On the eve of SXSW Interactive last week, EmBazaar founder and CEO Neil Patwardhan announced a new product on LinkedIn Pulse.
A Private PTA
Patwardhan’s almost two-year-old daughter, Alexia, is in preschool, a place where parents and teachers could collaborate on building the ideal learning environment if only they could agree on how to communicate.
Tired of email blasts, group texting and the privacy imperfections of social networking, he offered to do what he and his company do best: Build a private social network for the school.
“The parents all voted against building a Facebook group because even though it’s private, it’s still indexable and we didn’t want to involve our personal profiles with it,” said Patwardhan (pictured below right with Vice Presidents of Sales and Engineering Charles George and Kaustubh Pimputkar). “I proposed to build a network to help the parents, use it as a usecase for Skoop, and one school led to five. Now it’s improving the quality of conversations between parents and schools to keep in touch with teachers.”
Once users authenticate to the new app using a code issued through the school, they can connect with other parents and teachers, share media, manage events and have conversations in a feed of issues trending in each school.
Microcommunities with Minimal Management
While Patwardhan’s initial motivation for building the app was personal, the reasons his company was able to develop the product quickly are technical.
EmBazaar’s line of private social networks under the Skoop brand — which have included Skoop for cities, college campuses, SXSW and private events — are all built on Amazon Web Services.
The AWS environment allows Patwardhan’s engineering team to build and launch new social apps for private event clients in 30 to 45 days, and enlist new preschools in as little as one.
After building Skoop-branded social networks for college campuses and SXSW, EmBazaar began developing whitelabeled networking apps for private clients in the events industry. Using Skoop for Events, organizers can engage attendees with a feed of relevant content and real-time polls during and after conferences and festivals.
“I use my daughter’s social network every day,” he said. “It’s become a part of my lifestyle. I anticipate every parent that goes through this would experience the same.”
Images courtesy of EmBazaar.
