“We want to be the biggest virtual billboard company”

Founded by Pushkar Mahatta, worldfloat.com is a social networking website with a global user base.

Need for the business

There have been three revolutions in the virtual networking or communication world. The first revolution was email which began with the advent of Hotmail. It was the most efficient way for two people to connect with each other. This sort of communication is one on one contact.

The second revolution came with websites like Facebook, Orkut and My Space where a closed group of people could stay in touch with each other. The communication is not limited to two people but includes a group of people communicating and sharing information with each other.

Worldfloat.com is the harbinger of the third revolution. It is a global communication device which facilitates communication between many people on this planet on an equally diverse platform. Users can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world without being restricted by circles. Worldfloat.com is a platform which weaves the earth into one community.

Initial Challenges

The floating technology after the conception of the idea was hard to build and code. To synthesize all the top ten websites into one with a unique interface and functionality was a bigger challenge than anything else.

How unique is the idea?

Worldfloat.com is a pure software retail product which no one else in the country has produced and is therefore getting global acceptance. Signups by users worldwide has made worldfloat.com a potential front runner in the social networking arena. There is no comparable product available in the world today developed by an Indian which is not for just for the Indian market, but the whole world.

With the float technology, a user can travel and communicate with anyone in the 1600 cities that have been created by the website virtually. There is freedom of communication as anyone can ping or tap on someone’s picture and start chatting whether that someone is a friend or not. People have the ability to walk around in a virtually created real world on worldfloat.com. This sort of movement and technology was used only in virtual gaming before worldfloat.com pushed the idea into the social networking arena.

It gives the user the freedom to walk with one’s friend, travel to different cities and chat at the same time. Worldfloat.com is the virtual replication of real life in motion. It is the first of its kind to generate ad revenues through geo-tagging.

Revenue will be generated by provision of billboards in every city for the users to advertise their product. Currently all other websites are generating revenue through the profile page model whereas worldfloat.com is planning to create most of its revenue from being the biggest virtual billboard company.

Money raised

The company is self-funded. An extreme controlling structure is the unique selling feature of the website. The estimated market value of the website is $250 million. We are open to VC investment but the company will give out only minor stakes to VC funds as and when required. Also, we have patents for the website, which have been applied for in India and the US.

Learnings

With the current speed at which users are coming in, we can very easily project that within the next six months to a year we should have 10 million users on worldfloat.com because of the power of its interface and its functionality of being able to connect anyone in the world anytime, anywhere without the boundaries of groups.

The Indian spirit of the web industry has been that of a copycat mentality. With Flipkart being a copy of Amazon and naukri.com being a rip off of monster.com, there have been no original sustainable ideas that have shone in the virtual world.

Indians have the know-how and potential to innovate and come up with original products, provided we dare to visualize the unthinkable and the impossible.

Future plans

We plan to introduce a new module on worldfloat.com every 3-6 months. For example, a user will be able to do a virtual event in any city in the world at zero cost while sitting at home. The number of cities will gradually increase to about 30,000 created on our platform.

There is a plan to open an online education university for students all over the world to take forward the concept of educating a child at home.

(As told to Venkatesh Ganesh)