Anandan invests in authorStream: Are they really geared?

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Mohali: The web 2.0 is ringing big in tweaking the way software solutions are provided and it's the corporate bodies who seem to have a deeper interest in this area. For instance, authorGEN Technologies an e-learning software, services and authoring tools provider. The company's spun-off authorSTREAM has recently found the interest of Microsoft India's Managing Director Rajan Anandan, who has re-joined its board after a gap of three years. Anandan has been the initial investors in the company but moved out. Founded by Harman and Harbir Khurana, it is an online presentation sharing platform that enables to share Microsoft PowerPoint presentations across blogs, websites, social networks, on YouTube and on devices like iPods and iPads. So, what brings Anandan back to this online group? "There are 300 million PowerPoint users in the world and I am confident that authorSTREAM will have well over 50 million users in a few years," says Anandan. However, the main challenge that lies before authorSTREAM is to covert some user-base from the company that Rashmi Sinha and her husband Jonathan Boutelle, along with Amit Ranjan ventured into - SlideShare. The firm has already established the footprints not only in terms of powerpoints rather as an all document sharing platform. If that was not enough, they have also provided the proposition for business via their platforms like LeadShare and AdShare. authorSTREAM today gets five million visitors, 10 million monthly pageviews, compared to it, Slideshare attracts 20 million visitors, who generate 60 million page views every month. It has 1.5 million registered users. At this point it remains to be seen how far Anandan's investment take the positive route. This corporate interest is not new to authorGEN, whose 51 percent stakes were bought by Educomp in 2007. It was then, when Anandan left the firm. Harman has been quite a visionary in driving the growth of the company. He started the organization in 2002 as a small e-learning services company and served clients who needed e-learning projects. This later, was transformed into an Internet based education company, under the two brands Wiziq, which had a focus on the learning sessions and authorSTREAM which helps in collaborating business tools. Thus it provides a platform for education service providers to build their online learning businesses.

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