iDubba to develop mobile apps

MUMBAI, INDIA: It's not even two years since Rabi Gupta and Ashish Kumar jointly founded iDubba — a social TV start-up with personal savings of around Rs.7-8 lakh.

The unique web platform iDubba is designed for TV viewers and help them watch best shows and broadcast content available on Indian channels using the mechanism of email or mobile message alerts and recommendations.

“We have been working on the platform for close to two years with the idea on 'how to make TV viewing more interesting and enjoyable'. Since there are too many TV channels and programs available, it's difficult for the viewers to find or keep tab of interesting content and its schedules,” iDubba's co-founder Rabi Gupta told CyberMedia News

“There are two layers — social and recommendation on the TV. The social layer is the web platform that integrates with TV programs and shows' schedules and the recommendation layer uses technology that matches user interest and likes for TV content and then generates alerts on phone or email,” Gupta explained.

It also generates an intelligent alert based on user's specific content or TV show choice. However, he pointed out that not many TV channels are interested to share their content and program scheduling.

“So we have developed our own in-house content management system (CMS) and integrated it the official YouTube channels of Indian TV channels and have embedded videos of programs on to our platform which can be easily viewed by users,” Gupta added.

Interestingly, this young venture's success can easily be gauged by the growing faith of angel investors. At first, it got Rs.5 lakh funding from Morpheus and now has got a major funding valuing close to Rs.1 crore from Rajan Anandan (Google India MD), Srikant Sastri (Vivaki India head), Abhishek Rungta and Pallav Nadhani (Seeders.in), Suresh Shankar (Redpill) and few others.

“Given the investments we want to focus on developing mobile apps for Andorid and iPhone. Also want to invest in product and content development. At present our business model is make our platform popular and highly accessible to people and take it to a stage where it can be used for marketing and advertising to reach out to larger audience. We are not thinking of revenues, but focusing on developing new products and making TV viewing more interesting and enjoyable,” Gupta concluded.