Monday, June 14, 2004

Education

For Clark student, success just may be in the cards

By Neelang Parghi

Worried about forgetting your boss's birthday? You may not have to worry any longer, thanks to the work of one Clark University student.

Harsha Raghavan, a 25-year-old MBA student from Chennai (formerly Madras), India, has developed a special online greeting card program at www.eSuele.com that will keep track of the dates of special occasions and automatically send an appropriate e-card when that date arrives.

"I've been in millions of situations where I couldn't remember someone's birthday," Raghavan said. With eSuele .com, important dates can be entered into a database and the software will do the rest.

While many other websites offer online greeting cards geared toward family and friends, eSuele.com was developed with businesses in mind.

"A marketing manager meets lots of people. If they can keep in touch in an easy way, it will keep the relationship going - and get customers to keep their company in mind," Raghavan said.

The cards at eSuele.com are "fairly impersonal" and not too "cute and funny" like cards designed for close friends.

The website's name is a variation on the French word "seule," which is what Raghavan saw when he typed the phrase "on its own" into the Altavista .com translator and changed it to French. "I used that phrase because this software takes care of its task on its own. It's all automatic," he said. "You can send an almost infinite number of cards to an almost infinite number of people."

The software was designed while Raghavan was living in India at a cost of about $1,500, most of which came from his father's savings. With that money, he hired programmers to develop the software. Since the work was being done in India, this process "cost very little," Raghavan said.

The website came online in August 2001, just before Raghavan left India to study at Troy State University in Alabama. He is now about to enter his second year in the Clark MBA program.

The e-card program is designed to allow users to enter the names of others and their relationships with them. Once an important date comes around, the software will automatically find an appropriate online greeting card to send, using a process called the eSuele Automatic Selecting Engine (EASE). By automating the process, it saves the user time by not having them search through several different card designs, Raghavan said. All that's needed is a name, date and e-mail address.

Raghavan is hoping to get the word out to businesses in Worcester and the rest of Massachusetts about his program. For an annual fee of $5, small customers can send 250 cards each year, which is an "average number for a small business to use," Raghavan said. His largest client so far has been insurance provider MetLife. Another 650 people from India and the United States use the service.

Most eSuele customers found the site thanks to press coverage in India. "With zero marketing, it is impossible to drive any business," Raghavan said. He hopes to make eSuele profitable and eventually merge with a "stronger player."

"It will make my dream come true to provide a useful service to people around the world."

Neelang Parghi is a graduate student in business journalism at Boston University serving an internship at Mass High Tech.