In this world of instant global communication and online forums that allow individuals to contribute to the wealth of knowledge that lies a mere finger tap away, it’s no wonder companies have put two and two together and started crowd-sourcing aspects of their business.

But could this collaborative business phenomenon evolve into a world where there are no managers, and people could contribute when they wished because they were intrinsically motivated?

Software Testing with “99Tests”

That is the question Praveen Singh, CEO and Founder of 99tests, asked himself when he leaped into the crowd-sourcing fray in the winter of 2010 by starting a crowd-sourced software testing venture in the form of 99tests.

99tests offers crowd-sourced testing to software product companies around the globe.  These companies can hire twenty to sixty on-demand software testing professionals who will test their products in real world conditions over the course of a few days in order to catch critical bugs before customers do.

They test for various platforms such as mobile, Web and tablets and support a range of testing types such as functionality, security and performance testing.  With a workforce 4250 testers strong and over fifty global customers within two short years, 99tests has hit the software testing market floor running.

Many diverse companies from all over the globe have already enjoyed the effects of employing 99tests such as Intuit, Flipkart, and Cleartrip.

Whether you’re an established firm or a fledgling start up, 99tests accommodates your testing needs through fixed price per unit packages, a pricing standard used among other crowd sourcing companies such as CrowdFlower.  Each package varies in size depending on the client’s needs and 99tests communicates diligently with the client to make sure these needs are clearly presented and addressed.  99tests even provides a demo package for a steal to win you over.

And win you over they will when you consider that in just over two years, the 99tests community has logged 22,304 bugs.

Motivation Via Healthy Competition

Keeping the community dedicated to providing quality service is crucial to the success of crowd-sourcing firms, so what better way to motivate his testers than to turn each project into a healthy competition?

99tests makes each project a client sponsored competition amongst the assigned testers in which the top testers who find the most bugs receive a monetary prize.

But 99tests goes a step further and often these top testers will also win testing tools that help nourish and build their skill sets.  It is this perk that really sets 99tests apart from other crowd sourcing firms since it is not only their intention to deliver the best possible service to the clients, but also strive to strengthen each tester’s abilities.  By offering these incentives, 99tests guarantees a network of passionate and exceptionally talented testers.

In fact, founder Praveen Singh sees 99tests as a professional networking site for testers that creates a unique image and reputation for excellence. He would like to fortify his 99tests brand by creating a crowd-sourcing platform that testers want to be associated with and feel compelled to be a contributing part.

Praveen found a trusted partner in his Co-Founder Naveen Kumar, who expressed interest in 99tests after shutting down his own venture. Naveen plays a crucial role in the operations of 99tests taking care of the technology, development, and marketing aspects of the business. This leaves Praveen free to continue being the software crowd-sourcing evangelist he is.

It is equally important to Praveen to give value to the lives of the people in his community, as it is to provide his clients with exceptional service.  By outsourcing work to independent freelancers through an internationally accessible platform, he has helped place testers from remote corners of India in established organizations, significantly improving their quality of life.

In just over two years 99tests has been able to log over 20,000 bugs from this 4,000+ work force. They have done so with only a fraction of the 37 million dollars in venture capital their American goliath counterpart, uTest, has.

Praveen and Naveen’s goal for 2013 is to reach 10,000 testers and secure 200 customers by the year’s end.  They also want to expand into automation services and help companies manage the risk of releasing “buggy” software.  Ambitious, of course, but with increasing demand for crowd-sourced services, certainly promising.

Testing Tablet Photo via Shutterstock

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In 2006, the concept of cloud computing was just beginning to gain ground. Siva Devaki saw the Cloud as a means to achieve his longtime dream of building a full-service IT company. He decided to leave his secure career working for large companies such as Oracle and VeriSign. Drawing upon his past experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, Siva launched his venture that same year.

Initially, Siva focused his work on the Cloud computing niche. In this high growth market, Siva noted that Salesforce CRM was already quite strong, but lacked the same focus in other related areas. Here, Siva took advantage of AppExchange, a Salesforce-run marketplace of business applications.

Through AppExchange, partners can create specific apps to enhance Salesforce for businesses. Users can shop for available apps, search partners to develop a custom solution or list an app of their own. Siva quickly began work with Salesforce to build apps for enterprise and small and medium sized enterprise (SME) customers.

Today, San Francisco-based Mansa Systems is a provider of Cloud, mobile and social enterprise solutions. Mansa focuses on the creation of apps to fulfill the specific needs of both customers and developers. By leveraging partner solutions like Watchdox, SendGrid, Slideshare, Citrix, and Amazon AWS, each app is guaranteed to meet a certain proven user need.

In recent months, Mansa Systems has become an official Salesforce ISV partner. The company continues to work with Salesforce in the enterprise app space, creating, updating and launching through the Force.com platform. They have successfully launched several new apps at affordable price points.

Among the company’s releases are two apps built to deal with Salesforce’s data limitations. The Cloud Drop app expands file storage space and file size limits for teams, as well as enables folder hierarchies to better manage storage. Cloud Drop also provides service at the considerably lower price of 10 cents per GB, compared to $5 with Salesforce. MassMailer eliminates Salesforce email limitations for bulk and transactional emails. The app offers white label emailing for consistent branding.

Mansa offers additional apps to manage business data with Salesforce. Webinar2Lead saves time by automatically syncing all GoToWebinar data in order to align marketing efforts with sales for only $14.99 per month. Similarly, Slide2Lead offers auto sync for SlideShare leads, campaigns, documents and statistics, eliminating manual imports and exports.

A final recent release called 37 Seconds increases success with inbound leads by calling new leads as they are received. Calls can be made from any location and routed to a mobile or office line and are automatically recorded for ease tracking. This increased speed of response is a proven means to achieving sales, for only $4.99 a month.

Each app is priced according to its own specific attributes, using a set bracket for number of users or charging a percentage of the partner’s original price. As a general formula, service costs are either project-based or calculated according to time and materials spent – both varying from project to project.

In addition to their relationship with Salesforce, Mansa targets mid-size companies in the financial services and public sectors. Their current verticals include education, non-profits and health care and life sciences. Additional leads are generated via company apps in AppExchange and cross-selling current services.

Mansa provides the high-level services of a large IT firm as well as off-the-shelf apps as solutions. This dual specialization sets Mansa apart from competitors such as Appiro, Bluewolf and Astadia. Mansa continues to develop a personalized business by constructing integration templates or connectors for specific areas, which will provide new leads to specialized customers and projects. Through a global delivery framework, Mansa expands customer options by providing expertise on a worldwide scale.

Mansa already lists prominent enterprise-level names Paypal/eBay, Logitech and Topcon among their customers. Wholly self-funded, the company has already passed the $2 million revenue mark by marketing primarily to Salesforce customers through the AppExchange.

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The health care market is receiving increasing attention from entrepreneurs around the world looking to improve a complex field. Modern medicine continues to face budget deficits and inferior technology in both developed and developing nations. Health care IT (Internet technology) has taken off in the last few years. Also active is the field of ecommerce — across all sorts of niches, including health care.

eCommerce Within the Ayurveda Health Care Niche

Nirogam, an Ayurvedic product e-retailer, finds itself competing in an already booming natural health market. Nirogam Founder, Puneet Aggarwal, was born into the merchant class in his native India. His father was an entrepreneur running a metal fabrication factory. After his graduation in 1998, Puneet followed his father’s lead and started a business. This first venture, Ivycomm Systems, addressed a growing need for online presence as India began to adopt the Internet.

Puneet’s work introduced him to research scientist Dr. Pushpa Khanna, who had recently discovered an insulin-like substance in plant form. As her new website gained traction, Dr. Khanna developed an oral tablet of the substance known as Gourdin. She then asked for Puneet’s assistance in selling it online. His initial outreach to those who had shown past interest was immediately successful. Taking a cue from their first product, by 2002 the two had expanded their offering to 10 herbal products.

This shift toward all natural health solutions is based on an ancient Indian system known as Ayurveda, a system of alternative medicine emphasizing natural methods of healing and good nutrition.

There is a strong bias within U.S. and U.K. regulatory authorities favoring conventional pharmaceuticals over holistic medicine. This strongly affects sales and addressable market, despite the growing popularity of Ayurveda in the Western world, especially in places like California. In India, of course, Ayurveda is a known and highly respected science with a large number of existing brands offering products across various categories.

Nirogam is intended to educate patients regarding alternatives to modern drugs, and to provide a resource for those seeking a holistic option. In addition to natural wellness products, Nirogam offers herbal supplements, organic foods and natural cosmetics. The site is designed as a discovery platform, unlike the marketplaces of close competitors HealthKart, NaturalMantra and Satvikshop. This model captures a wider audience.

As many potential buyers are unfamiliar with the solutions offered, Nirogam offers an informative guide based on known symptoms. Nirogam also has an active social media presence and provides a forum for relevant medical discussion on their company blog.

It’s a Family Affair

The business is a family affair, and Puneet often seeks business advice from his mentor and father Satish. In turn, Satish must be proud of his son. Nirogam’s annual revenues are nearing half a million dollars, with a monthly growth rate of 15 percent.

Puneet plans to expand to additional niche markets in health care. New websites will follow the current model, providing comprehensive diagnostic information as well as a community and commerce.

Back in 2007, I published my formula for web 3.0 — an integrated user experience that is context-specific and brings content, commerce and community together, alongside vertical search and personalization. Nirogam has brought together, in the context of Ayurvedic medicine, most of those elements.

In the future, personalized diagnosis may be a service to add to the roster. Conceivably, somewhere down the line, you could be dialing into a video-conference with an Ayurveda doctor in Kerala to get a personalized consultation for that pain in your upper back. If you are interested in exploring the ancient science of Ayurvedic medicine, Nirogam is worth a look.

Ayurveda Photo via Shutterstock

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The narratives that surround the past and present economic state of Bulgaria are not unfamiliar ones. The transition to a liberal market economy culminated in complete economic collapse. From 1996 – 1997 Bulgaria experienced a period of instability and hyper-inflation.

The establishment of a fixed exchange rate for the Bulgarian currency and the nation’s entry into the European Union, has since stimulated macroeconomic growth. But Bulgaria remained one of the poorest member states of the European Union. Despite an improving economy and rising living standards, unemployment continued at high percentage levels. Though foreign direct investment has managed to stimulate some economic growth, entrepreneurship in Bulgaria encounters a host of challenges.

Bulgaria experienced a revival of the entrepreneurial spirit in the late 19th century, following their declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire. Despite continued warring, international trade flourished. It was between 1949 – 1989, during the Communist regime, that prosperity through private entrepreneurship was suppressed and designated as self-serving. Negative attitudes toward entrepreneurs continue to influence the Bulgarian economy.

In today’s volatile economic climate, Bulgaria does not possess enough free money to make investments in innovation. Predictably, the Bulgarian government has rendered private property and trade nonexistent, depriving aspiring entrepreneurs of private resources to mobilize. The process of partaking in capitalism without sufficient capital has resulted in fragmented entrepreneurial efforts, and often limits them to the service sector.

Business In Bulgaria: One Entrepreneur’s Journey

Victor Alexiev, entrepreneur and general renaissance man, would thus appear to be succeeding against all odds. Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, Victor’s past 13 years credit him with work in mathematics, software development, network architecture and investment banking, to name a few. In that time, he also attached two Bachelors and three Masters degrees to his name. Of late, however, Victor has realized his erratic work life could feasibly lead to unemployment, as no one can make sense of his past.

As a result Victor has refocused his efforts on entrepreneurship, a personal passion from his childhood. Victor had started his first business at age 14, building his own Internet Service Provider (ISP) and selling and installing the service in his hometown. With the help of classmate and fellow budding entrepreneur Todor Kolev, Victor’s business grew to 150 customers spanning three towns in 2001. And when underage Victor was contacted by the government’s commission for regulation of telecommunications due to licensing issues, he simply sold the venture to local competitors and transferred his customers to them.

Victor and Todor bonded over their shared passion for entrepreneurship and in 2008, the two began to work together. Obecto, a software development venture, grew steadily for four years before the co-founders encountered difficulty expanding their team. Job postings and hiring services yielded disappointing results, and candidates always seemed to be lacking the connection that made them a strong fit. In 2011, the two began to consider more effective and efficient ways to source and evaluate talent.

The issue of staffing was one many companies faced, in particular those looking to hire software engineers in a market that had grown beyond its carrying capacity. The job market was certainly not improved by an attitude of skepticism toward independent ventures and risks. Victor explains:

Employers were making promises they could not deliver upon, talents were making unrealistic demands, and there was a need for a more transparent marketplace.

That same year, Victor and Todor joined forces with their third partner, Ivan. Drawing upon his background in psychology and psychometrics, the three came together to build a recommendation platform specifically for software engineers in Bulgaria.

PoolTalent

The result is PoolTalent, a job board and recommendation aggregate. Though PoolTalent is intended for use entirely by job seekers and employers, the use of matching and personal profiles is strongly modeled on a typical dating site. The site makes uses of a compensatory algorithm that incorporates matching skill sets as well as cultural fit into its final scoring.

PoolTalent’s first version was released in late 2011, with a focus on data collection as well as social media and community features for users. However, a lack of engagement forced Victor and his co-founders to return to the drawing board, this time designing with users in mind. After a second disappointing release, the three decided to put the project on hold temporarily.

It was during that summer of 2012 that Victor happened upon and learned the methodology of customer validation. Victor and his co-founders went and gathered feedback from large IT recruiters based in Bulgaria, such as Hewlett Packard Bulgaria, Playtech and VMware.

The resulting version has abandoned social features in favor of focusing on becoming an information platform for jobseekers in the software development community. Customer input has now led to validation of the concept and ultimately, preliminary partnership agreements. PoolTalent now has 150 registered users, four partner companies and two active clients. They have recently expanded their reach to the career center of the Technical University of Sofia.

A New Bulgarian Economy

PoolTalent is an example of a new Bulgarian economy, as the entrepreneur movement gains popularity once again. Several of the nation’s non-profits provide small amounts of seed capital through competitions in order to promote entrepreneurship. Entry into the European Union has opened access to assistance funds that are now being utilized.

Victor’s story is an important one, because of his success in an environment that so clearly worked against him. Despite the improving economic climate, legislative framework, educational infrastructure and financing options remain insufficient to support disruptive or capital intensive startups.

Bulgaria’s attempts at developing entrepreneurs, albeit slow, is a much needed change. With a clear set of goals in mind for the immediate future, Victor is on his way to becoming just what Bulgaria needs: A practicing entrepreneur building a serious business.

Against all odds? You bet.

Bulgaria Photo via Shutterstock

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A 2010 survey by Internet Retailer of 149 chain sellers, chain retailers, web-only merchants, catalog companies and consumer brand manufacturers found only 8.8 percent of these companies operated an m-commerce site.

However, the same survey suggested 75.9 percent of these retailers already had plans to launch a mobile site with 31.9 percent expecting to be selling through mobile devices in the next six months.

Flash forward to 2012 when eMarketer estimated an increase of mobile sales by 81 percent to a total of $25 billion in revenue that year. Another 55.7 percent increase in mobile sales is expected this year, with mobile sales representing about 15 percent of total retail e-commerce in the U.S. by the end of 2013.

The increasing commitment to mobile retail and resulting rise in sales is no surprise. In his book M-Commerce, author Paul Skeldon estimates that more than 70 percent of the world’s population now own mobile phones, and 74 percent of those owners have made purchases as a result of using a smartphone while shopping. Based on current trends, mobile global commerce sales will have reached $120 billion by 2015, estimates Skeldon.

Small businesses need to develop mobile commerce presences of their own, if they haven’t done so already, to take advantage of the evolving market.

To do so, smaller companies have the choice to either invest in custom mobile commerce development or to purchase a ready-made solution that will give them a mobile presence with their current site’s options and features.

Companies like Zuznow, founded by husband and wife team Chen and Racheli Levkovich, say they offer small businesses the option to automatically render a traditional website in mobile form with no need for additional programming.

The company’s website describes Zuznow as a “one-click mobilization.”

Zuznow boasts 100 paying customers who use the service to create mobile-friendly versions of their websites while preserving the look and feel of their original sites.

Zuznow’s solution aims to supports advanced features, such as user authentication, shopping carts, optimized purchase forms and PCI compliance. No software installation is needed. Customers can incorporate Zuznow’s technology with just a few lines of code. Mobile optimization is then maintained 24/7, and updates are automatically integrated into the mobile version of the site.

The Zuznow team says the solution captures a website in its entirety and is capable of translating it for all available mobile platforms. Mobile device users visiting Zuznow-supported sites are automatically directed to the Zuznow proxy, which detects the device in use and converts the site to the appropriate mobile version for that device. The automatic adaptation service now specializes in complex business sites, especially e-commerce.

The service is delivered at a cost of $100 per month. The company continues to add conversion features for additional platforms like iPad and plans to incorporate optimization for smart televisions in the near future.

With a majority of customers currently in Israel and Germany, the company is working on partnerships to provide services in the rest of Europe and the United States.

Whether they use a service like Zuznow or work with a developer to create a custom option, small business retailers must consider how to provide mobile versions of their sites to take advantage of today’s burgeoning m-commerce market.

M-Commerce Photo via Shutterstock

The post M-Commerce: Why Your Website Needs to Be Mobile appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The Greek economy alone is experiencing a Great Depression.

But there remains a measure of hope in Greek national news with a slowly growing contingent of Grecian entrepreneurs. One such individual is Stathis Katinas, co-founder of online franchise Car Rental Bookers.

A veteran of the travel industry, Stathis first transitioned into car rental and online travel booking in 1996 after managing a family-run holiday complex in his hometown of Rhodes. Through outreach to local car rental companies, he found a common need for increased Internet presence to address international bookings.

Together with software architect Tristan Mcvean, Stathis developed CarGDS, a global distribution software to support small and mid-sized car rental operators, in 2004. Through a pilot site, the software was first implemented locally in both Greece and Cyprus. They targeted car rental operators without an online presence or with basic sites. Providing the industry’s first deliveries platform, the service increases revenues of suppliers by expanding their market reach.

Car Rental Bookers provides software to suppliers to maximize car rentals through online booking, as well as distribution software for the bookings. Website owners can also add the CarGDS software to their consumer-facing site and become affiliates through the shared technology.

CarGDS even provides a customizable supplier SaaS, with a back-end administration that includes fleet, locations, insurance and reporting. This technology expands the supplier’s market to include not just cities and towns, but airports, railways stations, resorts, hotels and ports.

The pre-crash market proved noncompetitive for Car Rental Bookers, as similar technologies have only grown in recent years. Now in 2012, harsh austerity measures have increased VAT, homeowner levies and especially fuel prices. Thus it becomes all the more impressive that Car Rental Bookers has negotiated supply deals with several hundred local suppliers. The company holds deals with leading brands including Alamo, Enterprise and Hertz, among others.

According to CNN, registered unemployment of 364,000 in 2008 grew to 1.26 million in 2012, an incredible of 25.1%. With four times the original unemployed population on their hands, many in Greece argue that the stringent austerity cuts being implemented are stifling economic growth. The argument is fair, as despite tax levies, the country still owes more than it makes with a national debt of 161% GDP.

This makes the Car Rental Bookers lean approach to business all the more refreshing. Initial product development was primarily handled independently, with low-cost outsourcing for any additional needs. The company is entirely bootstrapped to date and is housed in Stathis’ family offices to keep a low monthly overhead.

And although the CarGDS system was developed with limited resources and was completed as recently as 2012, business continues to grow. The service now covers approximately 70 countries with the most customers in Greece, Spain, Malta, Cyprus, and South Africa, in addition to U.S. based business. As tourism remains one of few contributors to economic survival in Greece, it stands to reason that car rentals will continue to grow in popularity.

The best-performing stock market in Europe this past year was that of Greece. A rise of 33% in the Athens index outdid even Germany’s DAX. Officials predict that the Greek economy will start to grow by October 2013. While it certainly doesn’t override the future possibility of the Greek exit from the Euro, an upward trend in output speaks to the positive influence of local entrepreneurs like Stathis.

Needless to say, many more such heroes are needed to avoid a multi-generational tragedy in Greece.

Flying Entrepreneur Photo via Shutterstock

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Further influenced by the works of Tony Hsieh and Gary Vaynerchuck, Dan shifted his work to addressing the challenges of creative content in email marketing campaigns.

In October 2010, Dan launched the Florida-based Happy Grasshopper, an easy-to-use email marketing solution. As, according to Dan, salespeople:

“. . .don’t know what to say, when to say it or how often it should be said.”

The company provides a team of writers and an automated means to staying in touch. Writers create timely, interesting message content that guarantees a response. Customers simply choose a new message once every three weeks, make any desired changes, and appropriate it for delivery.

Happy Grasshopper offers five services to sales professionals:

• Keep-in-touch.
• Canned content.
• Sponsored tools.
• CRM marketing tools with integrated drip services.
• DIY email marketing tools.

Their “one size fits all” solution is applicable to numerous industries. Dan’s two year focused acquisition effort has lead to over 3,000 customers in the real estate vertical.

The choice to focus on the real estate industry has been an important one for Dan and the team. It has brought them the opportunity to cater to the needs of the vertical, as well as gain reputation and visibility as a key player offering a compelling solution within the segment.

Unlike competitors Constant Contact and iContact, the service is not intended to teach users how to create and manage their own email marketing campaign. Happy Grasshopper avoids overwhelming customers with such choices. Instead, they provide friendly, engaging message content to take the place of industry related marketing content.

Their message open rates, at just over 30%, are 198% higher than Constant Contact. In addition to a clear advantage in content, the company outranks competitors in ease of use, network reach and pricing.

Customers currently pay between $19-39 per month for services, based on the size of their network. The plan also includes real time monthly reports on message deliverability and open rates. This scaled plan, covering up to 5,000 contacts, provides greater value to an individual customer.

Happy Grasshopper’s successful customer acquisition has resulted in numerous customer testimonials, and a “Cool Tool” accolade in REALTOR magazine. The release of an imitator service by a real estate media company was, Dan says, admittedly distracting. But the launch only provided further validation, as Happy Grasshopper continued to capture market preference. And despite external pressure from the real estate community’s status quo, the company’s user base continues to grow.

Happy Grasshopper was formally incorporated in March of 2011. Their focus has since turned to leveraging the success of their user base to form partnerships with tech providers, brokerages, associations and the like.

In 2012, Dan initiated a partnership with Virtual Results, a company delivering profit through Internet marketing. Happy Grasshopper ended the year with approximately $300,000 in revenue.

Dan, a multiple-time Inc. 500|5000 honoree, continues to stress the importance of conversation. The fully bootstrapped company is expected to reach the $1 million revenue milestone in 2013.

Logo Photo via Happy Grasshopper

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InSync Tech-Fin Solutions

One of the winners was InSync Tech-Fin Solutions, founded in 2009 to help eCommerce merchants worldwide to increase their efficiency by presenting an integrated solution between Magento and SAP Business One. Through their flagship product, SBOeConnect, the company provides both the capability of back office ERP Systems that today’s eCommerce solutions lack, as well as a compelling form of integration.

Atul Gupta’s move to Kolkata in 2006, combined with his computer science background and passion for information technology, provided the inspiration to serve Indian SMBs locally. It was through a focus on both service and product that Atul found the need for SBOeConnect. Initially, the finances for Atul’s venture came from family funds – InSync now operates on cash flow. And with a potential total addressable market of $95 million and a target of established and emerging eCommerce merchants, InSync is already profitable in the realm of $500,000, and has 80 paying customers to date.

iQeCommerce

Next we have the 2006-founded iQeCommerce, a hosted solution providing easy and efficient setup for small business owners in need of an eCommerce store online. Essentially SaaS via an eCommerce website, what began with the single site design of a collage website has evolved past a freelancing portal into a functional business.

iQeCommerce offers, among its services, custom store design, professional setup and pay-per-click (PPC) setup, with quotes provided based upon services requested. The company aims to develop a solution that maintains a high level of quality, thereby establishing long-term bonds with their clients. Additional claims include ensuring the customer is provided all required tools to compete in their respective market; considering iQeCommerce enters a competitive market itself, working against the likes of BigCommerce and Volusion, it’s an ambitious goal.

Founders Nilmoni Basak and Abhisek Kumar are longtime business partners, counting iQeCommerce as their second startup. Abhisek brings six years of experience in Project Management and Delivery, customer handling and troubleshooting to the venture, while Nilmoni’s past experience includes frontend design and working with the technical team to execute the product. Together, they hope to acquire 1,000 customers on iQecommerce within the next eight to ten months.

Over the past six years, the company can count over 500 customers served, and have designed and developed over 1,000 sites. Product revenues have exceeded the $200,000 mark.

Debate.fm

Working to the principle, “keep it simple,” the relatively new Debate.fm is reinventing the previous conceptions of online forums by featuring three full layers of user engagement and is heavily integrated with social media. Founded in May 2011, the startup presents an online platform that allows its users to start a debate in three easy steps, and to continue discussing their ideas with even greater facility. Founder Kamanashish Roy wanted to give debaters simple and varied means to make their ideas heard; moreover, his site provides a more anonymous means of sharing and discussing culturally sensitive issues than popular online communities such as Facebook.

Kamanashish is no stranger to the media space, with degrees in Journalism and Mass Communication as well as professional experience in online marketing. He was inspired to discuss a first post with his partners after watching a televised debate regarding a nuclear power plant in the spring of 2011. Their first prototype launched with just a single debate to widely popular reviews. Debate.fm currently acts as an offering of Kamanashish’s current company, WebPrachar.com, which offers similar services to offshore clients.

ShopOffice

Another budding venture, ShopOffice, is an online provider of office supplies, designed to serve the needs of small businesses. Under the slogan “you click we deliver,” ShopOffice is intended to be a one-stop-shop to order needed materials online for delivery, with no hassle.

Founder Rohit Singh became deeply interested in entrepreneurship while still completing a degree in computer engineering, and through his research was exposed to leading office supply providers Office Depot and Staples. Upon discovering that the concept had yet to be introduced in Eastern India, he set out to fill the niche.

Now, let us also look at the companies that are taking off in Bengal.

Indus Net Technologies

Founded in 2002, Indus Net Technologies provides end-to-end Web and mobile technology solutions and digital marketing services – specifically application development for web and mobile, integrated digital marketing and web design with specific work in SEO and SEM. The majority of Indus Net’s business lies in emerging companies, closely followed by digital agencies and enterprise; the company empowers small businesses and startups through the Indus Net Express program.

After purchasing a book on HTML and attending an exhibition on the subject in his hometown of Kolkata, founder Abhishek Rungta used the connections he made and the knowledge he acquired to make his way into the Internet business. Indus Net is a fully bootstrapped venture of over 500 full-time professionals and boats an annual turnover of over $5 million.

Virtual Information and Communications (VirtualInfoCom)

Another Kolkata company, Virtual Information and Communications (VirtualInfoCom) offers all manner of animation and graphics, counting among its accolades the title of India’s first game development training course, India’s first smart phone application training institute and creator of India’s first mythological PC game. In 1999, when the company was founded, animation in India was relatively new. As founder Arijit Bhattacharya was continuously approached by job seekers, he eventually decided to convert the demand into a training institute.

In addition, a team of 91 now spans three separate offices; services offered now include game development, mobile gaming and ad promotion, visual and special effects, Web page design, software development, and many more.

Games are created, sometimes from the concept stage, for sale through resellers, at which time VirtualInfoCom receives royalties for each download. Today, the company has over 175 resellers for their products, providing 60% of the company’s revenue – which has nearly hit the $4.8 million mark. This combines with additional revenues from training institute enrollments and site traffic from an online gaming portal.

Pinnacle Infotech

Next we have Pinnacle Infotech, providing CAD design, modeling and drafting solutions since its launch in 1992. Using the latest technologies, Pinnacle provides Building Information Modeling (BIM) services for the architecture, engineering, construction, electrical, and plumbing segments, and many more. The company is comprised of a team of 500 engineers, architects, and CAD professionals.

Founder Bimial Patwari began work in management consulting after a degree in electronics engineering, but realized his real passion was for entrepreneurship. After becoming an AutoDesk certified partner and providing training to engineering students in AutoDesk products, he realized the need for AutoCAD design services, which provided the basis for Pinnacle to go global in 1998.

The company has been entirely bootstrapped to the $6 million revenue mark, and continues to grow at a rate of 35% per year. Projects have shifted to larger scale designs such as airports, hospitals and convention centers.

A1 Future Technologies

Another Web design specialist, A1 Future Technologies, was born out of freelance work and gained momentum by specializing in corporate identity solutions.

Founder Srish Agarwal began as a freelance graphic designer while still in college, running a cyber café, during which time he became exposed to and learned web design. He then went on to create his Elance profile and began bidding in 2002. After hiring eight to ten young, fresh designers, he had built himself a team to work on the design projects that were increasing in volume. Once client began offering projects to Srish directly, he felt the time was right to break away from the exchange.

With revenues at $1.25 million in 2011 and a total of 60-65 projects per day, as well as an affiliated animated video site set to launch soon, A1 is doing steady business.

FusionCharts

Finally on our long list of Bengal-based startups is FusionCharts, a software suite that allows customers to create Flash charts: animated and interactive charts for use in Web and enterprise applications. Using a combination of Microsoft ASP and Flash technologies, the company offers 14 separate data visualization products that integrate with enterprise applications, PowerPoint and SharePoint, as well extensions for other applications such as Dreamweaver.

FusionCharts co-founder Pallav Nadhani developed and successfully launched the company while still in high school, drawing upon his father’s enthusiasm for technology and the convenience of their longtime home computer. Through a self-taught series of computer skills, Pallav learned that no user-friendly forms of data visualization yet existed.

Today, the company is fully bootstrapped to its current revenue mark of $7 million. Over one billion charts are created each month by 21,000 customers in over 115 countries.

So next time someone tells you that there are no entrepreneurs in Bengal, you can comfortably introduce them to Pallav, Bimal, Srish, Arijit, Abhishek, or Atul.

And in due course, many hundreds of others.

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But I have always believed that a successful startup is a function of customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional. You identify a market gap, build a product to address the gap, develop a business model, and generate revenues and profits.

ifood.tv has done just that.

In 2006, co-founders Vikrant Mathur and Alok Ranjan were interested in honing their culinary skills. However, they found that text-based instructional sites were sorely lacking in their instructional capabilities and incorporated no means of reaching out to recipe authors with questions – not to mention there were no visual elements to speak of.

So they took the resources they did find helpful, such as the Food Network, and set about developing a means of adapting it to an on-demand platform.

The result is 2007’s ifood.tv, a multi-platform video channel that focuses on the visual aspect of learning how to cook. The site features an ever-expanding library of videos that are hosted, managed and streamed through their content management platform, as well as text-based recipes. Content is created by an in-house editorial team and crowdsourced from professional chefs, video producers, authors and media companies.

Fully bootstrapped by its founders, Vikrant and Alok have invested $100,000 of their own funds to date, and are currently searching out strategic partnerships.

The company, profitable for 3 years, generates revenue primarily through advertisements: display ads, video ad networks, and in-text source campaigns, as well as custom, brand-specific campaigns involving social media and video.

At the start, ifood.tv competed directly with established, brand name media in online form, such as the Epicurious and Food Network sites. But as Vikrant points out, these sites fail to engage their own community of users – the very problem ifood.tv sets out to solve with its online community of recipe exchange and resource sharing. Up to 4 million monthly unique visitors rate and review existing content as well as providing new material of their own.

ifood.tv’s closest competition now comes from YouTube as the de facto platform for video content online. Vikrant and Alok’s project remains unique, however, by providing users increased facility in searching and organizing information, as opposed to pulling lists of aggregated videos.

While ifood.tv operates on its own steam, through its development the company itself has produced a Web 3.0 platform that can now be used to configure, manage and distribute videos and multimedia content of all kinds. Vikrant and Alok have already leveraged their work to launch a new nutrition site, NutritionRank, in June 2012.

At this point ifood.tv is approaching three million dollars in revenue, and will be exploring additional revenue models including e-commerce in 2013.

One of the most important lessons from the iFood.tv story is that bootstrapping works. Vikrant and Alok did not wait around for venture capital to get their business off the ground. They focused on customers, revenues, and profits.

Today, with $3 million in profitable revenue under their belt, Vikrant and Alok have many options open in front of them, including adding business lines with different business models, and, of course – financing.

Food Photo via Shutterstock

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As you read these short vignettes, notice, that most of these entrepreneurs have bootstrapped their ventures with very little infusion of outside capital. You don’t hear about them, because they don’t have big funding announcements to make. The entrepreneurship media ignores all these companies that don’t raise big money, but they generate big revenues.

The entrepreneurship media of the world is yet to come to terms with a simple fact that entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues and profits; financing is optional.

WaterFilters.net

Following a childhood filled with small-scale business ventures, including selling rulers to his neighbors, it was always clear to Minnesota entrepreneur Jamin Arvig that he would start a company. After attaining degrees in electrical engineering and law and a short time spent in the patent law practice, he decided to invest additional energy into an old venture, taking it online. Jamin and his wife come from technical backgrounds. They knew of the many opportunities associated with the e-commerce boom, and the benefits of building a business that drew upon the Internet’s global audience.

WaterFilters, started in 2002 while Jamin was still in college, simplifies the process of finding and purchasing water purification and treatment products. Jamin and his wife shared a limited knowledge of the water treatment industry. But they knew that the green industry was a growing trend, and they identified water filters as a key element.

After purchasing around $1,000 of water filters and setting up shop in his Minnesota condo, Jamin leveraged his wife’s existing connections in the industry to forge relationships with distributors, growing business slowly. These relationships allowed Waterfilters.net to list many of their products in an online catalogue. The couple also leveraged SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to acquire customers. The company reached close to $4 million in revenue by 2008.

2008 marked WaterFilters move to a custom-built warehouse that would serve as a distribution center. The business has also picked up a great many business customers, and even supplies retailers as a wholesale vendor.  The company has been entirely bootstrapped to the $10 million mark, running on only Jamin and his wife’s savings.

Quantum Retail

Also operating from Minnesota, Vicki Raport worked in retail software for a while, before setting up her own shop to plug gaps she observed in her domain.

Quantum Retail is Vicki’s missing piece: a layer of applications that takes information generated by enterprise apps, point of sale, customer transaction files and radio-frequency identification data, and brings it together in a manner valuable to retailers. This data, collected in a usable and manageable format, is intended to drive quantifiable improvement in retail operations. Quantum’s solutions align a company’s capabilities to buy and sell merchandise in tune with consumer preferences. Vicki described the product as “technology that thinks like a business.”

Vicki and her five co-founders (with a sixth introduced shortly after) draw upon a common background at Retek. They began with retail analytics using small sets of data points. Using open source materials combined with the generous support of a sponsoring customer, the team developed a prototype that they used to garner initial customer validation. The prototype was funded by Guitar Center in 2005.

Quantum Retail now operates on a platform that supports three key retail processes: allocation replenishment, forecasting and order planning, and assortment planning. Customers are given the option to enroll in one, or multiple services concurrently. Direct competition comes mainly from Oracle, JDA and SAP.  The business is fully bootstrapped by Vicki and her co-founders. Quantum Retail grew from six co-founders to over 100 employees and to $13.5 million in revenue by 2010.

Bay.ru

Born and raised in Chicago, Aaron Block never imagined a career in commercial real estate would take him all the way to Moscow, where he was to develop a newly acquired division of Cushman and Wakefield in 2005. His return to Chicago in 2010 also marked his move to Bay.ru, the first cross-border e-commerce business in Russia and the country’s fastest growing shopping site. Just two years later, Aaron is its CEO.

Bay.ru was founded in 2007 by the Russian-born brothers Gene and Anton Herman to help friends and family concerned about the security of items purchased online outside Russia’s borders. While in Russia, Bay.ru is designated as a ‘middleman’ operation, in the Internet industry, the company is known as a cross-border e-commerce company. Working in the ‘cross-border space’ implies that purchases are made from one country, the shopping is done from another, and goods are delivered directly to the consumer from a third.

As for the business itself, the supply chain is almost entirely U.S. based. Products are shipped to the company’s Chicago warehouse, where they are inspected for quality and checked against the customer’s original order. Additional services for quality assurance, such as photographs and consolidation, are also performed here before orders are shipped to the Soviet Union. By ensuring that the vendor never sees the consumer, Bay.ru has established itself as a single point of trust with its buyers.

Bay.ru has further established its success by integrating popular American catalogues, such as eBay and Amazon, into its online inventory. Perhaps the largest generator of business, however, is the offering of 500,000 separate “touch points” in Russia available to take orders. Because Russia allows pre-payment, Bay.ru has established a strong presence in kiosks, bank branches, post offices, Western Unions, and online payment systems, making it possible for the customer to pay in whatever manner is most comfortable, at any time.

Gene and Anton, with the help of family loans, bootstrapped the business on their own. The company has also raised $2.3 million in angel investments. Bay.ru became profitable in March 2012, and was scheduled to reach the $40 million mark by the end of 2012. Profits are generated in part through product markup above retail price, which can be anywhere between 9-45%. The value-added services performed in the Chicago warehouse add more margin. Additional profits are made by purchasing shipping at wholesale prices, as well as wholesale purchasing of freight, postal and courier services.

So you see, if the Midwestern journalists focused on companies with good, solid revenues, they would have many strong entrepreneurs to write about. As it stands, though, they are more interested in which venture capitalist has funded the company.  What a silly idea!

PerBlue

Shortly following the releases of the iPhone and Google’s Android operating system in 2007, then-University of Wisconsin student Justin Beck became intrigued by the possibilities that these new mobile technologies brought to the world of gaming. He began work on a concept for Parallel Kingdom, a location-based massively multiplayer game that uses the GPS on a player’s mobile device to place them within a virtual world overlapping their reality.

The first version of Parallel Kingdom, “The Age of Exploration,” was released in 2008 as the first game of its kind. The release coincided with the founding of PerBlue, Justin’s Madison, Wisconsin-based mobile and social gaming software company. Beck and his business partner, PerBlue’s CTO Andrew Hanson, both boast double degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. The two bootstrapped the business, providing initial funds on their own and offering early employees stock options in place of a paycheck.

Justin’s concept garnered a great deal of attention, and soon demand was high enough for the release of a second installment of the game in March 2009, “The Age of Gathering,” as well as a third, greatly expanded version in November of the same year entitled “The Age of Emergence.” The most recent release, “The Age of Thrones,” launched in October 2010 and focused on the game’s social features. It joins two other mobile multiplayer RPG’s (role-playing games), Parallel Mafia and Parallel Zombies, to round out PerBlue’s products.

PerBlue eventually raised some financing, but more importantly, the company has crossed $2 million in revenue.  And now, onto some entrepreneurs that are just about starting to get their businesses off the ground.

SimaFore

In 2010, Bala Deshpande and the three coworkers who would become his fellow team members were working in Ann Arbor, Michigan as resellers for a software startup, building an all-purpose analytical tool capable of identifying and managing risk in complex situations. Through his work in sales, Bala came to realize that not only were most companies incapable of extracting value from such complicated analytical tools, oftentimes the purchase of such software did not solve their original problem. With the assistance of these same coworkers, Bala decided to work toward a more tailored solution, avoiding the broad aspirations of general purpose analytics software.

SimaFore is a reliable way to convert data into an informational asset, providing analytics-based solutions to companies that cannot afford expensive software or a staff to extract value. The company develops custom-built apps tailored to solve specific issues based on a business need. Such services may include identifying key performance indicators, optimizing product quotes using cost forecasting, and overhead cost tracking, among others. By leveraging emerging trends in open source technology and cloud computing, the solutions SimaFore offers remain affordable.

The target market for SimaFore is small and medium-sized businesses, with an ideal customer that has between 10-100 employees, possessing at least some resources for collecting and managing their data.  SimaFore hopes to deliver custom apps to at least 25 SMBs in 2013. The solution is set to be priced at $10,000 for the first year, with an ongoing maintenance fee of $300-500 per month per customer thereafter. Over time, some of these apps would be productized and sold to larger numbers of customers in specific segments.

LinguistaLogix

As a language specialist for over 20 years, Ohio-based Professor Rex Ferguson often finds he is called upon for his services. While working as a Spanish language medical translator, he observed his work save a child’s life. He realized that hospital personnel were not given the language instruction necessary to successfully do their job while working with ESL patients. In response to this industry deficiency, Rex created LinguistaLogix, an educational software business focused on teaching oral proficiency targeted toward medical professionals.

Of course, there are many more entrepreneurs working throughout the Midwest, often unsung due to the media’s obsession with venture-funded startups. It is every bit our intention to highlight their stories.

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