IIMA incubatee set to take Captcha challenge to next level

You use them almost everyday on the Internet to create an email account, open a blog, enter a website or for e-booking, which is popularly known as 'Captchas'. Now, an IIMA incubatee is looking to take those fretful seconds you spend on unscrambling a string of alphabets and numbers to the next level by getting big brands to advertise on this platform.

The idea called yo!CAPTCHA will ask a simple question based on the advertisement instead of asking the user to recognise and type a random string.

Started by three BITS Pilani graduates, Ankit Gupta, Neeraj Agrawal and Dhruv Sogani, the start-up — Innovese Technologies — was incubated at the Centre for Incubation, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) in 2011 and given a seed funding of Rs 5 lakh.

Soon to start rolling on sites like ibibo.com and indiatimes, yo!CAPTCHA is already live with plugins on blogs like musicdip.com, mytakeonflicks and WordPress today. "Everyday over 280 million Captchas waste more than 800,000 hours of human attention. Through our product we will ask simple questions based on a brand and the correct answers will fetch the websites to earn revenues. Sites like ibibo.com get almost 15,000 new users everyday so it is a great opportunity for a brand to be up and going with this kind of traffic," says Ankit Gupta, co-founder Innovese Technologies.

The start-up is now looking to scale up by tying up with advertising networks that operate on digital advertising and is also working on ideas that will do away with the use of keyboard for the user to enter the Captcha. "Currently, Captchas are non-monetary but we have created a prototype whereby brands can advertise on the Captchas that can drum up brand recall by the users. We are looking at reaching out to all the big websites and publishers in a year," he Ankit.

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