PowerPlug Contest is a first of its kind initiative in India and the first edition witnessed applications from Internet, Mobile to Healthcare and Cleantech industry.
We looked at all the applications and here are the six companies we found very interesting. But before I share the names, let me also touch upon (and collect ideas) on whether such contests should have public voting or not. If you look at it, most of the reality shows end up
NOT selecting the deserving winner. Most of the times, voting is based on regional/religious and other sentimental issues and while PowerPlug isn’t a reality show, an important aspect of voting is the difference between consumer and enterprise segment. In fact, all of the six finalists have an enterprise component! (great coincidence) and that means as a consumer, you probably wouldn’t have tried the “REAL” offering.
So tell us how would you like public voting to be for such a contest? We’d like to hear from you.
And now, the finalists.
Company: Onze
Onze is re-inventing LBS for commons. LBS today, and specifically direction based services are restricted only to those people who can afford a high end navigation device or a GPS enabled mobile phone. With Latlong, Onze’s flagship product, every individual with a mobile phone can get directions in most human friendly manner. SMS your request to a regular mobile number (9008890088) in any format and you will be delighted by the response you get. It’s almost free, but for the SMS charge that you pay your operator.
Latlong’s powerfull NLP engine disambugates location and tollerates any spelling variations. Onze has built the city location database grounds up and has mapped each and every location along with tribal information associated with it.
Businesses use Latlong platform to guide their customers to their stores. Their advertisement carries Latlong’s mobile number asking their consumers to find nearest store by using Latlong platform. They use SMS and Web based Route Guide to handle requests for directions that they get often at their reception. Latlong provides a unique engagement platform where they get new consumers and delight them with followups.
Company: HirePlug
The world’s economy is growing and companies are hiring more and more people. It is becoming harder to get best talent to keep the innovation going.Today’s companies face huge attrition and very high cost of talent. After All the spendings behind job boards, agencies and social networks, the quality of recruits is low and cost of recruits is high. On the other side, everyone is friend-ing more people and building their networks on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Essentially, Social networks are ways to digitized the relationships. Once, a relationship is digitized it becomes a lot easier to manage and peo
ple are able to friend more people as they move on in their lives.
Hireplug solves the problem of putting these social networks to use. Once you’ve all the friends out there it becomes easy to share job opportunities with them. Especially when you are being paid to share jobs in terms of referral bonus.
Company: VisualWebSiteOptimizer
Wingify is a bootstrapped startup that makes Visual Website Optimizer, a product that is successfully competing with the mighty Google and gigantic Adobe in A/B testing and behavioral targeting space. We have over 6500+ users worldwide with customers including some of the most well known brands: Microsoft, Groupon, FourSquare, MakeMyTrip, etc. What’s interesting about us is that we make an international product based out of India (we’re so good at this that in fact lot of our customers believe we are a Silicon Valley company!).
Company: Ayojak
Ayojak serves the need of event organizers by providing an integrated event solution. Our suite of offering includes ready to customize attendee registration for online & retail, offer suite of payment solutions, effectively promote an event and effortlessly handle event support & logistics.
Company: Zipdial
Traditionally Mobile VAS players have been PUSH based and their engagement platform with end users has either been a cumbersome IVR experience or the complexities of a SMS Short code or Long code.
These models have their own pitfalls and have failed to engage with a large community of users, for whom the SMS Cost and SMS formats have been huge entry barriers. In addition, the PUSH based model of content delivery has failed to address issues around SPAM marketing and visibility into the usage metrics. For example, a content provider pushing latest steel prices to its group has no idea on the usage
metrics – read and even receiving it. 
ZipDial is a mobile engagement platform based on a call to action. Users dial (or ZipDial) to express their intent and the call is disconnected on the destination side, without connecting the call. ZipDialing is completely toll-free, operator and handset independent, and requires no SMS literacy skills. It’s as simple as dialing numbers — or giving a missed call. It’s also the simplest and most effective way for businesses of any size, to engage with their customers over the mobile. ZipDial can deliver content or collect customer opinions and feedback in an incredibly simple self-service model.
ZipDial can be applied to a large number of use-cases. But broadly, it can be summarized under the following
- Ratings/Reviews/Feedback
- Branding-Promotion.
- Content Delivery
- Mobile Verification
- Lead Generation
Businesses could be
- Large businesses like P&G, LG, KFC using ZipDial Survey and Polling Platform to capture user response. Additionally they can brand/promote their brands and offerings on the free content
channels, which generate millions of ZipDials every day. - SMEs like local clubs or door to door marketing agencies can leverage ZipDial to generate leads, deliver content via promoting a ZipDial number on all external promotions – flyers, hoardings.
- Web Businesses can leverage ZipDial Verification and Polling services for authorizing Cash on Delivery orders, profile verification and acknowledgement of delivery.
Company: Ohana Media
If you have a website, chances are that customers engage with you across multiple touch-points – search ( paid and natural ), display, direct traffic, social media, email etc. At each of these touchpoints customers provide you with tons of implicit and explicit data about their intent. It’s a no-brainer that you should be using this data to ensure you reach out to the right customers, at the right time, with the right message.
However, in practice, it is difficult for marketeers to use audience data collected across channels in their marketing campaigns or on-site personalization efforts due to multiple reasons:
- No unified data collection mechanism across channels, without the need for time consuming manual tagging processes.
- Products like Google Analytics lets you collect data but you can’t use that data in systems which take action.
- Different channels are treated in separate silos – learnings, data and insights from one channel is seldom used to improve performance in other channels.
- On-going optimization across channels becomes impossible to do manually, as scale increases.
Our flagship product OhanaQB, is an Unified Audience Marketing Platform, which attacks this head-on by letting you:
- Create custom audience intent clusters and track user behavior by cluster using data across multiple touch points
- Execute search, display, email, social and on-site campaigns through an integrated self-service interface
- Automate optimization of campaigns across channels using audience intent data
- Get access to Data, Insights and Actions through a single system.
In a nutshell, OhanaQB lets digital marketers reduce complexity of managing across channels and lower acquisition costs with intelligent optimization based on what we know about their users’ intent
Who is your fav powerplug?
» Follow PowerPlug contest on Twitter, Facebook for further updates.
