Real-time content visualization startup breaks into India with cricket

Very recently across India, there was great chatter and huge buzz on the social web, about a very famous and legendary cricketer's retirement. For those who don't know, I'm talking about Sachin Tendulkar, a legend in cricket, he has a great number of admirers across the country and over the globe retired in October and there was talk about his retirement in all sections of the society and businesses across India.

How is that relevant to this story? Sachin Tendulkar was a very powerful brand in himself across segments of businesses and minds of consumers across the country. That is what this startup Zauber, a software company born in Argentina understood  and capitalized on to showcase its offering to potential clients and this is what they created: Flowics: Sachin Tendulkar Demo.

They essentially paid tribute to the cricketer, a sports icon and business brand, with a social hub for #ThankYouSachin--a Twitter initiative that the BCCI (Board of Cricket Control in India) launched in association with Twitter India. But there's more to what they did and this product has greater business impact than just the bit they created to get maximum eyeballs across the country.

In today's day and age where technology across the social web is expanding its reach globally, it is quite important that brands have relevant tools to capture what audience across different segments of entertainment, business, sports, and etc are talking about their brand. That is exactly what their product Flowics helps with.

Flowics is a full media social engagement platform which curates, moderates and displays real-time social content that is relevant for brands and media companies available for the Web TV and any other digital screen. Flowics launched in 2012, after the company Zauber was involved in several projects building visualizations out of Twitter data since 2009.

Flowics allows publishers of any kind to easily create engaging social experiences that can be deployed directly on their digital properties, capturing the buzz generated by TV shows, sports and entertainment events, and important news stories, enabling them to better engage with their audiences. One of the key features their product has is their automatic curation engine and their broad catalogue of creative interactive visualisations. The curation technology helps their clients to filter the Twitter buzz and find the most relevant Tweets for a specific show or event, automatically removing all Tweets which do not satisfy specific pre-defined rules. Their visualisation engine provides a very broad range of solutions to display Twitter content on any digital media: On-air TV, jumbotrons or any giant screen and of course Web properties.

What's interesting is their focus on the Indian market, where businesses are adopting social media with a great volume of users across various social networks. Of course, with the growth in digital rising, this is certainly the market to target. What helps is that they are one of the very few Twitter-certified products for tweets curation and visualization. Although there are similar products and competitors in some markets, they seem to be the only company in India providing these services.

"One of our key features is our ability to process and understand Tweets in any language, as well as to provide internationalisation capabilities for all our widgets, including support for non-Western languages," said Gabriel Banos, CEO and founder of Zauber, in an e-mail interaction.

Currently their clients and market verticals include: TV networks and producers, online portals and media, events organizers, news media outlets, brands and agencies. Which is certainly a huge market considering a high penetration of television viewers in the country and also the ones who use social media quite a lot these days.

"We have high hopes on the Indian market, which we believe will grow very rapidly in terms of social media penetration, specially Twitter adoption. TV is a very strong and huge market in India, so the positioning of Twitter as the "second-screen" for TV, will enable new business opportunities for broadcasters, brands and producers, making Flowics a must-have product to better engage social audiences. Our product has already been used by Star TV for the #AllForUttarakhand campaign," added Banos.

Of course there are no doubts that the Indian market has a high volume of social media users, big FMCG brands adopting social media, digital and getting into new media services. Certainly what sparked the interest was this hope they had in this market. But the true test remains in seeing how fast and how well can they tap into this market, which is tough to crack on the sales front, be it for services such as theirs.