In the coming Startup Saturday in Bangalore (Feb 14 ’09), we would have Sumeet Anand, the founder and CEO of Kreeo – a Product Startup in the knowledge management space demonstrating with us. You can see passion ooze out of Sumeet as he speaks about Kreeo and his entrepreneurial journey.

The Concept: When you first start learning about a subject, you generally do a study of your own and then go ahead to ask few experts on the topic. What Kreeo is basically into is this methodology of knowledge distribution, for which a very generic term suggested by them is ‘collective intelligence’. In fact, Sumeet went on to explain that Kreeo is much more than that.

When you do a search on Google, you get numerous pages with the same content just because each of the content is on a different site. On the other hand, when you go ahead with Wikipedia for your knowledge search, you get content which basically ‘created’ by a few and mostly ‘updated’ by many. Kreeo is a hybrid of both of these plus something that they call as BOK or a Body of Knowledge. Sumeet refers to this as a part of Web 3.0. Sumeet will be demonstrating how this is done during the event. All of this has been made using Open Source Standards and there are versions available for free and premium users.

The customer that Kreeo aims to address is an enterprise which needs consolidated and a highly powerful knowledge management software. The common man, as per Sumeet, is a user, but the customers, are the enterprises from whom they get cash for their product and services.

Fully funded by self and a few trusted friends, Kreeo has not yet taken any VC’s help nor got incubated. Sumeet has been planning this since more than five years and even while he was about to quit his job, he went on train himself in relevant technologies so as to minimize his costs. He has a bunch of self-motivated folks working with him, who fight with their families and friends because of a lesser salary, but work with Kreeo because they believe in Kreeo. Well thats so typical of startups, isn’t it?

Sumeet also teaches Knowledge Management at the International School of Business and Media, Bangalore. He is now strategically tied up with some more startups to help them improve their services using knowledge management from Kreeo, while adding more value and usability to Kreeo.

The success of Kreeo can be gauged by the number of users they have developed, mostly outside India, who keep nudging them for more. You get more than couple of a million hits on Google for Kreeo! You can find Kreeo in almost all forums and all this without a dedicated PR in the company – it’s the customers/users who have done it all for them. They recently got featured on WatBlog and have captured prime slots in the television media.

Sumeet says he quit his job the very next day after watching the movie “Rang de Basanti“. Wow, so there is finally someone who took action after the inspiration. He is a believer. “The Youth”, he says have the “choice and power”. Lets exercise this freedom.

The name “Kreeo” is created through combination of two words “Creo” & “Kriya”, the former is a latin word meaning “to create” and the latter is a sanskrit word meaning “activity”, thus Kreeo stands for creating knowledge through the activity of networking and collaboration. It is fed on a knowledge aggregation model with a human filter and a co-creation aspect. They are confident of riding over this recession and breaking even with their existing customer base, without external funding.

The journey of Kreeo is worth listening to and the coming Startup Saturday is going to be one filled with stories of guts and emotion of a team that treaded the path without a VC and has a concept that can revolutionize the way we learn from the web. Make sure you visit the Kreeo team on this Valentine’s day – after all, startups all about passion!

Kreeo!!!