Travel pass: Pros may outweigh cons
IATA’s mobile application will allow travellers to store and manage certifications for Covid-19 tests or ...
Prasanna Kaliamoorthy (left), Co-founder & COO, and Anurag Gopinath, Co-founder & CEO, Tangsys Technologies
As a parent, there may have innumerable times when you have gnashed your teeth at the lack of any communication from your child’s school. There is this feeling of anxiety when the school bus that should drop off your child at the gate is a few minutes late.
It is exactly for these reasons that Prasanna Kaliamoorthy and Anurag Gopinath, both colleagues at American semiconductor company Broadcom, teamed up to start Tangsys Technologies Pvt Ltd, which offers its product under the brand SkoolBeep, to help schools communicate better with parents.
According to Prasanna, an electronics and instrumentation engineering graduate from NIT Rourkela, communication was the core premise on which they started the venture. The first service they launched was sending out messages, sharing photographs and activities, attendance record and sharing home work.
“We wanted to build a bouquet of products and services around the communication platform,” says Prasanna, 41, Co-founder and COO of the company. When they launched SkoolBeep, he says, schools had not seen any such product that would help them reach out to parents easily and communicate with them in a better manner.
“That was where we felt there was a gap. We said schools will also increasingly adopt technology and parent communication has to be one of the key aspects,” he adds.
In 2015, when they started the company, smartphones had become ubiquitous, even in smaller towns and cities, and women were adept at using the phones to communicate and share messages.
The mothers were the ones more deeply involved with the child’s education. SkoolBeep targeted them, especially parents in tier-2 and tier-3 towns. The product was built with their needs in mind and aimed at private schools that charged fees of ₹15,000 or more a year.
They started off, says Prasanna, targeting pre-schools, because if one pre-school in a locality had this product, others in the vicinity will be under pressure to get the product. Their first customer was a Montessori school in Bengaluru.
Since then, the product has spread more by word of mouth than anything else. A GPS tracking tool to keep track of the school bus followed.
Since then, SkoolBeep has added a number of features, including fee management and live classes, both of which are helping in the time of Covid-19 pandemic, where almost all activities have been shut down.
Prasanna says they are quite clear that they want to play in the communication software space, which is an interface with the parents alone. All other features will be built around this. SkoolBeep has even tied up with fintech players to offer parents the option of availing of an educational loan.
The software is hosted on the cloud and the app is available for download in both Android and Apple versions. They get their income from the schools.
SkoolBeep, according to him, has around 350 paying schools, 60 of them in metros and the rest in smaller towns, in the K12 segment in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.
The company would like to cover all the districts in these three States before venturing out, as the three States alone have nearly 3,000 CBSE schools.
IATA’s mobile application will allow travellers to store and manage certifications for Covid-19 tests or ...
A 2010 Act to regulate the medical sector flounders in implementation, even as healthcare remains ...
The scheme to boost local medtech manufacturing is timely, especially given the raging pandemic. But ...
Do pilots sleep on their job?
Fiscal stimulus, friendly monetary policy and firm commodity prices point towards normalcy, says the MD and ...
Price correction is a good opportunity for long-term investors to take the plunge
Q4 earnings, along with progress in controlling Covid-19 spread, will be in focus
Do keep in mind that premium may go up in case one of the members has a pre-existing condition
Inside Narayan Chandra Sinha’s universe house, metal and nature’s footprints are churned into an organic whole
It starts with the lack of new email messages: A sudden silence from my personal world. It’s a mellow Saturday ...
Love for food sparks an unusual friendship between a visitor and an auto driver in Hyderabad’s colourful lanes
In an age of falling female workforce participation, worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, policy makers and ...
Monotype’s 2021 type trends report points to a return to hand and the familiar
As ‘ear-points’ between a company and a customer grow, we are witnessing a rise in audio assets
‘Desi Twitter challenger’ Koo on connecting like-minded folks
Coca-Cola has just introduced an oat milk line in the US under its Simply brand. Smart move, say industry ...
Three years after its inception, compliance with GST procedures remains a headache for exporters, job workers ...
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of companies are altering the prospects for wooden toys of ...
Aequs Aerospace to create space for large-scale manufacture of toys at Koppal
And it has every reason to smile. Covid-19 has triggered a consumer shift towards branded products as ...
Please Email the Editor