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Apps That Are Making An Impact On The World

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From ordering food to booking rooms to getting travel plans organised, technology has evolved with every new app to help make the world a better place. For every small thing one does in life, there is an app that exists to make that task all the more easier. One of the positive sides of this is that now, apart from just the social angle of things, there are apps which help make the world a better place. Here are our pick of apps that not only contribute to the social betterment of the world, but help make an impact as well.

1. GlobalGiving

At its very essence, GlobalGiving is an organisation that helps in the growth of those foundations which are at the grassroot level. From raising money for building wells in Nigeria and to helping raise money for earthquake victims in Nepal, GlobalGiving works as the perfect facilitator. People who sign up on the site get connected to the cause they want to support and give money to, with regular updates on further donations as and when required. Since the time of its inception in 2002, this organisation raised almost $ 200 million from people around the world. Supporting close to 13,000 causes across the world, GlobalGiving helped improve the conditions of people all over the world.

2. LeftoverSwap 

Leftover food is always an issue and when you do not know what to do with the excess food, it more often than not goes to waste. To prevent wastage like this and to harness the power of smartphones to good, the LeftoverSwap app was created. Using the swipe and connect principle, LeftoverSwap lets people take pictures of leftover food and share it on their app. Once that is done, volunteers who are already registered on the app collect the food and give it to either individuals who need the food or to charities who work with the poor and hungry groups of people in the world.

3. One Today 

While donating to organizations is well and good, finding a legitimate cause can be quite tricky. One Today came to be as an attempt to resolve this issue and to remove middlemen from the picture altogether. Once you register on the website, One Today matches users to charities based on the users’ interests. Once you register and match with the charity of your choice, the app lets you donate $ 1 a day to these causes. Further, the app also allows users to increase the donations made by their friends, in an attempt to make a larger impact.

4. MindMate 

At a time when dementia is an increasingly common disease, MindMate comes as a blessing in disguise. With over 350,000 regular users, this app helps people stay connected to their memory with regular exercises. With interactive games created using the latest scientific research in the fields of dementia and mental health, MindMate helps improve one’s memory. What makes this app so much more interesting is it also offers a wide range of information on how to stay active, fit and healthy by giving users information on regular health and exercise.

5. Tree Planet  

What if you could lend a hand in increasing the number of trees by playing a game on your phone? Tree Planet, an app that does just that, recognised the growing addiction people have when it comes to their phones and helped plant over 500,000 trees in a period of four years. In the latest version of the game, every time the users save a tree from dying, Tree Planet plants a sapling/tree. Converting virtual trees into real trees, Tree Planet is making the world a cleaner and greener place, one game at a time!

Websites and apps like these have been specifically designed to make the world one cause and one issue at a time. If you think there are other apps like these that we missed mentioning, comment and let us know!

 

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5 Successful Indian Startups Founded By Women

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The workplace has undergone massive changes in the last century.  At the turn of the Industrial Revolution, any workplace was dominated by men while the women were delegated to run the homes.  However, with the advent of the internet and new and exciting technologies, workplaces have undergone a tectonic shift.  Women are no longer comfortable staying at home and are instead opting to lead teams and organisations.  As every year passes, we get closer to true gender equality, women have proven time and again that they are equally capable to get the job done if not better in some instances.  Names like Wolfe Herd (Bumble founder,) Kylie Jenner     (Kylie Cosmetics founder,)  Masaba Gupta (Masaba clothing label founder) are just some of the names who are known for leading world famous brands with their unique style of leadership. 

As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, we bring to you five women founders who run world famous and successful startups.

1) Upasana Taku-MobiKwik

If you are an Indian and are used to doing online shopping, more often than not at the time of payment, you would be directed to a payment gateway.  One of these gateways would normally be MobiKwik.  The startup is a well known name in the digital payments and digital wallet space.  MobiKwik was founded by Upasana Taku in 2009, who prior to founding MobiKwik used to work with PayPal.  Today Upasana Taku is also in charge of bank partnerships, business operations, and talent acquisition at MobiKwik.

2) Richa Kar-Zivame

An enthusiastic MBA student, Richa Kar, developed an online lingerie shopping platform in the year 2011.  Currently, Zivame is India’s leading online lingerie store with a valuation of more than $ 100 million.  The brilliant idea for her own lingerie business came to light when Richa tracked Victoria’s Secret’s sales, who was one of her clients when she was working at SAP.  She observed the lingerie sales figures reached peaks overseas but, Indian women were not provided with the similar innerwear.  While Richa was studying the Indian lingerie market, she realized the social embarrassment in India surrounding lingerie shopping.  Today Richa Kar could be credited with destigmatising the uneasiness surrounding lingerie shopping in India.

3) Falguna Nayar-Nykaa

After a long stint as an investment banker, Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa.com in the year 2013. An online one stop shop for beauty products from Indian and international brands, Nykaa changed the world of online shopping.  Who would have ever thought buying makeup online would be so easy? Falguni Nayar proved many critics wrong and created a brand new place for people who love experimenting with styles, designs and colors.

ALSO READ: Zivame: Founding Story

4) Sabina Chopra-Yatra.com

Yatra.com is a popular Indian website for making flight and hotel bookings.  Sabina Chopra was instrumental in identifying the potential for travel commerce in India and people moving towards cheaper or easier travel.  By the time, people started looking to make bookings, Sabina made sure Yatra.com was already in place.  Sabina was the former Head of India Operations of eBookers, which is also an online travel company based in Europe.  Along with this, she was also working with Japan Airlines which further adds to her experience in the travel industry.

5) Rashmi Sinha-SlideShare

SlideShare allows people to upload and access their presentations online.  While this feature is presently available everywhere, SlideShare was one of the first players in making this happen.  Rashmi Sinha was one of the founders of the presentation sharing platform SlideShare.  The company became so successful that in 2012, LinkedIn acquired the company for an amount of $100 million.

Let us know in the comments if you know any other wonderful women who have become leaders of their right or have started up and are doing extraordinary things.  We at Startup Stories wish a wonderful Women’s Day to all the women in the world who are changemakers.

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5 Reasons Why Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Thinks Whatsapp Is Dangerous

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Whatsapp found itself in the midst of a public relations nightmare over its latest privacy policy update.  Data privacy is currently a widely debated topic worldwide and Whatsapp has found itself in the midst of this debate time and again.  However the latest update seems to have irked a lot of people enough for them to make the shift to Telegram and the much recent app, Signal.  Telegram Messenger was launched in 2013 and although it is not as well known as Whatsapp, it enjoys quite an amount of popularity owing to its data security and encryption.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram Messenger, is no fan of Whatsapp and he believes Whatsapp is dangerous and not safe.  Elucidating more on the topic, Durov made his reasons known in a blogpost he published in late 2020.  Here are the five reasons why Pavel Durov thinks Whatsapp is dangerous.

1) If Jeff Bezos’ phone can be hacked via Whatsapp then nobody is safe.

One of the richest men in the world and the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos’ phone was allegedly hacked by Mohammed Bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.  Some of Bezos’s private communications and images were taken during the hack following which Whatsapp’s security was questioned.

2) The United Nations recommends its officials to remove Whatsapp from their devices

The United Nations recommends its officials to not use Whatsapp because it thinks Whatsapp is not a secure mode of communication.  In June 2019, a U.N., spokesman Farhan Haq said, “The senior officials at the U.N. have been instructed not to use WhatsApp, it’s not supported as a secure mechanism (sic.)”  This directive came when independent U.N. experts found a possible involvement of Mohammed Bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, in the alleged cyber attack of Jeff Bexos’ phone in 2018.

3) End to end encryption does not guarantee security.

Durov says “in their marketing, WhatsApp uses the words “end-to-end encryption” as some magic incantation that alone is supposed to automatically make all communications secure. However, this technology is not a silver bullet that can guarantee you absolute privacy by itself (sic.)”

ALSO READ: Users Flock To Signal Messaging App After Whatsapp’s Latest Privacy Policy Update

4) Chat backups on Android and Apple cloud are not encrypted.

Pavel Durov does not believe chat backups in the cloud are safe and says “Users don’t want to lose their chats when they change devices, so they back up the chats in services like iCloud – often without realizing their backups are not encrypted.  The fact that Apple was forced by the FBI to abandon encryption plans for iCloud is telling (sic.)”

5) Backdoors continue to exist in Whatsapp

“There are backdoors.  Enforcement agencies are not too happy with encryption, forcing app developers to secretly plant vulnerabilities in their apps.  I know that because we’ve been approached by some of them – and refused to cooperate.  As a result, Telegram is banned in some countries where WhatsApp has no issues with authorities, most suspiciously in Russia and Iran (sic,)” claims Durov in his blogpost.

As data privacy is becoming more and more important in the current day and age of the internet, we wonder what messaging application is totally safe.  

 

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Five Free design Tools For Startups And Students

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Creative design is an integral part of any organisation as it is used for various purposes and by various functions within an organization.  Be it for sales brochures, marketing collateral, presentations and product labels creative design is an integral part.  Creative designs help tell a story or a narrative better with images or videos.  For students, design can be used in their project thesis, dissertation defence, creative resumes and many more.

However, design tools are usually expensive and require an expensive hardware setup to render the final product.  This means a lot of expenditure for students or startups looking to make creative designs.  However, there are various alternatives which do the same job with almost the same quality which can be a blessing for startups and students.

In this article we give you a list of five free design tools for startups and students.  Read below to find out the list of free design tools.

1) Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform which comes with preloaded templates and can be used to create posters, documents, presentations and other visual content for free.  Paid subscriptions can be purchased for additional functionality but the free version does a good job.

2) Pixlr

Pixlr is an online photo editing tool which lets users edit pictures for free.  Pixlr’s photo editing is intuitive and is complemented by artificial intelligence for quick and personalized editing.

3) PicMonkey

PicMonkey is another free online editing tool which can be accessed via a web browser.  Free users can access most of the features and tools while a membership is needed for accessing the entire design workflow.  PicMonkey lets users access design templates for wedding invitations, announcements, thank you cards, business cards and many more.

ALSO READ: 8 Best Free CRM Solutions For Startups

4) Crello

Crello is a tool which offers both video and graphic editing for free.   Crello can help you create visuals for social media in just a few minutes, design a business card or a flyer, create marketing collateral for print, social and blogs, as well as create long-form content like presentations.

5) Gravit Designer

Gravi Designer is a vector based design tool which works on both online and offline platforms.  Gravit Designer is highly preferred for Linux users and the developers are known to listen to feedback from users and integrate good suggestions onto their tool.  Gravit Designer can be used to design websites, or create interfaces, and also to make illustrations or design the artworks of entire games.

This concludes the list of top free design tools for startups and students.  Let us know if you are already using any of these design tools or plan on using them in the future in the comments below.

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