Shivank Agarwal, Founder of BufferInfinite on life and work after winnng the NASSCOM 2012 Social Innovation Honour
Shivank Agarwal, Founder of BufferInfinite spoke to YourStory.in about his experiences since he won the NASSCOM 2012 Social Innovation Honour and the progress made by BufferInfinite so far.How has your journey been since you won the NSIH Award? How has the NSIH Award benefited you in your journey so far?
When we won the NSIH we were in the prototype stage. Now our products are in the beta testing phase. We get couple of 1000 hits in a day and this is without using any paid advertisement. It is the award that gave us the confidence and vision to take the project forward. Because of NSIH we are able to get some very good ideas from very good people. It has been a core source of motivation for our team members.
What has been your progress since the awards?
Like I mentioned, we were in the prototype stage when we won the NASSOM Award. The award gave us validation and now we are in the beta stage. We maintain a database of subtitle files and we provide it as a plug in. Users don’t have to do anything. They just need to use the plug in and watch it with subtitles. YouTube doesn’t provide any mechanism to subtitle videos. So users have to use third party products and then upload it on YouTube. With our product, they just need to use the plugin and it automatically gives the subtitle. The streaming is done directly on YouTube and we don’t take the video to our server. We are working as per the standards of Google improving YouTube interface. We are providing it as additional service.
How is your product available to the users?
We will provide downloadable links on request if people want to try your product. We have had requests from some people. We don’t give them the premium product. We give them the basic product so people get the idea of the product.
How do you plan to monetize your product?
We are planning to get a subscription model for our service. Users can subscribe to our service for 3 months, 6 months or a year. We provide support for multiple languages. You just have to select the language – any language and you will be able to watch it. Plus we are working on mobile products. We will be launching our iOs and Android products by the end of this year.
What is the future vision for BufferInfinite?
The core vision of our company is to make thing simpler for users using technology. Our core concept is based on technology and making things available through it. For this we have 3 major goals. Firstly, to make our service compatible with as many services as possible – platform compatibility. This will ensure that the users are not limited by the platform – platform independent. Our service should be available to them independent of our platform. Secondly, to provide service in as many languages as possible making our service language independent. Thirdly, making the subtitling process as simple as possible. This is to ensure that users don’t find it hard to subtitle videos and we have a large pool of data. These are the three things that we are working on currently.
Want to subtitle videos that you love? Check out BufferInfinite