It allows teachers to communicate with
students, parents and share resources
A
WhatsApp-like mobile platform called Flinnt, which allows teachers to create
groups with students and share academic resources like chapters, videos, data,
charts among others, is making learning resource rich, easy and interesting for
school children.
Academic
institutions
Developed by
a group of entrepreneurs from Ahmedabad in June 2012, Flinnt is currently being
used by about 105 academic institutions across Gujarat and a few in Mumbai,
Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Tirupati.
“This will
act as a communication platform between students and teacher. This is a
platform that allows one/few to many broadcast. So, content broadcast can be
monitored and managed. It is a good platform to share user-generated content
like documents, videos of class-room teaching, best answer written by a student
or graph or charts,” said Tarak Yagnik, one of the four founders and a
marketing expert.
The
Android-based mobile app is being used for students in the K-12 segment,
graduate and post-graduate.
How it
functions
“Up to grade
four, the teachers send one-way communications like reminders, announcements,
homework, activity photos directly to the parent’s phone,” said Yagnik.
Once
enrolled, the institute is given sign up codes, with which teachers and
students can use the app.
Teachers
post a document or a video on the platform; students can comment on it and
discuss it further.
But unlike
WhatsApp, the teachers can prevent mischief by restricting students from
commenting on a particular topic. The platform can also operate on a desktop
PC.
Currently,
the company has total 40,000 users for the app.
“Our charges
range from ₹5000 per annum to ₹15,000 per annum for different size of
institutions. We are targeting the private institutions first as they can take
faster decisions,” said Harish Iyer, Co-founder and CEO.
Breakeven
this year
The company,
which has raised around $400,000 including an Angel round from US-based
investors, expects to break even this year. Going forward, it is also planning
to raise about ₹10-12 crore
from venture funds.
Expansion
plans
In the next
two-three years, the company plans to cover about 8,000-10,000 institutions
across the country. By this year-end, the start-up plans to have a presence in
15 cities.
Because of
its high dependence on customer acquisition to add new users, 70 per cent of
the total cost goes towards it, while the remaining 30 per cent cost is for
development and infrastructure.
Source
| Business Line | 25 June 2015
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