Archive for February, 2009
Letzknow.com: Student entrepreneurs setting to kill the information gap
The taste of entrepreneurship kindled their spirit since their age of 14 while studying 8th grade with registering a company named “Tech Track Technologies” through which they churned out their own good quality self assembled computers to schools and renowned banks such as State Bank of India, Indian Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, etc., After two and half years they switched to multimedia and data recovery services.
While studying 11th grade the duo created a mark of being recipients of United Nations’ Youth Leadership Award from Mr.Kofi Annan, the then Secretary-General of UNO, at the Global Young Leaders Conference 2003, in New York. This award recognizes youth leadership in business, social as well as cultural activities. The two were selected on the basis of “empowerment by self employment”. The trip to United States got them an exposure on the functioning of American educational bodies. By comparison back in India, there is a huge information gap in the academic field. The vision to bridge this information gap saw the birth of letzknow.com during end 2007.
Mani pursuing Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering discipline at the Amrita University in Coimbatore
Sures is now a student of BioTech Engineering discipline at the VIT University, Vellore
Mani and Sures hail from Salem a town in Tamil Nadu. They have had their time together for 12 years at the same school. Interestingly they were childhood enemies till 5th grade and best friends after that. Their travel to USA for the UN conference gave an opportunity to explore and understand each other for a lifetime relationship. While pursuing their studies they were on the lookout for external events to enrich their knowledge. But, many a time, most of these wonderful opportunities came to be known too late to be missed. Lesson is that, timely information is wealth; and the duo strive to achieve this through their www.letzknow.com to dissipate information such as upcoming academic conferences, symposiums, cultural festivals, technical contests, workshops, scholarships etc.., on immediate basis complemented
A 6 member core team of students with clearly assigned roles run the show, besides an ever-growing number of young minds taking up various responsibilities like campus ambassadors, contributors, et la..,
The big challenge for them is that, their web site is to handle nation-wide traffic and has to open up fast even in the slowest internet connection in the remotest corner of the country. Making the right choices of the back end technology and the front end user interface is a life lesson for these young thrillers. Bouquet for them is their site clocking 16K + unique visitors in two months since going live. Their target users being students, faculty, alumni and anyone with academia, they are serving out for free with an idea of pepping it up with a bit of premium services in the future.
On marketing, “If the product and service is strong then every user is a marketing guy for us, Word of the Mouth is our style of marketing” quips Mani.
On entrepreneurship Mani is of sure that it doesn’t pay unless until the person in the driving seat is really passionate about it. “So get in only if your heart and mind is in line with it” tells Mani.
Address: www.letzknow.com #87, Ansari Street, Ramnagar, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu - 641009. Contact: info@letzknow.com Tel: Mani: +91 98945 80664, Sures: +91 98948 49647Blog: letzknow.wordpress.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/pub/dir/manikandan/hk
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