Somewhere in Net Limited, a company operating the World’s largest Bangla Social Media community is the first and only company from Bangladesh to be a winner of the prestigious Red Herring Award.
Through an event in Shanghai on the 16th of November 2010, Red Herring announced its Top 100 Asia Award in recognition of the leading private companies from Asia.
Red Herring’s business technology team is dedicated to cover innovation, technology, financing and entrepreneurial activity. As such, the editorial team of the media company has been surveying entrepreneurship around the world on a regular basis for the past ten years. Recognizing the level of innovation and entrepreneurship that is transforming business, around 100 companies from each continent is awarded the prize each year.
This year Somewhere In Net is the first ever company from Bangladesh to win the award. “As the pioneer in creating social media and online communities for Bangladesh where the number of Internet users may grow with 2,000% by 2020, I think our practical way of creating services in Bangla with easy mobile access was well received,” said Arild Klokkerhaug, Head of Opportunities of Somewhere in Net.
The company, which was initiated in 2005 in Dhaka, develops and operates the World’s largest Bangla Social Media Platform, including the popular Bangla Blog community www.somewhereinblog.net and www.aawaj.com, a popular location based community for activity sharing, allowing easy Bangla text entry and SMS-to-web features. Every month the platform sees more than 750,000 visits and displays more than 7,500,000 pages to Bangla speaking users accessing the services through web or mobile.
“We believe Somewhere in Net embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture, “said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. ” Somewhere in Net should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong,” he added.
“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” Vieux went on. “The Top 100 Winners emerged after narrowing down a list of nearly 1,000 highly promising tech startups from all over Asia,” he informed.
Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Asia.
Becoming a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs, Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.
