Raghu Pandey

Aspect of 'Quality' in colleges

raghu@ibranch.in — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:46:00 GMT

In most industries like manufacturing or software it is easy to observe and measure the quality of the product or the end result, which clearly indicates the quality of manufacturing processes involved in creating that product. Thus, through tests & observations of the product, it is easy to control the quality of background processes because every attribute of the finished product has a corresponding manufacturing process. However in case of a college, where the objective is to churn out high quality people (students), it is difficult to map the attributes of a student to his or her "manufacturing" processes.

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What is an Intra College Portal ?

raghu@ibranch.in — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:35:00 GMT

Although the Home page and FAQs section of iBranch.in contain a lot of information on Intra College Portals, still I felt like sharing my personal view on their need in colleges. Let me start by defining an intra college portal… It is a web based portal dedicated to a college, used by its students, teachers, & administration to collaborate among them. It allows them to share day-to-day notices & announcements, do day-to-day interaction, and share knowledge through Internet efficiently, without letting unauthorized outsiders see it.

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iBranch gets reviewed on 'Indian Web Startups'

raghu@ibranch.in — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:42:00 GMT

Happy New Year world citizens! Yesterday we got a nice new year gift from IndianWebStartups.com, an encouraging review of iBranch service.

Checkout this link to read the review.

Thanks a lot to Indian Web Startups team! Thank you to all our wellwishers who kept our spirits high in 2009. May all your optimisms bear fruit this year and may you over achieve your targets. My target this year is lose weight personally and gain - a lot of it - for my comapny. We have to take our Intra College Portal service to pan-India levels... as Docomo puts it, its a 'Do Year' for us.

So people... you know 2010 AD has arrived for the first time since BigBang and will last only for next 51 weeks! The "right" time you were waiting for has come... Think BIG (read ENORMOUS) and execute - Mediocrity is Sin!

Story of iBranch – Part 3of3 (Stand up... stay... walk... RUN!)

raghu@ibranch.in — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:56:00 GMT

How we got transformed from a software product company to a web services company was described in the part 2 of this series. That transformation however was merely technological. It brought about its own set of marketing challenges, of which the first was market positioning. It took us quite a few brainstorming sessions and sales pitches before we finally decided to position iBranch.in as ‘Intra College Portal Service’. This straightforward positioning proved the most effective as compared to generic and industry accepted terms like ‘Web Enterprise Portal’ etc. It also helped us in creating our own niche.

After the positioning got stabilized, the next task we had to take up was indeed herculean – motivating the teachers & Students to *Adopt* iBranch for their day-to-day intra college collaboration. By early 2008 we had managed to convince 8 colleges in Bhopal to subscribe to our service. It was obvious that the usage of our service in these colleges would define the future of iBranch.in. We virtually stopped doing new sales and focused on making iBranch successful in those 8 colleges (financially it was a very tough decision). Thus emerged our most important business process called ‘Evangelizing’, which was all about hand-holding and motivating an organization to become mature in doing online collaboration (it still is one of the most important processes in our company). We even designed our own collaboration maturity model for educational institutes so that the level of success of iBranch in an institute can actually be measured. (I really hope to see our maturity model grow into an industry accepted standard someday!)

Well… at the back end we continued to grapple with technology issues. Although by God’s sheer grace our web-app and the server worked like a dream, still we had to negotiate a lot with the power and broadband issues. The funniest of all problems was our “cost effective” UPS, which at the time of power cuts, used to become so hot that you can iron your shirt with it :D It finally burned our cash as we had to buy a good APC ups. (In mid 2009 we decided to outsource the server management part and hired a cloud server from Netmagic solutions.)

Although 2008 didn’t pay us good money, it paid off well in terms of confidence and recognition. Our clients became active users (one of the colleges became hyperactive!). We climbed to the top position in all search engines for our category ‘intra college portal’. And in higher education circles of Bhopal, iBranch became a brand. 2009 has been even better! We’ve expanded the base to reach upto 20,000 college students across 50+ colleges. Our company got selected for the TiE Mumbai’s Entrepreneur Nurturing Program for long-term mentoring, and we are now planning our next major upgrade & expansion in early 2010.

So that was the story of iBranch.in... Thank you for reading... I enjoyed writing :)

Technorati Verfication Blog Post (Not an article)

raghu@ibranch.in — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:29:00 GMT

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Got featured on YourStory.in

raghu@ibranch.in — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:09:00 GMT

Well let me first clarify that I am not into ‘Story’ telling business. It seems that the keyword ‘story’ has taken prime spot on my blog. Anyways.. whatever it is, its for GOOD! Amidst my own story-telling campaign, we just got featured on the entrepreneurship & startups portal YourStory.in.

Click here to see the coverage.

Hearty thanks to YourStory team for giving us the space & spotlight!

PS: My next blog is supposed to be ‘Story of iBranch – part 3of3’… Jesus Christ!! Got to find a synonym of ‘that word’ :D

Story of iBranch – Part 2of3 (“Its got to be a service, stupid”)

raghu@ibranch.in — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:03:00 GMT

In part one of this story I narrated how we started off with the product model and managed to get our first customer for our software product called “Informer”, and how we had to dump the whole thing. In part two I’ll tell you how we managed to convert our proposition into a web service. Honestly speaking, during those days I sometimes used to feel like Robinson Crusoe :D

Well, it didn’t take much time for the Gyan to dawn upon us that its got to be a web based service. After all if the clients need 24x7 access to the software and they can’t maintain the server at their end, SaaS is the obvious way out. It was Dec 2006 and our to-do list was pretty clear – get a server, a good broadband connection, a ups, register a website name.. and we are done! But unfortunately that needed money (how unfair).

Call it serendipity or the benefit of marketing ‘Informer’, we received a call from the office of the then vice-chancellor of technical univ of MP, Prof. P.B.Sharma, to work upon his pet project called ‘KU’ (Knowledge Universe) – a knowledge sharing portal. Although the only trace of KU which remains today is this copy of press release, it gave us the exact amount of money to buy a server, necessary software and a cheap UPS! Bulls Eye!

Our first server was Dell SC440 and somebody told me that it was Wikipedia’s first too! I could never confirm the fact but blissfully believed him as it used to lift my spirits :) It reached us in march’07 and within few days with a child-like excitement I configured it, did the test run for our web-app etc. etc. so that the day my broadband connection comes I could make the service online! That day came after F-O-U-R months! I had actually applied for a 4mbps reliance b’band connection for which there were no competing plans from other ISPs and at the time when I applied, reliance didn’t even have the infrastructure laid-out (which was obviously not told to me while taking the application). To avoid letting this webpage catch fire I wont vent out my real frustration.

Finally the broadband incarnated in our office in Aug’07 and we got transformed into a services company :) Our first “subscriber” was the client college which had paid for Informer. Initially the service was called inteeg.com which was an ad-hoc brand and then after a lot of brainstorming it was finally rebranded as iBranch.in

Story of iBranch - Part 1 of 3 (The 'Informer' days!)
Story of iBranch – Part 3 of 3 (Stand up... stay... walk... RUN!)

iBranch partners with IIM Indore for entrepreneurship workshop

raghu@ibranch.in — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:33:00 GMT

Hey whats up! Although I was supposed to continue with writing the story of iBranch, but before that I need to share an exciting update at our end! iBranch.in got a chance to partner with IIM Indore for their entrepreneurship workshop on ‘Business Ideas and Opportunity Evaluation’ which was conducted yesterday, 25th October 2009.

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Story of iBranch - Part 1 of 3 (The “Informer” days!)

raghu@ibranch.in — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:10:00 GMT

I had been thinking real hard as to what should be my first article on our official blog, and talking about a brief history of our service ‘iBranch.in’ seemed like the best idea. That’s because nostalgia is always handy in all entrepreneurs’ minds and I am no exception :). Alright, now the story...

Back in early 2006, the iBranch service wasn’t even remotely similar to what it is today. It neither was a ‘service’ nor was it called ‘iBranch’. It was a software product called ‘Informer’.

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WELCOME... This was looong overdue!

raghu@ibranch.in — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:20:00 GMT

Hello people :) Finally we have got our company blog up... and let me tell you thats no mean achievement! Well, although it adds to our multitasking challenge I assure you that this would be a happening place.