Let Me Know

LET ME KNOW

Talking about “let me know”…a phrase which we use in our daily lives but just casually. While speaking nobody peeps into the depth of the phrase and the one who got into the deep ocean of its meaning become a team in the form of a YOUTH WEB PORTAL!!

It is said that YOUTH of a nation are the trustees of POSTERITY. Our first Prime Minister PANDIT J.L.NEHRU mentioned in one of his books that if we want a nation to grow, then its initiative should be taken at an individual level because an individual’s growth is a family’s growth, family’s growth is society’s growth  and many societies turn into a developed nation. So, fulfillment of small goals leads to accomplishment of larger goals and “let me know” is just doing that wonderfully as they say “the difficult is done at once, the impossible takes a little longer.” It has done the difficult part and is heading towards the “impossible”.

Now what is the unique part which makes “letmeknow” different from others??

The uniqueness lies in the fact that “letmeknow” is “KNOWLEDGE” based portal whereas others are “INFORMATION” based.

Again, let us analyze this fact.

“Information” is something which can tell us everything. It has ALL the answers to questions we have not asked and which doubtlessly don’t even arise. We can extract knowledge from information but from knowledge, we extract WISDOM.

Knowledge is of 2 kinds-we know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. So, basically information is just a part of knowledge.

Knowledge itself is POWER.

NOW how to gain complete knowledge? Here I would like to quote-

“I keep six honest serving men,

They taught me all I knew;

Their names are-WHAT & WHY & WHEN,

And HOW & WHERE & WHO”

“LETMEKNOW” provides us with all the SIX serving men.

Now, why all this needed?

All this is needed so that an INDIVIDUAL get to know what he can achieve in the pool of various opportunities SINCE ‘knowledge’ may give weight but accomplishments give lustre and many more people  ‘see’ than ‘weigh’.

So, being a B.TECH in ‘electronics & communications’, I would like to make the role of this web portal crystal clear-

The symbol of atomic age, which tended to centralize power, was a nucleus with electrons held in tight orbit;

The symbol of digital age is the WEB, with countless centers of power-all equally networked.

A web is a tremendous grassroots revolution for the change in people lives coming from different directions which gives a message of HOPE for HUMANITY.

I congratulate “letmeknow” team for serving “HUMANITY” in a different way!!!

Thanks,

Disha.

DISHA,B.TECH IN ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATIONS.

Just as their by-line goes, they have succeeded in “breaking the information barrier” to a considerable extent. Let Me Know, also an investee venture of Unltd India, is a platform where one has access to several opportunities in the fields of Technology, Business, Art and Culture, Social Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.  So you may ask, why Let Me Know? The answer lies in the previous sentence – the very diverse range of fields in which you can find opportunities through this portal. The idea of browsing through scores of them in one place, as opposed to the arbitrary Google searches and surfing – which could be a shot in the dark – is certainly a big plus.

Let Me Know was founded in November 2007 by Nitin Rao a young Indian, aspiring to be a successful entrepreneur. The idea for the portal itself was born from a paper presented by Rao at the London School of Business in 2007. The need to help the Indian youth find appropriate avenues, combined with a passion for social entrepreneurship has resulted in Let Me Know, and it has been a boon for thousands of young Indians ever since.

How do they work?

The team at Let Me Know gathers information from Event Organizers, and also has a dedicated student team that works conscientiously to scout for opportunities in colleges. Through this vast network, they have been able to post thousands of opportunities for young Indians to grab.

By using tools like Google Friend Connect and SMS alerts, they have succeeded in connecting more and more youngsters in the three years of their operation.

What they have done so far?

One of the initiatives in 2009 was the Internship Madness Fiesta, during which there were a lot of internship opportunities posted on this site. Many students benefited from this rewarding initiative, and what’s more, they helped by sharing these opportunities with more students.

When you navigate through their website you are immediately struck by the simplicity and effectiveness that you see. Neatly categorized, you can view opportunities in the field of your choice, or you can view them all. They have a “Deadlines” tab as well, which is extremely useful when you want to quickly remind yourself of when something is due.

The popularity of this young team is very evident in the number of students vouching for them on the site’s blog, and the number of fans they have on social networking sites.

Nandini Muralidharan is a networking engineer and a free lance writer based in Mumbai. She writes for www.bookshopblog.com and www.chillibreeze.in

It was in the year 2001 that Joseph Eugene Stiglitz shared the Nobel Memorial prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to the theory of “Information Asymmetry”. I had first come across this term (as it is intended to be come across for an economics grad) in my 3rd year of university when I was doing a course on Money Banking and Financial Markets (and of course in Microeconomics). This is one concept which, if understood deeply, can change the way we live and approach life. This is precisely what LMK (letmeknow.in) is doing. It is breaking the information barrier, and for good reasons. There are a lot of wonderful things which we experience, very often, but just don’t realise the underlying economic/social principle; be it the classic “The market for Lemons”, where even the value of perfectly good quality commodities tends to go down or, the moral hazard problem which has been used to explain the behaviour of the financial giants (also referred to as “Too big to fail” firms) in the recent economic downturn. This, I feel is the power of Information-it can explain every phenomenon that happens to us.

If I had to name a few takeaways from my four years of campus/hostel life, one of the first would be the “respect” I developed for Information. For some this may sound ridiculous, for a few, this may not be new and for a select few, this maybe utter rubbish. I can quote many examples of how information dissemination brought about desired (and sometimes surprising but not unwanted) results. I cannot explain the “hows”, “whys” and “whens” for my adoption of the philosophy “Information is Wealth”, but I can simply attribute this to an invisible hand (could be the same ‘hand of god’ the Argentine great-Diego Maradona believes played a role in his goal against England in 1986). I was a participant of some of the most enterprising brainstorming sessions in my last four years. A few from my social circle termed it a waste of time, because it was too random and headed nowhere. But I always liked it because it was a chance for all the people involved in the session to discover new facts, share knowledge and gain exposure to what was until then unknown. I treat information as religion, embrace it, and not dodge it like it was bullets. It is not surprising to find out that as a result of any research going on around the world in different labs or universities, the end inference is nothing but information. Human are already on their quest to gather information, information about our past, our future, our very origins!

Sometimes I feel Information is not given its due. I found out that Information is an uncountable noun and I also observed this:

“When I type ‘indian’ on Microsoft Word, I get a spell check error or Word auto-corrects it to Indian; when I type ‘hindu’, again it does one of the above (corrects it to Hindu). But when I type ‘information’, MS Word does nothing!”  As a tribute to Information, we have to start to start it with a capital ‘I’. The point I want to drive home is that Information has to be treated as something that is divine and profound, for the simple reason that it has the power to bring all of humanity closer and make it wiser too! A close look at what Internet or Information Technology has done to us would reveal that they brought us closer to information. In other words, they pioneered “Information Dissemination”. As a result of Google or Twitter or Facebook (for that matter, LMK too!) or the new buzz word “Social Media” we are a becoming a close knit community, with information as the head of the family! It is because of all the Information emitters (Google/LMK et al.) life has become simple, simply because we are more informed now and decision making was never this easy.

This information explosion has started a long chain of events for the world to reach a stage where it is possible to make one person better off without making someone else necessarily worse off! In economics terms, we can reach a ‘Pareto Optimal’ state, this is possible because information is non-exhaustive, and it is not a ‘normal’ good!

Some say god is the one who knows everything; some call him as the one who oversees everything…….

All of this points to the fact that even God is actually God only because he knows everything, which simply means that ‘He has all the INFORMATION’. And maybe, someday when we have access to just the right amount of information then we might come to a conclusion that Information is equivalent to God and all of us who dwell on information would be called as devotees of a single God.

So, here it is-3 cheers!

To all the devotees of information. Let us continue the devotion and spread……you know what!!

Let us hope for a world where there is no Information asymmetry which I believe would, ultimately lead to prosperous co-existence of Humans (and, if we attain the right information in the future, other forms of alien life elsewhere in the universe too!)

PS: All the ‘coulds’, ‘woulds’ and any other term which represent certain amount of uncertainty could have been avoided if I had all the background information which can explain the phenomenon.

(I am sorry for the fact that I had to use a ‘could’ even in the Post Script! In a way, lack of information leads us into a vicious circle of uncertainty!)

I am a student and will be one till July 2011.Currently, doing my masters in Economics and Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus. I do some NPO stuff and I indulge myself in some activities that involve percussion and any of its allies.

Hi,

Thanks for being part of Let Me Know. We’re excited to see you break the information barrier, and to be part of your success.

How has Let Me Know helped you? Share your Let Me Know story, and be featured on our front page. Be it an internship that you bagged, a business plan competition you won or a college festival that you enjoyed, we’d love to hear from you.

Enter your information here – takes less than 2 minutes. We’ll need your name, a 25-word story, a picture (if possible), your college/company, the city you live in and if you are a student, your level and field of study (UG/PG).

Thanks, you’re an inspiration!

Warm Regards,
Team Let Me Know

If you’ve been to the site recently, you would have noticed a slew of changes taking place to improve the user interface. A better interface implies a better user experience. One of the most challenging decisions we’ve had to make was with regard to the Google Adsense ads which were located on the website. There were a few significant draw backs with using these ads; to put it in simple and remarkably few terms, they didn’t look very pretty. However, considering the ever increasing traffic too the website, they did serve as revenue generators. So the big trade off was: user experience Vs money. We chose to “trade off” money for user experience. Our logic was and remains simple, If we give the best possible service  to the users, they will love it enough to talk about it. To get customers to talk is perhaps the single biggest achievement for any business. Its big because it means a lot more than just satisfied customers, it means publicity, loyalty and a host of other pretty terms. Most importantly, it shows that we care. So, as we bid goodbye to Google Adsense for now, we request you to keep the comments and the feedback coming, because we’re listening and we care.

“What a wonderful job you are doing.This site allows us to know the things and bridges the gap to the real time world.” – Anusha

“Your website has proved to be of excellent use to me in my search for internships and scholarships. Well, I realized today that I have started spending more time on your website and links given by you than anything else I do on the internet! Excellent job!! And thanks a bunch !” - Sagar

“Never thought getting an internship was so easy and real….until “letmeknow” came by….Spread the word and let everyone know about this cool website.” - Venkatesh

“This site is an absolute boon. Would have loved to have this when I was in college! Great Job Guys.” - Rahul

“I’d like to inform you that your team is doing a great job, in collecting and presenting such valuable information. I’d like to suggest that you procure more information on internships and scholarships for the field of journalism, especially in relation to internship in television channels. Thanks for the great job!” – Preeti

Let Me Know replies,“Thanks for pointing that our Preeti, we’ll certainly be on the lookout for more opportunities in the field of journalism. At the same time I would encourage you and other journalism ethusiasts to suggest as many opportunities as possible to make Let Me Know more useful for everyone.”

Hello LetMeKnow users,

We are happy to announce that the Alerts have been reconfigured and are working fine now. I would like to tell u the advantage of Alerts-
>> You get what u are interested in i.e U get only those opportunities posted on the website for which you have subscribed. This is different from the Email Subscription which is powered by Feedburner. The email subscription is the daily newsletter that gives u the latest content on the website.

To try it out all u have to do is to login using any of your Google/Yahoo/Open IDs. The login button is on the Top left corner of the website under the Search bar. Once u login you can select the Alerts tab and then tick those categories you want to hear about.

- Technical Support @LetMeKnow

When I speak to the users of Let Me Know, I find that they all have something in common… they’re all hooked. Once they come across the website they find it difficult to not check for new opportunities whether they intend to use them or not. Let Me Know, is indeed quite fortunate to have a loyal user base. Their loyalty and our consistency have ensured that we can only grow from here. Ok… so we have a group of really cool people who are addicted to Let Me Know, thats great, so whats the next step? What can we do to ensure that we can offer them better services and how do we make them part of the process? We believe the answer lies in building a community around the website. We need to give the users something more, so that they have in common something more than just an unquenchable thirst for opportunities. We need to give the users a platform where they can not only interact with us but also among themselves. Google Connect and the newly deployed Discuss Community have contributed to a significant extent in this regard. However, we’ve made it a conscious policy to actively develop a strong community around the website, which means that we’re not going to solely depend on Google or Discuss to do it for us. We believe in providing a more personalized experience to the users based on their suggestions and preferences, so users can watch out for exciting new opportunities to get their opinions noted. So when do we know that our job is complete ? How do we gauge the success of our community building strategies? Well… the one of the pillars around which the community is built is the facilitation of our users to help themselves get a better service from us. Better service can mean a lot things, whether it is to have more number of opportunities or having a more intuitive console on the website. The number of entries we get from customers and their activeness on our forums have proven to be valid indicators.Making the website self sufficient with respect to the content has always been a dream, a dream in which users actively share opportunities which they hear about. Out role, until we achieve such a state is to facilitate their sharing activities, perhaps through better design or through augmentation with other services. Measuring customer satisfaction is a completely different ball game though, how do we check whether our customers are satisfied without dissatisfying them? Now thats something worth pondering about.

We are happy to annouce that LetMeKnow now provides SMS alerts. We are using the Google SMS Channel. After testing it for a few days we have found it pretty reliable in alerting the user about the updates on the site. Users are notfiied about any new Opportunity added on the site through out the day.

Click here to subscribe to the SMS Channel.

As the head of Communications @ Let Me Know, I get to speak to a lot of curious people about the website. Almost all of them have something positive to say and a lot of them have really good suggestions to improve the site. During the course of these conversations, I’m often asked what my motivation to work for LMK is. (This is often after people realise that we are, at present, non-profit and hence there isn’t any monetary compensation that I receive) Each time, my reply is similar. I love what I’m doing. Interacting with people professionally (or semi-professionally) is something that I’m good at, (reasonably so ) and I like writing stuff  – be it publicity mails or blog posts. However, the one key factor that makes my like what I do is this – I am part of something that can actually change people’s lives, albeit in a very small way. The very fact that there someone, somewhere, gets to benefit from LMK is sufficient motivation to do my job properly. And I’m sure this is what drives most, if not all of the team at LMK. And this is why we have come as far as we have, in a surprisingly short duration of time. So here’s to the motivation behind team LMK. Join us, in Breaking the Information Barrier!

P.S. Happy Diwali to everyone!