InVenture Announces New Mobile Application for Small Businesses
Friday, November 4, 2011
InVenture Announces Release New Mobile Application “InSight” for Small Businesses Worldwide
SMS System Will Offer Unique Insights Into the Inner Workings of Successful Micro-Entrepreneurs
SANTA MONICA, CA, NOVEMBER, 3 2011 – Peer-to-peer micro-investment platform InVenture is proud to announce today, “InSight”, a short messaging service (SMS) application for use by InVenture to track financial and social metrics of its micro-entrepreneur partners. Data captured by InSight will link individual micro-entrepreneur to systems for tracking and analyzing financial performance, and give online supporters valuable information for measuring the social benefit of their “InVestment.”
“InSight is a powerful tool that can work on any mobile device and provide the InVenture team with an understanding of how to further help our clients grow and be successful.” says Shivani Siroya, InVenture’s CEO and Founder.
Developed on Intuit’s txtWeb platform, micro-entrepreneurs are prompted to report their daily revenue and expenses via SMS to the InSight system. Data is tracked and analyzed by the InVenture team, and easy to understand reports are returned to the micro-entrepreneur so they can follow their growth. The data captured by InSight will also be made easily accessible by researchers, market analysts, and others interested in measuring the implications of small business growth on families living in poor communities.
Intuit’s txtWeb team is working with NGOs and social enterprises that are using SMS to reach their constituents at the base of the pyramid. The team believes that txtWeb can be a very useful platform for fast and inexpensive experiments using SMS, and that InVenture’s InSight service represents a perfect opportunity to put its technology to the test.
“The beauty of InSight lies in its simplicity. The client responds to simple prompts and the responses are organized in such a way that allows organizations to easily access and analyze from anywhere in the world.” says Rupesh Shah Corporate Sustainability Director of Intuit.
InSight will initially be rolled out to InVenture’s partner organizations in India, with Mali and Mexico to follow soon after.
“We piloted this program last Spring and the data was revelatory.” says Siroya. “Being able to track this data on a macro level will make us a more valuable partner to these businesses and ultimately help evolve the industry as a whole to become more effective and transparent,” she said, “It’s very exciting.”
For more information about InVenture, please go to www.inventure.org or follow on Twitter at @inventurefund.
