Voicetap wins Red Herring Asia Top 100 award

Voicetap Technologies, a start-up venture based in New Delhi that aims to bridge the knowledge gap by connecting knowledge seekers to experts, has won the Red Herring Asia Top 100 award at an event held in Shanghai recently.

The company said in a press release that it had also been included in the Red Herring Global Top 200 and would have to make presentations in San Mateo to try and win a place in the Red Herring Global Top 100.

It said Voicetap had recently received Singapore dollars 1 million in seed funding from a Singapore-based consortium.

"Winning the Red Herring Award is a great validation for any company, and for a company that is 10 months into inception – it speaks of the strength of our team, business model and global vision for the product," Mr Mrigank Tripathi, founder and CEO of Voicetap said,

Commenting on Voicetap’s win, Mr Alex Vieux, CEO of Red Herring said, "We see great possibilities for this young company. They are one of the youngest companies that has ever won the award, and the reason they have been chosen is because we believe they could change the way knowledge is acquired globally. Their model is unique – and their execution flawless".

According to the release, the Red Herring editorial team used an intensely competitive process to select the most innovative companies from a pool of more than 1000 companies to honor 100 cutting edge private technology companies from China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam, bringing together an elite roster of entrepreneurial and global venture investment firms.

Past award winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube, it said.

Voicetap has recently launched Getafixx, a knowledge engine that the company's head of technology, Mr Devanshu Pandey, said was a web-based solution for connecting users to experts directly.

"We did in-depth studies into user behavior and usability of various platforms and realized that the maximum time a user spends on the web is on his email account – and that’s the perfect place for him to find knowledge. Thus, Getafixx is a knowledge buddy that resides inside the Gtalk client / Gmail, and you can ask it to connect you to experts on any topic of interest. You don’t need to know the expert, his location or any details –Getafixx will find him, and connect the two of you," he said.

"The applicability is immense. Students want to know about career options, parents want to connect with other parents, the average investor wants to talk to the real investment expert and the job seeker wants to get tips on how to crack an interview. All this is real knowledge – for which people inherently want to interact directly to relevant experts who can help them through the problem. That’s where Getafixx fits in. The response has been great - even though we launched the private beta less than a week back, we have already got close to 700 experts signed on across various fields," Vivek Khandelwal, a co-founder of the company and a current student of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay added.

NNN