All posts by anna402300

Business Case, News, Opinion

Work-zilla

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Too busy to do everything by yourself? Work-zilla will do it for you!

In the final year of my Bachelor, I had a class in Monetary Economics. The teacher for that class was a graduate from our faculty who just returned after his master program in South Korea. After one of the classes, he told us about his and his friend’s startup. It is an Internet platform in Russian that is called Work-zilla, where people can perform quite easy tasks for others for a little amount of money. At that time, I did not see big potential in that business but within two years, Work-zilla had 60,000 dollars turnover and about 100,000 users.

There two types of users of the platform: 1) clients who publish tasks and 2) performers who complete tasks. When clients create tasks, they should mention the type of task, and give a short description, including a deadline and a price. In two minutes, a client receives some candidates to do the task. Continue reading Work-zilla →

Business Case, News, Opinion

Foursquare Split: Recommendations vs Check-ins

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Would you like to know what your friends do? How they spend their time? Where? With who? What are their favorite places? Where are they are now? Alternatively, did you have this following experience: You meet with your friend and tell what you did some time ago and it appears that you were at the same time at the same place and unfortunately, you did not know that?

Foursquare is an answer to all these questions. Almost everyone heard something about the company as itis one of the biggest startups of Silicon Valley. Now, it exists for more than five years and during this time the company raised around $600 million of investments and increased its users base from 50,000 people to 50,000,000! Moreover, since 2010, April 16 is 4sqDay; this date has a clear link to the company’s name.

Foursquare is a social net where you can “check-in” in any place where you currently are. You can also add comments, photos and people with who you are. For that, you earn badges and points to compete with your friends and other users. When you check-in, your friends will see that. If it close by, then they can join you to have fun together or they can just like, comment on your check-in and look at profile of the place. When you click on a place, you can see general information (e.g. address, open hours), photos and comments made by other users about this place. In addition, Foursquare helps you to find places where to go based on different parameters: distance, previous visits of you and your friends, and rating. Foursquare thus helps you to share your location with your friends and search for new places.

Continue reading Foursquare Split: Recommendations vs Check-ins →

Business Case, Videos

Italki: foreign language learning platform

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Nowadays world becomes more and more international. People travel more, have more international colleagues, even international families became more common. Therefore, being able to speak many languages is more important than ever.

In 2006, the educational platform Italki that helps people to learn foreign languages was introduced. The educational platform solves many of the most common problems that arise during language learning. The post will analyze problems, which may occur on each step of learning language road starting from picking a language to lessons themselves, and how Italki deals with them.

Firstly, a person chooses a language that she wants to learn. However, it is very hard to find teachers of languages that are not very common. As Italki works as a platform, which connects teachers and students, it has a huge pull of teachers. Therefore, it is possible to find native speakers of any language.

The next step is to find a teacher that suits your requirements. Different people learn languages for different reasons, that why they have different preferences. Continue reading Italki: foreign language learning platform →