Work Home Money

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

The company

Atebits is a Philadelphia-based software start-up. Atebits makes a $2.99 iPhone application called Tweetie.

The idea

Twitter is free to use, which means you can send and receive messages free. However, people don’t mind paying for an app which makes it easy to use on the go.

Atebits was started by 25-year-old founder Loren Brichter. He wants to create a Microsoft Outlook for the 140-character set of Twitter. “Twitter is like e-mail,” Brichter says. “The vast majority of people use it for superficial crap, but a small percentage uses it for something useful and powerful.”

Brichter put the first version of Tweetie up for sale in November 2008. To promote it, he sent a message to his friends on Twitter.

The result

The popularity of Tweetie can be gauged from the following points-

Tweetie is the most successful iPhone app for Twitter

About 12.7 percent of all Twitter users have bought it (Twitstat.com)

The most recent version, reached the top of Apple’s bestseller list within 36 hours (leaving behind popular titles such as Electronic Arts’s Madden 2010 and CNN’s iPhone app).

How Twitter applications work

You can create Twitter application and sell it to people who like it. Twitter applications incorporate, organize, and rearrange tweets in real time. Twitter applications can be created for mobile phones such as iPhone.

Examples of twitter applications- collecting messages written by professional athletes (using the app called Twackle), translating tweets into the language of the high seas (an app called Post Like a Pirate).

With their applications are sold from $1 to any higher amount. As the number of twitter users grow continuously (which is in billions), the chance of making money by selling twitter applications is enormous.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

For people who are new to blogging and who are wondering how to create their first blog, here is a visual guide for them to show them how to create their first free Wordpress blog -

Find the online visual guide here

This is a simple and visual guide that describes every step that leads to a free blog of your own.

The Guide mentions:

“Welcome to the new world of blogging. Here we will show you how to create a blog of your own. Create a free Wordpress blog of your own within the next 10 minutes.”

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Eko is a mobile banking company. It is different from other SMS-based bank applications in India. Users make payments and transfer money simply by dialing numbers.

About 60% of Indian population is unbanked and Eko targets them and right now it focuses on the 1,000 kilometer corridor between Delhi and Bihar.

The accounts created for the users are actually held by the State Bank of India. It insures up to 100,000 rupees per account. But that does not mean Eko’s customers have to go into the banks, they don’t ever go. The tiny corner groceries available in every neighborhood and street corner, urban areas and expansive rural areas in India work as the “tellers”. In India these stores has a very important role, specially for the poor and rural people, which sell medications by the pill, shampoo in tiny sachets, cell phone minutes by the Paisa, and frequently extend credit when needed. Eko wants to tap this trusted source of vendors to sell one more thing.

The interface is simple enough for anyone to use (even it has crossed the language or literacy barriers)-

• Eko transaction
• Eko customers type the bank’s short code
• then an asterisk
• then the mobile number of the person you are paying
• then an asterisk
• then the amount
• then another asterisk.
• Then comes the signature.

Signature is an important part because the account is solely on phones, which can be stolen. In general RSA token is used to validate such online transactions involving money. But Eko’s founder Abhishek Sinha wanted a cost-effective equivalent of an RSA token. So, he created a paper version of it. A Eko account holder gets little booklets with pages of 11-digit codes. Among these 11 digits, 7 digits are random numbers, with four randomly placed black marks, where the person enters his or her PIN. This means security because even if the booklet is stolen, no one can find out the PIN number and can’t access the account. Sinha reached out to VeriSign to see if they could come up with a better solution- instead they endorsed his and every booklet has got a VeriSign logo on the back.

Freedom from always having to carry cash has obvious safety and empowerment implications. But this is a hard company to build out broadly in a country like India. The very strength of the model to truly reach the unbanked-turning those

Turning the trusted, neighborhood grocers into tellers is a costly and time-consuming effort because there are so many of them serving relatively small neighborhoods and villages.

Eko has 30,000 account-holders right now. “I thought it’d be a million by now,” Sinha says. “We’ve had a lot of false starts.”

The service was launched in late 2007. Eko first outsourced the management of the grocers to a third party who sells multiple things through the channel already. But the product needed more hand-holding and so the number of accounts wasn’t growing. Since last November, Eko has taken over the management of these grocer accounts. It has assigned employees to each neighborhood and invested in street promotions (it has used Bollywood cinema-eque jingle extolling the virtues of banking) and bedecking stores with in-store signage. Now opening of new accounts are increasing. Eko had just 6,000 accounts before the switch in strategy. It added 10,000 in January and is now adding 10,000 every 15 days.

But costs of managing and operation have gone up a lot. Sinha, who made some money founding a previous company Six DEE Telecom Solutions, self-funded the venture until now. Eko also got a $1.78 million grant from the World Bank and The Gates Foundation. But that will not be enough. Sinha is working on raising a venture round now and he hopes to get a whopping $10 million.

The business has a huge social need and business opportunity and it is scalable but it lacks capital. With enough investment it can become a profitable business model soon.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.