SEVEN YOUNG software developers, including a team leader at the Lucknow centre of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), are currently developing an Israeli website for presenting books, literatures and thesis work on a wide variety of subjects in a “neat summary” for all to read and learn globally.
And if this idea sounds interesting, read on. Avner Avrahami, founder CEO of shvoong.com, which is in the business of collecting “abstracts” and summaries of books, thesis, essays and anything that interest the mankind, was in Lucknow recently to talk to TCS managers and developers involved with his pet project which had already gone online. An interesting aspect of the website is that the owner is also offering to pay people who can write abstracts of books, newspaper articles or essays and submit them on the website.
shvoong.com is part of Israel-based Shvoong Holdings which owns companies such as Random Logic with revenues in excess of US $ one billion.
In an audio conference from Israel conducted at the TCS Lucknow Centre, Avrahami commented : “My idea on opening a website such as shvoong.com had been to ‘summarise the human knowledge’ to provide a lifeline of information on any subject to the global community”.
“We pay the authors for what they contribute to the website. Now nobody needs to go to a brick-and-mortar library to seek any information,” he said.
Avrahami has already shown tremendous interest in collaborating with Indian R&D centres, academicians, managers and engineers. “I would like to collaborate with the professors in Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur and University of Lucknow for abstracts of their research work,” he said
“We pay the authors for what they contribute to the website. Now nobody needs to go to a brick-and-mortar library to seek any information,” he said.
Avrahami has already shown tremendous interest in collaborating with Indian R&D centres, academicians, managers and engineers. “I would like to collaborate with the professors in Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur and University of Lucknow for abstracts of their research work,” he said
So why Lucknow and for that matter TCS to develop and maintain the website? “We got in touch with TCS people in Israel and later got in touch with the company’s top brass in Mumbai during our visit to India recently. It was known that the Tata Group has 300,000 employees worldwide. You can’t find any better company than this around the world. And we chose Lucknow because Israelis mostly target big cities such as Mumbai for business, but we found working in a smaller city more comfortable”.
“In India you get the best software job done with global quality in half the price than in other parts of the world,” he added.