Cairnsmith Communicates Your Interior Design Ideas

Cairnsmith is a solution put forth by Sheer Industries Group which allows users to communicate design concepts in true immersive 3D, with the help of augmented reality.

According to founder and business development director Shawn Ignatius, the solution is made up of different modules. The ‘Cairnsmith Mainframe’ sits on your computer whilst the ‘Cairnsmith Satellite’ sits on your iPad or android device.

So how does Cairnsmith work? Shawn tells us,

Interior designers first draw out their concepts on our mainframe software and then syncs it with their mobile device. It turns the tablet into a ‘Magic Window’ that allows you to walk into your empty home and visualize every concept in true immersive 3D with the use of augmented reality.

And of course to top it off, we allow firms to communicate more effectively by making changes on-the-fly with the use of the iPad (picture right). This enables clients to instantly visualize how a certain concept would look like in their home before work has even started. This is enabled by our real time rendering engine that is researched and developed by us; which requires little computational power to churn out photorealistic 3D imagery.

Shawn also stressed that computational power is very limited on mobile devices these days. What sets Cairnsmith apart from other companies is its ability to have real-time changes. It claims to have improved the scalability of interior design and architectural firms, on top of halving the workload processes. This could possibly mean that one is able to move into their newly furnished home a lot quicker.

The idea came about in late 2010 when Shawn’s father was facing difficulties trying to furnish their new home. He explains:

Dad took a long time describing how he wanted the theatre room to be built to the interior designer. They were both pointing in the air at nothing; stating how and where a certain console should be put. There were no drawings and tools to help them communicate the design between them. It was strange that the designer was holding an iPad but never took it out to use it. This was when I thought to myself that there had to be a better way.

So Shawn started researching and discovered that this was indeed an issue for most interior designers, architects, and engineering companies. And soon after, Sheer Industries Group was born.

The Singapore startup is looking to launch Cairnsmith solution locally by the end of the year, and hopes to expand to the Asia Pacific region by the end of next year. They are also looking at the US market, but Shawn emphasizes that the main priority at the moment is to get a good product out to clients.

At present, the company has a small group of companies testing its solution, with four research and development engineers doing their best to ensure its solutions are of top quality standards. It has also recently received funding from a corporate investor, Kareliech. If you wish to find out more about Sheer Industries, you can visit its website here.

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Facebook launches Promoted Posts, Available for Indian brand pages too

Faecbook has launched promoted posts, a new advertising option for marketers enabling them to promote status updates on a per-post basis. Facebook is rolling out Promoted Posts to all the brand pages and is available in India as well.

Pricing of Promoted Posts start from $5 and Promoted Posts will be marked as ‘sponsored’ in the news feed. A post can be promoted within 3 day period of creation and just like Facebook ads, the budget you set for your promoted post is a lifetime budget that will run over the entire duration of your promoted post (read the FAQ/hat tip: @beingpractical).

In-stream advertising?

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have been pushing In-stream advertising, as opposed to pure-play banner ads. With mobile being the next frontier of monetization piece for Facebook, is in-stream advertising the only way to monetize eye balls?

What’s your opinion?

From Pluggd.in forum: Why I will never buy a Facebook phone?

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It’s a 5-day competition for 2 Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaways, and it starts today!

It’s time to win the Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaway, you have five days to do so. Read on to find out what’s in it for you and how to win!

So here’s how we are going to run it. We will be selecting 1 winner from Singapore, and another overseas winner. For the selected winner residing in Singapore, we will be giving out 2 Echelon tickets. For the selected winner residing outside of Singapore, we will be giving out 2 Echelon tickets along with a 3 nights stay in Singapore, sponsored by Roomorama.

The fully furnished room located at Chinatown in Central Singapore, comes with air conditioning, cable tv, wifi, housekeeping services, full kitchen cabinets, refrigerator , washer and dryer. Definitely better than where any of the e27 team are staying right now. Details of the room can also be found here.

Photo: Roomorama

To stand a chance at winning, here’s what you need to do:

1. Take a photo with your favourite web or mobile app.
2. Post it on our e27-Roomorama Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaway event wall.
3. Write a creative caption for your photo stating which country you are from. (Helps us to identify the local and overseas winners)
4. Share and get your friends to like the photo.

The post with the highest number of likes will be chosen as the winner. The 2 winners will be selected by the end of 3rd June and we will announce the winner on 4th June.

You have 5 days to win this so start snapping away with the favourite photo of your app and stand a chance to win our Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaway.

On another note, our Early Bird tickets for Echelon will close at 2359 hours (SGT) on 1 June, Friday, so do grab them quick if you have not!

Example of a photo submission

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It’s a 5-day competition for 2 Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaways, and it starts today!

It’s time to win the Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaway, you have five days to do so. Read on to find out what’s in it for you and how to win!

So here’s how we are going to run it. We will be selecting 1 winner from Singapore, and another overseas winner. For the selected winner residing in Singapore, we will be giving out 2 Echelon tickets. For the selected winner residing outside of Singapore, we will be giving out 2 Echelon tickets along with a 3 nights stay in Singapore, sponsored by Roomorama.

The fully furnished room located at Chinatown in Central Singapore, comes with air conditioning, cable tv, wifi, housekeeping services, full kitchen cabinets, refrigerator , washer and dryer. Definitely better than where any of the e27 team are staying right now. Details of the room can also be found here.

Photo: Roomorama

To stand a chance at winning, here’s what you need to do:

1. Take a photo with your favourite web or mobile app.
2. Post it on our e27-Roomorama Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaway event wall.
3. Write a creative caption for your photo stating which country you are from. (Helps us to identify the local and overseas winners)
4. Share and get your friends to like the photo.

The post with the highest number of likes will be chosen as the winner. The 2 winners will be selected by the end of 3rd June and we will announce the winner on 4th June.

You have 5 days to win this so start snapping away with the favourite photo of your app and stand a chance to win our Ultimate Echelon Experience Giveaway.

On another note, our Early Bird tickets for Echelon will close at 2359 hours (SGT) on 1 June, Friday, so do grab them quick if you have not!

Example of a photo submission

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Corporate gifting startup, 5by7 brings great looking business gifts

5by7 is a corporate gifting company that works with several brands (Microsoft, Apollo, Marriott, Audi, Philips etc) and the company has seen tremendous growth in the last 18 months.

The Delhi based startup offers products like coasters, laptop sleeves, cubix, notebooks etc to corporates, who often look at these gifts as part of their employee satisfaction program.

Here is an brief QnA with Piyush Suri, cofounder of 5by7.

1. What’s the current traction/volume of business?

We’re a young company, we launched 3 years ago but have seen a tremendous growth last 18 months – owed to our product differentiation and execution strategy. We work with industry leaders in Hotel (Marriott, Leela, Ritz Carlton, Radisson and more), Airline (Indigo), FMCG (Pepsi, Coke), Durables (Phillips, Apollo, Sennheiser), Luxury (Audi) and IT (Microsoft, Capgemini, Opera Software). We’re growing at about 100% annually.

2. In general, such businesses are mostly regional by nature (i.e, not too many pan India players). What are your thoughts around this?

Its good to have presence in major cities, but we’re quite effective servicing clients in Mumbai and Bangalore from Delhi. They come us since our product and value proposition make a lot of sense to them. We don’t have a ‘warehouse model’ which makes us quite easy to service clients, our product development and operations is based in Delhi and this helps us be agile. We handle enquiries from all over India, with a strong online presence we fill the gap of not being there physically.

3. Any plans for consumer route?

We believe that the B2B market is still huge (About USD 1.5B), its quite fragmented which means there is a tremendous growth opportunity. For the next year or so our focus will be the B2B market, however we have done some retail merchandising projects (e.g. our tie up with India Art Summit running their store and also Indigo Airline’s inflight merchandise) which gives us a good insight and experience in B2C market, so we will move when the time is right.

4. Future plans?
Our DNA has been design (which is evident in our products and website UI), we will continue to differentiate ourselves and innovate around products. We want to be the top 3 players in India over the next 5 years in the gifting space. We’re looking at keeping our team lean, automating processes and going international, we started an office in France this year and have got a very good response.

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Early this year, corporate gifting service eYantra acquired Privilege Corner.

Also see: Corporate Gifting Service Capricorn Receives Seed Funding from Seeders

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South East Asian travel metasearch engine, Wego launches in India

South East Asia’s travel metasearch enging Wego has now spread wings to Indian subcontinent.

Wego enables a view and price comparison of available flights, hotels, holiday packages and deals aggregated from over 150 websites. Some of its partners include Yatra, Makemytrip, Cleartrip, Expedia, Via etc in OTA, Lemon Tree, Accor, Taj Group etc in hotel chains, Myguesthouse.com, Stayzilla, India Hotel Review in budget accommodations and many others. In all, its inventory includes 3,50,000 hotels, 600 full service and low cost carriers, 34 sites globally in 20 different languages and currency denominations. The site also ranks hotels in order of their popularity with users locally and provides aggregate reviews making it easier for users to make their choice. It also provides a data wise search mechanism that illustrates the cheapest days to fly on the most important routes graphically.

As a part of its strategy to localise content and delivery, the site integrates multiple language options, including Hindi, Gujrati, Punjabi, Tamil and Bengali. Wego India is already generating around 17 million monthly in the total value of booking leads passed to travel partners and after setting up its Indian arm it expects to do pure play business worth 5 million in the first few months in India alone. The site gets around 120,000 visitors a month and expects to grow it to 3 million visits in the next three months. Infact 25-30 per cent of their total marketing spend will be on acquiring new partners and customers in India.

Wego has a strategy to develop as one of Asia’s fastest growing travel sectors and thus its foray to India. It has also made a strategic investment in Valadoo, a social commerce travel business in Indonesia that provides its members with a curated selection of unique, discounted travel offers and getaways targeting Indonesia’s growing number of leisure travellers. In India, the Singapore based company has positioned its Indian head office in Bangalore, has a team of 160+ employees and is simultaneously setting presence in 5 cities in the country. Wego earlier acquired HolidayIQ and the team set up in India includes HolidayIQ employees as well.

Wego claims to have secured all the major online travel agencies and many other travel sites as their partners including those less familiar to travellers, but with interesting inventory and exceptional deals. The site’s claimed growth prospect seems to be an obvious area of interest given the fact that the Indian travel industry is growing by 32-38 per cent YoY. Wego aims to gain a top position in the Online travel space within the first year of its operations but faces stiff from Kayak, Ixigo and Travelocity.

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Escape From Bullshitters, Surround Yourself With A+ People

Darius Cheung posted an interesting opinion piece about his thoughts on the startup scene here. And I particularly like his point about ‘waiter vs doer.’ If you have been following my thoughts, I think it’s pretty obvious that I hate waiters as well. Not those in a restaurant – but people who don’t act and just complain about things.

Apart from waiters, I also hate celebrity entrepreneurs, those who talk and tweet a lot but with no real results. Their mouths are their most valuable assets. My closest allies are people who are doers, people who sometimes talk (yes, inevitably) but also produce good quality work – be it an entrepreneur, investor, interns, or someone climbing the corporate ladder. I have the inbuilt habit to detect bullshitters and I will usually move myself away from them. Because bullshitters, I believe, are negative people to be around. And I really mean it.

So enough of the ranting. My point is that as an entrepreneur (myself included), we’ve got to be more ruthless with ourselves. I can’t speak at Darius’ level as I have not yet crossed the victory line in the way that he has. But I do know that hard work is required to get something done well. You know that too, don’t you? School taught us that, but it seems hard to apply the same thing in real life, unfortunately.

Hard work and sweat aside, you also need to mix with the A+ people. Not those snobbish people who think they are smart, but with people who you know you can rely on for group projects. And in entrepreneurship and business, it is important to mix with people who are doers, and not waiters. Seriously – your clients and customers included.

Surrounding yourself with A+ players makes you positive and want to strive for the best. It helps to get things done quicker too. Many folks advised me to hire only the A+ doer-type people. I did that and I have been very fortunate so far. But that’s not enough: you’ve got to hang out and network with other A+ players outside your team, including people like students/interns who have the potential to be an A+ type player. It also requires you to detect bullshitters so you can remove yourself from him/her. The doers are the ones that make things happen while the waiters will just stand there and BS about things not going their way. As an added bonus, the A+ people also attract other A+ people. That’s the general impact that I find and it should only get better as your network gets larger. Have fun doing, not waiting or BS-ing.

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