New Delhi: Want to befriend an IITian? Thanks to a website people can now make friends with graduates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.
Dateiitians.Com is the brainchild of three graduates from IIT Kharagpur -- Layak Singh, Kinshuk Bairagi and Nikhil Kaushik.
While Singh is the chief of operations and business management, the other two are co-founders of the portal that now boasts of 7,000 users, 35 per cent of whom are girls.
The website, which was launched in February, aims at bringing quintessential geeks to one platform and introduces them with others and share information.
"Techies are regarded to be the people who are always busy with their ideas and work, those who have little or not time to interact with people and are considered boring because of their obsessive hobby or narrow interests. We wanted to connect these geeks and let them have some fun," Singh said.
The idea to launch a website struck the trio when they were having a chat at IIT-Kharagpur that IITs do not have much girls.
"We were of the opinion that the boy to girl ratio is not good and students do not mingle easily. So to establish a connection between the IIT students, we planned to start with the online website. We, in fact, did a market survey and find out it to be a worthy initiative, thus started the making of a dedicated dating website for IITians," he said.
After an incredible response, the website is all set to go global in August.
"This is the alpha version (testing/starting phase) of the website, we are soon going to take it to the global level with its new version releasing in August, which will have many more new things and that`s a surprise," Singh said.
When the site was started, it was only open to techies and engineering professionals from IITs and IIMs but later it was open to others as they got many requests.
The website has a tie-up with about 100 Indian and foreign varsities.
Explaining the difference between the dedicated dating website for geeks and other social networking websites, Layak says, "This is different from other social websites, say such as Facebook, as there exist many fake profiles as well. Only real techies are allowed to register after a tough screening process."
PTI
