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Riding high on online ventures

Young Entrepreneurs
Last Updated 28 January 2013, 16:34 IST

The new media is providing many youngsters an opportunity to fulfill their dreams of becoming entrepreneurs.

The trend of college students and young professionals starting their own web portals is catching up fast in the City, most of them being graduates from reputed educational institutions. Not only have these websites turned their owners into businessmen but are also doing very well financially.

Anand Meena, a B.Tech graduate, founded aglasem.com in 2009 when he was studying in Delhi Technological University (formerly known as Delhi College of Engineering) and now he is fully into it. The website provides study material of various subjects and fields, free of cost. It also updates students on upcoming entrance exams for different courses and universities, board exams, scholarship exams and other matters.

“A few days before every exam we had to get into a huge queue outside the photocopy shop to get notes. To have all the resources ready to do well in exams, one had to run around to get the right book, ask various teachers and students about the syllabus, it was always a huge mess. It struck me that if all the information is given in one place, online, it would be so much easier for everyone. And that was when aglasem.com came into being,” Anand shares with Metrolife.

“As people started to know about it, some friends in other colleges also helped us in providing their college related things on the website. Slowly we realised that there are so many students in our country who are looking for updated and authentic information online,” he adds.

Himanshu Garg, an electrical engineering graduate  from IIT Delhi, is a foodie besides being a technology buff. A combination of both of his interests led to the origin of bigbite.in, an online food ordering and discovery platform.

Launched in March 2012 with his partner Sajal Garg, the portal allows customers to place order using cash on delivery or online payments. The order is beamed to the restaurant as soon as it reaches it via fax/email. The customer is mapped to one of the customer care executives who co-ordinates with the restaurant during order cycle and keeps customer updated about interim status of order. The portal has more than 500 restaurants on board.

“It wasn’t going to be long before someone like us came up with an idea like this. The inherently scalable nature of internet has always fascinated me. I was motivated to use it to reach out to people similar to us and solve problems that are faced due to unorganised nature of the restaurant industry,” says 24-year-old Himanshu.

Himanshu joined a technology firm and acquired the skills that he would need to build and manage this web-based business and left it to start his own venture. “Once I thought I’d learnt enough, I quit my job and started working out the business plan,” he says. Disappointed with the way news is presented in either ‘biased’ or ‘unclear’ way, two Delhi University students, Abhisek Ghosh and Manas Vyas, have started a website theindianeconomist.com, that aims to provide a better perspective on current issues.

“The mainstream media does not focus on youngsters. The way news is presented, is either biased or caters to a section who already have a strong base of the issues. We aim to present political issues, foreign policies, economic policies and debates in a comprehensive and easy way,” says Manas, a II year student of Hindu College. The articles for the website are contributed by students or recent graduates.

“The first question was ‘are youngsters really interested in serious news?’ We did a survey to find out and it turned out they are but feel the lack of a right platform, which we are now attempting to provide,” adds Manas, who has designed the portal and also writes for it.

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(Published 28 January 2013, 16:34 IST)

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