Godparents.in

(Cross posted from Byte Channel)

Of the many startups that try to build up a social network in one form or another, this one is different. It does not have games, apps, or sharing in circles, but has profiles and pages, and has an asymmetric sharing. Pages are for organizations and can be linked from profile pages of children, which can be followed by the second kind of members, the Godparents.

Godparents.in is not just another internet startup. It is a platform that brings together thousands of underprivileged children in need of money for basic necessities like nutrition and education to willing donors. You would say there are numerous other organizations that do that, like CRY, Akshaya Patra, Smile Foundation et cetera. Godparents is different because it goes a step ahead and establishes a connection between the donor and the person.

By giving the child a name, a face, and a background story. And allowing you in making informed decisions on your donations, track where your money goes, how it is used, and most importantly how it impacts the lives of children that you choose to support, making Godparents.in a data-rich, transparent social-service-network specifically focussed at facilitating one-to-one financial support to underprivileged children.

Sample Preeti Upadhyay, who is a 10 year old girl studying in VII standard. She is good in studies and likes drawing, singing and reading stories. Her father is a daily wage labourer and mother a domestic help. She has two sisters and their parents meagre income is insufficient to meet her educational expenses. She requires a sum of Rs 8,600 per annum to take care of her school fees, uniform, books, and commute to school.

In addition to the above details, Preeti's profile page has a photo of hers, a list of her grandparents who have contributed towards her needs along with their contributions, and the NGO (with a link to the NGO page) that takes care for her.

So, Godparents.in establishes a three-way relationship between needy children, patrons, and NGOs.

A donor can go through the entire list of children's profiles and choose one or more of them to god parent. Every child has a total requirement and the amount left to raise. You may help a part or full of the remaining amount required. Godparents.in collects the money on behalf of the connected NGO, on which they have already had a due diligence done. The fund transactions are quite transparent with the incoming and outgoing funds listed on the site, including breakups of funds raised by NGO. Also accessible are regular updates on your Godchild's progress (through updates on child's profile) and the annual reports on the activities of recepient NGOs.

You can also connect to other godparents through their profile pages that have their brief bios with email ids and phone numbers If you feel good deeds should not be boasted, you can remain an anonymous Godparent. However, a public contribution adds to the transparency of the process. Your choice..

The novel idea was innovated by Shubham Shrivastava and Shivam Shrivastava. The creation and maintenance team for Godparents.in consists of a total of 17 volunteers, many of them IIT graduates and working in corporates in India and abroad. Apart from individuals, the effort has support from a few organizations as well. Microsoft supports Godparents.in under their 'BizSpark Global Startup Program', and Flipkart provides free publicity by distributing Godparents.in bookmarks along with the books that they sell online. As of today, the site has 15 NGOs and 415 godparents.

All the best Godparents.in. This will make a difference. I am signing up for a god parent right away.

90di- Simple Search for complex travel

Crosspost : vcbytes

90di, a new travel search engine in the already flooded market of online travel sites, stands out because of its unique features. First, it is not a travel agency, it simply searches on various modes of travel and redirects you to the respective booking sites, much similar to ixigo. But the best feature lies in the integration between various modes of travel, bus, train, and flight.

With its simplistic google-like homepage sans any ads (I wonder what their revenue model is), 90 Degree Internet Travel lets you combine all modes of travel between a pair of destinations. The search bar is simple, again like google’s, and one can enter source, destination, dates, and modes of travel in plain English and the powerful parser parses them to generate a list of meaningful search results. Of course you have the form-like search page too.

Another interesting feature is the ‘near search’, which lets you search routes to lesser-known destinations, that do not have an airport, or even a railway station. Once you search for such a destination, 90di gives you a list of close by locations to choose from. These are the much-needed features that the founders of 90di used as the USP for their travel site and will definitely take them far and ahead of competitors.

One improvement that can be done in the inter-mode search is to include the transition time. For example, in Bangalore, a one-hour window between landing at BIAL and boarding a train at Majestic is utterly insufficient. Intra-city travel times can be taken into account to not show such a result.

BackRub

Ms Brown was not in a position to haggle. She was recently divorced and living with her sister, so when a small technology start-up offered her a job in 1999, she welcomed it with open arms. The post paid $450 a week, plus a pile of what were then worthless stock options. She was the 41st employee of the organization, which, like many other startups, was incorporated in a garage by two students.

Today, nine years later, the company has 15,916 employees, sports a revenue of $10.6 billion (2006), has a stock market worth of $207 billion, and is the most popular name on the internet—Google. Ms Brown is one of the 1000 employees who have accrued fortunes of at least $5 million apiece from the web-giant.

Oh, did I tell you about Ms Brown's job profile? She was hired as a masseuse. After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, she retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. Phoebe, are you listening?

Google shares recently hit an all-time high of $747.24, up nearly 900% from their debut. “I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” Ms Brown said. “Every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again,” she told The New York Times of the fortune that she reaped from her former employer in the course of just five years. She now owns a large house of her own and spends time travelling the world overseeing the charitable foundation that she founded with her windfall.

She is also looking for a publisher for her memoir—"Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google". And as you would expect, these days, at least once a week, she splashes out on her own private masseuse.

PS: The Google search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" (because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance). I wonder whether that was Ms Brown's suggestion.