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Company

SmartCrowds was started in October of 2007, with aspirations to apply the vast pool of intelligence on the web, to help solve real-world problems. We looked at the way Businesses work, and realized that there is one part of it that could realize significant benefits with the use of a complementary approach. That area is Marketing! - which includes Advertising, Market Research, Branding, PR, Distribution, Product/Service Strategy and Design.

Every one of these aspects of Marketing mentioned above, could improve significantly, when performed in collaboration with the very people for whom Businesses exist - Consumers!. The Internet with its fast growing usage, provides the platform for fast, scalable and efficient collaboration and research. The Media consumption patterns of traditional Media outlets such as TV, and Print are fast changing with the advent of Broadband, Peer to Peer sharing, and powerful portable devices. Business is rapidly becoming suspectible to changes anywhere on the globe. Businesses are faced with a fast changing landscape, and there has never been a better time to truly Connect with their Consumers, and Partner with them to figure out how to best deal with the changes. The need for Businesses to tap into the insights and creativity of people beyond their company's borders is undeniable.

BrandAdda is our first step in enabling, nurturing and promoting a productive dialogue between Consumers and Companies. Our goal is to provide provide Engagement Marketing tools & services, in the form of an online portal, web widgets, social network applications, and consulting. We work with Brands and Agencies to help build active, engaged communities for Brands. These communities help promote the Brand via online buzz, and word of mouth marketing. They also make a great focus group, tell Brands about what they would buy, generate ideas and are a source of instant feedback.

We believe that the future of Marketing is going to be partnership-based, and we're here to facilitate the partnership between Consumers and Companies. We like to call it Partnership Marketing.

SmartCrowds is based in Bangalore, India.

Team

Tej Arora

Tej Arora

Founder

tej@smartcrowds.com

SmartCrowds was founded by Tej Arora, who has spent many years in the Computer Industry. Tej has spent most of his career on Development of mission critical, scalable Server Platforms, in roles ranging from Engineer to Architect at Companies in the San Francisco Bay Area (Oracle, Netscape, AOL).

Notable experiences include the Development of the Storage Layer for Oracle 8 as part of the Oracle Server Technology Group, and Development of components of the pioneering Kiva Application Server (later Netscape Application Server, and then iPlanet Application Server).

Most recently, Tej was the Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo R&D India, heading the Media Engineering Group.

Tej has a Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT, Madras and a Masters in Computer Science from Univ of California at Davis.

Dr. Srinivasan Seshadri

Srinivasan Seshadri

Advisor

Dr. Srinivasan "Sesh" Seshadri, is the Chief Technology Officer at Kosmix. Sesh has many years of experience in Academia and Industry. Prior to Kosmix, Sesh was the Chief Technology Officer for Yahoo R&D India. His notable prior stints include founder of Strand Genomics, a biotechnology company, a research jock at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Professor at IIT, Mumbai.

Sesh has a Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT, Madras and a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Mukund Mohan

Mukund Mohan

Advisor

Mukund Mohan is the CEO and Co-founder of BuzzGain. BuzzGain empowers companies and individuals with Do-It-Yourself PR (Public Relations). Previously, he was Vice President of Marketing at Inovis, a leading B2B supply chain communication provider. Before Inovis, he was Head of Product Marketing at Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP). Mukund pursued his Masters in Computer Science from University of Maryland at Baltimore. He serves on the Board of Directors for Semantic Defence & Kinetic Brains and is also on the Advisory Board for SmartCrowds.

The "Real" Team

The heavy lifting, which actually brings our Products into existence, is done by our cross-functional team that consists of User Experience Design, Product Mgmt, Engineering, and Operations. It is challenging to list this team, because it has been quite fluid, and has included part-time consultants, contractors, part-time/full-time employees who came and went or just joined recently. The final product is an amalgam of all their fine efforts.

The Giants

How can a team of 3-4 go as far as a team of thousands?. When attributing work done, the term Shoulders of Giants comes to mind. Of all the parts in our product, perhaps over 90% is the creation of the Open Source Movement. Without it, the product would not have been possible to build with the features it has, with the small team that worked on it, and in the amount of time we built it.

We are deeply grateful to the hundreds of thousands of developers and Open Source supporters whose pearls of contribution have built a vast treasure for everyone to share. For SmartCrowds, whose core belief is the Wisdom of Crowds, this is resonance at its best!. We've benefited hugely from the following invaluable work:

  • Apache
  • Curl
  • CVS
  • Cygwin
  • Drupal
  • Eclipse
  • Emacs AND Vi
  • Firefox Plugins (MeasureIt, Firebug, View Source Chart, FireShot, etc..)
  • Linux (Centos, Ubuntu)
  • MySQL
  • OpenID
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • W3Schools

The Honorary Advisor Network

Our Ideas, Strategy, Direction are powerfully influenced by a benevolent network of well-wishers, who we have consulted all along. These kind folk include VC Fund Managers, Founders, CEOs, Directors, Investors, and ex-colleagues at prominent companies in India and the US. They have kindly given their valuable time to hear us out, and given impactful feedback.

Investors

Our investors include two "Angels" who work at a world-renowned Internet Company based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Blog

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