Hyderabad: Ravneet Singh, Tejas Shah, Aneeq Dholakia and Vennela Miryala will not be celebrating Diwali this year. It’s their favourite festival but then the students of IIIT-Hyderabad aren’t complaining. They are flying to the US on October 23 to showcase their android app, Brthe, on AngelHack’s Global Demo Day.
At the meet in San Francisco, 30 startups from 15 countries will demonstrate their products, hoping to win over the investors.
So, what is Brthe all about? It won the Hyderabad edition of AngelHack in May and was chosen for the Web Summit in Dublin and has even impressed Telangana CM K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
Ravneet and Tejas have been so busy working at it since December 2013 that they haven’t been to their hometowns, Patiala and Pune, on a long vacation. They have been bypassing their academics too.
“Last July, I missed out a discount of 50 per cent at an icecream parlour in the city. I could have had it for Rs 75. But I didn’t know about the offer. This happens quite frequently. We are trying to solve this problem. Our app alerts you about discounts, offers, and exciting events happening in the city. But mind you, they are not random alerts. Our algorithm is such that it will send you alerts only of your interest. That’s the point, interesting activities and offers will find you; you don’t have to find them on the Web.”
There’s more. “The app provides end-to-end solutions. That means if you are going to watch a movie, you can book a ticket using our app, find a cab to get there and also a restaurant. You don’t have to hop around apps for every service,” he adds.
While Ravneet looks into the planning and management aspect of Brthe, Tejas executes the ideas, Aneeq markets their product, Vennela writes the content and makes sales strategies, two other students on the campus, Roopgundeep Sodhi and Lovepreet Sidhu, look into the technicalities.
Collating so many service providers and so much of data wasn’t much of a task for Ravneet and Tejas, as they are pursuing MS in Information Retrieval and
Data Mining respectively.
The team is now looking forward to their two-week sponsored trip to the US. “We have earned this after a lot of hard work. Two days, we will be in Los Angeles, then in San Francisco and Las Vegas. We’ll work, but have fun too.”
