Uvouch

The 14th participant is Uvouch

Uvouch is a social medium to share your passions with the world; from business to politics, music to sports, movies to travel and a lot more. Users can create their own fan communities within seconds and save any type of media in one place. It provides users easy-to-use tools to add videos, links, polls, articles, blogs, RSS, music, playlists and unlimited text modules to their clubs.

Uvouch offers global media search functionality by connecting to the top 10 media websites including YouTube, google, yahoo etc. Videos can be simply viewed and added to accounts and fan clubs with one simple click Users can easily create playlists of their favorites, organize their video clips collection and fully customize their channels. Uvouch.com also allows users to bookmark their favourite links, websites, and clipping/annotation from a particular webpage for future reference.
Parveen Panwar is the founder of Uvouch. Let us learn more about Uvouch from him:

Q How it start?
A. Uvouch was created to reduce the problem of scattered media like videos and other online information that users like to save and find at one location. The main idea was for users to have one place where they could save and share anything they were passionate about.

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. 9 months

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Beta.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. To make Uvouch one common destination for fans and other users who like to share their passions with the world. It can be from business to sports, movies to music, essentially anything you like. Basically, networking is based on the common interest of users about anything and everything.

Q. What services it provide for consumers or customers?
A. Uvouch users enjoy a wide range of free services and some of the most important ones are:

• Creating their own fan communities within a second
• Promoting their own services/business for free through the use of fan clubs
• Importing and searching for videos from sites like YouTube, yahoo, google etc
• Saving web clippings and bookmarks
• Social networking with friends, co-workers and family members
• Posting blogs

And many more…..

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. The idea of creating fan clubs or personal community pages online within seconds and also giving users an easy way to add online findings to them

Q. What market segments vertical are you targeting?
A. Web2.0 based information saving and intellectual social networking

Q. What type of customers are you targeting?
A. Everyone, as there is something for one and all. Entertainment doesn’t have age, customer or country limits.

Q. What age group of verticals of people will benefit the most?
A. Mostly 13+, anyone who likes to discover and save interesting stuff online

Q. How many users are using your service?
A. 23k approximately registered users and 400k+ unique users a month

Q. What sort of marketing are you using to spread the word?
A. Viral marketing, search engine marketing and banner marketing

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are there any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?
A. We are monitoring our traffic progress through Google Analytics and our own coded tracking solutions. We measure the effectiveness of traffic through information like repeat visitors, new visitors, country segments, bounce rates, referrer sources, and search engine effectiveness.
Our own tool measures the rate of registration, usage and other performance

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is there any new model, which is being tried?
A. Currently it is advertising but we are brainstorming on some type of subscription, we will keep you posted.

Q. What has been the easiest to use, out of the box and most helpful technology?
A. API, our user can search through millions of media items of different online media companies with one simple click

Q. Are you using a lot of open-source tool sets for this?
A. We are using a few of them, such as WordPress for blogs, HTML editors etc

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. Apache server and MySQL database

Q. How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
A. I catch up with other entrepreneurs daily on online forums. I haven’t been able to find any dedicated communities in my city so far that suit my interest and business market, but l am still looking!

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. You can set up an online business with a few thousand dollars. It’s all dependent on the size of your project.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people to start their venture in Australia?
A. Limited knowledge, help and financial support for online-related businesses

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and the market segment you are in?
A. As the technology develops, more users will be able to access the internet through mobile phones, video game consoles like Xbox etc. Even in developing regional areas in countries such as India and China internet access is increasing.

The media and social market will also keep expanding. Most video platform sites like us will stay up to date with the trend and we will see more online TV and better quality media online

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Just believe in what you do. There may be several set backs from investors and other people who won’t like your product, or think it’s not good enough. The key to success is to always believe in yourself and your product and also keep improving your services.

Thanks, Parveen for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hearing from them in future on the progress of Uvouch. All the best for Uvouch and the competition in this carnival.