Last few days were pretty busy for CollegeKhabar team. We were continuously testing an new features for the CK website. In same series after hard work of 1 month we are able to devise an algorithm and statistical method to ‘rank Engineering Colleges’ across country.

Details are posted as below:

Why engineering colleges ranking?

Consider this:

1. For college-entering students to decide the best option available.
2. For colleges to know what they need to improve and where they stand in the pecking order.
3. For recruiters and human resource managers to decide the college they would visit for campus interviews and negotiates pay packages.
4. For students and alumni, for whom it is a matter of pride.

What is new in this ranking?

This question is constantly raised even by CollegeKhabar team that what new we are adding to these surveys as compare to those done by big market research firms and magazines. This survey will be focused on most important aspect (our secondary research shows that students put placements in engineering colleges a way ahead than faculty – student ratio, infrastructure, intellectual capital etc.) a student seek in one college - Placements.Importance is also given on industrial relations, opportunity to work on good projects and quality of faculty members.

Coverage in this blog: Anubhav n Vichar

Quality of an institute can be judge by the perception of the students who are studying there or by opinions of Alumni. We tried to link this with this ranking. Recent Outlook survey put emphasis on perception of HR managers across industries we are trying to look in perception of students about these institutes.

How this will work?

Entire ranking process will be divided in two phases. First phase

Phase 1: Opinion Poll – Popular choice

During this phase a survey will be run on CK giving opportunity to students to themselves rank the various institutes. Later these results will be analyzed based on pre decided algorithm which give authenticity to the survey and will be revealed later.

Any attempt to rig the rankings may face action by way of disqualification of their college.

Phase 2: Detailed analysis

Focus group interviews, industry expert opinion and analysis of Placement records of the listed institutes. This will be done by giving appropriate weightage to different parameters where Placements will be larger chunk of the pie.

More details are posted on link: http://www.collegekhabar.com/ranking-2010.php

Hope this ranking would satisfy the need and demand of sound, fool-proof, students’ side based Ranking.

From past few days we were reviewing services (read: information) provided by Collegekhabar.com to visitors. Team thought that we need to introduce new services in order to gain confidence and improve visibility among more students as a part of our core strategy. Things are getting standstill (no breakthroughs) and user participation is not picking up with same rate as we expected. Everyone was in favor of generating new ideas and implements them to prove ourselves truly innovative (are we? please comment)

Brainstorming is the most recognized buzz-word associated with idea generation. Our management friends can understand it very well and will appreciate how confusing it is. We too decided to have a brainstorming session (on conference calls, as team is dispersed across cities). There were few ideas came in entire exercise. Not even a single idea is radical (read: out of box) but adding to what can be done more with given resources.

Devendra was in favor of doing more marketing gimmicks and Hemant (technology obsessed) was looking for technological improvements (interface design and coding) to increase user interest. Naveen and Suruchi were constantly in favor of introducing more services. Few ideas shortlisted for worth consideration were: Rankings of engineering colleges on basis on public poll (how? is still a question), weekly magazine (downloadable), Fresher Jobs (in progress), quizzes and optimizing social media more effectively for marketing purpose.

We invite your comments and suggestions in related to these ideas which can help CK to grow organically. We would happy to have any new idea from your side as you can best suggest what readers are looking in CollegeKhabar. Hope some ideas pour in and we will be able to ‘co-create’ CollegeKhabar as best online community for students in higher education.

New year 2010 started with some great news for CK. As expected our new server was working fine and website was up 24*7 but the best news came from WagonR smart idea contest where we won city final (Jaipur) after competing with hundreds of ideas and invited for zonal finals in Mumbai. Most important thing for us was that we didn’t won because not only of public votes but of “idea” only. Hemant (Co-founder, CollegeKhabar) went for investment pitch joined by Naveen for Q&A session. Entire event was a great learning for us. Venture Capitalists (VCs) & Indian Angel Network at event suggest as very valuable input for entire idea and support to develop much stronger B-plan. Entire contest was covered by CNBC TV18

College Khabar too selected for Regional finals of “Vulture’s Nest”- Biggest B-Plan competition in Asia by IIT Bombay. CK was also online media partner for the event. We didn’t qualify for finals but got our lessons for improvements.

Everything was going fine but suddenly “Murphy- strike” (Something that can go wrong will go wrong) in middle of December month. CK website was locked by our server provider even without sending a prior notification. Website as per our hosting provider using much bandwidth and server was not able to take the load. We were in mixed reaction- one: we are growing much faster than our expectations; second: this disturbance would definitely cause annoyance among visitors and we would be not available when we would be most required (Placement days!)

After many hassles we are up in 18 hours but server problem keep continuing. Now we found that most of time, server remain down and no one was able to access CK. Disappointment in team was growing like anything, we decide to move the server. Technical guys thought for a VDS (Virtual Dedicated Service) but it was not feasible that point of time. Technical team hosted CollegeKhabar on Hostgator; US hosting service (We want desi company but it didn’t work). Now we are up! 24*7

Dear Stakeholders*

CollegeKhabar is an initiative to bring together students, colleges and prospective employers. At CollegeKhabar news related to placement activities, admission details, events and competitions in educational institutes across India is updated regularly. We have recently completed first quarter (3 months) since launch on Aug 23^rd, 2009.

This report records the summary of performance.

Highlights: Tangibles

- Covered in print media with nearly half page articles (DNA & Dainik Bhaskar – leading Hindi daily)

- 250,000+ page views

- Growth rate is still more than 100% month on month (MoM) basis.

- 2000+ registered users for newsletters and feeds

- 600+ articles/news/events/reviews posted

- 400+ Khabari requests in 3 months

- Media partnership with 30+ institutes for various events and competitions including (IITs – Kanpur, Roorkee, Kharagpur, Bombay & Delhi, IMT Ghaziabad, School of Management, IIT Kanpur, NMIMS Mumbai, NITs – Jaipur, Jalandhar, Allahabad, Warangal, BITS – Pilani, BIT Ranchi, Thapar University, and many more)

Highlights: Intangibles

- “College Khabar” becomes a unique keyword in Google within 3 months.

- Reviewed and appreciated by many startup communities including: Indianwebstartups.com, squamble.com, younoodle.com, Hotindianstartups.com, startupticker.com, gajeebo.com, startup-companies.com, bsherpas.com and many more.

-  Students started mentioning College Khabar in their blogs/feeds as very useful place for placement preparation. (We are getting benefits of Viral marketing without investments)

Highlighted Achievement:

-  Listed in ‘Microsoft Bizspark’ program (among 240 startups from India in recent years)

Reach:

Reach of Collegekhabar.com is mainly restricted to India (95% of total visits) but website is also viewed in North America and Europe.

In India CollegeKhabar.com is browsed from nearly all major cities. Please refer attached map for reference as mentioning names of all cities is not possible. Areas with bigger circle have more visits than others.

Disclaimer: Map is not a true picture of National Geographical Area (Distorted) of India. (If you want to sue anyone for this mischief, sue Google as we are just using their service: Google Analytics – most comprehensive tool to analyse visitors – Our ” helplessness” )

Future Plans:

Any venture requires at least working capital to remain engaged. Currently we are able to generate revenue to take care of operating expenses which excludes hosting, designing and payment part.  We are not looking on bottom lines but definitely focusing on expansion, increase in reach and improved services. We are working for better visitor experience, convenience in surfing the website as well as searching desired content and few surprises!

Future plan also includes extension of services offline. Primarily this will have partnerships with small institutions and colleges to collaborate for mutual benefits (details can’t be disclosed because of obvious reasons).

Summary:

With our current growth potential we expect an organic growth with a truly outstanding and committed group of people working for CollegeKhabar.com. We like to thank you for your continued support. Together, we look forward to doing our very best for you every day, everywhere and in every way.

_____________________________________________________

* includes students – undergraduates, post graduates and aspirants, college management, company officials, startup communities, any government personnel, friends, family or anyone else who have any minor stake in collegekhabar.com

Complete report is available at Rs 200 – delivery charges (not to be taken seriously!)

Disclaimer: This report is not supposed to be check/cross verify or scrutinized under GAAP or any other accounting principles by our friends (Specially- MBA Finance, CFAs, CAs or anyone interested in Finance) as we announced that we didn’t followed any rule of accounting and for them it is a piece of crap!

____________________________________________________

With every passing year the events conducted by Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur keep getting bigger and better. Neuron ‘09, which took place between the 23rd to 25th of October, 2009 managed to move the whole organizing engine to a new level. Neuron ‘09 had a wider array of events which covered both technical and non-technical fields. Neuron’09 had seen a whopping participation of around 3000 students covering around 80 institutes throughout India.

Some of most popular events include “Hachfest”, “Robotics” & “Animation” which were more on technical side where as literary, management & miscellaneous events (Cultural) were of different experience and creativity. There were 50 events in total (Number is big enough to realize the complexity in organizing the events)

The major attractions were “Treasure Map” ,”Tech Chat”,” Junkyards” which saw more than 100 teams participating in each event. The coding freaks were all set to break the codes in “CodeSmith”.

“Pipe-o-mania”, ‘Designs Unlimited’, Brake the Break’, ‘Straw Strappers’, and ‘Main Gate Entrance Design’ were brain strikers for the participants.

On the Second day  the DJ night and rock band performance (Alaap and Glitz) were prime attraction. Over DJ the whole MNIT was dancing and singing.  Closing ceremony witnessed rocking performance by   Rivaldo (Love In December Fame) and Pyrocrackers’ (the fire cracker) show.

Success of Neoron’09 is solely due to hard work and efforts put by Organising committee. Team worked continuously for more than 3 months to make it a successful event. Kudos to Organising Team as Neuron’09 emerged as one of India’s top technical festival (in Top 5 in North India)

Special thanks to Mr. Aniket Gaikwad and Mr Gaurav Bansal for their support and cooperation to CollegeKhabar.com in media partnership and timely information for all our readers.

(Note: Click any thumbnail to get bigger size picture)

Last week it come up with pleasant surprise as one of our team member got a call from DNA office asking about Collegekhabar.com. Mr. Ajay Singh (Editor-education) showed interest in writing about CollegeKhabar.

Next morning we got space in newspaper and we were announced a big hit in Jaipur

For complete article in detail click here: http://epaper.dnaindia.com/dnaahmedabad/newsview.aspx?eddate=10/7/2009&pageno=5&edition=16&prntid=43732&bxid=29050220&pgno=5

We are thankful to Mr. Ajay Singh and DNA media for writing about us and helping us to connect with more students.

Things are working out for CollegeKhabar slowly. In past one month we have seen support and excitement for CollegeKhabar. Marketing Strategies adopted are paying and we achieved more than target.

Some  Highlights/Statistics CollegeKhabar achieved in one month are:

a) Covered by the print media on the very first day of the launch.

b) 13,000+ visits in total with 60,000+ page views.

c) 500+ registered members & 800+ newsletter subscriptions and counting

d) Keyword searched for maximum visits is ‘College Khabar’ (We are now on our way ahead to become a unique key word for search engines)

e) We are getting 25+ Khabari requests per week

f) We are official Media Partner with 10+ premier institutes for their events. Some of these institutes include: IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee, IMT Ghaziabad, IIT Kharagpur, NIT Jalandhar, NIT Jaipur, NIT Surathkal etc.

We are getting new proposals everyday but we can’t do each & every because of our limited bandwidth, so we are planning to increase it now.

We are thankful to all our visitors.

CollegeKhabar team is working with full efforts and zeal since launch. Everyone is happy around looking progress we are making everyday. There is still one thing who cries out of anger about these workaholics. This is our “Coffee maker”. Every one CK Team is addicted to caffeine and coffee is an every hour activity.

Things would be okay if coffee is consumed during day only but here real works start at night. When you work late night there is a phrase “burning the midnight oil” but here is the case of  ’burning /heating the heart of a coffee maker’. Last week it refused to make more coffee for us (short circuited) but team manage to make him (the coffee maker) convince to stay (repaired). We don’t how long will this strategy work but we need coffee to stimulate new idea and keep work going and coffee maker too need a break.

This has become a classic case of Conflict Management… Do our management friends reading.

CollegeKhabar is proud online partner of annual fest of NIT Jalandhar: techNITi’09

WEBSITE: http://www.techniti.org

NIT Jalandhar brings for you techNITi09.  A technical fest for students consisting of competitions, seminars, symposiums, workshops, guest lectures and almost every notion that can inspire technology and innovation. The previous editions of the fest were stupendously successful, receiving an enthusiastic response from schools, colleges and universities across the nation.

Are you up for a challenge? Do you have the passion and ingenuity to pioneer the world’s next technological revolution? Or are you just looking for a fun filled weekend with a technical twist to it?

If you have been consistently nodding your head for the past few seconds, then we strongly recommend you to put all activities on hold and make sure that you are becoming a part of techNITi09 falling this September.

MAIN EVENT CATEGORIES:

Online:

Mind Flex

Online Quiz

Sci-Fi Writing

On-site :

Think

Create

Innovate

Mean Machines

Management

Chill Pills

Coders Hub

For more details please check techniti’09 website