Viplav Communications began by offering constituency management services to politicians such as Scindia. It then worked for the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, in Goa and this year, anchored the BJD campaign in Orissa.
Viplav Communications Pvt Ltd, CEO: Pallav Pandey - For the general election, the Delhi-based start-up put together a digital portfolio that included services such as the SuperCaller, which can make 500,000 calls a day. This cost-effective tool was used by the BJD in Orissa. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
The company also built software to check whether duplicate names were present in the voters list. “We used fuzzy logic to match names like Beena and Veena. This detects people registered more than once in the voter list,” says Pandey.
In April, Germinait Solutions Pvt. Ltd, an year-old Mumbai-based start-up, launched ElectionTracker, an online service that trawls the Internet for information on politicians and their parties, then aggregates and analyses such data to isolate the prevailing sentiment.
“Our work was primarily based on areas of AI such as machine learning and natural language processing, technology that can be applied very easily to understanding unstructured content on online sites,” says Ranjit Nair, CEO and founder, Germinait Solutions. The start-up had leveraged this tool to build applications for companies but was looking to showcase the technology with a high-profile application. “So when election 2009 was announced, we took it on as a challenge to see if we could adapt our platform to launch a tool for Internet users during the election.”
The Germinait Solutions team worked overtime for nearly four weeks before ElectionTracker went online, an offering that Nair expects will be of interest primarily to media companies and others looking for processed content.
Political parties, too, are beginning to leverage the data processing inputs that technology firms can offer. In Orissa, Viplav Communications ran MSurvey, a cellphone service where voters were quizzed over the phone by surveyors even as their geographical location was tracked by global positioning system, or GPS, devices and fed into Viplav Communications’ server with voter-generated content. “Based on the results of our survey, the BJP-BJD alliance in Orissa was broken,” claims Pandey.
Some digital companies also built e-governance and election-oriented tools this year because of the high visibility that the process delivers. Lifeblob.com, a website that runs a social timeline service (a form of digital diary that maps the social media that subscribers share on to a timeline), is a case in point. The website was looking for a platform to garner visibility for the timeline service, being used primarily for social networking. The idea of adapting it for use in the election by building a timeline for a mainstream politician came when the LifeBlob team saw the public reaction to Tata Tea Ltd’s Jaago Re (Wake Up) campaign.