Ever wondered how to make a personality statement on the Internet? Once you’ve decided to position yourself as a technophile or a hiking enthusiast, how do you go about it? One way is to start a blog or a website, but you have to keep it regularly updated. To address this headache, Sudhanshu Saxena and Alok Srivastava have come up with Actwitty. The start-up whose name is a play on ‘activity’ intends to carve a business out of building social profiles from publicly available data.
The founding team hit upon the idea while working for Samsung in Bengaluru. They use customised algorithms for ‘semantic analysis’ of users’ feeds for division into 23 broad categories such as business, technology and sports. Who could use such a service? Head hunters mostly, but also other companies and individuals. “We plan to sustain ourselves by selling the app as a plug-in to blogs, jobsites, alliance-making sites, social media, etc,” says Srivastava. Their business model, in part, also replicates popular networking sites like a LinkedIn or DropBox where less than 5% of the user base pays for specific services. “We will build a revenue stream on top of ‘freemium’ [basic service is free, but a premium is charged for advanced features] services,” says Saxena. Still in the early stages, the duo is building popularity for the brand via social media websites, blogs and start-up events.
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