Indian Startup Headrun Helps the Malaysian Government Achieve a World Record

Thursday September 20, 2012 , 5 min Read

Headrun was founded by Prashanth Ellina, the CTO and Karthik Bala, the CEO in the year 2010. What started as a two member team hacking away in a spare bedroom quickly turned into a team of 18 buzzing Headrunners and they then took up an independent bungalow in BTM Layout, Bangalore. In 2011, Prashanth Azharuddin joined the founders as the third partner, and currently drives sales for Headrun.

Offerings:

Notemonk

Notemonk.com is an educational site that explores an exciting new way to learn from textbooks. They first put up free educational books for download on the site and then quickly built a social network around it for students to interact by asking questions and getting them answered. Built on Linux, Django, Python and jQuery, Notemonk is a technology test-bed for Headrun in order to analyze user behavioral patterns, social relationships and in-house technology dry-runs on massive real world traffic and is used every day by millions of students and educators across the world. Notemonk is also at the forefront of the Open Educational Resource Reformation movement (OER) by enabling educational reach to everyone who has access to the internet.

Juicer - Web Crawling Framework

Juicer is the first product from the stables of Headrun and is a framework for powerful and exhaustive crawling of data sources on the World Wide Web. Having crawled and indexed millions of pages of data, the Headrun team has provided social media monitoring and analytics firms with secondary data from a multitude of sources specifically tailored to suit the indigenous needs of customers. This essentially means any data that is out there available publicly on the world wide web can be fetched and aggregated as a continuous cycle and fed into a database format of choice for further analysis, text mining operations and such.

The data sources can be segregated based on the country, and this is done through an automated processes as well as manual culling. They offer a full blown data fire hose as well which pulls data from feeds collected from all over the world. They also write crawlers for various public web sources and extract data from them on a continual basis.

TweetJuicer - The powerful real-time twitter querying engine

TweetJuicer is a powerful real-time twitter querying engine that is intended to be an economical alternative to purchasing the twitter fire hose. It is an interface to set queries based on your products, interests, company, brand, competitors, industries and such, to monitor these filters for changing trends and further analysis. Any user with a valid twitter account can design query filters and start monitoring Twitter data.

With a firm focus on being a twitter fire hose alternative, TweetJuicer enables efficient tailoring of queries to retrieve all information from twitter on specific brands, products, competitors and industry trends without purchasing the full fire hose.

Cloudlibs VPS Hosting

Headrun, in its capacity as mass data aggregators involving many peta bytes of data has worked with data center providers across the world and hence Cloudlibs VPS Hosting is an attempt to showcase Headrun's capabilities in making a world class VPS hosting service.

Headrun works both as a services organization to keep the revenue stream running whilst the team dabbles at making new products. From a services perspective, they take up and work on projects on fixed costs depending on the size and complexity of execution. They recently released the first versions of their flagship products, Juicer and TweetJuicer.

“A few years ago, we saw a huge hype around the concept of cloud computing. The scenario we believe is drastically different today as most of it has been demystified. Essentially, we see cloud computing as a wonderful opportunity to make IT teams in Enterprises so much leaner and it could be the silver bullet for a lot of enterprises to better prepare them for an impending downturn of the economy,” says Prashanth.

The Malaysian World Record in their Words:

“This was brilliant for us, and is quite an interesting experience. We work very closely with Thoughtbuzz, our Social Media Analytics partner in Singapore and they spoke with us regarding a 'tweetup' event planned by the Malaysian Government as part of their 55th Independence Day celebrations. The need was for a customized version of TweetJuicer to be able to capture tweets targeted towards a certain hashtag '#merdeka55' over a one hour period with the aim of the Malaysian Government to set a new world Twitter record. So, between the hours of 20:15 and 21:15 Malaysian time, 150,000 people, 10000 special tweeters and the whole of Malaysia were asked to send in as many patriotic messages as possible towards the hashtag. The hope was to collect one million tweets which would have already set a new world twitter record but these things never really go to plan, do they? The people of Malaysia really stepped it up and we recorded a total of 3.611 million tweets sent in towards the hashtag within that time frame! It was indeed a colossal challenge for us to handle such high loads of incoming data in such a short duration but TweetJuicer was up to the task. We passed on the statistics to the Malaysian Government and the World Record was presented by the Malaysian Prime Minister and the Minister for Information and Culture to the whole of Malaysia.”

Karthik feels that the reputation India has developed on the back office service it provides to the world works against them. This repute does not really hold a business in great stead when it requires foreign markets to look at it as a product company. However, their team is confident that the critical mass of young product companies applying their innovation on the global marketplace will reach a tipping point soon resulting in the elevation of the Indian technology industry right up amongst the best in the world.

Kind words for the Indian Startup Ecosytem indeed! Check out Headrun, and also give a look at their Page on YourStory Pages!

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