With more than 200,000 members, Cosmenet is undoubtedly one of the largest beauty product review website in Thailand. Also serving as a platform for beauty brands to engage their customers and find the loyal supporters, Cosmenet is also interestingly founded by a Japanese man based in Thailand. Friendly CEO Shinsuke Wakai has been based in...
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With more than 200,000 members, Cosmenet is undoubtedly one of the largest beauty product review website in Thailand. Also serving as a platform for beauty brands to engage their customers and find the loyal supporters, Cosmenet is also interestingly founded by a Japanese man based in Thailand. Friendly CEO Shinsuke Wakai has been based in...
The post Cosmenet: A Japanese man’s successful break into the Thai cosmetics industry appeared first on e27.
Miniature human face models made through 3D Printing (Image: Wikipedia)
In the third edition of our weekly : TheSunnyMag, we bring you the interesting, the insightful, the happening and the strange from across the world wild web. Please share your feedback with us (simply write to team@pluggd.in) on what you’d like to see in this section.
The education factory: Machines Are Taking Over: Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point — the summer of 1997 — he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind — attempts to simulate the learning brain. Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning. Why not model a computer program on a human tutor like Lindquist? Read the full story here.
How Social Media Is Helping Plant One Million Trees In Patagonia: Green technology journalist Nino Marchetti, a Facebook game hater, writes how he discovered Reforest Patagonia, a campaign helped plant 100,000 trees in Patagonia where a devastating man-made fire burned over 43,000 acres in the iconic Torres del Paine National Park last december. Since then, the Chile-based non-profit initiative, has been working to restore the ecosystem to its former glory. Among other things, they decided to leverage love for social media games into real world action. Through this creative campaign, Reforest Patagonia recently achieved their first 100,000 tree milestone, and is well on its way to the goal of one million planted trees by 2013. Read how they do it.
How Social media is used in Indian schools to spy on kids: School officials are assuming fake identities to befriend students on Social media and check if they are making uncharitable comments against their teachers, schools or even each other, in an ethically questionable and possibly illegal expedient to curb what they see as unacceptable behaviour in India. What message are we sending to the kids? Read about this grossly unethical behaviour here.
When Bohemians do a startup: Tracy DiNunzio isn’t your typical Silicon Valley startup founder. She’s a painter and a self-proclaimed Bohemian. She did her first tech startup after the age of 30. And she didn’t start her company in Northern California. Find out more about how this entrepreneur raised $ 28,000 using Airbnb to fund her startup out of necessity and drove the company to profitability before paying herself a modest salary. Read the full story here.
The Economics of Pussy Riot on YouTube: News flash: The jailed Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot “did not gain international fame through their musicality per se.”
That insight—none too surprising if you’ve ever clicked on a Pussy Riot video on YouTube—appears in an academic paper (pdf) by three electronic-commerce researchers from the University of Texas, Austin. The 45-page paper, filled with equations and Greek letters, explains how being deliberately offensive can help a video break through the clutter on YouTube, where 72 hours’ worth of video are uploaded every minute. Read the full story here.
Barber Shops don’t scale fast, startups do: A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Let’s start with a distinction that should be obvious but is often overlooked: not every newly founded company is a startup. Millions of companies are started every year in the US. Only a tiny fraction are startups. Most are service businesses—restaurants, barbershops, plumbers, and so on. These are not startups, except in a few unusual cases. A barbershop isn’t designed to grow fast. Whereas a search engine, for example, is. Read more by startup guru Paul Graham here.
Facebook Can ID Faces, but Using Them Grows Tricky: Facebook on Friday confronted a new obstacle over what to do with one of its most vital assets — pictures.The company promised European regulators that it would forgo using facial recognition software and delete the data used to identify Facebook users by their pictures.The decision could have wide repercussions on how facial recognition technology — a particularly sensitive technological advance — is used globally as surveillance cameras are increasingly installed in public spaces. Read the full story here.
It ain’t over yet: Apple requests additional $707 million in damages, permanent US sales ban on 29 Samsung devices. In a motion filed late Friday, Apple asked Judge Lucy Koh to add an additional $707 million to the $1.05 billion in damages awarded by a jury in last month’s ruling against Samsung. The company also requested a permanent ban on US sales of 26 Samsung smartphones and three of its tablets. Samsung, meanwhile, argued for a new trial and said that, “at a minimum,” the awarded damages should be reduced by $35 million. Read more here.
The Era of Retail 3D Printing Begins: A quirky kind of store has opened up at 298 Mulberry Street in downtown Manhattan. It’s the first retail location for MakerBot, one of the leading consumer 3D printer companies. People can come in, look at a variety of printed objects, and buy 3D printed knickknacks like watch bands and little plastic squirrels for their friends. They can also check out the just-released Replicator 2 printer from MakerBot that costs $2,199 and lets people build larger, more precise objects than its predecessors could. Read here.
Cardboard Bike from Israel Makes Cycling Even Greener: Engineers told Izhar Gafni that a cardboard bike was impossible. But he went ahead and made one anyway. An ardent cyclist and skilled mechanic, Gafni found a cardboard bicycle taking shape in his mind. American engineers he consulted solemnly nay-sayed, but he couldn’t let go of the idea, he told the Israeli tech blog NewsGeek (in Hebrew). The story behind the cardboard bicycle is here.
Scientists Turn Entrepreneurs: Academics are beginning to take their research and ideas forward by setting up their own ventures. Forbes India has an interesting series on them. Read more.
Lifehack: 30 ways you can save one minute a day: We’re all looking for ways to save time. No matter how small the amount, the more time we save today, the better off we’ll be in the future. Maybe not tomorrow, but definitely over time the minutes and hours will add up. But where do you start? Here.
Here goes the daily Newsreel for today:
- Google plans to shut its once-popular music download service next month, read original post here / So Baidu trumps Google yet again, the promise of legal content on Google notwithstanding.
- Startup village, an incubator backed by Government of India, Kerala and people like S Gopalakrishnan has now eyeing to become world’s largest telecom incubator, read the complete story here / Kerala has been making all the right moves vis-a-vis startups in the recent past. Another success story in the making after the now popular “God’s Own Country”?
- EU forces Facebook to kill face recognition for now Original Story / Oh well, Facebook is having to grow up post IPO, isn’t it? :)
- Twitter’s Japanese Lifeline : Users can get emergency updates for any entered zipcode in Japan Original Story / Hmm, hyperlocal updates – news, services and ads next?
- You’ll soon get to download all your tweets, from what the Twitter CEO said! Original Story / Not sure how many users will actually do it, but this sounds pretty responsible.
- 2567 developers coding non-stop for 18 hours set a world record for the Most Participants in a Software Development Marathon in one Location at KTPO, Bengaluru. Read the original post here / Let’s have a quality record next, guys – this isn’t very different from sooo many tech parks!
- Facebook now lets you view your searches in your activity log. Original Story / That activity log sounds very very scary!
- Oracle promises to expand its cloud business as hardware sales slow Original Story / Is this a strong signal for the end of large enterprise software as we know it?
Dropmyemail will be hosting a party at their office on the 28th of September in order to help foster better relationships among members of the startup community.
The post Drop everything else and party with Dropmyemail next Friday appeared first on e27.
Dropmyemail will be hosting a party at their office on the 28th of September in order to help foster better relationships among members of the startup community.
The post Drop everything else and party with Dropmyemail next Friday appeared first on e27.
If you are a startup, what are the different ways of setting up the company. One way is to setup a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). In this episode of eLagaan Whiteboard Friday, the eLagaan (http://elagaan.com ) team explains all about this new way of doing business.
For small businesses, setting up a private limited company may not be the best approach and LLPs work better. However, there are drawbacks to LLPs if the business is poised for growth. LLP has been in India for about 3 years. LLP offers a limited liability so that if something goes wrong, your personal assets are not impacted. It is also a globally recognized way of doing business. Now Foreign direct investment is also allowed in LLP.
One designated partner must always be resident in India. LLPs will not be able to create stock option plans. Major disadvantage in LLP is that it can’t be currently converted to a private limted company. This is seen as a major disadvantage if at a later point the company needs to be converted to a private limited company. If your business is poised for growth, LLP may fall short at certain places like division of voting rights, issuance of shares etc.
Dropmyemail will be hosting a party at their office on the 28th of September in order to help foster better relationships among members of the startup community.
The post Dropeverythingelse and party with Dropmyemail and Singapore startups next Friday appeared first on e27.
Dropmyemail will be hosting a party at their office on the 28th of September in order to help foster better relationships among members of the startup community.
The post Dropeverythingelse and party with Dropmyemail and Singapore startups next Friday appeared first on e27.
The Department of Electronics and Information Technology has launched Internet search engine, Sandhan, which enables users to search for tourism-related information across websites in five languages including Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.
How does it work?
Users can enter their queries in one of the five languages after that Sandhan retrieves a set of relevant documents in the chosen language, from data crawled related to tourism domain. In next step, retrieved documents are presented to the user in the form of an ordered list based on the relevance of the document.
Features
- Users can submit a query using either the InScript keyboard or the phonetic keyboard. In the case of the InScript keyboard, users can type using that keyboard layout or an onscreen keyboard can be used to submit a query to the system.
- Sandhan can process the query based on its language and retrieves results only in chosen language.
- Snippets generated for each of the retrieved document help the user understand the context of query terms in that document.
- Many of the Indian language web pages are in custom fonts that make the search difficult for retrieving documents. Sandhan uses a font transcoder that converts the custom fonts into Unicode fonts for processing.
- A summary is produced for each retrieved document. Basically, it helps users to get an idea about the overall content of the document without opening it.
- An additional URL-based semantic search facility is provided for Tamil language.
Sandhan has been developed by 120 researchers of 12 institutions including IIT Bombay, CDAC Noida, IIT Kharagpur, CDAC Pune, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology Gandhinagar and others over a period of six years. The project is led by Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharya under the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme of DeitY.
Has mobile payment solutions company mChek shutdown? From various sources Pi spoke to, its key people have moved on and last we checked, its website was not reachable directly or through Google (if you type in main.mChek.com, you might get in but many links do not work). Technical support numbers listed on their site don’t work. Customers are complaining on their Facebook page. What gives?
Started in 2006, the company had partnerships with telecom operators like Airtel, Banks like Citi India, ICICI Bank and e-commerce companies like MakeMyTrip and Yatra. mChek had also raised $ 10- 13 million from Nexus India which invested in companies like Netmagic and DFJ which counts companies like Path, Yammer and Feedburner in its portfolio.
Sanjay Swamy (ex-CEO of mChek), who quit the company in February, is now the Chairman of Ezetap, a 
Square like mobile payment company which turns cell phones into point of sale devices using an electronic attachment. Other key people have also left the company, according to sources.
Surely, the company had a lot of things going right for it. It had marquee clients. It has raised millions from investors. Mobile is booming, financial services, e-commerce and everything around it is booming too. It even launched in Srilanka and claimed a million users.
But then what happened?
One thing is known: That its end users were not very happy, at least not towards the end. A Facebook page which appears official has customers posting stinkers on the wall. And since February this year, no one seems to have bothered to clean up either. Telephone lines to their listed Mumbai office are also out of order.
The lengthy process of getting an mChek account also seems to have had a role to play. But why was it not simple? Surely the people who designed it knew what they were doing. The signup wasn’t simple enough because of a complex regulatory environment and device dependency was off-putting for customers.
The ecosystem was too fragmented with many giant banks and equally large telecom players having to work with a multitude of merchants in tandem to enable one transaction.
mChek was quite an idea when it was launched six years ago. The technology was nascent and much of it was still cutting edge. But when it comes to adoption, perhaps it was way ahead of its time.
Six years hence, the technology has matured and is almost commodity stuff now. However, industry watchers say that the operating environment is too complex for startups to work around with ease. Until recently, there weren’t many financial instruments available on the phone either.
Taking a crack at mobile payments in India is not an easy thing to do. Most players operating in this area have been struggling to get users to opt pay with mobile. Connectivity issues in rural areas make it worse. The process is too difficult to become the standard on entry level phones used by people who aren’t all that tech savvy. On smartphones which are more of an urban phenomena, companies have managed to add a layer of abstraction (using apps) to simplify the process. But then, urban users have many other ways to pay for their buy.
What’s your take on the reasons behind mChek shutdown? Did the exclusive deal with Airtel (which did promote the service) stop mChek from fishing for other deals?
Was mChek too early in the mCommerce game?