weRead enters into a alliance with Lulu.com

BANGALORE, INDIA: weRead, one of the most successful social networking applications for social book discovery has entered into a strategic alliance with print-on-demand leader Lulu.com where the application will include titles from Lulu.com’s vast online marketplace. The deal propels the popularity of self-published books from Lulu’s exhaustive online marketplace that works on the long tail principle and also increases the collective universe of books available to users of weRead.

weRead is a popular social networking application created by the team led by Krishna Motukuri and Harish Abbott in June 2007, that allows its users to easily discover, recommend and review books, and share book-related interests among friends on social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Bebo and Orkut. The application currently has over 2 million registered users across social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5 and Bebo. weRead is one of the top 50 applications in Facebook. The weRead community has over 40 million books and 1.5 million reviews in their virtual bookshelves.

According to Bob Young, Founder and Chief Executive, Lulu.com, “Our strategic alliance with weRead is a stepping stone in the arena of publishing by bringing together traditional and self-published works in one marketplace. weRead gives us access to an expanded library of all books in print thereby enriching social interactions that is complimented by weRead’s discovery, independent ratings and reviews, and readership communities on social networks.”

Talking about the alliance with Lulu.com, Krishna Motokuri, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Lulu.com (formerly weRead) said “This association helps weRead augment our applications further, and empowers us with a larger catalogue and wide range of independent authors.”

Social networking space is booming in India with new sites like Minglebox, Bigadda, Chakpak growing hand in hand along with global players like Facebook and Orkut. Around 67% of internet traffic flows through the social networking sites testifying the fact that people today want to stay connected online. These sites are also opening avenues for a niche market of social networking applications across the world that enables engineers to enrich networking experience targeted at consumers.  As per the International Data Corporation (IDC) report, the social networking market will grow from $46.8 million in 2006 to $428.3 million by 2009.

Given this background, weRead has also spearheaded the arrival of a new breed of Techies in India - Techies 2.0. Techies 2.0 can be defined as a group of intrepid techies who pursue the ultimate challenge in software technology, - software product development, and perform a range of activities, from conceptualization of a product to implementation and incremental enhancement, based on user feedback.

While Techies 0 in India predominantly comprised of IT professionals working in IT services and BPOs, and work on a predefined client brief, Techies 1.0 evolved to work in software product development. Both techies 0 and 1.0 work is highly dependent on an assortment of support teams from marketing to pre-sales who translate client requirements in a language understood by technology professionals.

The social networking space has heralded the arrival of Techies 2.0 who own of all aspects of software product development including user requirement, product specifications, product features, software design, coding and scalability.

According to Harish Abbott, Senior Vice President, Products, Lulu.com (formerly weRead)  “The social networking application space is an extremely challenging market that requires conventional techies to evolve into Techie 2.0 who not only bring fundamental understanding of technology but also the analytics and a strong and in depth knowledge on the user profile and requirements. Being a start-up, the team performs a range of functions including product management, hands-on product development, managing user feedback that is incorporated in future product versions and work on scalability issues given the increasing popularity of social networks.”