Infoshare launches ‘Kavakatu’ at Microsoft ‘Accelerating Asia Pacific 2011’ summit

By Cheranka Mendis in Malaysia

Sri Lankan non-profit technology company Infoshare yesterday launched ‘Kavakatu,’ a brand new web application to monitor and evaluate projects at the Microsoft’s ‘Accelerating Asia Pacific 2011’ summit in Kuala Lumpur.

Exclusively concentrating on non-profit organisations and their activities, ‘Kavakatu’ will help the bodies to measure their social contribution and effectively carry out projects. Developed as a result of an Asia Pacific region conference organised by the company held in May this year in Colombo, the web application was created as an answer to the challenges and issues faced by non-profit organisations.

Infoshare CEO Anuruddha Edirisinghe attending the launch in KL told the Daily FT that the conference in May opened their eyes to some of the key issues faced by non-profit operating groups. Representatives of over 50 such groups was said to have attended the conference from some 30 countries in the region.

The application helps organisations track and define indicators, set targets and give updates, measure progress and track immediate outputs or strategic outcomes. It also helps organisations stay on mission, plan better and see the big picture and get a quick overview of the status of all projects. It will also help analyse in depth what’s working and what’s not and were resources should be focused.

The application is part of the company’s partnership with Microsoft under ‘app incubator’ where Infoshare develop solutions using Microsoft’s web infrastructure, technology and tools for non profits in the region.

“We work with non-profit organisations in various forms of capacity building. The conference was conducted like an open forum or a discussion where we discussed the kind of problems they undergo and what sort of solution would fit best to correct the errors,” Edirisinghe said.

Afterwards an analysis was carried out and the company came up with four concepts which they would be useful for such companies. Taking into account budget, time and most sought after application, ‘Kavakatu’ was identified as the in demand and most useful out of the four.

“This is very fundamental to non-profits irrespective of the cause they stand for. Because projects carried about such groups need to concentrate and assess the degree of its social contribution, ‘Kavakatu’ will help them find the details.”

Edirisinghe said: “It is a cliché that people always say that technology is just an enabler. ‘Kavakatu’ is also an enabler. However it is not here to replace and tell one how to do business.” The application would enable proper management of data, develop a metric and is far better at number crunching better than a human.”

The application will initially cover the 50 companies that attended the event in May by next week and depending on the feedback, modifications will be available to the public later on as well.