Indian-Singapore start-up to launch consumer 'Taste Graph'

An Indian-Singapore start-up is set to launch next year a "Taste Graph" data that could revolutionise consumers relationships with service-based business houses through information technology.

The Taste Graph would provide simple data on specific requirements of consumers to marketing businesses, giving them more knowledge to provide specific services to the people, said Suresh V Shanker, co-founder of the start-up, Crayondata.

The data would be used by retail outlets, banks, telecom and hospitality companies.

The final product, Choice Engine, would be for businesses to use the Taste Graph data to meet their customer and consumer requirements, said Shanker, an Indian-origin IT industry veteran who has worked with international groups for the past 17 years in Singapore.

Crayondata is currently working on the Taste Graph data covering consumers in India and Singapore.

"We aim to make big data simple for companies providing services to the people," Shanker added.

Taste Graph aims to collate essential choices of consumers or customers from a wide variety of choices, and in some cases as many as 1,000 and that remains a challenge for service-based houses to understand and match the demand of end-product users, he said.

Crayondata, incorporated in October 2012, has 50 IT engineers in the Chennai-based back office and 25 in the Singapore-headquartered front office working on the new IT package to be launched in the next six months.

He further said Taste Graph/Choice Engine would be one of the many new products to be developed by the one-year old Crayondata as consumer-driven Asian markets grow in the coming years.

Shanker said he also expected more and more Asia-based companies to innovate and develop products in the sector, given the huge potentials in the growing regional markets in the coming years.

"But Asians need mindset change and think bold and big with their inventions. There is enough talent to develop innovations from the region," he told PTI.

Taking this forward-looking and thinking approach, Crayondata has started tapping the engineering expertise from India and the brand-oriented market development from Singapore.

"Crayondata is to tap the best of both India and Singapore," Shanker added.

The Crayondata team includes co-founder Srikant Sastri, former chairman of Vivaki India, a solutions-integrated marketing service company in India.