The people of type semantic web are very organized and disciplined users of the online content and media. These are data analysts, statisticians, market researchers, Higher Graduation Students, Content Writers & Marketeers, etc. who clip and save every piece and page they find referable and worthy.
For these people bookmarking and bookmarks are an important part of their daily lives. There are some great bookmarking tools available but what happens many a times is, when it comes to searching for something people tend to forget they had it bookmarked which can be referred quickly, but they just open up the browser and start googling.
Owlink is one such app which won’t let you forget your bookmarks, yes, these guys at Owlink are serious about bookmarks and understand why the clipped copies go wasted and they are making bookmarking more simpler, cleaner and professional. So its bookmarking not just for individuals like the usual ones do but even for teams and communities.
We’ll get into conversation with Rajoshi Ghosh, Founder and learn more about owlink.
There are some very popular & widely used social bookmarking tools available. Why use Owlink? How would you describe the USP?
We bookmark something because we think it will come in handy later. We have found that almost all bookmarking tools focus on the act of bookmarking and operate under the assumption that you remember what you bookmarked. You need to visit another website, or look through your folders to search for your bookmarks. But the truth is, we forget.
USP:
Owlink integrates bookmarking into Google search. We show you relevant bookmarks when you google for something. You can always go look for your bookmarks on the website, but we realized that often you forget you bookmarked something. Owlink’s search algorithm brings up pages bookmarked by you or groups that you are a part of (on Owlink) on the Google search page itself.
These are two of the use cases where Owlink is very helpful:
a) You bookmark pages regularly on a given topic of your interest, say, good web-design. When you google for “Good header styles”, Owlink will prompt all your relevant bookmarks on the right of your Google search page and you can go through what you had bookmarked earlier and forgotten about.
b) You are working on a project with 4 people. You rely on Google to help you find relevant resources- blogs, papers, and review articles on the project topic. You bookmark relevant pages and give it a hashtag(label) chosen by the group, say #project101 on the Owlink Chrome Extension. When your project-mates search for information online, they see relevant pages bookmarked by you and can save time by benefitting from your resources. They can also just google for #project101 and see all bookmarks by every member of the team.
Our best features are:
- Bookmark pages with simple comments and hashtags – organise with hashtags and not multiple folders.
- Bookmark PDF’s, which are indexed by us and thus are searchable on Google.
- Share your bookmarks with groups that you create/are part of.
- Find your bookmarks and the group bookmarks with Google search (relevant bookmarks appear on the Google search page itself along with other Google results as usual)
Saving Bookmarks along with comments, tags and hashtags, this indicates a large storage requirement. How do you plan to scale?
We’ve used robust, and community approved open-source tools to create our technology stack and we have followed best practices while architecting Owlink.
Our current software set up with our hardware will scale to a few hundred thousand users and after that the tools we use will allow us to scale by increasing hardware configuration.
What’s the Database engine being used?
MySQL and Redis.
How was the experience demoing at Startup Saturday Bangalore?
The demo at Startup Saturday Bangalore was great for validation of our product. The feedback we received was very helpful. The crowd seemed to really like our product and we’ve had quite a few sign ups after the demo.
Tell us something about the Team behind Owlink.
Tanmai Gopal – Founder:
A computer science graduate from IIT Madras. During his stay in college, he implemented a lot of software, including one that was selected for funding as the ICSR innovative student project. His final year DDP project was an applied research project, which was taken by DRDO for further funding. He’s a freelance research and software consultant for labs and companies.
Tanmai has architected the product and leads the dev team.
Rajoshi Ghosh – Founder:
A computational biologist by education, from NUS (Singapore). She worked in a genomic research for 2 years after graduation, after which she spent a year in Ghana, teaching as a Fellow at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology. Companies that she worked with have been covered by media as upcoming startups and have been featured by TechCrunch and adopted by the 500 startups accelerator program.
She is behind the product development and business development of Owlink.
The rest of the team:
Engineers: Kiriti, Akhil and Saathvik – Computer Science students at IIT Madras. These guys worked on Owlink relentlessly over the summer and set up the beta product.
Artwork: Samyukkta is a Visual Communication student at MOP Vaishnav and is the talent behind our logo and the lovely artwork on the website.
Team Owlink
What are your future plans for Owlink?
Currently, Owlink is a Chrome Extension. We have a set of features coming up over this month, which include a Firefox version and social media integration for signing in and sharing.
We are very optimistic about Owlink. The next few months we will be focused on marketing the product.
We will be coming up with paid version for enterprise documentation (for software teams, classrooms etc) and paid features for the users (bookmarking space).
