SharkID: The Smart Phonebook – How Referenced Networking is changing the nature of conversations
SharkID has evolved since its inception in August 2016 and today it aims to become a one-stop solution for contact management and referential networking.
“The idea behind SharkID struck when I was on a sabbatical. It was when I ran out of (physical copies) of business cards during my trip, that I realized how dire a need there is of a simplified contact management system that simply represents a person’s name as his/her brand identity. And replaces physical visiting cards by digital identities since everyone uses a smartphone” Says The Founder Mr. Ramesh Sinha.
Image Credit/Source:SharkID
The Founders of SharkID is Ramesh Sinha. The Directors are Rakesh Sinha (e-Procurement Technologies Ltd) and Jignesh Patel (Silver Touch Technologies Ltd.) SharkID is a joint venture of e-Procurement Technologies Ltd and Silver Touch Technologies Ltd. Together they have agreed to give the seed capital of US$ 2 Mn to SharkID. Jointly, both the companies have a turnover of Rs 200 cr and employ over 2000 people.
We are a team of a 27+ team comprised of serial entrepreneurs, veteran techies and a young bunch of go-getters working on agile technologies, including AI & Deep tech.
- We aspire to be the default phonebook of the planet.
- Looking forward to expanding Shark ID as a people rating app
- The goal is to connect the last billion mobile users of the world and reduce the six degrees of separation to three. If you have just 1000 friends on SharkID, you can reach out to 2 Lakh people in 2nd degree & 2 Million people in 3rd
We all are married to our Telco & ISP. The moment we change our contacts we go out of touch. With SharkID you stay in touch, always and you can divorce your Telco & ISP as & when you please without going through mobile number portability. People are habituated to manually updating their phonebook so much so that they do not feel the need for a smart phonebook that can auto update the phonebook. Everything is anchored to Mobile Number and hence it gets compromised easily. Plus user cannot change their mobile number frequently. We want the world to move towards SharkID and give our users to change their contact coordinates without going out of touch with the world.
Video Credit/Source: SharkID
We had decided to design a product that is disruptive and accelerates the pace of change. SharkID meshes technologies to actually Smarten the smartphone and puts the choice in the user’s hands, for once. We all have multiple digital coordinates today – mobile number, email, Instagram, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, etc…which makes for an increasingly cluttered digital profile, making it almost impossible to recall or store. SharkID enables convergence – share your single-point contact and the recipient will get all your coordinates. Moreover, Digital Business Cards that can be shared easily – no hassle of carrying actual visiting cards. Because you can control who has access to your card, you choose who can contact you
Think of the Smartphone as a classroom. Every feature (student) has been “smartened” and evolved – whether it is the camera, clock, music, search or memory. But the poor phonebook has been ignored. And we still bow to the dictates of the smartphone manufacturers – we manually update, save, enter and manage coordinates. This is where SharkID stepped in to address this problem.
Because we have a reasonable warchest and an in-house capability to tap more, we are not unduly worried about funds/revenue/inflow currently. For now, we are focused to build a robust, technologically agile and user-oriented product. We are committed to keeping SharkID Free for an individual user and Free of Advertisements. However, SharkID will become paid for Corporates & Professionals. Having just launched our Corporate Card; we will decide on Monetizing depending on how fast the product is adopted by enterprises and professionals.
“SharkID for Business” will fundamentally impact the way business is done – RN (referenced networks) will ensure there are more referrals, more trust, more conversations and more volumes. With SharkID enabling convergence and conversations, I am confident that Enterprises will embrace this idea & form their own communities on our platform. Whether it is customer interface, insights, business patterns….the sheer amount of intelligence generated by SharkID will be of immense value to the enterprise. At SharkID, we strongly believe that individuals, Enterprises, and brands have latent brand equity that has yet not been fully leveraged. Our AI & Big Data mesh will enable smarter referrals across the board to unleash the power of smart networks”.
Imagine technology having a fundamental impact on core management functions like HR, Customer relations, Sales, and Marketing. Think of a Hoarding with only the logo and brand name – so, because the brand name is the SharkID. Whenever a customer or a potential business lead searches for the brand, they get referred to someone in the brand’s network and get the info about how they are linked. Think of the incredible amount of intelligence that various departments like HR, Sales, Marketing, Advertising, etc…would get through SharkID and how this could be deployed in real-time for maximum efficiency.
We have so many touch-points (mobile number/email/social handles etc…) yet distances between all of us are growing. Let’s all have a single, globally unique ID – SharkID.
Total Mobile Numbers in our network – 40 Mn
Total Installations: 3 million
Calls made using SharkID (Dec – Jan): 3.3 million
Total Cards exchanged: 1.7 million
We are committed to keep SharkID Free for an individual user and Free of Advertisements. However, SharkID will become paid for Corporates & Professionals. “Our target for March 2019 is 1 lakh corporates, 1 million business cards, and 10 million individual downloads”.
Advice to freshers: “Go ahead and do it. Ensure that you have a Hollywood blockbuster story to narrate when you retire” Says the Founder Ramesh Sinha
Url: https://sharkid.in/
