mainly intended to alert the public of HiveFire’s product. The company started signing on Curata customers early last year, and already has 40 customers for the software-as-a-service platform, which runs about $1500 a month, Pawan says.
One customer is Verne Global, a company out to build a completely green data center in Iceland. In the process, they’re trying to establish themselves as the authoritative source on such facilities, and are using Curata to build a website with that purpose. Pawan tells me that Curata’s gathering and sorting functions are especially applicable on a subject such as a green data centers, which typically encompasses content from both environmental publications and computing publications.
The Curata engine scans niche sources and bigger media outlets for data on the subject, saving executives the time of scouring publications themselves for related content. “If you’re a CIO or CTO you don’t want to have to go through all these,” Pawan says. “We pull together all that content and filter the most relevant.”
On the Curata dashboard, the customer can sort through the content the engine pulls in, and decide whether to publish it, feature it, or keep it away from their website. They can also create content original content to the website. The entire process takes an average of 19 minutes a day, he says. The dashboard also gathers analytics on how viewers are interacting with the data on Curata-powered websites. And it’s not only websites that Curata users can use to get their message out; the platform can also communicate with customers via e-mail newsletters, RSS feeds, and social networking sites.
Pawan wouldn’t say how much financing HiveFire has raised so far, but he did note that his father is an investor. He did say that while he’s gotten mentoring and an entrepreneurial example from Desh, his relationship with his father doesn’t differ all that much from other board members. “At home we talk home stuff, and at work we talk work stuff,” he says. “There’s a nice separation between the two.”
