Technology
Sri Mandir helps Hindus visit holy temples and donate virtually through their phones
Living within the U.S., the Trivedi family sought a technique to follow the ritual practice of worshipping one among India’s Jyotirlingas, a sacred image of the Hindu god Shiva. After searching YouTube for tactics to ceremonially offer flowers and other items at an Indian temple on Sunday 2023, the family found a video about an upcoming worship app called Sri Mandir.
The app offers customized videos of ceremonial prayers from greater than 50 Hindu temples in India and lets users take part in prayers, donate and access religious content virtually from their iPhone or Android smartphone. It was just what the Trivedis were searching for.
A yr later, the Trivedis proceed to make use of Sri Mandir. A member of the family told TechCrunch that the app helps users make last-minute prayers and donate money to their faith’s temple, even in the event that they live removed from their home country and have access to local temples and priests. But that comes at a steep cost: the typical monthly cost of a Sri Mandir outside India is $100.
“Sri Mandir simply converts rupees to dollars and costs a ton of money, making it an ultra-premium app and not for anyone on a budget,” the user said.
The app fills a growing need. As a part of their long-standing rituals, Hindus world wide often visit temples of the gods and goddesses they worship, make offerings, and take part in prayers seeking peace, well-being, or higher relationships. However, access to spiritual services and information in India has been largely inaccessible and unorganized.
Serial entrepreneur Prashant Sachan, who hails from a village near the economic city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh and previously co-founded social commerce startup Trell, founded Sri Mandir’s parent company, AppsForBharat, in November 2020. He saw that even people in rural India were getting online, but noticed that religious practices within the country remained largely offline.
“When I first started experimenting, devotion was one of the behaviors I started thinking about because we felt it deserved attention that it wasn’t getting,” Sachan said in an interview.
The three-year-old app boasts over 30 million downloads since 2020 and only opened as much as markets outside India in January. Since then, Sachan told TechCrunch, the app has grown by 25% to 30% per thirty days and has gained 500,000 registered users and 2.5 million installs outside India. The majority of its global audience comes from the United States, followed by Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Middle East.
Sachan said Sri Mandir’s primary users outside India are first- and second-generation Indian-Americans who don’t often visit temples in India but wish to connect with their roots.
This global reach has helped Sri Mandir increase the revenue it generates from small transactions made by users through the app, offering prayers and donations. Today, 25% of Sri Mandir’s total revenue comes from outside India.
In addition to connecting users to temples of their faith, Sri Mandir helps the priests at those temples gain more followers, which ultimately allows them to earn more cash. By dedicating five to 6 hours per week to the app, a priest typically earns about 25% to 30% greater than his regular income from day-to-day operations.
Manoj, a priest on the Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple in town of Trimbak within the western Indian state of Maharashtra, told TechCrunch that the Sri Mandir helps devotees, even those that should not in good physical shape but are willing to participate in occasional prayers.
The priest receives 40 to 50 devotions per week through the Sri Mandir app. He noted that the app also helps the priests receive more payments from the devotions—the app charges individual users even for group prayers, while groups visiting the temple in person may not pay individually. But Manoj admitted that it lacks the divine atmosphere that folks experience after they are physically present on the temple. He compared it to the difference between taking medication at home and receiving full treatment after being admitted to the hospital.
AppsForBharat now hopes to assist Sri Mandir reach much more users. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Indian billionaire and tech veteran Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum Partnership.
The most downloaded app by Indians
Sri Mandir shouldn’t be the one app offering such content within the country: DevDham, Vama.app and Utsav offer similar offerings.
Still, with 30 million downloads since 2020, Sri Mandir is the one Hindu-focused app among the many 100 most downloaded religious apps globally, in response to Sensor Tower data shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
Bhagavad Gita in Hindi (2 million downloads) and Sanatan (2 million) are the subsequent most downloaded Hindu religious prayer apps on the planet as of 2020, in response to Sensor Tower data.
Still, Sri Mandir is much behind the world in probably the most downloaded religious apps. According to Sensor Tower, YouVersion Bible App (274 million downloads), Muslim Pro (132 million downloads) and King James Bible (122 million downloads) were the highest three religious apps as of 2014.
In India, Bible App for Kids (22 million downloads) and Muslim Pro (10 million downloads) are the opposite two most downloaded religious apps, each trailing Sri Mandir.
In terms of revenue, Hallow Prayer & Meditation is the world’s highest-grossing app as of 2020, with consumers spending greater than $84 million on in-app purchases, in response to Sensor Tower. On the opposite hand, Sri Mandir has earned lower than $100,000 in in-app purchases since 2020, in response to Sensor Tower.
This is lower than the most well-liked religious app in India by consumer spending, Joseph Prince Gospel Partner, which has earned over $300,000 in in-app purchases in India since 2020.
Next: Religious Tourism
With the newest round of funding, AppsForBharat plans so as to add features that aim to capture 5% to 10% of the potential market, which is estimated to be value $50 billion.
One of them is religious tourism through Sri Mandir.
Sachan told TechCrunch that the startup plans to assist users plan visits to temples and pilgrimage sites through the platform, partly by partnering with traditional travel agencies. The executive said pilot programs for religious tourism have already begun with a select group of devotees.
The app may also permit you to purchase special tickets to visit holy sites and deliver prasad (food offerings to idols) and related religious goods.
In addition, the startup plans to construct a “complex technology stack” with a CRM-like experience for temples and historical sites in India. These services will initially be available without cost, but the corporate eventually plans to charge fees to administer these services, Sachan said.
The startup also goals to expand its temple network tenfold, to 500 temples, over the subsequent 12 to 18 months.
The Series B funding round, during which the corporate participated solely with equity, was also attended by Susquehanna Asia VC, in addition to existing investors of AppsForBharat: Elevation Capital, Mirae Asset VC and Peak XV.
Technology
Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode’, bad hiring and why avoiding risk is deadly
Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold a complete of two corporations for billions of dollars. Now he plans to start out delivering takeaway food Wonder made public in a couple of years, at an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.
We recently spoke in person with Lore in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of constructing meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophy. Below is a part of what he said on the topic, flippantly edited for length and clarity.
Lore on the so-called founder modewhere founders and CEOs actively engage not only with their direct reports, but in addition with “skip level” employees to make sure that small challenges don’t grow to be big ones (Brian Chesky works this fashion, as does Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, amongst others):
Yes, I didn’t just like the founding mode because I operate in a different way. I focus very much on the concepts of vision, capital and people. We meet weekly with the leadership team and spend two hours every week on the core elements of vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors and values - akin to: things you’re thinking that are already set.
You think, “Oh, yeah, we’ve done certain behaviors before. We have already established the values. We dealt with performance management. We have our strategy.” But as you grow and develop quickly, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you must sustain with it… and just speak about it and speak about it.
When everyone is fully aligned and you have got really good people, you simply allow them to do it; I do not have to get entangled in any respect. So I won’t go into the small print of what people do, so long as they know the nuances of the strategy and vision. When you connect that together with your team and they achieve that with their very own team, everyone is moving in the correct direction.
What Lore thinks about hiring the correct people:
I actually, really care about hiring rock stars. That is, one and all (I hire). I used to think you could possibly interview someone and inside an hour resolve whether or not they were a rock star. I actually thought so, and I believe other people think so too.
It’s not possible. I’ve employed hundreds of individuals. You cannot tell in an hour-long interview whether someone is a rock star, and it’s normal to get honeyed. Someone talks about a great game, sounds good, says the correct things, has the correct experience, and then it doesn’t work out and you wonder why.
I began going back to resumes and attempting to draw correlations, and I discovered that there was a definite pattern that superstar resumes had that distinguished them from non-superstar resumes. This doesn’t suggest that somebody who doesn’t have a superstar resume cannot be a superstar. I miss these people, it’s okay. But after I see someone with a superstar resume, they’re almost all the time a superstar. When I interview them, I already know that I would like to rent them, and it’s more about ensuring that I’m not missing anything from a behavioral, cultural, or values standpoint – we would like it to be compatible.
However, your resume must show a demonstrable level of success in each position you have got worked in. This means multiple promotions. This means staying with the corporate long enough to advance, and leaving and moving from one company to a different is a giant step. Superstars don’t move sideways. They don’t move from a great company to a bad one because bad corporations must pay more to draw people, so sometimes they shake loose individuals who should not that good, who just need to go for the cash.
But you discover someone who’s (at the highest) 5% and you take a look at their CV and it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a giant jump… promotion, promotion, big jump . When I get a resume that shows a visual level of success, I take it and pay them what they need. It’s very essential for me to get this superstar there. And you are constructing an organization of superstars.
You have to have a correct performance management system in place in order that they know exactly what they should do to get to the following level. Because superstars are very motivated. They need to know what they should do to get to the following level, especially Generation Z. They need to know and get promoted every six months.
Finally, Lore talks about his belief that taking more risks is the solution to secure a startup’s future, even when this approach could seem counterintuitive to many:
People all the time underestimate the risk of the establishment and overestimate the risk of introducing change. I see it over and all over again.
If you have got a life-threatening disease and the doctor says, “You have six months to live,” at that time you may go on a trial drug or anything, even when it’s extremely dangerous (it should look good). Basically, you are trying to take a risk to avoid inevitable death.
If you are super healthy and every thing’s going great and someone says, “Take this experimental drug; it can make you live longer” (many individuals will say), “You know what? It’s too dangerous. I’m really healthy. I don’t desire to die from this drug.”
However, startups are very different from large corporations. When you’re employed at a big company like Walmart (whose US e-commerce business Lore tracked selling is certainly one of his corporations), it’s about incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.
As a startup founder, you’ll likely die. Every day that you just live and do that startup, there is a risk that you’re going to die. The probability is 80% and only a 20% likelihood it should actually work. So you have got to take this into consideration when making decisions. You must search for opportunities to take risks to cut back your risk of death. The establishment is the worst thing you may do. Doing nothing is the most important risk you may take.
Technology
Australian government withdraws disinformation law
The Australian government has withdrawn a bill that might have imposed penalties on online platforms as much as 5 percent their global income in the event that they fail to stop the spread of disinformation.
The bill, backed by the Labor government, would enable the Australian Communications and Media Authority to create enforceable rules on disinformation on digital platforms.
IN statementCommunications Minister Michelle Rowland said the bill would “provide an unprecedented level of transparency, holding big tech accountable for its systems and processes to prevent and prevent the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation online.”
However, she said that “based on public statements and conversations with senators, it is clear that there is no way this proposal could be passed through the Senate.”
When a revised version of the bill was introduced in September, Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), criticized it in a one-word post: “Fascists.”
Shadow communications minister David Coleman was a vocal opponent of the bill, arguing it could encourage platforms to suppress free speech to avoid penalties. Because the bill seems dead now, Coleman sent that it was a “shocking attack on free speech that betrayed our democracy” and called on the Prime Minister to “rule out any future version of this legislation”.
Meanwhile, Rowland in his statement called on Parliament to support “other proposals to strengthen democratic institutions and keep Australians safe online”, including laws to combat deepfakes, enforcement of “truth in political advertising during elections” and regulation of artificial intelligence .
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can be moving forward with a plan to ban children under 16 from using social media.
Technology
Department of Justice tells Google to sell Chrome
Welcome back to the week in review. This week, we take a look at how the Department of Justice ordered Google to sell Chrome to break its monopoly, whether OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, and the way artificial intelligence corporations are exploiting TikTok for research purposes. Let’s do it.
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should get rid of its Chrome browser to help break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google is an illegal monopoly for abusing its power within the search industry, and the Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome poses a “significant challenge” to pursuing countermeasures aimed toward establishing a competitive search engine market.
Anthropic raised a further $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to make Amazon Web Services the first training site for its flagship generative artificial intelligence models. Anthropic can be working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s chip manufacturing division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, custom AWS chips for training artificial intelligence models. Amazon’s recent money injection brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.
OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, say the publisher’s lawyers. As part of the lawsuit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so the lawyer could seek for copyrighted content in its AI training kits. However, within the letter, lawyers for the publishers claim that OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one of the virtual machines.
News
Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul had hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian encourages Optimus to make a heart out of his hand, dance like he’s at a luau and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more
Oura’s valuation exceeds $5 billion: The smart ring maker has received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which constitutes Oura’s Series D financing round, raises the corporate’s valuation to over $5 billion. Read more
Let’s organize a celebration for Partiful: The customizable event planning app challenges legacy solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events, is a favourite amongst Gen Z users, and was just named a top app of 2024 by Google. Read more
Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon allow Teams users to clone their voices so that they can talk to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Read more
Hackers attack Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached a web-based course founded by an influencer and self-confessed misogynist, exposing data on nearly 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on sex trafficking and rape charges. Read more
What makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ruled that each one digital services that handle significant volumes of transactions needs to be subject to bank-style supervision, which could impact Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo. Read more
A more conversational Siri: According to sources cited by Bloomberg, Apple is developing a new edition of Siri based on advanced multilingual models in an attempt to meet up with more natural-sounding competitors comparable to Google Gemini Live. Read more
Making Money With TikTok Brains: Several AI-powered research tools are taking advantage of the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, during which the text of an uploaded document is read in a monotone voice against a backdrop of “weirdly satisfying” vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay. Read more
Threads attacks Bluesky: As Bluesky’s user base surpasses 20 million, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a brand new feature called custom feeds to capitalize on user demand for more personalization. Read more
ChatGPT within the classroom: OpenAI has released a free online course to help elementary and middle school teachers find out how to introduce ChatGPT into their classrooms. However, some educators are concerned about this technology and its potential for error. Read more
Do we want one other day by day word game? Normally I’m an evangelist for word games and crosswords, but I feel like we’re quickly approaching market saturation. Netflix has launched a brand new day by day word puzzle game in partnership with TED called TED Tumblewords. Read more
Analysis
Please don’t send X-ray images to the chatbot: People often turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions on their health concerns and higher understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs and PET scans to the AI-powered chatbot, Grok, to help interpret the outcomes. Medical data is a special category subject to federal protections that, usually, only you may circumvent. But simply because you may does not imply you need to. As Zack Whittaker writes, it’s price remembering that what goes on the Internet never leaves it. Read more
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