Informer

Company Name:              Informer

Sector                            :              PC / Mobile Internet (Software as a Service)

 

Business Overview:

Actions such as receiving a phone call or SMS, GRAB THE Customer’s ATTENTION to the device. Internet on a mobile phone is primarily, user initiated. As smart phones and net-books reach the masses, the need for delivering value, to a mobile customer and getting customer's attention, is more useful, than a pull based internet. A push based model guarantees such a possibility. The need for benefiting from internet, as a push based model, is the idea of creating the product "Informer".

 

Market opportunity:

Addressable Market size:             

• Android has a first year market size of 125,000,000 users
• 100 million European T-Mobile users will be offered the G1.

May target software for additional platforms like IPhone, Blackberry, JavaME, WinMo based smart phones after success with android, thereby increasing the target market size by leaps and bounds.

Reference:

http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2009/01/01/android-in-2009/

 

Rev potential: Depends on which model will be adopted.

May use on any of the following models for revenue generation

• Advertisements
• Publisher Content
• Customer Plug-ins

 

Business Model and Business Development:

Internet is dynamic. New content gets added to it all the time. Internet is vast and the cloud keeps on growing in size. The amount of information that a user will be interested is a small subset of internet. User can define it, at any moment.

 

(1) It can be personalized like

• Twitter updates
• Orkut scraps
• Calendar events
• Jobs for your profile

(2) OR it can be location based like

• Shopping deals in a city.
• News of a country.
• Weather of a region.

(3) OR it can be time based like

• Price of a stocks in my portfolio at this moment
• Status of my hosted application now

 

"Is there any latest information available on points (1), (2) and (3) on the internet?” is a question, if answered, will SAVE the customer a lot of TIME. Most of the times, the user is actually concerned with a specific state of the information, rather than the information itself and this is called a "value point",

Example

• Is the price of a stock above/below a value?
• Is my application down?
• Has a "user defined webpage", been updated?

 

This is where, Informer comes into play. It regularly checks for a user specified “value point”. If met, user may want to take further action. Sometimes user may just want to get notified, so that he can take further action manually. For example, user might read a particular webpage/blog entry and wish to read it again in the future when a new entry is posted or the page is updated. For this purpose, earlier the user used to add the page to his favorites, and check for updates manually, periodically. With Informer, the user defines the page URL and lets Informer worry about the “check for updates” task and gets notified by Informer whenever that page gets updated. Informer also makes its user to be the FIRST TO KNOW, about any event compared to the non-users of this tool. To meet the above requirements, Informer contains a set of plug-ins that defines functionality as stated above. A plug-in also contains some initial configuration to setup. Example: User may enter stock symbols and give a value above/below which notification is required. The user adds the plug-ins of interest to her/his profile. Apart from that it contains a core processing engine and UI specifically intended to define the tasks to be automated. Interfaces that Informer intends to support are for Web and Mobile users.

 

(4) If the customer needs some "value points" that are quite different from normal, and niche, then specific plug-ins to meet that need can be developed.

 

Competitive Analysis:

Provides a single point of contact for all the users pull based data extraction needs from the internet.

 

Current status:

Team: 1 member

Infrastructure:

• Development (1 PC,1 Device)
• Testing( 1 PC, 1 Device)
• Hosting (2 servers(1 for beta and 1 for production))
• Google AppEngine.

 

Technology:

Mobile Client                            -              Android, [IPhone, Blackberry, WinMo, Java ME]

Google App Engine              -              Java

Web Client                            -              Adobe Flex

 

Funds Required / Use of funds

Cause	Amount
Infrastructure(Internet Connectivity/Hosting/Office Maintenance) + Development Costs	1 Lakh per month

 

Business address and contact details:

Avinash Mangipudi

(Postal address will be confirmed shortly. Bengaluru or Hyderabad)

Mobile: +91 997237 0066

Email: avirads@gmail.com , panchadara@yahoo.com

 

If you like the idea and intend to be a minipreneur of Informer product, I’m selling shares with the denominations of Rs. 2000, Rs. 5000, Rs. 10000, and Rs 1 Lakh. Dollar amounts would be $100, $200, $1000, $5000. Monthly updates on the progress will be sent to your email. Weekly updates will be blogged so that you can post suggestions, if any. When the product makes profits, the same will be disbursed to its shareholders equitably. Design/Development would be started as soon as some funds are mobilized for the purpose. Your ideas are welcome. Also welcome any VC’s or angel investors who would like to fund entirely. Please contact me if interested.

 

About Me: I have returned from USA in Jan 2009 after staying there for 2 years. Currently working at a top MNC and intend to quit job and begin Informer initiative shortly. To have a look at my profile, please check out http://docs.google.com/View?id=dd235pwd_5f66x38dn or

http://namoham.blogspot.com/2009/06/avinashmangipudi.html . Thanks for your time.