Pune based Entrepreneur Titash Neogi on Bibkosh, a Knowledge Curation Platform that allows creation, curation and collaboration

Tell us about Bibkosh.

Bibkosh is a Knowledge Curation platform that allows academics, students and professionals to Create knowledge in the form of notes, pictures, documents, email archives. Curate knowledge from various sources, including social networks and the world wide web. Collaborate with friends, peers and others over this created and curated knowledge.

As a net user, all of us are on facebook, twitter, emails, blogs, and on web-pages. We also socialise and gather knowledge off the web, in real life. This constant stream of information causes an organisation problem, but at the same time creates an immense opportunity for everyone. There was a time when we had gurus and novices. Now information is becoming truly democratised and gurus are going away. We are all coming to a common platform of information equality. We can all go to google today, research on a topic and learn everything there is to learn about that in a short span of time. This makes, all of us, knowledge curators. The second source of knowledge is the social web. The social context in the form of people's experiences, emotions, localised contexts of culture, makes knowledge richer and more accurate. This gives all of us a motivation to showcase our knowledge. Bibkosh gives everyone the opportunity to become a social knowledge curator.

Why the name Bibkosh?

Bibkosh is an acronym consisting of bibliotheque(greek for library) and kosh(sanskrit for vault). Bibkosh symbolises your personal information vault and knowledge curation place on the internet.

Where are you based? What is the size of your team? Are you looking at hiring?

We are based out of Pune. Our team size is 5 and yes, we are looking to add more people in the near future, specifically in creative design and quality assurance.

Tell me a little bit about your background? Do you have a co-founder?

I have a masters in IT from ICFAI Hyderabad. Prior to starting Bibkosh, I was working as a project lead at Symantec Corp, US. My areas of focus were information management, findability, search engines and web applications. No, technically I do not have a co-founder . However, the current executive team of Bibkosh got built after I started Bibkosh, but for all practical purposes, my team members, Geetanjali Shrivastava and Nitin Sharma, have shared every bit of my entrepreneurial journey, with its highs and lows.

How exactly does Bibkosh work? Explain in detail.

Bibkosh solves the following problems for its users

How do I keep track of things that I already know, problems that I have solved in the past? How do I know what knowledge people in my social graph have? How do I showcase on the social graph, the knowledge I have? How can I bring together in a single container, tweets, posts, emails, articles, pictures, videos and people - that are relevant to one topic, but are not otherwise socially connected to me.

The first step in solving these problems is to become a gateway for users to share and create knowledge. Bibkosh allows users to keep sending information that they think is valuable, or is worth curating to their bibkosh account. This can be done by Using the bibkosh tabs within bibkosh to add urls, notes or upload files, Using Bibkosh toolbar for chrome, firefox, IE. The toolbar lets users send interesting URLs to Bibkosh at the click of a button. Via email to Bibkosh - users can send important documents, notes etc that they receive in email - to their bibkosh account. Via Facebook /Twitter - Bibkosh can capture a users social data from facebook and twitter, for reusing it in other contexts and locations.When a user sends information to Bibkosh, it gets stored in themes. Themes are containers of information, which can then be shared with groups or individuals. A theme is like an ever expanding book, comprising of notes, pictures, documents, comments from people, facebook wall posts, tweets, etc. Once users create themes, then they can publish these themes across their social networks. This is a completely new form of personal publishing, where literally at the click of a button, an entire collection of knowledge becomes available to others in a book-like fashion.

As people keep using Bibkosh, in the course of their work, the information they send to Bibkosh helps in building a knowledge profile - an online knowledge identity of a person. This gives one-shot view of what a person is reading, writing, or has expertise in - helping people tap into the knowledge of their social graph.

Are there any other players in the market doing similar things?

Our closest competitors are diigo and mendeley.

What is your competitive advantage?

Bibkosh.com is a much broader platform when compared to diigo and mendeley. Our focus on content curation and personal publishing via themes gives us a competitive edge over our competitors. Our competitors provide features that allow people to collect information and share it individually. We take this forward and let people collect information and then put them together in various creative combinations in the form of published themes, to tell different stories. We also have a host of other features - Bibkosh groups, ability to follow users, Bibkosh channels, etc. that give us a strong competitive edge.

How much capital was required to startup?

Bibkosh is funded through friends and family. We have raised around 70K USD in the past year to reach this point.

Let us know about your expansion plans.

Our vision is to create a world wide knowledge graph of every internet user. A knowledge graph would contain information about every individual’s interests, usage patterns and connection preferences on the web, from a knowledge perspective. We believe that with Bibkosh themes, people will do amazing new things in personal publishing and knowledge curation. They can mix and match a youtube video, a blog post, a tweet and a facebook feed from their friend, all diverse content in the same physical space - creating an amazing cocktail of personalised dynamic booklike experience. Because themes will be virtual and constantly live, they will change with each new experience and new fact that a person connects. The Bibkosh dream is to make everyone on the social graph a knowledge curator, and bring every knowledge curator onto the social graph.

Is there anything else that you want to tell us about the market that you are trying to capture.

Knowledge curation is one of the hottest trends in industry right now. However traditionally knowledge curation is been viewed as something that nerds, geeks and people of an academic bent of mind do. At Bibkosh, we are trying to change this perspective and provide a knowledge curation/personal publishing tool that is both powerful, yet fun. We think by marrying the social aspects of facebook to content curation, we will bring knowledge curation to the masses, make it more broad based and fun.

We at YourStory.in are impressed with Bibkosh’s mission to bring knowledge curation to the masses. We wish them good luck in this endeavor. Please check out http://www.bibkosh.com and do actively create, curate and collaborate!

What are your thoughts on this story? Feel free to write to us at feedback@yourstory.in