Mnemonic Dictionary (www.mnemonicdictionary.com)

Short of words for GRE, GMAT or even CAT? You feel you are wasting your time and energy remembering all the difficult words? We present to you a solution -The Mnemonic Dictionary (www.mnemonicdictionary.com), which is going to help you in memorizing all these scary words.

Mnemonic Dictionary(MD) helps people retain and recall new words. MD provides memory aids (called mnemonics) for each word. Mnemonics is a connect to-be-remembered meaning of words with a systematic and organized set of images or words that are already firmly established in long-term memory and can therefore serve as reminder cues.

In an exclusive interview to the GeekOnNet team, Amit Aggarwal founder of MnemonicDictionary.com speaks about his company, its goals and future plans.

Founder: Amit Aggarwal
Founder's Background: B.Tech. Chemical Engineering, IIT-Bombay.
http://in.linkedin.com/in/amitaggarval

The Geeks: What inspired you to start MnemonicDictionary?
Amit: The idea for mnemonic dictionary came when I was still in college and was preparing for GRE. This exam primarily lays a lot of emphasis on vocabulary and I would struggle for hours to memorize new words. This technique worked wonders for me and I wanted to reach out to all those students and professionals with similar concerns and to save them from the usual grind. Mnemonic Dictionary was launched after spending several hours on building quality content for the website.

The Geeks: How long have your website been functional? Can you please explain your "Business and Revenue Model"?
Amit: Beta version of Mnemonic Dictionary was launched in May 2007. We are exploring other revenue models but currently our website is making money only from online ad inventory.

The Geeks: Your website contains a lot of information. What technology do you use to maintain such huge database of words?
Amit: Mnemonic Dictionary uses SQL format of Princeton University data bank, Wordnet which consists of not less than 150,000 words.’ Mnemonics’ on the website are mainly contributed by the active members and users.

The Geeks: Name some of your competitors in the market. How do you differentiate your website from them?
Amit: Answers.com and Dictionary.com offer similar services but none of them provide mnemonics aid. Mnemonic Dictionary is the only place which provides memory aids along with meaning and usage for each word.

The Geeks: What was the biggest hurdle you faced and how did you overcome it?
Amit: Biggest hurdle was getting traffic on our website as we started with a very low budget of approx 80,000 INR and did not have any money to invest on the professional marketing of the website. We capitalized majorly on Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. Currently, we are getting more than 1000 visitors daily only from search engines.

The Geeks: What are your future plans of expansion?
Amit: We are planning to publish our mnemonics data (for words in Barron) in the form of a book, so that users with constraints like poor net connectivity or inaccessibility to internet are not deprived of this wonderful technique of building vocabulary.

The Geeks: How do you publicize your website? Any big publicity campaigns coming up? What is your USP?
Amit: Word- of- mouth publicity has gone a long way in making us popular. Many GRE/GMAT/LSAT/CAT aspirants keep recommending the website to their peers’ .Also, our sound knowledge of SEO and SEM has helped us. The USP of our website is its powerful use of “mnemonics” to help in easy retention of words.

The Geeks: What background skill, knowledge and experiences help you in your business?
Amit: Experience and passion for web development and online marketing via SEO and SEM has made this journey rewarding for me.

The Geeks: My readers look at you entrepreneurs with a lot of respect and inspiration. We would like you to just give us some insight on your "mantra of success"?
Amit: I would like to quote famous lines of Shiv Khera
“Winners don’t do different things, they do things differently”
You just think how you can solve everyday problems differently and the rest would automatically fall in place.

We are very fortunate to have so many budding entrepreneurs in our country. We as GeekOnNet team is here to encourage their hard-work and talent. Our aim is to bring in more visibility and awareness for such startups. We hope all our avid followers help and support us in our novel initiative.

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EveningFlavors : for, your every evening is special

Looking to go out for a romantic dinner or a date with a special someone? Family in town, and you want to take them to a popular restaurant? EveningFlavors.com has just what you’re looking for. Team GeekOnNet comes again with one of the hottest startups of Bangalore (Bengaluru).

EveningFlavors.com is an online media & Services Company started by a team consisting of IIT and Industry professionals who has substantial knowledge in their respective fields and executed the idea in a cost efficient manner. Their aim is to make every evening of yours special. They started executing this idea from August, 2008 onwards EveningFlavors.com is the India's leading restaurant reservation, review and search site. EveningFlavors provides you with amazing offers and great events taking place in Bangalore.

You can now plan a party or book a table at your choice of place, rate and cuisine with a click on the mouse or a call to 080 - 40894999.

In an exclusive interview to the GeekOnNet team Akash Shrivastava, co-founder of EveningFlavors.com speaks about his company, its targets and future plans.

Venture Name: EveningFlavors.com
Founder(s): Akash Shrivastava, Ravi Shrias, Vinod C, Abhishek Kumar

The Geeks: What inspired you to start eveningflavors.com?
Akash: 90% of business ideas come from the problems we face in our daily life. We(team eveningflavors) being foodies always use to face issue to explore different restaurants and lounges on weekends and finally we had to be adventurous enough to risk our evening to explore new restaurant or rely on friends to get information about the new restaurants. We never found a dedicated service or web portal which would be reliable one stop solution for all dining and partying needs. Looking at the scope we quit our jobs in Aug. 2008 and started working on our baby idea which turned out to be huge content rich dedicated portal to F&B industry, table reservation and party assistance service called as EveningFlavors.com.

The Geeks: How long have your website been functional? Can you please explain your "Business and revenue Model"?
Akash: It’s been one and half year we are in business. We are lead based model where we work with our partnering restaurants to generate leads.
We already have around 300 active tie-up and another 200 indirect tie-up with restaurants in Bangalore. Average of around 10000 diners in Bangalore dine through us. Now with the sort of niche audience we have, new avenues of revenue have already started emerging in form of subscription and advertising.

The Geeks: Your website contains a lot of information, how do you basically keep yourself updated with all those new restaurants opening up every day? What is the secret of such a strong network?
Akash: We have put in strong initial effort to maintain the content on our website. Since, internet is still not in reach with the common people we had tough time in convincing restaurant owners for our portal. Slowly we picked up our pace and now are able to maintain the updated content by dedicating a team especially for the content management. Apart from this we are having user generated content too. Once we have got a brand value even the restaurants and beverages companies are putting their info in our website.

The Geeks: Name some of your competitors in the market. How do you differentiate your website from them?
Akash: Since, the market is crowded there are actually few big players like JustDial, and Asklaila, Burrp who falls into the basket of our competitors. But we are far different in term of our uniqueness for the content,offering and services which we impart.

The Geeks: What was the biggest hurdle you faced & how did you overcome it?
Akash: With so many TV channels, magazines and internet websites various marketing medium are saturated to its brink and initial stages of our business we used to have a pretty difficult time to get an appointment from restaurant owners leave aside explaining them the concept of Evening flavors. Whenever we tried to meet a restaurant owner we found tens of people already in the queue for meeting with them for promotions and marketing and they usually use to stereotype us as just one more good for nothing website!!!
Having put in lot of thought and efforts we have now established ourselves as strong brand in Bangalore market.

The Geeks: What are your future plans of expansion? How do you want your customers to look at eveningflavors.com 3 years down the line?
Akash: Our futuristic plan includes expansion to 15 top cities of India.And we work with the vision that 3 years down the line if your planning your dining and partying the next thing which should come in your mind is Evening Flavors.

The Geeks: How do you publicize your website? Any big publicity campaigns coming up?
Akash: We are having strong hold in the market segment for our publicity. Right from the online publicity we are hitting the offline market for our publicity. We are having marketing partnership with pubs, lounges, restaurant, newspapers and magazines for our offline publicity. Having tied up with CallEasy, CommonFloor and mofirst we are looking at even the bigger picture of our market hold.
Above all of this we are into SEO, SEM and viral marketing using social networking websites like facebook, twitter. Today EveningFlvors's facebook fanclub is having more than 4500 people.
Please wait and watch for the big publicity campaign coming up, they are there and will be implemented very soon.

The Geeks: What background skills, knowledge and experiences help you in your business?
Akash: Me, Ravi and Abhishek having few years of experience in corporate was something which led us frame the idea of EveningFlavors though with vinod having 17 yrs of experience in various fields was a asset and we got a good support from our family and friend which helped us dealing with issues very professionally.

The Geeks: My readers look at you entrepreneurs with a lot of respect and inspiration. We would like you to just give us some insight on your "mantra of success"?
Akash: Ha ha ha :)(Laughs) We have not tasted the big success yet though successful in achieving smaller landmarks. Would like to say it’s long tough journey, believe in your dreams, keep your eyes and ears open and keep learning from your mistakes .

If you think that I am missing something if you wanted to know about the venture mail me/comment your questions. My email id is ranjeet@geekonnet.com. I will try to include those questions in the forth coming interviews.

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