In the winter of December 2015, after quite a few years in Saket, the entire nearbuy family packed their bags and left for Gurgaon. At first sight, the new office, 50 times bigger than the old one, was overwhelming.

Today, the nearbuy office, located on the main road of one of the most buzzing streets in Gurgaon, can easily be described as one of the best places to work at. Here’s why:

1. The men at the helm: If you happen to see either Ankur Warikoo, Sachin Kapur, Sumeet Kapur, Ankur Sarawagi, Ravi Shankar or Snehesh Mitra walking around the office, you wouldn’t believe they were the directors of the company. Down-to-earth, motivating and brilliant, these guys sit with the employees, eat with them and sometimes, even get thrashed by the employees at a game or two of table tennis.

2. No traffic troubles: The office is located on Golf Course Road near Sun City, and hence provides a little respite from the office traffic rush. Zoom past, but don’t forget to say hello from the other side.

3. No space constraints: Every person enjoys 84 sq/ft of personal space, with 32 meeting/conference rooms, each named after our favourite Bollywood movies, in a building that has the capacity to accommodate 600 people. Unlike your possessive ex, we understand the concept of personal space.

4. Food and Fun: Resembling an American diner straight out of your favourite sitcom, with splashes of red, the nearbuy cafeteria is a place where the entire office staff satisfies their cravings at the daily five-spread lunch buffet or evening snacks, available to everyone. Either that or they’re unwinding over table tennis, darts, PlayStations and other board games. Because after eating, we must exercise.

5. Way we work: Since we spend over 40–50 hours a week with each other in office, we often vent out our frustrations, unleash our inner artists and do other such crazy things in the office, amidst concentrating on work, of course. After all, you know what they say about all work and no play.

6. Other perks: An endless supply of seasonal fruits, an inexhaustible coffee machine, an unlimited stock of tea bags, chocolate milk, badam milk and soup packets are also on offer. There’s also a library, Apple TV on all screens, a TV lounge, beanbags, lazyboys and couches through the entire office. Just in case sitting on a desk is too mainstream for you.

7. The Verdict: All this apart, what makes nearbuy the best place to work at, is the attitude of each and every person who works at the office. We work hard, and party harder. But most importantly, we respect each other, take ownership, always look at improving our performance and give our best to what we do. We’re all a big, happy family in this 60,000 sq/ft home we call nearbuy.

nearbuy is looking for Interns! If you want to be part of this awesome little world, apply now!

The post Inside nearbuy’s Gurgaon Office | Where playstations meet workstations. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Ola, one of the biggest cab aggregators of the county is now preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), company’s CFO told to ET.Ola appointed Rajiv Bansal from Infosys as its new Chief Financial Officer in January this year.

With no proper timeline mentioned, Rajiv Bansal said, “OLA will have world class processes in 6-8 months and we want to be ready for an IPO as early as possible.”

“If we execute this properly we can be financially prepared for an IPO. If we execute well we can become Infosys,” he further added.

Ola, run by ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd has so far raised $1.8 billion in equity funding from investors like Tiger Global, SoftBank, Didi Kuaidi, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital among many others.

In addition to the taxi services, the company has also expanded its portfolio to launch its payment wallet Ola Money, hyperlocal grocery service Ola Store (which is reportedly shutting down) and food delivery service Ola Cafe.

Mr. Bansal termed initiatives like Ola Cafe and Ola Store as “experiments”, while the cab aggregation and wallet Business will be critical.

The company currently has over 275,000 cabs and 75,000 auto-rickshaws on its platform across 102 cities in India.

2. TechHub And Google Announced Global Partnership And Expand Collaboration To India

Google and TechHub announced their global partnership on Wednesday, bringing more opportunities to TechHub’s 700+ tech startups around the world.TechHub, the global community for tech entrepreneurs, announced that their partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs will benefit startups from India for the first time. Google supports TechHub’s work to help hundreds of tech companies’ scale up their businesses. Now TechHub members in Bangalore and other locations of Riga and Bucharest, plus Madrid, Warsaw and London will have access to programmes and assistance from Google, including Google mentors, the Google for Entrepreneurs international demo days, GFE Exchange and Google Cloud Platform credits for qualifying startups.

Elizabeth Varley, TechHub’s global Co-founder and CEO said, “We are excited to bring this partnership to India to increase TechHub’s support to Indian Startups. In Bangalore we see a huge variety of Startups creating innovative products, and we want to help them succeed both in India and all around the world. TechHub and Google for Entrepreneurs is a strong partnership that will empower Indian entrepreneurs to go global from the very beginning.”

David Grunwald, Google for Entrepreneurs’ Head of EMEA Partnerships said “We are excited to expand our work with TechHub beyond Google for Entrepreneurs’s Campus network, where we have collaborated successfully over a number of years. TechHub’s ‘community first’ values and their focus on supporting founders and startups with education and programs align perfectly with the goals of Google for Entrepreneurs.” 

TechHub’s community is global: members hail from 60+ countries and every member can access Googlers in six international cities. TechHub membership gives each entrepreneur access to every TechHub in the world and all the programmes and opportunities available there including flagship events like Startup Funeral, and the monthly TechHubTuesday Demo Night.

Around a third of members’ base their teams full time in one of TechHub’s spaces, with the majority of members accessing the benefits of TechHub through its rich programme designed to help Startups face the challenges of building and growing a global tech company.

3. Tinystep Is Taking ‘Not So Tiny Steps’; Receives Funding From Silicon Valley Investor

As India’s first parenting social network, Tinystep announced that it had received an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Flipkart. Only a month since, Tinystep has once again received impressive validation and support. This time from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, Matt Glickman. He is the founder of the biggest, most popular portal in the parenting domain, BabyCenter. BabyCenter reaches more than 45 million parents a month from every corner of the globe. In the United States, 8 in 10 new and expectant moms online use BabyCenter each month. Matt has invested an undisclosed amount in Tinystep and will also be stepping in as an advisory board member.

On the progress of Tinystep, Nishant Verman, head of Corporate Development at Flipkart said, “This concept has great potential in the existing market, it is the much needed tech product in the parenting domain. Entrepreneur from the valley investing in an Indian company at such an early stage is not very common. Given Matt’s domain experience, this is a huge validation of Tinystep’s potential.”

Additionally, Matt Glickman said, “I obviously resonate with the domain and in a mobile first country where users love to chat, I think Tinystep is doing a great job. They are showing some great early traction, are getting great customer feedback and are moving in the right direction to solve a big problem.”

Tinystep plans to use the money for improving its product and strengthening it’s team. Being a social platform, the app has features like posts, multiple chat options and a public forum that truly draws their users in. The Startup only has bigger plans for the future. The Indian parent community has a lot to look forward to from Tinystep.

In response to Flipkart’s funding as well Matt Glickman’s, Tinystep Founder, Suhail Abidi said- “I couldn’t be happier. We have Flipkart, India’s e-commerce giant backing us one side, and Matt as an advisor on another side with his unmatchable domain expertise and entrepreneurial experience. This is without a doubt, amazing. Silicon Valley has given us Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and many more awesome social products, Tinystep can be a tiny gift from India.”

4. Uber launches pilot project UberMOTO in Bangalore

On March 3, Uber unveiled UberMOTO that enables riders to tap a button and get a motorbike ride in minutes. “This is a great way for people to save time and money on short trips and provides last mile connectivity at the most affordable price – as low as ₹3/KM,” they said in a post on their official Website. “UberMOTO is another step to help cut congestion in Bangalore by getting people out of cars when they don’t need to use them, and by encouraging motorbike drivers to share their ride. It followsthe launch of Uber’s carpooling service, which is designed to get more people into fewer cars. By using today’s transportation infrastructure more efficiently, Uber’s Technology can help the Government of Karnataka cut traffic and congestion at no extra cost to taxpayers,” they elaborated. 

 

How it works:

• Choose the UberMOTO option in your Uber app. Enter your pickup location and request your ride.
• Your driver’s details are shared with you straight away – name, photo and the details of the motorbike.
• All riders and drivers have to wear a helmet in Bangalore by law. Wear the helmet provided by your uberMOTO driver and put on the strap for your safety.
• Uber’s standard product safety features are in place before, during and after every trip, including GPS tracking, 2-way feedback and the ability to share trip details with family and friends.
• At the end of the trip, you can choose to pay through any of our payment options – including CASH.

 

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It is the era of Startups and there has been a flow of companies setting foot in the industry, so many that its difficult to keep a track on the market.

Here are 5 Startups you should check out!

1. Faircent.com
Founders: Rajat Gandhi, Vinay Mathews, Nitin Gupta
City: Gurgaon.
Industry: P2P lending, FinTech.

Faircent.com is a financial Technology companies in India and is growing at a very fast rate. This Startup enables a direct communication between the creditors and borrowers. Borrowers post their loan requirement and reason, duration and the interest they may be willing to pay. Lenders can make offers to the borrowers which the borrower may accept or refuse. After the two parties have reached a mutual consensus Faircent helps legalise the transaction and subsequently assists in collection and recovery of the loan amount.

On the Website, two pools of members register: lenders and borrowers. Borrowers post requirements for loans citing reason, loan period and a target interest rate which they are willing to pay. Lenders can individually make offers to borrowers, which the borrower can accept or refuse. Borrowers too can approach willing lenders with their loan proposals. Offers are defined in terms of amount to be lent and the applicable interest rate.. Each participant acts based on their own discretion with no intervention from us. Both borrowers and lenders can strike deals with multiple members, thus, lenders can offer a portion of the total loan amount to a borrower and lend to multiple borrowers, and borrowers can seek to raise money from multiple lenders.

Once an agreement is reached between the borrower and the lender, a formal contract is signed by them. . The lender then transfers the amount to the borrower’s account and the borrower makes periodic repayments via EMI over the stipulated time period.

Repayment can be done by issuing post dated cheques, or making electronic transfers via NEFT, netbanking etc. Repayment can be made and tracked through Faircent.

2. StylFlip:
City: Mumbai
Founders: Zarik Nabi
Industry: Fashion Technology
For fashionable women who have closets full and yet nothing to wear, StylFlip is a social platform to sell, shop and flaunt your branded pre-owned fashion. Founded in November 2015, they are a mobile app that hopes to revolutionize shopping by giving you access to thousands of trendy, high fashion and luxury brands at a fraction of the cost. Through the StylFlip app you get access to an infinite and de-cluttered wardrobe filled with only the pieces you love.

Zarik’s wife – a fashion designer, has a keen sense of style and loves to keep up with the latest fashion trends.  With her ever-growing wardrobe, there were a whole lot of items that were barely used or didn’t fit and some even had tags on. Many items were significant to her and had memories attached to them. She did not want to just dispose of them. This got them thinking. There surely is someone out there that would treasure these items like she did. How could they connect with like-minded women to sell some of these valuable fashion pieces to and use the earnings to fund her next purchase while de-cluttering her closet?

And thus StylFlip was born.

They believe:

• Selling should be as easy as buying – Selling on StylFlip is as easy as 1-2-3. Click, list and pack your item. The team at StylFlip will pick it up from you as soon as it finds a buyer.
• Buying pre-owned should feel as good as buying new – Authenticity, safety and trust are as important to us as they are to you. Their StylFlip Promise takes care of all that and more.
• Looking good is all about sharing and flaunting – Fashion is a celebration of each one’s unique style and encouraging others to look great. It’s not about fancy Ad campaigns.
• In making a difference – Whether its reducing carbon footprint by re-fashioning, donating to support a cause cause or fostering a sense of entrepreneurship, they hope to make a difference at every step of the way.

3. Chaayos:
City: New Delhi
Industry: Cafe, Chai
Founders: Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma

The concept of chai adda or “Tea Room” took centre stage in our country for many years, with discussions on life, society and politics happening over chai. It was a place that brought together the young and old, rich and not-so-well to do. A kadak chai and samosa shared after work, an irani chai with bun maska over meeting a prospective life partner, or a hot adrak chai in the morning to wake you up – chai was a part of every social setting for us.

Yet somewhere along the line, this rich heritage of chai addas was lost and “Chai” took a backseat – taken over by the multinational coffee chains, suddenly chai was no longer the beverage that we bonded over.

Chaayos was born in November 2012 out of this premise – a contemporary interpretation of the chai adda, serving freshly made chai. Their focus is on serving your “Meri Wali Chai”, a chai made exactly to our customers’ liking the minute they place their order – be it an adrak tulsi kadak chai or a paani kam elaichi cinnamon chai. They offer 25 different types of teas, customisable in 12,000 ways. with 12 add-ons.

Chaayos delivers Tea in New Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida and one can place orders via their application or may call them directly. As of now, the Startup has five outlets around the city.

4. SilverPush
Founders: Hitesh Chawla and Mudit Seth
City: Gurgaon, Haryana
Industry: Advertising

SilverPush is a Technology Marketing platform for brands to understand and connect with their customers. The Startup helps their clients understand if their recent TV commercial is doing well on social media. This helps improve the effectiveness of a campaign, and helps companies make decisions faster, which helps them grow sales and market share at a global scale. This way, clients do not wait until next sales cycle to know if their campaign worked, they know it when they want to know it.

Claiming to be Next generation Advertising 2.0, SilverPush is leading the industry in bridging the customer journey from TV-Search-Social-Mobile, and focusing on deliering a great brand experience for the users. They understand what your customers are looking for, what they are saying and what they do.

– Over 2 million minutes of broadcast TV video is fingerprinted and analysed by SilverPush platform everyday.
– Their GPUs track television across 300 channels.
– In 10 ms they identify what is going on in the television using Artificial intelligence and deep machine intelligence.
– They track over 40 different dimensions of metadata – everything from the brand, agency, actors, products, songs, moods and other pertinent data.

This results in the largest and most comprehensively tagged catalog of TV broadcast data in the world.

5. Consure Medical:
Founders: Nish Chasmawala , Amit Sharma
City: New Delhi
Industry: Medical Device

Founded by a globally diverse and experienced team of engineers, clinicians, designers, and Business executives, Consure Medical is an emerging medical device company focused on developing and commercializing novel critical care technologies. Consure is continually innovating new products, expanding its portfolio of critical care solutions to help bridge the chasm in healthcare continuity that currently exits.

The Startup‘s flagship Technology is the Qora Stool Management Kit. Qora is the only stool management device that integrates a hygienic applicator to deploy a diverter inside the rectum by a minimally trained care provider or a motivated family member.

Founded in 2012 by medical device veterans Nishith Chasmawala and Amit Sharma, Consure has brought together a diverse and motivated team to execute on its bold mission of becoming one of the most patient-centric medical device companies in the world. The team brings over 25 years of experience in the medical device industry spanning the US, European, Indian, and Japanese markets. They’re a budding and hungry team of entrepreneurship-minded of technologists, clinicians, and investors that enable us to achieve large milestones in impressive fashion. Most importantly, their multicultural, cross-functional team is what helps get Consure’s technologies to the patients that need it the most.

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Made by: Mister Beep

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Ever sat around scratching your head, making a to-do list and wondering how you are going to complete the list of all personal tasks that you have? Meet Dunzo, the mobile app to get all your daily tasks ‘done’. These tasks can be anything –  from conventional ones like, getting a reservation at your favorite restaurant, visits to the grocery store, getting your car picked up from servicing, or fixing something at home, to non-conventional ones like driving pigeons out of your balcony, or repairing clocks.

Started by Dalvir Suri, Kabeer Biswas, Ankur Aggarwal, and Mukund Jha, this Bangalore based start-up, was launched in 2015. Since then, they have tied up with 100-150 businesses for easy completion of the tasks requested by customers, and have attended to 10,000+ happy customers.

“We went around getting partners for only things that users wanted. We realized that very very tiny percentage of local businesses actually matter in the local space and you don’t end up using more than top 5% of local businesses.” Biswas told Economic Times.

Dunzo operates in three very simple ways:
– Create a to-do list of all the mundane things in your life that you want to be taken care of.
– Chat with Dunzo’s human operator about how you want to go about checking your tasks off the list.
– See your tasks dunzo-ed away.

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Dunzo comes with the following features:
– Multi-tasking: Dunzo lets you add multiple tasks to your to-do list, which you can get done all at once.
– Add, edit, cancel and modify your to-do list as and when required.
– One Tap payments: A large part of completing your to-do’s, is to pay for them, hence Dunzo is designed to be cashless.
– Tracking: You can track your tasks, and get notified of their progress, while they are in the process of being completed.
– Dunzo is available 24*7.

In their recent pre-Series A round of funding, Dunzo has raised an investment of $650,000 from Blume Ventures, Aspada, and a few well-known angel investors like Sandipan Chattopadhyay, CTO, Just Dial and Rajan Anandan, Head – Google India.

Dunzo is currently a 19 member team, with most of the employees working in the Technology department. According to Kabeer Biswas, they’d be utilizing the money for further product development, to get more people on-board, planning an expansion in other cities, and partnering with more businesses.

Currently, Dunzo’s Business model is based around charging the customers for logistics, which varies from task-to-task.

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Directi comprises of a group of tech businesses owned, operated and invested in by Bhavin Turakhia and/or Divyank Turakhia. The Group boasts of multiple Business units that are run independently by their respective management teams. The Directi portfolio companies comprise of Media.net, Skenzo, Radix, Ringo, Flock, Zeta and Codechef. Directi also comprised of BigRock, ResellerClub, LogicBoxes and WebHosting.info which were sold to the Endurance International Group in a $160 million transaction in 2014. Across these businesses, Directi employs 1500+ people across 8 offices, with over 9 million customers, revenues of over $250 million and a group enterprise value of over $700 million.

This week, we take you inside Directi’s India office, as we explore their work culture, employee perks, and what makes it a great place to work at!

Facilities:
1. All employee’s have an option between keeping chairs and colorful bean bags.
2. All areas/ floors across multiple offices have different themes that draw a fine balance between being quirky, fun, yet functionally efficient.
3. Sound proof cabins with walk in doors to roam about freely, yet not disturbing others. 3. Employees can saunter in casual attire all week and even avail flexible working hours for everyone.

4. Each employee is offered with an option of having multiple monitors and docking stations for ease of working.

5. Every Floor has Butlers to provide the employees with food at the ease of their workstation.

6. Free Snacks corner at every floor. These are regularly stacked up with Fruit juices, choicest Teas and Coffee and snacks.
7. 24-hour open In-house GYM with professional trainers.
8. Every new employee is made to feel special with a big welcome kit and a complimentary Kindle with a FREE Amazon account.

Recreation:
9. The company takes leisure time (fun) and breaks very seriously! It’s a common sight at Directi to have people playing football on Xbox, or refreshing their minds at the Foosball Table, TT table, Pool Table or at carom Board anytime. Sometimes, employees just watch TV.
10. The company has invested into creation of an inspiring and open area for conducting jamming sessions for the musically inclined and employees can play guitar, Keyboard, Cajon!

11. Dance Sessions – Yes. Employees can opt to pursue their interests right within the office premises, during your work hours, and the HR will support you for that.
12. The company also has TT tournaments, pool tournaments, box cricket and football sessions that regularly take place at Directi to rough it out.

13. Women employees can get their kids to office (anytime and any day) – No bar. Every day is women’s day.

14. Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF) meetings every Friday with Beers and Breezers are the absolute norm for Directi-ians. The company lives by the rule work hard and party harder. The whole office officially gets together every 2 months to party at the large café which turns into a dim lit dance floor every now and then.

Liked this post? Take a tour of other famous offices as well.
Inside Microsoft Office | 10 coolest things you get as a Microsoft employee!
Inside Google Office | 15 coolest things you get as a Google Employee.
Inside the Facebook Office | 10 coolest things you get as a Facebook Employee!

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1. Shaheen Mistri, CEO, Teach For India:
Shaheen Mistri founded the Akanksha Foundation in 1991 and is the founder and CEO of Teach For India. Akanksha educates 5000 children in 15 schools – equipping them with the education, skills and character they need to lead empowered lives. Teach For India educates 30,000 children across 7 cities & is building, in parallel, a force of leaders who will be committed to demonstrating, inspiring and catalysing systemic change – until the day comes when all children across India attain an excellent education.

“I started Akanksha instinctively. I was visiting my grandparents in Mumbai and during that visit, the inequality in the standard of education between the private and public schools struck me. It was clearly one of those heart over head things,” she told YourStory in an interview

I guess my background helped. I had the privilege of having been in over 10 different schools when I was growing up. It helped me understand people, how to mobilize them and how to adapt to different systems. Those lessons kept me in good stead,” she added.

Shaheen has a Masters Degree in Education from the University of Manchester, England. She is an Ashoka Fellow 2001, a Global Leader for Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum 2002, an Asia Society 21 Leader 2006 and serves on the boards of Akanksha, Ummeed, and the Thermax Social Initiatives Foundation. She also serves as a committee member for the National Council for Teacher Education.

Talking more about Teach For India, she says, “When it comes to TFI, we’ve had different challenges at different points of time. At the crux of the movement are the really idealistic, brilliant people who come forward to teach, but it’s awfully hard for a lot of those people to commit two years to it. There’s societal pressure. The classroom atmosphere isn’t easy to succeed in. We’ve had better classrooms lately. But it can be pretty hard.”

2. Richa Singh, Founder and CEO, YourDost

“When I was at IIT Guwahati, my hostel mate committed suicide. She was worried about her placements. This could have been avoided if we knew what she was going through. Even though we had counsellors and psychologists in the campus hardly any student was seeking their support or help,” Richa Singh told YourStory in an interview last year. 

After venturing into the post-college world, Richa realized that a lot people all around her, from different walks of life, were struggling with mental health, and the stigma that surrounds the concept of “getting help” in India, just made things worse.

With the motive of providing a channel for people to vent, seek advice and to overall organize the entire counselling industry, Richa came up with the idea of YourDost – a platform that acted as an emotional support system, where people can be completely anonymous, and talk to psychologists + trusted experts, in the time of despair.

She found a great founding team in Puneet Manuja, IIM alumnus, Prakhar Verma, from BMSCE Bangalore and Satyajit Nandekar, Northeastern University.

The team of professional counselors on YourDost, help you cope with tough times – work stress, relationship, self-image and many more, and support you in your quest for self improvement.

“However ironic it may sound, the word ‘mental’ is associated with madness and insanity. As a result, seeking mental counselling is a huge taboo in our society. Seeking support is considered a sign of weakness. Most of the times we keep our problems to ourselves because we are not very comfortable accepting our vulnerabilities,” she says.

Since their launch in December 2014, YourDost has more than 70,000 users, that make use of 300 interactive sessions every day, with over 75 experts. The platform also claims a 40 percent month-on-month growth and raised Rs. 2.5 Crore in Angel funding.

3. Vandana Luthra, Founder, VLCC

“When I started, there were hardly any women entrepreneurs. It was a male-dominated environment. I had to face a lot of criticism, a lot of people tried to ensure that I did not succeed and grow. The only thing I believed in was that my concept was unique, unusual and it was being introduced in India for the first time,” Vandana told YourStory, explaining how it was like starting out in the eighties.

Vandana was born and brought up in an upper-middle class, educated family, with her father being a Mechanical Engineer, and her mother, who ran an Ayurvedic Clinic – Amar Jyoti. Inspired by her how her mother’s cause impacted the lives of other people, she thought of doing something similar and combining beauty and wellness, with holistic approach. Following this, Vandana took to Europe for further studies.

Post marriage, she started a small health & beauty salon in her neighborhood, which laid the humble beginnings of the VLCC Wellness empire that we know today.

“My husband was very supportive and offered to fund my dream but I was adamant that I would not take money from anyone. I booked the place and took a small loan and got started,” she recalls.

After the initial struggle with striking a balance between nutritionists and cosmetologists + beauty and fitness experts, Vandana’s product line took off and became the talk of the town. A few months in, her investment started paying off, and soon, she was entertaining a clientele list consisting of celebrities.

Today, VLCC spans 11 countries, 135 cities and 310 outlets, with Research and Development centres of their own. Vandana herself travels extensively to countries across the globe, in order to keep updated with the latest trends in her industry.

4. Chantelle Menezes, Founder and Content Manager, Explorate
After graduating from Xavier’s College – Mumbai , in Psychology and Anthropology, 22-year old Chantelle was still figuring out life, when Explorate happened.

Explorate is a fashion discovery platform, that was created to “make sure you never get lost in a sea of average products again”. With Explorate, you can find the season’s latest trends and best products in clothing, makeup, and accessories, handpicked from all your favourite brands and e-commerce stores, in ONE place, by a strong fashion forward community consisting of fashion enthusiasts, bloggers, stylists and more.

“Being millennials that spend most of their time browsing the internet and shopping online ourselves, we found a dearth of genuinely good, user-recommended products on ecommerce Websites. This means people waste precious time just skimming to find good quality. We realized that if fashion-forward people could recommend products from their favourite online stores, it would make so much more sense for other shoppers.

Cutting down cumbersome shopping time ( from around 250 popular ecommerce Websites in India itself) and at the same time, featuring the best products from the best stores and brands, would make the experience more engaging and enjoyable. This is how we thought about Explorate and we kept building on the idea, from there,” the team at Explorate explains on their Website.

Since there launch, Explorate has an inventory of 50,000 user-recommended products, 20,000 users, out of which 70 percent are returning users.

[quote_box_center]“In my own experience, women are more often than not greeted with incredulousness or polite complacency, at best, especially in a space like the Startup community, which is dominated by IIT-ians and the proverbially Business-minded. It gives me immense satisfaction to meet and support other women who take bold steps to fight against the odds and pave their own path to success,” Chantelle told YourStory in a recent interview.

Apart from Explorate, Chantelle also finds herself driven by music, and has performed in Coke Studio, and MTV Unplugged.

5. Rashi Menda, Founder and CEO, Zapyle
Faced with the infamous – ‘I have nothing to wear,’ problem herself, Rashi realized how most of women have a closet fullof clothes they have never worn, or have worn only once or twice. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find a new home for the clothes you bought with love, but never put to use? Or, if you could pick the chic-est outfits from someone else’s wardrobe, for half the price?

Following this same thought process, Rashi sat down and chalked a plan that resulted in the inception of Zapyle, a platform where you can:
– Sell: Want to pass on your pre-loved items to someone who’ll give it as much love? Just post it, share it with fashion lovers like you and make some quick green.
– Buy: Be sure you’re going to make some fabulous finds for your own closet! Follow your favorite closets to score the best pieces at the best prices.
– Discover: Get lucky with the best deals on premium brands, just at the touch of a button and explore tons more!

What started off with a web version, soon became an app that has a 3.6 on Playstore at the moment, and features 54+ closets with around 100 domestic and international brands.

Rashi, who is a Economics graduate from University of Minnesota, completed her education from Delhi, and has worked with Ernst & Young previously.

Talking about what her biggest challenge as the CEO, she told YourStory,”I was lucky enough to find a tech consultant who guided me through the process and got me a perfect team. I believe, if you are a CEO – you have to be a chief everything officer, otherwise it is hard to be successful. In the past 3 months, I have been reading a lot about different coding languages, learning about python and attending several tech events. Events have definitely helped me get better at my job.”

Rashi regards Sheryl Sandberg and Sophia Amoruso as her biggest inspirations.

On being a women entrepreneur, she notes, “As the founder of the business, investors often want to know if I am married. When I say yes, they perceive it as a risk – because I may want to have a family in the near term. It takes a significant amount of effort to reassure investors that I am not planning a family in the near future.”

If you are a woman entrepreneur, or know one, share your story with us at blog@letsintern.com

The post #WomenInBusiness | 5 Women Entrepreneurs in India that you should know about! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

1. Cubeit is a mobile application which lets you collect content from any source, and makes it ridiculously easy to find and share.

Founded in 2014, by Sarthak Jain, Prathmesh Juvatkar, and Mithun Madhusudan, who came together at IIT Gandhinagar, with a vision to revolutionize the way devices and content interact with each other, Cubeit is backed by early investors IIT Gandhinagar, Asha Jadeja Motwani (a Silicon Valley investor) and also by India’s top Venture Capital funds, Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners.

How it works:
- Collect: Think of a Cube as a container to put any digital content — links, documents, videos, photos, music — anything at all. Just share content to Cubeit from any app and it will be saved, organized, summarized, and made shareable.
– Curate: Organize your stuff into neat Cubes, irrespective of content type or source. This means a link you like, a photo you’ve taken, or a video from YouTube, all live together. No more switching between apps to view different types of content!
– Consume: You know how links tell you nothing unless you click them and open them in another browser?Cubeit fixes this by displaying all content as cards, which give you important information up front, along with actionable buttons.
– Collaborate: Sharing from Cubeit is easier than ever. Just swipe right on any card or Cube! Any content you or your friends add in a shared Cube instantly synced and saved. It’s a shared Dropbox for every type of content!

“We started out building Cubeit because we realized that your digital life is spread across too many different apps and we wanted to bring it all in one place. We wanted to create one place where you can store anything and everything.

Here’s a use case: You are researching a story on Elon Musk. You get content from multiple sources – Tim Urbans comprehensive article, a Product Hunt link from the Tesla Model X launch, Space X video from YouTube, Musk’s tweets and so much more. On your PC you would open a folder and put all these different types of content into it. On the phone, we’ve built Cubeit to get your apps together.”
– Nithin Kumar, wrote on Product Hunt.

2. Betaout helps small and large e-commerce businesses do behavioral Marketing like Amazon, by understanding their customers and personalizing every single Marketing message across all channels to increase conversion.

Founded in 2014, by Mayank Dhingra, Raghubir Thakur, Nandini Rathi, Ankit Maheshwari, and Arhun Maheshwari, Betaout enables marketers to create advance customer segments through a simple drag and drop interface, and then target each customer segment using multiple Marketing mediums like push, email, sms, on-site engagement, in-app, and web notifications in a single window. The Noida based Startup is backed by  Kunal Behl(Founder and CEO, Snapdeal), Anupam Mittal(Founder and CEO, Shaadi.com), Vijay Shekhar Sharma(Founder and CEO, Paytm), Phanindra Sama(Founder, Redbus), Girish Mathrubootham (CEO, Freshdesk), Ashish Kashyap (CEO Ibibo Group) and many more big names. They were also picked up by a U.S based accelerator program – Techstars Chicago 2015, and recognized as the ‘Top 250 most promising Startups in Asia’ by Pioneers Asia 250, recently.

3. Simulanis was started back in November 2013, by with a vision to revolutionize Engineering learning; a vision to enable every student to visualize different aspects of core Engineering chemical, mechanical, civil, electrical and instrumentation and more; a vision to help them practically ‘do’ the stuff sitting at their homes, through industry-wide simulators.

What if students wishing to learn about the operations of an oil refinery, using our products and technologies, they could literally just ‘walk’ into the plant and immerse themselves into an incredible virtual 3D experience, whilst simultaneously training themselves at their own pace and comfort?

What if he could do the same for a pharmaceutical plant, a FMCG production plant, a car manufacturing plant, a power generating plant, and so on?

Simulanis was started to fulfill this dream, by providing  practical learning experience every student deserves and aspires to get, through an industrial-interface. Their products are aiming to solve the most common pain points of most engineers (students, graduates and professionals) who find it difficult to effectively visualize and conceptualize complex Engineering subject matter – be it diagrams, schematics, drawings, processes, concepts, laboratory experiments, technical site operations, and so on. Poor visualization, in turn, leads to their poor performance during examinations, job interviews, or applying the technical know-how in industry.

Simulanis, with their Technology-driven, immersive and market-disrupting products help increase employability rate of these engineers by bridging the skills-gap through quality learning.

4. FreshMenu:
Of the many pressing concerns in life, the one that bothers most of the busy, bored and always-on-the-run modern day youth is ‘Food’. Dulled by eating ‘ghar ka khaana’ everyday, the need to go online to look for appetizing cuisine is but natural. To rescue the fresh-food- seekers and the quest to whip up interesting food options in the kitchen led to the inception of FreshMenu-delivering fresh tasty meals at your doorstep!

Based out of Bangalore, FreshMenu was founded by Rashmi Dagga in 2014, and has operations spread out over Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi NCR.

What makes FreshMenu different:
1. Finest Ingredients: All of their produce – from the highest quality sauces, oils and exotic spices from across the world to get that authentic flavour – is freshly sourced and prepared daily.
2. Tempting Menus: Their daily changing menu keeps abreast with the latest food trends and offers a whole new experience everyday.
3. Amazing Chefs: The team of 100+ chefs at FreshMenu constantly explore, innovate and customize various international recipes to suit your taste. Trained from the topmost culinary institutes, all their chefs have years of experience to celebrate.

4. Prepared Fresh: Your meal starts getting prepped only after receiving the order. It’s always fresh, wholesome and delectable. Since, their kitchens are spread all over the city, you can trust your meal to be always piping hot. FreshMenu also promises a 45 minute delivery time.

They raised $16.5 Million in funding in January this year, and reportedly picked up another Rs. 31 Cr last month.

5. Webkul is a web and mobile product based organization that builds innovative and valuable products, for enterprise level e-commerce sites. Founded by Vipin Sahu, Vipul Yadav and Prakash Sahu, they are ISO and NSR (NASSCOM) certified, and have a team of 100+ employers, that work out of Noida.

Webkul has developed more than 700 web extensions and apps in the past 5 years for open source platforms which are used and trusted globally by more than 30000 customers. Their very impressive clientele list includes Princeton University, Intel, Healthkart, Harvard Alumni, UNESCO, Costco, Eurostar, MIT, Bharat Matrimony, University of Queensland, and more.

The post Weekly Spotlight | 5 Indian startups that you should check out right now! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month Programming project during their break from school.

Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Click here for more details and apply now.

Location: All development occurs online; there is no requirement to travel as part of the program.

The post Google Summer of Code 2016 | Become a student developer for Google and get $5500! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Bio
My name is Girish Mathrubootham and I am the Founder and CEO of Freshdesk. I am 36 years old, married and live with my wife and two boys in Chennai, India. This is the story of how I quit my comfortable job and launched my own Startup. Hope you like it.

My last job

For the last 9 years I was fortunate to be an employee of Zoho Corporation (was called AdventNet when I joined in 2001 as a PreSales Engineer) and in my last role I was  VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp.
I had  a great team and the satisfaction of having built several successful products under the ManageEngine brand.

I have been building on-premise helpdesk systems since 2004. In fact I have experience with an ITIL helpdesk, a customer support helpdesk and a facilities helpdesk and know a lot about these markets. In addition to this I had a ringside view to all the action in cloud computing happening in Zoho.

How it all started

Sometime in the middle of last year I was reading this article on Hacker News. This article was about Zendesk raising their prices 60 – 300% and how their users were unhappy about it.

I was just reading this as a news article and browsing through the comments on HNwhen a simple comment from user megamark caught my attention.

That comment was like a slap on my face. Here was an opportunity sitting right in front of me. I had the domain knowledge and I knew that a massive transition to cloud is happening. The spidey sense in me told me that I should throw in my hat into the ring. That was the exact moment that I decided that I should build something in the customer support market delivered as SAAS.

The next few weeks were actually pretty stressful. I couldn’t sleep because of the excitement and the fear.(school fees, home mortgage etc.) I had not talked to anyone(not even my wife) about the idea but I was researching all the companies in the space.

I actually read everything that was ever written on those companies on Hacker News. The Hacker News Search (yes that tiny little link on the bottom of every HN page) is in my opinion an entrepreneur’s best resource. (If you are the type who prefers reading printed articles you should consider the Hacker Monthly)

I zeroed in on some potential domain names and found that freshdesk.com was actually expiring in a couple of weeks. So I backordered it on Godaddy and waited and waited. It was almost a month before the domain was officially transferred to me.

The Team

The time had come when I needed a co-founder. I talked to my good friend and colleague of several years, Shan – who is a great techie and he immediately agreed.

For a few weeks we tried working weekends and nights but since both of us had families and kids it was obvious pretty soon that we had to do this full time if we were serious. We both resigned in October 2010. Now we have a team of six people – (3 developers, 1 UI/UX designer, 1 QA / Customer support engineer and me as – the Product Manager / CEO).

US Company or India Company

We are based in India and I couldn’t find any payment gateway provider offering recurring payment solutions in India. The best payment processors that we wanted to work with worked only with US bank accounts.  We decided to incorporate Freshdesk in the US.  You can read the entire story of how we incorporated a US company from India here. We used FeeFighters to search for an affordable card processor and almost settled on Co-Card, but instead went ahead with the more expensive Braintree as they had everything we needed and also had excellent reviews on Hacker News. We also ended up registering a company in India as we were going to have employees, hire an office space etc.

Logo & Website

We wanted a logo and a Website and we did not have a designer in our team at that time. I looked at several outsourcing options and again Hacker News gave me 3 excellent choices – 99Designs, ThemeForest and SortFolio. We liked the idea of 99Designs very much but we wanted a Website Design and a logo and we found an Indian company on Sortfolio called Getmefast.com who agreed to do everything for around $450.

Marketing

We put up the Website with standard helpdesk features and we wanted to know if customers would buy what we were going to build.So we created a Wufoo form for beta signup and started advertising on Google Adwords, Facebook and LinkedIn with $10 and $25 and $50 budgets. We also wrote some blog posts which got some decent views. In all we spent around $350-400 in advertising and we got more than 150 valid signups.

We started looking for patterns in our customer profiles and identified that most of our leads were from a few niche market segments that we could market to easily.

Product /Market Fit

We started engaging with our prospects on what they were currently using and what problems they were facing. In many cases people were telling us clearly what they really wanted to see in their customer support software.

We were surprised to see that a lot of what customers wanted were their core problems solved and not some fancy features like supporting customers from their Facebook wall or converting tweets into customer support tickets. While we understand that these are definitely the way of the future, many many customers do not need this today.

Another important learning for us was that customers did not want to be dealing with separate invoices for their helpdesk, their contact management software, for their customer feedback forums and customer satisfaction surveys. The SMB customer wants one invoice and as much functionality as possible in the customer relationship management solution.

We also identified underserved market segments (companies with multi-brand support requirements) and segments which were getting priced out because the current solutions were expensive.

So we re-prioritized our feature set to what we thought is the ideal product/market fit for us. This means that things like Twitter and Facebook integration can wait. But things like multiple support emails or support for SLAs and Business hours are in.

Today Freshdesk is one of the fastest growing SaaS customer support solutions in the world today, with businesses right from the hottest garage Startups, all the way to some of the biggest enterprises relying on it to deliver exceptional support to their customers.

They have more than 500 passionate employees globally and Freshdesk helps over 50,000 businesses and organizations around the world offer better, more personal support to their customers.

This was orginally published on the Freshdesk blog here.

The post How I quit my comfortable high paying job, and launched my own startup. | by Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO, Freshdesk. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Google Creative Lab is inviting applications for The Five – a one year paid program, that is offered to only five people, where you work on things that matter – which could be big, small, and ideally the first of its kind at Google.

Former ‘Fivers’ have been designers, filmmakers, developers, and the occasional wildcard, who have had the chance to work with some of the most talented people around. Amongst other things, the current Five have helped Design a Website to recruit the next Five, that looks like this:
The idea is to see what prospective applicants for The Five, can do with some shapes, a text bar, and plain white page. Write it, Design it, code it, break it. In their words – “consider this the cover letter to your application”.

Obviously, we soon had a bunch of people coming up with the most creative responses they could come up with, for their application.

The post Google Creative Lab has the coolest application form ever, for their internship program! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

1. StalkBuyLove:
Founded in 2013 by Tushar Alhuwalia, Ashna Chopra, Nishrit, Srivastava and Shikha Alhuwali, Stalkbuylove is a vertically integrated women’s fashion brand, that has its own manufacturing hub in Delhi. Inspired by Zara, and working at the pulse of international fashion, they provide young Indian women with clothing, jewelry, accessories and bags at resonable prices and unbeatable quality.

Since their inception, Stalkbuylove clocks a whopping $5 Million in gross-revenue run rate, 8 percent month-on-month growth, 12 complete inventory turns per year and gross margins of 70 percent.

Accordingto the reports, they recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Littlerock – a German venture fund, Singularity Ventures, 500 Startups, and more.

2. Drivojoy:
Founded by Ravindra A, Aman Singhal and Vishwanath Kollapudi, in 2015, the Bangalore based Startup provides the easiest way to get your two-wheelers repaired. No more worries about having to drive and drop your vehicle at the mechanics – book an appointment, and get your two-wheeler the royal treatment from the trusted team of certified mechanics at Drivejoy.

With our less than 30-seconds booking process, secure payment and a 100 percent money back guarantee, DrivoJoy aims to be the most affordable, convenient, and transparent approach to bike repair and maintenance.Recording a 30 percent month-on-month growth, they have been catering to 400 bikes per month, and have attended to 2000+ users. They also raised a $600,000 funding from well-known names like Indian Angel Network(IAN), Shailesh Rao(Currently: Twitter, Previously: Google), Bhavani Rana(Amadeus Capital), Kunal Shah(Founder, Freecharge) andDeepak Gupta(Co-founder, EquityCrest).3. BigBasket:
Founded in 2011, by Hari Menon, VS Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh, Abhinay Choudhari and VS Ramesh, BigBasket is India’s largest online food and grocery store, where you can find over 18,000 products – from fresh Fruits and Vegetables, Rice and Dals, Spices and Seasonings to Packaged products, Beverages, Personal care products, and Meat – listed by 1000+ brands. Choose from a wide range of options in every category, exclusively handpicked to help you find the best quality available at the lowest prices. Select a time slot for delivery and your order will be delivered right to your doorstep, anywhere in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, Vijayawada-Guntur, Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore, Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar, Vadodara, Delhi and Lucknow.

Based out of Bangalore, BigBasket recently raised $150 Million from Abraaj Group – a UAE based private investor firm.

4. Room On Call:
Room on Call, a name strategically chosen to immediately communicate the brand’s value proposition, is exclusively for those looking for branded budget accommodation. With a simple click, travellers are able to choose their preferred destination from an array of the choicest properties, including prominent guest houses, boutique hotels, and hotels. A 24X7 helpline also facilitates booking in real time, in case one is off the grid.

The Gurgaon-based Startup was founded in May 2015 by 37-year-old Amit Goel, formerly of eBay; 35-year-old Nirupama Dhawan, formerly of DHL Express; and Pradeep Kumar Sajjan, formerly of Pepsi and LNJ. Abhishek Kumar, Director of Strategy and Investments at Microsoft India, is also an advisor and stakeholder. They attracted their first round back in September 2015 from Payal Syal, a US-based investor, and a senior executive at Yahoo. They pumped in seed funding of $300,000 into the then seven-month-old Startup, which helped them grow to over 42 locations, with 400 hotels, and a total inventory of over 8,000 rooms.

They recently raised $2 Million from Cash ur Drive(CUD) – a Mumbai based advertising company.

5. CityShor:
CityShor sifts through a variety of places, information, food joints, restaurants, shopping hubs, stores, products and travel places in a city(Ahmedabad + Pune, for now). Then, it compares, evaluates and identifies what’s best, unusual or unexplored for each particular category and presents it to the people of the city.

Launched in 2013, by Pankaj Pathak, and Pallavi Parikh, CityShor claims to be raking in a revenue of Rs. 3Cr by next year, and plans to expand to Bangalore with its services, following their recent round of angel funding of an undisclosed amount, from GAIN, an angel network based out of Vadodra.

Looking to start your career at a startup? Apply for startup internships and jobs today!

The post Weekly Spotlight | 5 Indian Startups that raised funding this month! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

This post was written by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager – Google India, for the Google blog. 

Think of the last time you searched on Google for health information. Maybe you heard a news story about gluten-free diets and pulled up the Google app to ask, “What is celiac disease?” Maybe a co-worker shook your hand and later found out she had pink eye, so you looked up “pink eye” to see whether it’s contagious. Or maybe you were worried about a loved one—like I was, recently, when my infant son Veer fell off a bed in a hotel in rural Vermont, and I was concerned that he might have a concussion. I wasn’t able to search and quickly find the information I urgently needed (and I work at Google!).

Thankfully my son was OK, but the point is this stuff really matters: one in 20 Google searches are for health-related information. And you should find the health information you need more quickly and easily.

So starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.

We worked with a team of medical doctors (led by our own Dr. Kapil Parakh, M.D., MPH, Ph.D.) to carefully compile, curate, and review this information. All of the gathered facts represent real-life clinical knowledge from these doctors and high-quality medical sources across the web, and the information has been checked by medical doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic for accuracy.

That doesn’t mean these search results are intended as medical advice. We know that cases can vary in severity from person to person, and that there are bound to be exceptions. What we present is intended for informational purposes only—and you should always consult a healthcare professional if you have a medical concern.

But we hope this can empower you in your health decisions by helping you learn more about common conditions. We’re rolling it out over the next few days, in the U.S. in English to start. In the long run, not only do we plan to cover many more medical conditions, but we also want to extend this to other parts of the world. So the next time you need info on frostbite symptoms, or treatments for tennis elbow, or the basics on measles, the Google app will be a better place to start.

The post Google launches ‘Health-Cards’ in India, to make, for accessible information about 400 diseases. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

1. iShippo, is a Bangalore based Startup, founded by Karma Bhutia, and Deepak Ramachandran, that offers an online eCommerce marketplace for buying and selling hand-crafted/home-based products including jewellery, beverages, groceries, photography, bakery, personal care, gifts and novelties, personalised cakes, furniture, medicines and wellness, home decor, toys and accessories, consumables, custom packages, art and sculptures, and clothing.  Enabled by integrated order management, ePayment and logistics to ensure quick and efficient delivery, iShippo provides a delightful ecosystem for producers, sellers, shippers, and buyers on a mobile app with assured security and total transparency.
With iShippo, you can:
– Save items and shops as favorites to revisit them later.
– Get notified the minute an order ships.
– Talk directly to shop owners to get all of your questions answered.
– Explore curated recommendations tailored to your taste.
– Use ePayment services to check out swiftly and securely.
– Discover upcoming events.

2. Gapoon is an online platform where you can connect with and hire trusted and verified professionals, for home maintenance – plumbing, painting, cleaning, repairing, carpentry, pest control, electrician, and more, through a hassle-free single click appointment. booking process.
What makes Gapoon different?

• Gapoon partners with the expert and the verified team of professionals that can meet the standards as well as expectations of our esteemed customers and can offer high-quality services. Once selected vendors are background verified.
  
• Gapoon provides you the best tailor made customized home service packages that are very economical and are highly transparent in nature with upfront prices.
• Gapoon ensures better quality and good service warranty at each step of the whole process We have a policy of 30-day service warranty and we provide redone of work if customer is not satisfied.
• Gapoon only associates with the vendors and the service providers who have a very good reputation and powerful track record of service quality, ensuring customer security and safety.
• In case the chosen vendor becomes unavailable then Gapoon provide the same calibre work, in order to cater to the needs and requirement of the customers.

3. Headquartered in the teeming metropolis of Mumbai, Doormint was founded in 2015, to provide a convenient, and Technology-driven way, to solve one the most common household problems – Laundry, through their web portal and mobile app.How does Doormint work?

• Select a convenient date, time-slot and the category of service required – combinations of washing, ironing, or dry cleaning – and place a booking through Doormint’s app, Website or helpline number.
• Doormint will send a pick-up boy at your house, who’ll process your garments at their partnering facilities, and return them back to you within 96 hours of pick up.
• Doormint uses the best laundry detergents recommended by experts to wash your clothes, rinse them with fabric softners and dry them under low temperature in dryers to keep up the brightness of the linen.
• Although the services offered and the prices differ from locality to locality, Doormint’s laundry service starts at as low as Rs. 12.

Currently Doormint is operational in Mumbai, Bangalore and Gurgaon.

4. Furlenco is Home Furniture Subscription Program based out of Bangalore, that offers a wide range of curated home furniture experiences, designed to suit the lifestyle needs of varied audiences spanning students to families and expatriates.
Furlenco’s Furniture Packages are convenient, cost-effective and offer access to quality furniture -beds, tables, couches, sofas, recliners, chairs and more – with the added advantage of being able to exchange it at will.To deliver the best possible home experience, our furniture is designed and developed in-house by a team of experienced designers who follow a strict development process, resulting in an enhanced product experience.

Currently, Furlenco operates in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune, with a delivery times between 24 hours to 7 days depending on the package. All their deliveries and pick-ups are free of cost, so you do not need to pay anything apart from the monthly subscription fee. The delivery team also installs and lays out the items as per your instructions.

5. Started by a bunch of IIT alumni, Rocketbox is a Mumbai based aggregation and analytics platform for Intra-city logistics, that lets you book pick-up trucks, through their Website, mobile app or phone call, for transporting materials from one city to the other.

Logistics is a 200 billion dollar market in India alone and comprises about 14% of the national GDP. It’s obvious from the numbers that it is seemingly complex and gigantic in scale. Rocketbox leverages Technology to convert this seemingly complex process into a simple intuitive interface for the end user, and removes human involvement wherever possible. Users can request vehicles at the click of a button, track, pay and access invoices all on their app.

As the end user, you’d be required to declare a few details including pick-up location, drop point, type of vehicle and  the time, following which you’d be informed about the standardized charges. Once that’s settled, a registered driver from the nearest checkpoint will reach at your pick-up destination in 30 minutes.

The post Weekly Spotlight | 5 Indian startups that you should check out right now! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Freshdesk is one of the fastest growing SaaS customer support solutions in the world today, with businesses right from the hottest garage startups, all the way to some of the biggest enterprises relying on it to deliver exceptional support to their customers.

Today they have more than 500 passionate employees globally and Freshdesk helps over 50,000 businesses and organizations around the world offer better, more personal support to their customers.

They recently another 60,000 square feet to their existing 60,000 square feet office, in Chennai. Let’s take a look!

The post Inside Freshdesk’s Chennai Office | Journey from a warehouse to a 120,000 square-feet work space! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

This post has been curated from the answers received on – What’s the worst thing about working at Facebook?

1. “This is a question I get asked fairly frequently by interview candidates, so I’ve given it a bit of thought,”says, Keith Adams, Software Engineer at Facebook, who has spent 4 long years at the organization, working at the back-end, HHVM and PHP engine.

“The worst thing about working at Facebook for me has been on-call duty. Most engineering teams run complex, frequently modified software in production. Since things have a way of going wrong, teams have a rotating responsibility for responding to unanticipated emergencies. Since these can happen any time, day or night, and are of unknowable scope and severity, being oncall is a serious responsibility; many millions of users are affected every minute the site is broken, ” he adds.

Explaining further, he says, “My current team’s rotation lasts for two weeks, and rolls around two to three times per year. For those two weeks I don’t leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have “one too many” at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on on the nightstand as I sleep. And yes, once or twice a year that phone does go off at some bizarre hour to rouse you from your slumber and go fight a fire in production.

While it can be satisfying to help get the site back in order when it’s sick, it really is not for everyone. This part of the job just isn’t fun for me; I find debugging under time pressure through a 3 a.m. haze stressful.”

2. “I’m a Facebook engineer who’s been with the company for two years. I want to first say that I’m really happy at Facebook — on balance, it’s a truly fantastic place to work. I also want to note that Facebook is a company with several thousand employees. As such, the company is far from monolithic — there are things that are bad about working for specific groups at the company, or in specific roles, so the answer will naturally vary from group to group, role to role, or location to location. That said, there are a couple of things that seem to pervade the company,” a user that wishes to remain anonymous, said.

His first beef with the organization is their take on ‘professionalism’ – where employees “are (implicitly) encouraged to be themselves at work”. Employees use the same account for work that they do for the “outside world” and are expected to partake in the unofficial sport of the company – beer pong, where you drink with your co-workers, socialize, hang out outside of work(with people from inside of work), talk about your life.

According to him, this has a significant downside – “At most companies, you put up a wall between a work personality and a personal one, which ends up with a professional workspace. This wall does not exist at Facebook, which can lead to some uncomfortable situations.”

3. Working by the thumb rule of, ‘Move fast and break things’, Facebook is rapidly growing by a factor of 2 every 18 months or so, for which it does not have “a truly functional infrastructure,” said the same user.

“We’re trying to figure out how the philosophy of empowering people to just build cool things works in a company with 4,000 employees instead of 500; we’re definitely not there yet. It seems weird to complain about the lack of bureaucracy, but it’s a problem right now because we’re growing so fast and have never emphasized organization, polish, or stability,” he added.

Philip Su, Director of Facebook London Engineering Office, emphasizes a similar point on his blog – “Over the past two years, the number of engineers at Facebook has more than doubled, but the rate of source code commits continues to grow proportionally with the number of engineers. This is in clear violation of the law that Fred Brooks established nearly 40 years ago in The Mythical Man Month, and that’s exactly what this “supposed” productivity is: myth.  I see engineers around me committing code all the time, releasing new features onto the site every week, and I just sit back and chuckle to myself.  Happy, happy fools.”
Inside the Facebook Office | 10 coolest things you get as a Facebook Employee!

4. “I chose to work at Facebook. They contacted me and recruited me from a job,” starts off another anonymous user. “This was the single greatest feeling I ever had. I felt privileged, honored in fact, to work with a company that has a huge public mission and has such a positive social impacting game plan. I drank it up. Interview after Interview I felt more and more excited and set on being a part of Facebook.”

“The first two days of orientation are spent mainly on you understanding the culture. While I believe and understand that the culture is important, the emphasis seems too much. Instead of a heavy focus on what “make an impact” means to the company and your particular role, it’s more about how not to break the circle of trust with the cool people.

The sentiment is that they only hire the best people for the best company in the world, so go compete! The company pushes this constantly. Its so overbearing that you almost feel like they are trying to convince themselves.

I walked away from that orientation terrified that if I didn’t find something that would put my name in neon lights within three months, I would be fired.”

Lack of team structure makes for a constant struggle, as “majority of the management staff has little idea or focus on creating a team.” This might make for a suitable atmosphere of work for some people,  but for others, who like to know where the guard rails are, who work well with guidance on – what it means to be successful, what growth looks like, and how you can make an impact as an employee – the lack of ‘us’ and opposed to ‘me’, and the emphasis on ‘personal wins’, can very easily be a nightmare.

On  related note, another user adds, “As a contractor and back fill for someone on maternity leave, I was temporarily assigned with very little guidance or support. Instructions were not clear, everything was a guessing game, and I was immediately set up to fail.”

5.  Amongst all the answers that bear a stark negative connotation, former Software Engineer Intern at Facebook, Jinghao Yan, chimes in with – “The worst thing about working with Facebook is that I have but one stomach for all the food.” (Haha?)
6. Another former Facebook intern questions the choice of Facebook’s primary programming language being PHP, and how Facebook – the product, being closely related with the Development process, makes for a very distracting job profile.
“The attitude of – ‘move fast and break things’ – is not necessarily a bad thing, but the way engineering is approached at Facebook in extremely flawed, in my opinion,” he said,”The company is definitely not as strict and careful, when it comes to privacy,” he adds.

7. A lot of employees also find the concept of having an open-space, no-cubicle style office – mind boggling. “When you have huge rooms filled with rows and rows of picnic style tables with people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with six inches of separation, there is zero privacy,” said one user.

8. A 2012 Facebook intern notes that although Facebook is an awesome place to work, and he’d love to go back, if he had no better alternative – what turned him off during his time there was “the complete lack of focus on his team, and no clear vision for the future of a product”.

“I was told that the product I was working on was extremely important and was going to be completely rewritten in 6 months. As a result, I was instructed to simply fix bugs and make small scale improvements where I could. On the last day of my Internship, the team decided that it was not worth completely rewriting the project. Last time I checked, this project has been redesigned, but is essentially the same as it was when I interned there,” he said,”I think the bigger problem was that I had rather ineffective management. As an intern, this crippled the project,” he adds.

9. Another reported issue is that of “code quality that varies greatly between teams.”
“Some teams believe that ‘testing’ slows down the development process, while some teams believe that ‘testing’ helps to speed up the development process by eliminating uncertainty,” a user told.

10. Lastly, there are employees that believe that Facebook is a large company, that is trying to act like a young one. “This is kind of like an Adam Sandler movie where he’s old but wants to act like a teenager,” one of them said, which makes things rather “awkward”.

The post Top 10 reasons to NOT work at Facebook| Facebook employees share their worst experiences. appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

1. Browntape:
Founded by Gurpreet Singh, Piyush Goel, and Ian Morgan, Browntape is a cloud-based modern, affordable, and efficient software, for online sellers for their e-commerce needs, no matter what marketplaces they are selling on.

While Piyush and Ian were completing their PhD in Artificial Intelligence, in the UK,  a couple of their friends were selling stuff on eBay, however, they soon realized that it became extremely painful and tedious to process the orders to get them out the door and to the customer. To deal with this problem, he jointly built Scrobbld.com – a quick tool that could keep track of the orders and shipments, with Ian, which laid the foundation to Browntape, as they realized that there could be other people who could benefit from this service.

Post UK, Ian worked with General Electric, and Piyush moved to the sunny lands of Goa, to work with a leading UX design firm, which was headed by Gurpreet.  In four years under his leadership, the design firm grew from scratch to just under a million dollars in annual turnover. Geared with his business experience, Gurpreet decided to join Piyush and Ian to take Scrobbld to the next level. A quick trip to the UK brought all three on the same page and they decided to go for it. Armed with the learning from Scrobbld, they started working on the next version of the service ground up, and hence Browntape was born.

With Browntape, online merchants (sellers who sell on eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc) manage their orders and inventory in one place without the need to log in to each site separately. A seller can bulk print shipping labels, invoices and manifests and track the status of all his orders in one console. When an item sells on one site, the stock quantity gets updated on all his online stores automatically via Browntape.

So far, they’ve received two rounds of angel funding, and are backed by Ganesh Krishnan, a serial entrepreneur and a prolific investor.

2. Prototyze:
An incubator, currently working in stealth mode, that turns ideas into businesses, Prototyze builds mobile Technology centered products in multiple sectors such as mFitness, transportation, financial services, and corporate training and learning. Four ventures catalyzed by them(Mobiefit, HandyTrain, Carryage, and Seynse) have already been incorporated as independent companies with independent teams, investment and trajectory.

Their other companies include ScreenRoot – which focusses on human: screen interaction Design, Synapse – which specializes in Business communication, Visual JuJu – centered on multimedia, Starving Artist Films – which makes films designed for online media, Zaki –  which focuses on custom art for individuals, corporate and architects, Gulnar Soaps, that formulates and markets natural hand-made soaps, and Shirkshop that focuses on open source furniture design.

Unlike accelerators, companies under Prototyze are not rotating guest ventures, but are created from scratch – where  everything from investing (and facilitating) capital, to providing infrastructure, to expanding venture teams, to helping build products, to providing services including financial and legal, is taken care of.

Founded by Gourav Jaswal, Prototyze is backed by both individual and institutional investors, and is driven by a team of evangelists, guides and mentors.

Monte Carlo – their HQ, is located in Dona Paula, Goa, and plays host to 70+ people, 3 venture teams and a mini zoo. Pretty close by you’d find their second office – Monte Cristo.
Their third office is located opposite a hospital and next to a bar. It seats 45 people and 2 venture teams. Prototyze also has 3 guest houses are designed to host clients, partners and interns – two of which have an infinity pool with a sea-view, while the other is 60 seconds away from a beach.

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3. Tea Trunk:
Founded by tea connoisseur – Snigdha Manchandha, Tea Trunk provides a wide range of gourmet teas, that are hand crafted after days of tasting, refining and re-tasting, so that you get nothing but the very best from India’s tea gardens—with all the flavour and health benefits intact.

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4. Vacation Labs:
After being exposed to the travel industry, and the challenges that come along with it, during his 5-year stint at Cleartrip, Saurabh Nanda, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, started Vacation Labs that builds powerful, yet easy-to-use Technology tools, for tour operators that enables them to market their products and services, better. The online booking system, that was built keeping in mind the complexities of a travel-based business, is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and is now powering websites of operators across the globe – from North America to Europe and from Africa to Asia. Operators with varied tour options – weekend trips, holiday packages, etc – and activities such as scuba diving, trekking, camping, rafting, walking and cycling, cooking classes, and so on, are selling their services online, without any hassles and in minutes.

..and they are doing all of this, out of a Bungalow in Goa!

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5.

What would a Design studio of the 21st century look like? Who would it work with? What kind of work would it produce? How would it evolve? Beard Design was founded in 2012, by Abhishek Sarda, as an experiment to answer all of these questions, and to create a prototype of a modern Design studio. They work with emerging brands on brand identity Design, Web / UX / UI Design and packaging Design, and also tinker with space Design, brand communication and strategy, sometimes.

With the simple belief that good ideas are born in the mind, but are given life by the hand, the team at Beard Design cherishes the joys of creating and crafting, of seeing their work come alive.

Over the last 3 years, they’ve worked with 170+ clients, across 27 cities,
11 Countries, 10 Time Zones and 4 Continents. They are domain-agnostic, which explains why their works spans 11 industries including education, healthcare, e-commerce, automobile, hospitality, consulting, hardware, non-profit, real estate, publishing and you name it!

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The post Part #1| 5 Entrepreneurs that picked Goa to ‘start up’, and never looked back! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

It is the era of Startups and there has been a flow of companies setting foot in the industry, so many that its difficult to keep a track on the market.

Here are 5 Startups you should check out!

1. Faircent.com
Founders: Rajat Gandhi, Vinay Mathews, Nitin Gupta
City: Gurgaon.
Industry: P2P lending, FinTech.

Faircent.com is a financial Technology companies in India and is growing at a very fast rate. This Startup enables a direct communication between the creditors and borrowers. Borrowers post their loan requirement and reason, duration and the interest they may be willing to pay. Lenders can make offers to the borrowers which the borrower may accept or refuse. After the two parties have reached a mutual consensus Faircent helps legalise the transaction and subsequently assists in collection and recovery of the loan amount.

On the Website, two pools of members register: lenders and borrowers. Borrowers post requirements for loans citing reason, loan period and a target interest rate which they are willing to pay. Lenders can individually make offers to borrowers, which the borrower can accept or refuse. Borrowers too can approach willing lenders with their loan proposals. Offers are defined in terms of amount to be lent and the applicable interest rate.. Each participant acts based on their own discretion with no intervention from us. Both borrowers and lenders can strike deals with multiple members, thus, lenders can offer a portion of the total loan amount to a borrower and lend to multiple borrowers, and borrowers can seek to raise money from multiple lenders.

Once an agreement is reached between the borrower and the lender, a formal contract is signed by them. . The lender then transfers the amount to the borrower’s account and the borrower makes periodic repayments via EMI over the stipulated time period.

Repayment can be done by issuing post dated cheques, or making electronic transfers via NEFT, netbanking etc. Repayment can be made and tracked through Faircent.

2. StylFlip:
City: Mumbai
Founders: Zarik Nabi
Industry: Fashion Technology
For fashionable women who have closets full and yet nothing to wear, StylFlip is a social platform to sell, shop and flaunt your branded pre-owned fashion. Founded in November 2015, they are a mobile app that hopes to revolutionize shopping by giving you access to thousands of trendy, high fashion and luxury brands at a fraction of the cost. Through the StylFlip app you get access to an infinite and de-cluttered wardrobe filled with only the pieces you love.

Zarik’s wife – a fashion designer, has a keen sense of style and loves to keep up with the latest fashion trends.  With her ever-growing wardrobe, there were a whole lot of items that were barely used or didn’t fit and some even had tags on. Many items were significant to her and had memories attached to them. She did not want to just dispose of them. This got them thinking. There surely is someone out there that would treasure these items like she did. How could they connect with like-minded women to sell some of these valuable fashion pieces to and use the earnings to fund her next purchase while de-cluttering her closet?

And thus StylFlip was born.

They believe:

• Selling should be as easy as buying – Selling on StylFlip is as easy as 1-2-3. Click, list and pack your item. The team at StylFlip will pick it up from you as soon as it finds a buyer.
• Buying pre-owned should feel as good as buying new – Authenticity, safety and trust are as important to us as they are to you. Their StylFlip Promise takes care of all that and more.
• Looking good is all about sharing and flaunting – Fashion is a celebration of each one’s unique style and encouraging others to look great. It’s not about fancy Ad campaigns.
• In making a difference – Whether its reducing carbon footprint by re-fashioning, donating to support a cause cause or fostering a sense of entrepreneurship, they hope to make a difference at every step of the way.

3. Chaayos:
City: New Delhi
Industry: Cafe, Chai
Founders: Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma

The concept of chai adda or “Tea Room” took centre stage in our country for many years, with discussions on life, society and politics happening over chai. It was a place that brought together the young and old, rich and not-so-well to do. A kadak chai and samosa shared after work, an irani chai with bun maska over meeting a prospective life partner, or a hot adrak chai in the morning to wake you up – chai was a part of every social setting for us.

Yet somewhere along the line, this rich heritage of chai addas was lost and “Chai” took a backseat – taken over by the multinational coffee chains, suddenly chai was no longer the beverage that we bonded over.

Chaayos was born in November 2012 out of this premise – a contemporary interpretation of the chai adda, serving freshly made chai. Their focus is on serving your “Meri Wali Chai”, a chai made exactly to our customers’ liking the minute they place their order – be it an adrak tulsi kadak chai or a paani kam elaichi cinnamon chai. They offer 25 different types of teas, customisable in 12,000 ways. with 12 add-ons.

Chaayos delivers Tea in New Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida and one can place orders via their application or may call them directly. As of now, the Startup has five outlets around the city.

4. SilverPush
Founders: Hitesh Chawla and Mudit Seth
City: Gurgaon, Haryana
Industry: Advertising

SilverPush is a Technology Marketing platform for brands to understand and connect with their customers. The Startup helps their clients understand if their recent TV commercial is doing well on social media. This helps improve the effectiveness of a campaign, and helps companies make decisions faster, which helps them grow sales and market share at a global scale. This way, clients do not wait until next sales cycle to know if their campaign worked, they know it when they want to know it.

Claiming to be Next generation Advertising 2.0, SilverPush is leading the industry in bridging the customer journey from TV-Search-Social-Mobile, and focusing on deliering a great brand experience for the users. They understand what your customers are looking for, what they are saying and what they do.

– Over 2 million minutes of broadcast TV video is fingerprinted and analysed by SilverPush platform everyday.
– Their GPUs track television across 300 channels.
– In 10 ms they identify what is going on in the television using Artificial intelligence and deep machine intelligence.
– They track over 40 different dimensions of metadata – everything from the brand, agency, actors, products, songs, moods and other pertinent data.

This results in the largest and most comprehensively tagged catalog of TV broadcast data in the world.

5. Consure Medical:
Founders: Nish Chasmawala , Amit Sharma
City: New Delhi
Industry: Medical Device

Founded by a globally diverse and experienced team of engineers, clinicians, designers, and Business executives, Consure Medical is an emerging medical device company focused on developing and commercializing novel critical care technologies. Consure is continually innovating new products, expanding its portfolio of critical care solutions to help bridge the chasm in healthcare continuity that currently exits.

The Startup‘s flagship Technology is the Qora Stool Management Kit. Qora is the only stool management device that integrates a hygienic applicator to deploy a diverter inside the rectum by a minimally trained care provider or a motivated family member.

Founded in 2012 by medical device veterans Nishith Chasmawala and Amit Sharma, Consure has brought together a diverse and motivated team to execute on its bold mission of becoming one of the most patient-centric medical device companies in the world. The team brings over 25 years of experience in the medical device industry spanning the US, European, Indian, and Japanese markets. They’re a budding and hungry team of entrepreneurship-minded of technologists, clinicians, and investors that enable us to achieve large milestones in impressive fashion. Most importantly, their multicultural, cross-functional team is what helps get Consure’s technologies to the patients that need it the most.

The post Weekly Spotlight | 5 Indian startups that you should check out right now! appeared first on Student Resource - Learning Centre | Letsintern.com.

Made by: Mister Beep

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Ever sat around scratching your head, making a to-do list and wondering how you are going to complete the list of all personal tasks that you have? Meet Dunzo, the mobile app to get all your daily tasks ‘done’. These tasks can be anything –  from conventional ones like, getting a reservation at your favorite restaurant, visits to the grocery store, getting your car picked up from servicing, or fixing something at home, to non-conventional ones like driving pigeons out of your balcony, or repairing clocks.

Started by Dalvir Suri, Kabeer Biswas, Ankur Aggarwal, and Mukund Jha, this Bangalore based start-up, was launched in 2015. Since then, they have tied up with 100-150 businesses for easy completion of the tasks requested by customers, and have attended to 10,000+ happy customers.

“We went around getting partners for only things that users wanted. We realized that very very tiny percentage of local businesses actually matter in the local space and you don’t end up using more than top 5% of local businesses.” Biswas told Economic Times.

Dunzo operates in three very simple ways:
– Create a to-do list of all the mundane things in your life that you want to be taken care of.
– Chat with Dunzo’s human operator about how you want to go about checking your tasks off the list.
– See your tasks dunzo-ed away.

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Dunzo comes with the following features:
– Multi-tasking: Dunzo lets you add multiple tasks to your to-do list, which you can get done all at once.
– Add, edit, cancel and modify your to-do list as and when required.
– One Tap payments: A large part of completing your to-do’s, is to pay for them, hence Dunzo is designed to be cashless.
– Tracking: You can track your tasks, and get notified of their progress, while they are in the process of being completed.
– Dunzo is available 24*7.

In their recent pre-Series A round of funding, Dunzo has raised an investment of $650,000 from Blume Ventures, Aspada, and a few well-known angel investors like Sandipan Chattopadhyay, CTO, Just Dial and Rajan Anandan, Head – Google India.

Dunzo is currently a 19 member team, with most of the employees working in the Technology department. According to Kabeer Biswas, they’d be utilizing the money for further product development, to get more people on-board, planning an expansion in other cities, and partnering with more businesses.

Currently, Dunzo’s Business model is based around charging the customers for logistics, which varies from task-to-task.

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