Smart Bicycles ( Old One - 2017 work )

Note - Did this as a proposal for a company that didn't go ahead, so thought of sharing it now as a use case of IoT. Post our proposal, there was a wave of connected cycle startups ( not that I am saying because of our - means my startup proposal, but a lot of work was done with connected cycle and renting platform ). Now when I look back at it, it was a good-to-have thing but might have worked for cycling enthusiasts and those with costly bicycles. 

Last-mile connectivity is still a problem and a lot of startups are working on it and are working on it. Pedl ( Zoom Car ) was one of the products pretty famous at that time ( they shut down the operation in 2018 ). Most of these startups are E-Bicycle startups like Yulu Or Zypp Electric ( not an e-scooter company but an Electric vehicle as a service company ). There are many other startups. But with connected bicycles, it would have added to the health economy of our country also ( these days, no one wants to walk - one can say that we don't have good roads to walk on and specifically these startups - e-bikes - are there everywhere on the pathways also ). But assume government policies like that in every major startup hub - only cycles allowed or public transport, then we are enforcing a good habit ( focus on the word enforcing and good ). Probably, I will write in detail about the end-mile connectivity startups in my next blog. Till then enjoy a small piece on one of the IoT implementations. 

Connected Cycles - Another use case of IoT

In this busy schedule of 8 am to 5 pm, one thing that people are most worried about is health. With the kind of diet, pressure in the office, and daily busy routine, it's a bit difficult to manage health properly. Where it's a bit more physical to run daily, people prefer cycling, swimming, or some physical gaming activity. When we talk about cycling, most of us from childhood use that as a mode of commuting from our home to school or even to our colleges.

In this new era of technology, with the available resources people are interested to see how they are doing in every particular field how much they are spending on daily household groceries, how many hours they are spending while commuting, or how their car is performing. Similarly, people who do cycling as a hobby would like to see how much effort they are putting in while cycling, how much energy they are burning, and what the last route they took, in fact, they would like to share the same with their fellow cyclist just to see the comparison in the performance.

Proposed Device 

Mountable device A battery / Solar powered power device with AES encryption, built-in GPRS / Bluetooth connectivity for uplink connectivity, an automated lock, and the following sensors. 

1. Accelerometer 
2. GPS 
3. Gyroscope.

Hardware features would have been 

1. Low-power device with battery backup and Solar charging 
2. Uplink - 4G or Bluetooth-based (Bluetooth-based wouldn't have worked for an anti-theft feature or tracking feature ). 
3. A robust - IP67 kind of enclosure 

Data collected by the device from all these sensors is pushed to the connected cycle platform in real time using GPRS or using Bluetooth to the user's mobile phone and from there to the central cloud using 4G/5G (whenever there is activity in the sensor). Once data is received on the server, multiple types of analytics can run on top of the data collected like the amount of calories burnt, performance of the cycle, requirement of service, and usage. The same data is also made available over the Android application for the user along with other relevant data.

Old design - Didn't think of the lock system. 

New designs by startups working in smart bicycle lock space - like ilockit ( image credit to ilockit team )

One question can be why not simply use a mobile phone application to monitor how much distance I have traveled or how many calories I have burned. The answer is simple, yes you can, but with a device fitted to cycle, you can have a lock also and an anti-theft feature. 

Connected bicycle platform 

A connected bicycle platform where data from the devices collected can be stored, analyzed, and displayed. The same platform also exposes REST API following API first methodology (it gives us leverage to develop other applications as well as distribute the data to the users to develop their own dashboard - more user engagement).

Features 

1. User IoT sensor data display - Display of data pushed by the application like real-time position (accurate position with the help of Assisted GPS), average speed, distance traveled, any incident of fall, battery consumption, usage, calories burnt, and requirement of bike servicing. 
2. Cyclist community - Organise and share the cycling event in the community, invite other users, share the experience, share moments, and rent / Exchange cycles. Share real-time weather data, organize events, and meetups, invite non-cyclists to join the network, and share your thoughts. 
3. Cycle insurance, service  Track real-time usage of the cycle, real-time location, prevent theft, and crash alerts, see nearby service centers in the city, arrange pick-up for service, see the latest offers, and buy insurance for your cycle.

Home Automation using Raspberry Pi - Part 2 - Developing web-app

Wrote this back in 2017. A lot has changed since then, but still worth publishing. Made a video, but unable to locate it. 

Developing a Web app for Home Automation 

In my previous blog, I discussed one of the most interesting applications of IOT - Home automation and the reason behind why I am building such a project despite the fact that it is nothing new and a lot of people have done that previously and the answer was a curiosity to implement technology in daily use. I work in one of the best IOT startups based out of Bangalore and have learned a lot in the last 3 years i.e. Product development, Hardware, Firmware, and a bit about web-application.
Web applications play a major role in any of the IOT applications as they provide an interface to interact with the device i.e. that device can be a device that we are trying to control or a device that is sending data to a remote server. Below is a short description of the data flow from the device to the server and from the server to the device.

Although I never worked in depth on any of the applications (except some that I developed for myself), I find this project to be a base where I can try implementing some of what I have learned. 

As I discussed in my previous blog DIY type projects are quite different from what we use to develop in any company, here while discussing the web app, we will not be doing the optimally best code with all the possible features, but initially, we will try to make it work and then later on we will keep on adding different features like SSL or OAuth based API's like this. Please pardon me if my way of coding seems to be too repetitive.

Web-app  

Front-end - I am using Material Design Lite  - UI developed using MDL literally looks good without investing much in CSS. For asynchronous communication with the server, I thought of using AJAX or JS. 

(a) Using Ajax, a request to the server can be made in the background to get the latest state of the device i.e. if someone at home has turned OFF / ON the device manually, that state needs to be reflected on the web app. 

(b) Using JS to receive the data from the backend and change the state of the radio button accordingly. 

Probably i will create two working branches of the code i.e. one with Ajax and one with JS. As of now, i will go with option (b), as it is relatively easy for me to write a code in python and pass it to a JS using Jinja. Below is a small pictorial description of what i explained above. 

Back-end - I am using a combination of Python, Nginx, Flask, and MySQL for server-side coding. I learned most of it from Digitalocean post on how to create web-application. I have been doing Python for some time. Also in my present startup, i always come across Python code base for the gateway, so it's relatively easy for me (yes for me only, most of the people I know work with PHP). 

API first should have been the approach that I should have taken if I had been writing this to be distributed as a service or product. But as I am doing this only for my personal use, for web-application, it would be a normal request but for Android applications, I have to write apis. And when it comes to API, you need to take care of security (I have to do more research and reading on the same). I am still in the process of learning more about API's. While working with Flask + Python, you will get a lot of support in writing API with all the related issues being taken care  of like 

1. Flaskapi.org 
2. Flask Restfull 
3. Building API's under 30 lines of code using Flask Restfull 

Moving ahead of APIs, when we consider hardware running a small stack of software that will actually control the appliances, we need to think about "how to pass the information from the server to the device". Well there are multiple ways to tackle this problem and I will discuss in detail with respect to them in my next blog post on Hardware (Hardware as in RPI + relay board + small piece of software), but still in order to get that done, I need the counterpart on the server.  As this post is on the web, I will focus mostly on the web par (APIs do come under this) but still focus should be on the web app. 

To make it look more professional, I will create a login / sign-up page which will let me use a combination of login ID and password to make it secure. Also, going ahead, we can make the landing page more systematic like Places --> home/office --> appliances. 

Moving ahead, I have chosen Mysql as a database and not any other time series database because here the velocity of data is too low, and of all, we are not storing but updating the records, so Mysql seems to be the best choice. Now in the future, if this same server, is to be used to calculate the energy consumption of a house, then we have to store the ON/OFF state for the full day and then at the last of the day, run a script to calculate the net electricity consumed (yes - of course it will some more coding or you can say lot of coding - like storing the power ratings of the appliance, then for each user, each appliance, calculate the energy consumption, then for a person calculate the electricity consumed and then email / sms him etc. 

Below is the snapshot of the working of the web app and corresponding changes on the back-end DB. As of now, this is running locally in my system. Once this all is tested, will deploy it in the server and start using it. 

 

NCR Air Pollution - Claming diwali not a contributor to NCR Air pollution problem would be wrong

NCR Air Pollution 

It would really be a stupid point if we claim that Diwali don't contribute to the pollution fiasco and our failure to control pollution. It would be more like giving a excuse of your stupidity by comparing it to the others, but i would also like to emphasis on the selective biasing of the people towards Diwali and all the fuzz around social media. Here is an article which talks about the major reasons contributing to the air pollution  and yes pollution due to fire crackers contribute significantly to this but air pollution start increase post diwali from October 25th  because of change in weather patters. 

People now days are more aware of the fact that air around them is polluted. You can verify this by looking at the increase in the sales number of Indoor Air purifier ( 18-25% increase in sales in winter season ) and that is the reason, people have moved away from burning crackers . Here is article which talk about post-diwali  AQI of 2018 and 2019 which was 642 in 2018 and 368 in 2019. Though this 2 year AQI don't define what will happen next year, but i think people know that this pollution is going to impact their children a lot and they don't want a bad future for their children's. What is needed is a reform on micro-level making people understand the impact of air pollution just like GOI has done for open defecation.

Diwali happened to be a festival during the start of winter season where temperature start decreasing, moisture content start increase and wind speed near the surface of the air decrease ( obvious as there is very little difference between the surface temperature and high altitude temperature ). We have observed this phenomenon in Bangalore while running a experiment. In the day time, the number of PM10 particles count ( 1 hour average - 3 minute sensing ) was lesser as compared to the night time and the reason behind this was ( as mentioned in the previously was presence of air moisture and warm air near the surface ( Bangalore is not too cold even in winters and thus there is some difference between the air near to the surface and air at 1000 meter height ) which is not the case in the NCR region.  I have done similar kind of experiment in Kanpur before Diwali and during Diwali. Below is the graph representing PM2.5 and PM10 values in outskirts of Kanpur in the month of June.

Here is the link to the trail of tweets during my experiment of Air Quality last year in the month of November. I wanted to extend this experiment by deploying more number of static air quality monitor in Kanpur just like Skymet has done now in Delhi i.e. monitoring hyper-local air quality in Delhi and doing analysis along with other factors like Temperature, Humidity and density of vehicles in the vicinity thus reaching a conclusion if peak time impact the air pollution. Here is the link to Skymet android app. This kind of experiment will help the local government to find the sources of pollution and then take measures to reduce it. I am not going to point out possible solution to this problem because i think there are people with far more knowledge and experience but i think, evey individual has to contribute their bit in the fight against the pollution. I have done my bit by saying big NO to crackers from last 3 years and i have plans to do local workshops in Kanpur to raise awareness towards  pollution.


Now coming to the reason behind writing a articles on air pollution all of sudden, one friend of mine asked a very valid question that where all this pollution goes. I have some understanding that heavy particles eventually settle down but what about other gaseous pollutants like NO2, SO2, PM1 and PM2.5? I am raising this question to all the experts out there to help me understand what happen to the produced pollution? Does it literally settle down ? We all know the hole in Ozone layer. I read a really interesting article which discussed in detail about how Particulate matter settle down indoor, but i am not sure if that stand true for outdoor.

Link to a online book for those who want to under particulate material in depth ( no i didn't went through it ).

I am contributing my bit to fight against Air pollution and would request all those who are reading this article to spread awareness about Air pollution at their level. 

Belated Happy Diwali to all. 

Home Automation using Raspberrypi - One of the most interesting application of IOT.

Home Automation using IOT 

Hello friends. Starting a new technical blog series on home automation using IOT (Internet of Things). And this time not something like which i had done a long time back i.e. control a AC appliance(refrigerator) using a SIM900 GPRS module, Arduino UNO and text SMS and later tested the same with HC-05 bluetooth module and an android application. This story started a long time back (almost 3.5 years back), when i started working with Rajeev on a remote basis and we were developing "some" home automation device - something like Wemo Switch from Belkin.  And no wonder, we were able to control the device. I lost the video though or other wise i would have uploaded it here. 

Wemo switch from Belkin

Side View of proposed device

front view of proposed device

How it look in actual

At that point of time, building such thing was more of your passion rather than building a startup out of it. You do a lot of research for sales, hardware and even take stupid decisions (like buy a electric imp device and then loose it somewhere, Rajeev was so angry!!!!). 

But now when you had some hold-on on the hardware, you understand things a bit more, you understand what a product which can be used by general public and users is, you can clearly differentiate the DIY and a "product". So what i am trying to write about here is a DIY project which probably only i will use but yes, i can feel that this will be useful for me. Now question is why am writing a blog on home-automation and why even i am doing this when a lot of people have done this earlier and my answer is "out of curiosity and to apply IOT in day-to-day life and make things easy " I am designing it for myself as i am planning to do some Agriculture / Hydroponics related stuff at my home and in that, i would require some thing like continuous monitoring and remote control and secondly sometime i become too much lazy that after reading a book, i don't want to get-up from the bed and turn the light "OFF".

Company where i presently work do continuous monitoring but that is what i call as "Product" because 100's of people use it on a daily basis and what i am trying to create here is more of my personal usage i.e. it will not be required to handle "x" amount of traffic, i will not write workers queues to manage different jobs, i will not optimise my Mysql performance, i will not use a time series DB, i will not use any kind of load balancing stuff here and not even two layer authentication for API's (yes when you work in a startup with guys like Rajeev - you know some stuff about web-designing also). 

So this time, i would create a small home automation using a combination of 

1. RPI
2. WiFi / Ethernet 
3. Bluetooth
4. A 5V 230 V relay, some other hardware 
5. And an simple web / android application

I will try to go as much as detail in possible (there are many existing home automation projects in net and here is one of the link) and will push code to a  git repository . I will start first with controlling a AC appliance with RPI GPIO and later on i will try to make RPI as a hub and communicate to the other switched via Bluetooth or other communication options. I will try to do this systematically and will keep on adding the information here also.  In-fact i already started coding a bit for web-application and made a small web-page using MDL (Material Design Lite). Although the UI don't seems to be good, but i am working on it and will try to make it more aesthetically pleasing. 

A sample UI for the home automation project using MDL

I will divide this blog into some parts

1. Web-application
2. Hardware
3. Android Application - Will take help of my brother Ravi who is a Android Developer 
4. Complete set-up
5. Introducing bluetooth in the scene for making RPI as hub. 

Pathankot attacks - Technology would have helped.

Adapting new technology can be of help

First of all, my deepest condolences to the families of all martyrs who died fighting for the country during pathankot attacks and i just want to clarify that i am from a defence family and i always appreciate what soldiers do for their nation being on the front line while we live a peaceful life in our homes.

Recently i was talking to one of my friend during this new year and when this Pathankot attack happen and it was really devastating when you hear about the people who die during these attacks. First of all, i would not like to make it a political topic, so no point discussing that why these kind of incidents always happen after someone from India visit Pakistan, you take example of Kargil war or pathankot attacks. Many newspaper talked about the security lapses after this attack.  Well, as per me, the major concern which everyone should have, that if the most important military bases which are on the front line like Pathankot  are not secure then what about the other military installations. 

Myself being from technical background always think about how technology can help in these kind of situations if our armed forces are properly trained to use them. 

(1) During the kargil attacks, i was so affected to hear about the Indian army casualties, that i thought that why cannot a drone or UAV  cannot be used during these kind of fights. 

(2) When Mumbai attacks happen, i saw some of the videos, that a army personnel is using a long stick to see inside the window where terrorist have taken place, the also i though, why cannot advance robotics can come into action. 

I know, situations in war jones or during these kind of attacks are not like what we think of. There is a tense and environment of urgency during those kind of situations. Army personals or defense personal have to take quick actions and some time have to put up there life on the line. But my point is aren't they trained for these kind of situations. Or cannot be put some more effort in training our commandos and army personal to use technology while tackling these kind of situations. There is a huge possibility that Indian defense might be using these kind of technologies. 

In my thoughts if latest technology would have been used, Pathankot attacks would have been succeeded and all those who died in these attacks wouldn't have died, very specifically Col. Niranjan. 

How technology can be useful. 

• Use of Defense Database and Image processing system - On a approx basis, i think, no of higher ranking officials in India would not be more then 5 lakh to 6 lakh. Why can't indian government can make a huge database. In that case, terrorist who entered Pathankot defense land using Police SP car would have entered. How? Face scanning using DIP would have come into action here. I know it can be a tricky application. Putting together all the officials name in a DB and sharing it with some organization is just like putting too much at risk, but then technology have played role. 

• Use of Robotics in bomb diffusing -  Long time back, i had seen a movie Transporter movie. In that movie they had used a robot to open the door of a minivan. Why cannot we use robots in diffusing or scanning bombs. Means here is my main questions which i want to ask and in any case i am not doubting the patriotism and heroism of  Indian soldiers. Why don't indian army use robots in defusing bomb and why Col. Niranjan have to take action in defusing the booby trap. He was a big asset of Indian Army and NSG who was specialist in defusing bombs. He was also in action during Mumbai attacks. As per me, he wouldn't have died but again in war zone or during these kind of attacks, anything can happen. Now how robotics can be of use? Simply search for Hand gesture based robot control and you will get lot of results.

1. Gesture based robot control with video 
2. Bomb defusing robot - how it work
3. Two robot based bomb defusing
4. UK army bomb defusing robot
5. Bomb defusing - evolution 
6. Bomb Defusing robot from Johns hopkins researchers
7. And the best thing is i find a DRDO (Defense research development organization) based robot for bomb defusing called as Daksh ROV.  Really this is amazing, when it was handed over to Indian Army, why it is still not in use???Question remain the same? Why technology is not used effectively in these kind of situations? And here is the video of DAKSH in action 

• Use of UAV's in area scanning - With companies like IdeaForge in existence, why don't we use their quadcopters/UAV's in scanning the area and then taking some action? Here is a video which demonstrate how Quadcopters can be useful in these operations. 

And there are lot of others idea people and GOI can come with, in order to make Indian Army and NSG commandos more effective during these kind of operation. These kind of operations effect everyone in the nation. When some soldier die, people feel the pain of family who lost their son and there is nation wide mourning. I can only hope, that technology will be used in a better and enhanced manner in up-coming operations.

Jain Hind, Jai Bharat. 

Indoor Irrigation Project - Technical Blog

Indoor Irrigation Project - Use case of IOT(Internet of Things)

What when you are out of home on a long holiday or if you forgot to plant you trees from a long time and you love doing indoor and outdoor gardening but don’t have time to water  your plants due to busy schedule.At present IOT (Internet of things ) is one of the most interesting topics.Many companies are working on IOT to provide smart gardening solutions and  i can name some of them here. 

1. Greenopia - They are developing smart pots for planting your trees as well as they provide online advice  for planting different trees. Based out of Bangalore, they raised money via crowd-funding and people all across country supported them. 
2. Clickandgrow - Another smart gardening kit like greenopia. 
3. Edyn - Earlier know as SoilIq, i saw their website almost 2.5 years back when their founders were explaining there product in some event and from then they had grown a lot. They provide solar powered solution for smart gardening coupled with their app.  
4. Daisy  - A project hosted on Indiegogo for smart watering of plants. 
5. Plantlink - A wireless soil moisture sensor coupled with a central coordinator for smart watering of plants. 
6. Biptonics -   provide their smart router and cloud to which you can plug you own sensor or provide your own readings and manage your garden from a web-browser. 
7. Botanicals - Smart gardening kit by sparkfun - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10334
8. Koubachi - A wifi based plant sensor which measure T, RH and Lux , determine the need of the plant and send notification based on them. 
9. Cooking hacks open garden project - They had provided a excellent document on how to use their hardware along with software to make a smart indoor garden using Arduino. 
10. Instructables for Indoor Gardening - A open source platform where people share their ideas and work . This section is devoted to Indoor gardening. 
11. Click and Grow - A project based on Spark wifi module for smart gardening inside your house in a mobile garden. Interesting project. 
12. Groove Ecosystem - A complete grow bed which provide you a indoor garden coupled with LED grow lights and a aquarium, connected via Wifi to a cloud server which provide you, your garden data in real time on a app. App has many features like you can get to know the health of your plants by taking a pic. 
13. Niwaone - A similar kind of project like Groove.

What i am sharing here is a project which i did almost 2 years back on Indoor Gardening based on IOT - Internet of things. Internet of things let you access real time data from anywhere using internet. Data from the environment is sensed by the sensor , provided to the controller. Controller then transfer the same data to the cloud using any communication option like GPRS, Wifi, Bluetooth etc to the cloud server. From cloud server the same data can be published using Android application. 

I did this project  using bluetooth communication. I used open source hardware Arduino,  HC-05 bluetooth module, relay , soil moisture sensor, 16x2 LCD and a dc water pump to water the plant. Below are some of the components which i used. 

And below is the whole set-up which i did.

You can clearly see the LCD displaying the values of moisture of the soil. The readings of the Soil moisture sensor are send to the android application using bluetooth and depending on user , a DC motor can be turned ON or OFF. But this lead to a limitation of user interaction and that is why 2 modes were provided, fully autonomous mode, in which you can set up range, so that is moisture goes below the  range, DC pump will be turned ON automatically. 

Generally when dealing with the smart gardening or IOT based indoor gardening, there are basically 3 parameters which need to be monitored and measured. 

1. Soil Moisture - This need to be calibrated by planting the sensor in dry soil and then measuring the sensor readings and then planting the sensor in wet-soil  .Depending on the readings we can provide water to the plant using a small water pump controlled by the Arduino via relay. 

         Soil moisture sensor à Arduino à Relay à Water Pump.

1. Surrounding Temperature and Humidity - Surrounding T and RH play a major role. These parameters also need to be maintained. For  a DIY purpose DHT22 or DHT11 will work perfectly fine.   
2. Lux  or light intensity  - This can be measure using ISL29023 sensor.

          ISL29023 flux sensor à Arduino à Relay à Florescent lamp.

 Here is a screenshot of the app which was developed by Ravi Kumar who is a friend of mine and a professional Android app developer. I am sharing git repo link for the code used in this project . 
https://github.com/shailendra0408/Indoor-Irrigation-Project-

 Below are 2 videos which demonstrate the working IIP project. 

                                     

Initial Marketing and Sales Strategy for start-ups

Start-up Gyan - Some Initial Sales and Marketing strategies for startups. 

Being one of fan of Steve Jobs, i will start with a quote(Source), quoted by him for people who simply love what they do in their job either you work in a start-up or a corporate world. Well being working in a start-up where you don't have a defined responsibilities unlike that in a corporate. And of those, if you are working in a hardware startup,  your responsibilities increase. Starting from finding a nail in busy SP road or a fabricator in Peenya or finding a PCB manufacturing guy in Vijaynagar or finding a corporate customer across nation(Sales) or marketing your firm across facebook or twitter or linkedin or instagram, you have to participate in everything. Well of all, Marketing and Sales are one of the key areas where more focus is required. Being in a start-up, i find it worthwhile to share  some of my experiences which might be useful for my fellow mates in the same field, although thoughts put here are quite common. 

Any start-up in its early stage of bootstrapping have a limited budget of marketing as most of it is consumed in product development that include salaries, office space and other related stuff. So i will focus my blog mainly on the bootstrapping stage where marketing is not given much of the budget unlike in corporates where modes like PPC work a lot.  Generally at  this point of time, digital marketing and some PR do the work. When we talk about digital marketing we talk about posting on various social media platforms like facebook, Google+, twitter, instagram, quora i.e. where we are socially active. So as per me, these social media platform would be the first goal for starting digital marketing. 

(1) Facebook - Post regarding your start-up and product you are making in the related pages, communities and groups. Ask you friend to promote your page. Use all your connection. "Yes" be blunt, you might be making your personal life to commit suicide but all is fare in start-up(On a funny note, generally people keep their private life separate from professional). Always  post relevant article and always don't market yourself or otherwise you will be banned from the group. Don't spam. Also always tag important parameters inside your post, it help you getting shown in result when someone search for it. 

(2) Google +  - With Google putting effort on Google+, its quote interesting platform. #Tagging is must here and believe me, it help a lot in google SEO. I am speaking this with my personal experience. Become part of the communities in the google+ is a good start.  

(3) LinkedIn -  For getting in touch with people who are more interested in technology, LinkedIn is a good platform. A good amount of technology oriented people and people who are specialized in their spectrum generally hangout here, so there is a good probability of your start-up getting viewed by corporate bosses. 

(4) Twitter - Twitter is just like making your native followers who are really interested in your work. Now Twitter has also started its marketing and some people some how provide followers and ask for money, but believe me, twitter is a place where you like to have your own followers. #Tagging work here too. 

(5) Quora -  Quora is a also a place where many people hang around but it is considered not a very productive place. Having your team blog here and sharing your experiences work. I hadn't done any marketing 

(6) Youtube -  Uploading some of the videos related to your product help a lot in attracting your customer towards you. You can explain a idea or product in a better way using a video as compared to a article. Platforms like Powtoon help you create free videos upto some limits. 

(7) Slideshare -  Slideshare, a sister platform of LinkedIn. It is also a major platform which indirectly help you do your start-up SEO in the same platform using #tags. More clicks and more audience and people who hangout on slideshare are not like the audience on FB, they are equivalent to those of LinkedIn. 

So this is about some of social media platform where i had some experience. There are  more platform which  are quote famous but i don't have any relevant experience of the same like PINTEREST and INSTAGRAM

Some other way's of doing free digital marketing 

(A) Forums related to your start-up and explaining about your product

(B) SPAMMING (oops, i hadn't done this , but if you have a mailing list of your prospective audience, you can try that). MailChimp help you do so easily. It help you create beautiful templates either by using their UI or if you talented enough  then uploading your own HTML. 

(C) Blogging -  Writing blog about your start-up and sharing them on the Social Media platform is a also a good way to do digital marketing. If some one from your team know SEO, Blogger can itself can provide you a good reach. Here is the blogger help on the same and one more blog to do SEO in your blog.   

(D) PR - Getting published in some of the start-up related sites like YourStory and others give your start-up lot of traction in the eyes of people working in startup eco-system and VC's and believe me, mouth-to-mouth marketing is the most effective marketing. Get in touch with bloggers who write about start-up domain and domain in which you are working and tell them your story. Every reporter want a story to write, if your startup seems interesting to them, they will write about you. 

(E) Participate in Hackathons and Related Events -  when you talk about your start-up in these events and hackathons, it leaves a long lasting impression. So take part in as many as possible events and talk about yourself. Do chest beating about your product and be confidence (For your reference over-confidence and confidence are two different things ). 

Well at last, it all marketing depend on what kind of product you are developing and how effective it is. Is is really changing life of some people around you and making it simple. More impressive your product is, more effective will be the marketing as it is all about your start-up. 

So this all about Marketing. I didn't discussed about sales, as it is really a complex thing. I would only like to say few words about sales at start-up stage where you are the one who is making the engine from scratch "talk to more and more people and that is the best thing you  can do". Marketing lead sales take some time to play it roles but don't wait for that, wiite more and more mails and talk to more and more peoples. 

I might have missed many points, but this is all i have to share at present. Have a good day. Happy start-uping .........