Raghu Pandey

Intra College Portal and NBA/NAAC Accreditation Benefits

raghu@ibranch.in — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:29:00 GMT

Actually this post was supposed to be titled “Intra College Portal and Quality of Learning Environment – Part 2 of 2”, as I am going to continue the discussion from the part 1 of this blog. But I thought of highlighting something which we have recently ‘Discovered’… and it’s an exciting thing for us!

10 Things You Must Know About 21st Century Jobs

raghu@ibranch.in — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:01:00 GMT

This is the official blog for my eBook "10 Things You Must Know About 21st Century Jobs".

I published this eBook on 23rd August 2010 for all those people who are going to see the coming decade of 21st Century as an important or critical period in their professional life. I hope you will find it interesting and well timed! Enjoy reading!

You can download the Complimentary eBook here.

Please share you comments and suggestions for the Next edition on the Official Facebook Page for this eBook.

iBranch 2.0 ...Launched

raghu@ibranch.in — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:30:00 GMT

Hello World!
This post is going to be a BIG change from my past communications in which I had been constantly blowing my favourite trumpet "we are planning iBranch 2.0... we are working on iBranch 2.0... we are going to launch iBranch 2.0...", since last few months.

To the relief of many readers I am saying it this time in present perfect tense - Ladies & Gentlemen we have launched iBranch 2.0 today, finally!

New product... New website... New logo... and New punchline. Everything is new!

1000 Cheers!!

raghu@ibranch.in — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:12:00 GMT

Hello Everybody! Its an emergency post :)

iBranch team is so much engrossed in the development and planning the launch of iBranch 2.0 that we totally missed a BIG MILESTONE passing by!

At around 10 in the night of 29th May 2010... iBranch.in got its ONE THOUSANDTH blog article!!!

Intra College Portal and Quality of Learning Environment – Part 1 of 2

raghu@ibranch.in — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:50:00 GMT

Continuing from where I left my last blog 'Aspect of Quality in Colleges' in this article I wish to talk more about the Quality issue in colleges. As I love to evangelize that the sure shot way to improve the quality of the 'Learning Environment' of a college is to have an Intra College Portal and to utilize it well, I have frequently seen people going confused (students, teachers & directors alike) with "What really is this thing called learning environment?"

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.

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.

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!

More ...

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 :)

More ...

Technorati Verfication Blog Post (Not an article)

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

874WY527CRYU

More ...