the event – an unprecedented happening. No wonder that when we opened the call for applications, we received more than 55 of them.

The competition was tight, and the job of the jury was not easy. The jury – Rajiv Prakash(Next in Advisory Partners , Saumya Meattle (ModuleOne), Srikant Sastri (Vivaki), Vivek Agarwal (Liqvid eLearning) and Vimalendu Verma (Magic Software) – rated the startups on the following parameters: originality, impact, practicability and applicability of the Innovation. After a lot many conversations and debates, 8 companies were shortlisted.

The big question: Will you be there to see the innovations being put forward by these companies? Next year could well be your turn.

Bluegape helps brands in setting up fan merchandising stores. Fan merchandising is ignored by most brands in India and is also a unique way of promotion for brands.

Cite Communities is an open online community for management professionals and serves more than 28 lakh people worldwide. The community offers a free-to-use knowledgebase with a discussion forum. This is where professionals can share career-related queries, which are answered by experts and mentors. The trump card? Anonymity.

Dineout is a table reservation website that enables customers to book a table, online and on the phone, at their favourite restaurants in town. It provides fantastic discounts – something not on offer if customers go to a restaurant directly.

Huntshire helps solve the problem of finding the right talent in a given time frame. Right now, companies must post vacancies on job websites and wait for 30 days to get maximum applications. Post this, the candidates are screened. The entire process takes 30-45 days. Huntshire does all this in 3 days, eliminating the need for a two-step process.

PerfectMyEnglish is a Web and Mobile App enabling tangible improvements in English communication skills for students and professionals. They offer personalised mentorship, detailed analytics, spoken English skill remediation through VoIP services and end-to-end solutions, helping businesses and recruiters achieve key English training and assessment objectives.

NowFloats: With 850M mobile phones (over 90 per cent feature phones) and SMS being a pervasive technology, NowFloats enables creation and updating of websites through SMS for small and medium businesses in India. Smartphone owners can use mobile Apps.

MindHelix: Sentinel is the first app designed with women’s security in mind. The app can send instant alerts in case of any problems. A forced power-off of the phone or an improper exit of the application will trigger an alert to be sent. Prolonged signal loss will also cause a ‘fail safe’ alert SMS and email to be sent from the company’s server.

Mobile Harvest is a two-way oral and intuitive literacy neutral community and networking platform, much like an oral Wikipedia for our emerging billion. It attempts to bring the benefits of social media to people who are not comfortable with reading or writing. 

Huntshire – Hiring Talent via Virtual Hunts!

HuntShire’s mission is to match the right candidate with the right employer through online talent hunts that are designed to assess specific skills against job requirements. It conducts role specific talent hunts on behalf of a range of recruiters and registered candidates can simply choose to participate to show they have the right skills for the job.

 

 

In conversation with Aakriti Bhargava from Boring Brands the young co-founders talk about their startup moments and life in Huntshire

How did you get the idea for your startup?
The idea of having hunts is inspired from Google’s treasure hunts. While Vishnu, CEO, was doing his under-graduation in NIT Raipur, he organized his college’s online treasure hunt event. A Treasure hunt consists of a series of puzzles, which the user needs to solve, sitting at his home. He was surprised to see that the winners were from different parts of the country and when the test methodology can deliver legitimate candidates for online fun event why cannot it have for a recruitment drive.

What makes Huntshire unique from others in the recruitment  industry?
We are creating a platform that enables companies to have virtual walkins. A company will come to our platform and create a hunt. Candidates from anywhere can participate in the hunt with the Hunt URL. This process takes less just about a week and helps companies access to skill profiled resumes.

Who made the initial investments and how did you get it together?
Our initial investments are from our savings. Vishnu and Gaurav were office mates while in cognizant. Vishnu and I are high school mates.

What are you actually doing what others are not?
Recruitment space has multiple players. But the practices today are still outdated. For a company, to recruit candidates, they need to go to a job board and access resumes. They need to call up candidates and see the interest level of them in the jobs. They need to use another filtering tool to screen candidates based on skills. This process itself takes more than 40 days. Post this; companies have to interview shortlisted candidates.

We combine the process of sourcing and filtering into one and help companies recruit faster. With the 20+ clients that we have worked with, we have seen than saving more than 70% time and 60 % cost.

What is the biggest asset for your startup?
Our team. We are individuals from different educational and cultural backgrounds and united for the common passion of solving the problem that all three of us faced. Also the passion, that it takes, to be part of a startup.

What is the founder’s biggest fear?
Our biggest fear is slowing down. Success doesn’t mean that we are doing our best. We still need to work harder.

As an endeavour to give a platform to product startups in India, ProductNation will continue to bring to you a short tête-à-tête with some really cool and young startups.