“Everything has its origin in Events” claims Arun Katiyar, CEO of SEraja. Seraja is an online portal that resorts to some innovative yet simple ways to keep the world updated on the events.
The name by itself may not give out exactly what the company does, but Mr Katiyar explains “Its an Indian sounding name, there is no particular thought behind the name.”
The rational behind the Seraja was thought of by its Chairman Mr Ramesh Jain, who is a Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine.
Mr Katiyar lucidly explains the thought process behind Seraja, “documentation is an abstraction of things, and not the complete thing. Everything is interrelated to events. SEraja forms a platform to make the documentation of events more real by letting users upload not only pictures but also videos.”
SEraja has also embraced, mobile technology to bring about live capturing of events. To further emphasis on the simplicity of use the of Seraja, Mr Katiyar explained how his daughter who recently visited California could for example have used Seraja to update her pictures and videos and hence let her friends and family have a peek on her activites there. Mr Katiyar states “ Seraja has an option of capturing live events that aredone in real time.”
On a Statistical note Seraja currently has 200,000 events posted on its website and has 1400 registered users. It manages to pull in an average of about 50,000 page views a month. Seraja is not currently funded, are looking for funding.
Upcoming.org which is under the Yahoo Umbrella is a very similar concept to Seraja. So what is the major difference? Both websites have a simple functionality that is to upload events and have a web of events, the difference is the execution. Seraja has an execellent looking website and have tried to make everything as simple as possible. Besides its hold on some great mobile technology and have incorporated some rss feeds.
Mr Katiyar believes as a future prospect that “Seraja will be looking at about 200,000 registered users in about a year’s time. We plan to achieve this by further enhancing our services”
Another interesting aspect that caught my eye regarding Seraja was their use of the Blog. They have effectively used it to explain their drawbacks, or system failure and measures and reasons taken to combat these problems to the users.
Here is what Rajesh Jain said on his blog announcing the closure of SeRaja
“Sometimes due to lack of focus a particular copany is not successful. I feel that was the case in the last Seraja also. We could not focus on where should this be used initially to refine it and make it usable before going to other applications. Anything that tries to address multiple applications from the beginning, ends up addressing no application. And that happened with Seraja. A good lesson. But too late for Seraja. And a funny thing is that we knew it but we could not control other factors to overcome the problem. Well, so is the life of an entrepreneur.”
Another one gone burst.
@ Ankit
Its not Rajesh Jains’ blog…it is RAMESH Jains’ blog..(co-founder)