Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Wouldn’t be nice on sharing the experience of your favorite hangout place with your friends and get rewarded? also getting recommendation on new hangout places you may like all through SMS. Good news is Revu.in has arrived.

Revu.in is a customer engagement plus reward platform on mobile. Revu.in is an innovative way to publish reviews about anything you like in real time by just sending a SMS. The platform enables businesses to build and engage with their community.

Revu.in is a Bangalore based startup founded by Mayank Sharma, Ishwar Sundararaman, Jaishankar Jayaramakrishnan. Revu was started in June 2010 with an idea of using mobile phone as a platform where consumers can talk about places they have been to and immediately promote it within their social media.

Revu bridges the gap between businesses and consumers using an existing device that consumers anyway use today – Their Mobile phone. Businesses run their mobile loyalty, engagement and informational programs and consumers subscribe to them with just their mobile number.

For users Revu.in provides a platform for them to share their experience in a restaurant/pub/concert plays etc with their friends on twitter/facebook and also let them socialize with other people in platform with similar interests.

Revu.in monetizes from the business for deploying its customer reward platform. For businesses Revu provides platform to offer rewards and discounts to their customers.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

There was a strong buzz in the internet space that Facebook is going to launch its email service and most likely to compete with gmail aka gmail killer, Facebook put an end to all such speculations yesterday.

Facebook announced the launch of their new messaging service that envelopes  e-mail, instant messages, Facebook messages and SMS.

Salient Features of Facebook messaging service -

• New messaging system is designed to save all messages, meaning users will have a history of their communications.
• New messaging system will work with other e-mail systems, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail.
• The new messaging system is platform agnostic, so users can send and receive messages via mobile, IM or Facebook.
• New messaging system doesn’t exclude non-Facebook users, If your friends aren’t on Facebook they will be able to send and receive messages.
• Introduction of Social Inbox which filters the messages you want, organized by the people you care about. It’s spam free and designed to highlight conversations with your real friends
• Users can have facebook.com email addresses but this won’t be the primary usage of this new messaging system.

Cisco recently launched social media monitoring tool called SocialMiner.  It is a social media customer care solution that can help you proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites.

By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow to organize customer posts on social media networks and deliver them to your social media customer care team, company can respond to customers in real time using the same social network they are using.

SocialMiner makes use of  algorithms to keep a watch on social network like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for keywords and phrases that are relevant to customers. The software then synthesizes and filters the most significant and relevant ones, forwards them onto a customer care executive who can take care.

Cisco SocialMiner provides:

• The ability to configure multiple campaigns to search for customer postings on the public social web about your company’s products, services, or area of expertise
• Filtering of social contacts based on preconfigured campaign filters to focus campaign searches
• Routing of social contacts to skilled customer care representatives in the contact center or to experts in the enterprise–multiple people can work together to handle responses to customer postings through shared work queues
• Detailed metrics for social media customer care activities, campaign reports, and team reports

With Cisco SocialMiner, company can listen and respond to customer conversations originating in the social web. Being proactive can help your company enhance its service, improve customer loyalty, garner new customers, and protect your brand.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

BeIdiotSafe is a social venture that showcases bad driving, traffic violations and dangerous road etiquettes. The intent for launching this social service is  to create awareness about traffic sense and road responsibilities.

BeIdiotSage also offers a platform for individuals to upload videos and images and allow them to share on networking sites like facebook, twitter.

Do you know Road rage claims one life in every two minutes, making it the highest rate of road trauma deaths in the world. It is time that we start identifying those people, who due to their careless behavior cause damage to others on the road.

These are the things “idiots” does constantly: - Over speeding,  Drunken-driving,  Cell phone conversations while driving ( i am one of the them), Dangerous and reckless driving,  Violation of traffic norms and rules, Negligent pedestrians, Signal breakers, violating one way rule (very common in Bangalore), Tailgating, Weaving in and out of traffic, Honking the vehicle’s horn or flashing lights excessively,  Opening door in the middle of the road & Spitting on the road (very common in Delhi).

Be Safe, Don’t be Selfish and Drive sensibly.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Chakpak is like Indian flixster which  provides loads of information about movies, film personalities. They have some fun features like wallpapers, quizs, forums, movies trailors, celebrity news etc which appeal to movie enthusiasts. Chakpak is a web2.0 startup and has social networking feature which allow user to add friends and allow them to see photos, movies they have bookmarked. User can also view the reviews, ratings and discussion of its friends on Chakpak. I like the bollywood news section, its quite comprehensive.

Chakpak was founded in 2007 and received $5M funding from Canaan Partners and Accel Partners till date.

Chakpak’s orkut and facebook app is quite popular, app enables allow users to take up quiz, compatibility tests. Lets have a look at their app traction on facebook -

 Lets analyse the monthly traction at Chakpak portial-

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	2.4M
Unique visitors (users)	1.7M
Reach	0.1%
Page views	10M
Total visits	2.9M
Avg visits per visitor	1.7
Avg time on site	4:00

Chakpak has been making money through advertisements by playing role of publisher, Ads seems to be their lonely means of monetizing. With 10M monthly pageviews Chakpak makes atleast Rs. 10L/month. But question arises is it enough revenue to achieve break even through ads.

What can be the new means of making money for Chakpak, share your feedback and suggestions.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com