Of late, Facebook pages where one can post anonymously have become the rage among youngsters. This coupled with the kind of crescendo that the app, Secret, has reached in tech circles shows that the internet sure loves anonymity. Various ideas are being floated to cash in on this new trend of anonymity, one among them being that the social networking behemoth Facebook now permitting anonymous login for its apps, putting the onus completely on the user to choose to share information or not.
Here in India, Ashutosh Garg, 26, an engineer from Delhi College of Engineering, Niranjan Bala, 34, and Rajesh Eswarlal, 25, both MCA graduates from NIT-Tiruchy, are trying to change the way students share campus gossip and secrets with Bakfy, India’s first anonymous mobile app for students. Here, students can share anything, from campus happenings, secrets and rumours to jokes and views. Feeds from other colleges are also available to the students.
The trio completed the first version of the app in three weeks and launched it in a local college. Started in March this year, the venture has around 15 campus ambassadors working along with the three-member team.
Ashutosh says, “The coolest feature about Bakfy is its anonymity. It has the potential to make students talk about stuff they would have never opened up about earlier. We assign random names to users to hide their identity. Students can share a post with their college or to the entire Bakfy audience. It is a mobile-only app”
At present, the app is live in 30 colleges across India, which includes VIT, DAIICT (Gujarat), IIT-Guwahati and NIT-Srinagar. “In fact, we are expanding to two-three colleges every week,” adds Rajesh. “We dream of the day when the first thing a new entrant to a college does is download the Bakfy app. The Bakfy team is trying out a bunch of things to market the app,” says Niranjan.
They aim to expand to 80 colleges and add 10,000 users by the end of the year. The app is available only for the Android and Windows operating systems now. The trio feels that the iOSmarket for students is less and does not plan to launch the iOS version anytime soon. The founders are in talks with a few investors to raise capital to sustain operations and gain traction rapidly. Bakfy is planning to explore new platforms and might even let you send anonymous messages within your company soon!
Mathew.maniamkot@gmail.com