At a time when the dotcom is better known as “dotgone”, there seems to be one company which is moving against the tide. Venture capital funds and die-hard Internet enthusiasts cite it as an example of what everyone should be doing during the current downtrend - if you have a good idea, it is the best time to enter the sector. Net4nuts managing director Chirag Patel tells Gaurav Raghuvanshi that behind the “nutty” name of his company and its youthful team there is a very serious commercial idea.

What is Net4nuts all about?
We are promoting a new concept — Universal Resource Management (URM). URM would be the final link to efficient resources deployment and bring synergies among different web-based services. Companies have reaped huge benefits by synergising intra-company resource management and the advent of the web as a powerful business communication tool has seen huge payoffs from similar reorganisations of inter-organisation resources. The idea is to integrate resources at all levels by creating an application scaleable enough to be able to connect resources from service providers, enterprises or individuals. That is exactly what our solution — “Avtaar” does.

How does Avtaar work and how is the integration achieved?
Avtaar is your extension in the virtual world. If you have any electronic device you should be able to keep tabs on all your important activities like managing different e-mail accounts, your stock portfolio, arrange movie tickets etc. Avtaar would enable all of these. Suppose you want to be alerted when the price of a particular scrip reaches a certain level. Avtaar would ensure you are alerted on your cell-phone or computer. Apart from that, you would be able to execute a buy or a sell order from your cellular phone. If you want to know what movie your favourite channel is showing, a simple SMS command would get you the answer.

But who would adopt the URM tool?
We would tie up with different service providers as URM allows online services like e-mail, news, portfolio, travel, weather watch and calendar or any other individual information managers or sources to collaborate among themselves in a completely automated two-way dialogue. Information across devices flow seamlessly, integrating real-time online with every activity an individual performs. URM does away with manual intervention that some other applications with similar functionalities require — considerably increasing privacy, timeliness and eliminating the human element in the process. At the individual level, the user only needs to know his or her password. The open architecture of Avtaar allows it to be relevant for any contemporary technology.

Have you tied up with service providers, and what would be the revenue model?
We have announced the product a couple of weeks ago. Normally, it takes about 45 days for any deal, so we would have to wait for some time. But the initial response has been positive. We have already bagged our first customer in ConvergeLabs, a wireless and telecom services solutions provider, which has adopted Avtaar to give access to its customers to its online resources over an ordinary GSM handset. The revenue model we are looking at is a share in the additional business the service providers generate using Avtaar. If it adds value to their service and gets them more customers, I am sure they would not mind parting with some part of their revenues.