TruTamil release
For Immediate Release

By Naomi Grossman

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. " Three years ago, there were two conflicting forces that impelled Raja Seshadri to develop ndxCards, note taking software that he created for his company, TruTamil LLC: his daughter and the extensive travel he did as an independent IT consultant.

Seshadri's daughter was in high school then and his observations of how she took notes for her papers frustrated him. "She was taking good notes on index cards and then they became useless," he said. "It didn't seem to make sense to me. I was looking for software to help take notes and get organized and help with presentations but there wasn't anything simple [available]."

At the time, Seshadri, who is now 54, was traveling weekly from his home in Arizona to New York for a client. In the post-Sept. 11 world, travel was time consuming and Seshadri found himself with a lot of down time waiting in airports. He began thinking of ways to help his daughter.

He soon had a product that he showed to some friends. "I thought it was just for my daughter, not for my business," he said.

But when an IT company in Australia happened to see ndxCards and said it wanted to buy it, Seshadri realized he was onto something.

Seshadri spent the next two years selling individual units of ndxCards, while trying to figure out how to quit his day job. Last spring he decided to go for broke. With a second mortgage in hand, he hired three consultants in India to develop the latest of ndxCards. He is also in the process of putting together a marketing team and is talking to various distributors in the United Kingdom and Australia about a partnership. In the United States, Seshadri is going after the community college student market " which numbers 10 million " with a goal to have ndxCards become part of a class curriculum.
Three teachers are currently using the software to teach their courses.

"Community colleges teach how to be a college student," said Seshadri. "The big universities do also but most students there know already. NdxCards could be a teaching tool. If I get a dozen colleges, I can afford to market to college bookstores and English departments."

According to Seshadri, ndxCards is very different from a standard word processor. "It's like having an index card at your disposal," he said. "It's there when you turn on your computer." A user can type into the cards, or cut and paste from another document or a Web site and then store the card in a marked folder. The system will recognize shorthand and abbreviations and spell check the notes. Cards can be selected based on subject, keywords or date of use and can be "spread out" to work with. "It makes note taking very easy," said Seshadri.

It is perhaps ironic that Seshadri's career has taken on a decidedly high-tech focus considering that he spent the better part of his early years "fighting against being a technical person," he said.

After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras in 1973 Seshadri came to the University of Wisconsin to get a master's degree in industrial engineering. Seshadri then worked at the university to save up money to travel around the United States. He got as far as Texas before his money ran out. "I wanted to see the country," he said.

He sold his car and took a job as a waiter but eventually a former classmate convinced him to come work for Wisconsin's Department of Health. For the next three years Seshadri worked on managing Medicaid and the state's health policy, but by 1979 Seshadri said he got tired of the politics. "I wanted to help people but [everything] was moving to the right," he said. "The newly elected people didn't seem to care."

Seshadri took a job with Honeywell in Minnesota in its IT department. He spent the next 20 years with the massive technology and manufacturing company working in different departments. About six years ago, after a number of changes at Honeywell, Seshadri decided it was time to move on and become an independent consultant. By the time he left, he was responsible for a group in Arizona that was focused on improving efficiency within the company's commercial aerospace division.

Meanwhile, Seshadri started TruTamil in 1992 when he wanted his daughter to learn her mother tongue. He had been helping to teach her and other local Indian kids how to read and write Tamil but his handwriting, he said, was not good. He wrote a software program that developed Tamil fonts and his friends recommended he sell it.

"This was before everyone had PCs," said Seshadri. "I marketed it half-heartedly." Seshadri placed a few small ads in the back of some Indian publications and orders trickled in. Eventually, Seshadri stopped marketing the software altogether " although he still offers the products on his Web site " as other companies began to develop font software. "By this time others were creating fonts," said Seshadri. "Mine were better but I just intended to fill a vacuum."

The company name has remained, however, because when the Australian company wanted to buy ndxCards Seshadri was caught off guard. "The company said we'd like to buy some licenses. What's your company? So, all I had was TruTamil.
The deal gave me the incentive to make a product."

Within a week of that deal, Seshadri put together a Web site and was selling an average of five to 10 units a month.

Slowly, traffic increased and Seshadri began cutting down his consulting hours as he worked on improving on the first version of ndxCards.

As sales steadily increased, Seshadri realized that the cards were no longer just a hobby. By the spring of 2005, a decision had to be made. "I saw it was taking too much time to get returns on my investment," he said. "I had to decide if this is the business I'm in."

It is now. Seshadri said the latest version of ndxCards has outlining tools, can develop a draft and can "shuffle" cards. For the college student, it also has tools for references and citations and a sources tool for reporters who wants to list where they got their information. "To me, as far as this product is concerned, it has significant potential," said Seshadri. "Even if we get a small piece of the community college student market in the United States, the business will take off."