2. Overview
Gabber is a Q&A engine that collects answers from mobile devices, question and answer services,
social networks, and the web. Users can ask questions in a variety of different languages and receive
answers in real-time. The Gabber engine also stores questions and answers in an intelligent database
for future use.
The company is currently managed by a team of experienced entrepreneurs and technology experts.
The management team has experience delivering solutions for companies such as AEG, Grant
Thornton, Goldenvoice, Gorilla Nation Media, Nokia, SEG, and UBS.
3. Meet The Team
Rishi is an entrepreneur with over 9 years of software development experience.
He currently serves as founder and lead engineer for Gabber. Prior to Gabber,
Rishi founded RKM Group. RKM Group is a software development firm that
focuses on taking technology startups to market, with North Social as its most
recent success. Rishi’s past resume includes AEG and Gorilla Nation Media. His
expertise is in Agile Management and offshore software development.
Niraj drives strategy, operations, and business development for Gabber. Prior to
Gabber, Niraj co-founded Appregatta Technologies. Appregatta is a technology
portal focused on providing outsourced sales and marketing to cloud based
technologies. Niraj’s past resume includes technology investment banking for
SEG, Grant Thornton, and UBS.
4. Problem
Q&A services have closed communities, which require users to be logged in to ask and answer questions.
Q&A platforms lack game mechanics (badge levels, rewards to user).
Q&A services fail to leverage existing social and mobile networks for information capture (deeper
integration with social and mobile networks means it is easier to capture information from an existing user
base).
Q&A services don’t extract intelligent information from indexed question and answer pairs.
Q&A services don’t offer multilingual question and answer support.
Q&A services are geared towards SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) instead of average mobile and web
consumers.
The current Q&A market is limited to a small subset of users.
5. Gabber
Gabber is a Q&A platform that gathers answers to questions through various networks (mobile, Q&A, and
social). It enables an individual to anonymously ask a question and obtain answers in real-time. Gabber
will be available as an application on Android OS, Facebook, iOS, OpenSocial, Twitter, the web, and
various other networks. The platform will be integrated into existing networks, which will make it
convenient for individuals to ask and answer questions.
6. Gabber
Flexible: Users can ask and answer questions from a variety of interfaces. Gabber tabs can be
can be installed on websites. Companies can also run a white-label edition of Gabber for feedback
sessions, press releases or any other type of real-time Q&A activity.
Game Mechanics: Users will be rewarded for accurate and useful answers (badge levels and custom
pages).
Intelligent: Gabber extracts intelligent information from questions and answer pairs.
Mobile: Mobile devices are supported, which enable emerging markets to utilize the Gabber platform.
Multilingual: Gabber supports multiple languages and stores all question and answer pairs in English.
Open: Users are not required to register in order to ask a question.
Simple: The user experience is greatly simplified. There are no complex account creation processes
and all answers are delivered in real-time.
Social: Gabber leverages existing social networks to gather answers to questions.
The Gabber platform addresses the following key points:
9. Technology
Gabber collects answers from mobile devices, question and answer services, social networks, and the
web. Once a question is answered, Gabber indexes the question and answer pair in a document oriented
database for future use. An NLP (natural language processing) layer then extracts the object, predicate,
and subject of the question and answer pair. This enables Gabber to route future queries intelligently and
identify users by their subject matter expertise. All data is stored on a sharded cluster so that Gabber can
scale easily.
11. Market Size
United States
•US internet market expected
to grow to 250M users in 2014
(18% YOY growth)
•US mobile internet market
expected to grow 82% by 2013
to 134M users.
•35% of U.S. adults have cell
phones with apps
•Ages 18-34 comprise 50% of
internet users
India
•India’s current internet
market at 306M users at a 10%
growth rate since February
•Fastest growing mobile
market with 127M mobile
internet users
•Only 2M current active users
•60% of active users are
accessing chat, social media,
and mobile blogging sites
Worldwide
•Almost 2B internet users
•450M mobile internet users.
•Expected to double by 2013
•IDC expects fastest growing
mobile applications will be
online communities
•China largest internet
population 370M
•Worldwide internet
advertising market expected to
reach $100B by 2013
12. Business Model
Gabber is a Q&A community that gathers answers to questions through various networks (mobile, Q&A,
and social). The community enables users to engage in structured Q&A forums to facilitate discussion
and rank responses to improve relevance and identify subject matter experts.
Launch MatureGrowth
User
Acquisition
From
•Advertising
•E-Mail
•Viral Marketing
•Social Media
•Distribution Partners
Gather User
Information
Compile User
Analytics
Optimized
User
Includes
•Q&A Patterns
•Followed Topics
•Followed SME
•Usage
•Social Media connect
Based On
•Q&A History
•Followed Topics/SME
•Shared Content
•Frequency
Monetization
•Private Q&A Forums
•User Analytics
•Targeted Ads
•Sponsored Forums
13. Growth Strategy
The Company’s strategy is to leverage existing networks to collect and index real-time Q&A data for
consumer use. Gabber will capture data from multiple access points (mobile devices, the web, and social
networks). The company will also focus on emerging markets where mobile and web usage rates are on
the increase (e.g., China, India).
Gabber will encourage brands, celebrities, and educational institutions to participate in private/public Q&A
forum with followers by offering a free white label edition of the product.
Launch Growth Mature
Viral, Sharable website tags, Facebook Likes/shares, Twitter mentions, Blogosphere referrals
Direct Email
•Targeted email lists
•College list serves
•Events
Distribution partners
•Mutual linking sites
•Affiliate networks (entertainment, academic)
Internet Advertising
•Google Adwords
•Facebook Ads
Search Engine Optimization
•Organic search
•Optimized page markup
Public Relations
•Buzz Marketing
•Company Blog
14. Competition
Launch MatureGrowth
Company Market Competitive Advantage Q&A Model
gabber Worldwide
(Focus
India/US)
Mobile, User-specific topics, SME directed
forums, Easy/clean UI, strong query (natural
language) technology and cloud based
infrastructure for quick and efficient updates
and deployment
User generated questions/answers. Users can achieve SME by
earning badges per community voting on submitted answers.
Private or public topic specific forums functionality. Also white
labeled Q&A forums for major brands. Technology can also retrieve
archived responses per relevance.
Facebook
Questions
Worldwide Largest social user base. Questions are submitted through users news feed to friends and
responses are displayed in same manner.
Yahoo Answers Worldwide 2nd largest database of questions/answers. Submit questions to user community. Answers/users are not
categorized.
Aardvark
(Google)
Worldwide Largest potential user base. Could become
part of Google Search. (TBD) Acquired by
Google for $50M in February, 2010.
Allows users to submit questions and receive an answer from
topic experts within seconds or minutes.
Answers.com US Combines user community responses with
editorial database for answers. Largest
database of questions/answers.
Traditional Social Q&A site. Community answers the questions and
poster can edit and collaborate.
Quora Worldwide
(Focus US)
Strong management team, high profile users,
elegant UI. Raised $11M at $86M valuation.
Submit question to entire community and system will route to
subject experts as well as the general users. Can follow topics or
users.
Stack Overflow Worldwide Niche market. Q&A for
developers/programmers.
Traditional Q&A and ability to vote on questions and answers up or
down and edit questions and answers in a wiki fashion. They
employee game mechanics so users can become SME by receiving
positive reviews.
Formspring US Simple community interaction Questions can be submitted and answered by a single person.
Results are viewed by community.
Rediff India First mover advantage. Large potential
customer base with fastest growing internet
market (India).
Mobile instant messaging application.
15. Milestones
Q4 - 2010
Secure financing of $250K.
Build out development team and hardware infrastructure.
Create backlog of user stories for product (Agile).
Software development.
Q1 - 2011
Release of web application with Facebook, OpenSocial and Twitter support.
Software development.
Product testing (Test Driven Design).
Q2 - 2011
Release of Android and iOS version of product.
Integration of Hindi and Chinese language sets.
Software development.
Product testing (Test Driven Design).
16. Milestones
Q3 - 2011
Integration of new networks for Q&A collection.
Add support for SMS queries.
Software development.
Product testing (Test Driven Design).
Q4 - 2011
Expansion of language support.
Implementation of NLP layer to extract semantic information.
Software development.
Product testing (Test Driven Design).
17. Conclusion
Disruptive Q&A platform for web and mobile markets.
Real-time Q&A in the cloud.
Intelligent data extraction of question and answer pairs.
Multilingual support.
Use of existing social networks and Q&A services (leveraging existing infrastructure and ease of adoption).
Cost-effective development model: world class engineers located in Noida, India.
Experienced management team.
Agile software methodologies ensure product reliability and speed to market.