Prabook – Prabook is an English-language, web-based, open-content collaborative biographical encyclopedia.

Startup Name: Prabook

Tagline: Prabook is an English-language, web-based, open-content collaborative biographical encyclopedia.

Elevator Pitch: Prabook is an English-language, web-based, open-content collaborative biographical encyclopedia, comprising over 3 million people. It’s owned, developed and supported by World Biographical Encyclopedia, Inc., located in New York, United States.

Unlike other biographical encyclopedias, Prabook gives its users the ability to put in the database profiles of people who did not have international recognition but were important for their local or professional communities, or just for other people. With Prabook, users can share worldwide articles on themselves, their ancestors, relatives or publish an article as a gift to a friend.

It also allows innovators, artistic people, and others to visualize their creative works by uploading images of paintings, designed buildings or electronic devices, etc. making Prabook a unique promotional platform for talents from all over the world and depict their life paths.

Target Market: Prabook service is targeted as follows: 1) The main target is the general public. People can share a story about relatives or themselves or create a biography as a gift to their friends. The Internet World Stats reports about 4.3 Internet users in the world, 1.1 of them are English speaking people. 2) Prabook is also targeted at top executives, artists, architects, designers, scientists, educators, lawyers, and other people who want to promote themselves or their creative works and have no chance to be in Wikipedia. According to the International Labour Organization, their number exceeds 300M in the world. 3) The last group is national, academic, and public libraries providing data to researchers. Their number in the world is more than 478,000 according to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

How will you make money?: 1) Focus on the professional audience of researchers, professors, students.
According to Prabook target audience, the project will develop in two main directions. The first one is for the professional audience of research scientists, professors, and students. The second one is media which will be focused on the general Internet audience interested in people-related news supported with biographical information.

Prabook will be developed to become one of the leaders in this market. The number of articles is planned to reach 8 million by the end of 2022; 4 million of them will only be available for subscribers. Prabook will continue to be updated with articles from English-language biographical dictionaries and “who’s who” publications. In addition, the database will be enlarged with content translated from sources that were not published in English.

2) The media part of the project will cover all popular topics. It will start with art, book, and movie news. Then the number of topics will be extended to business and economy, politics, science and technology, sports, entertainment, and others. This direction will be developed to attract big corporate advertisers as well as to keep Prabook database of popular people up to date, adding new content to existing articles or creating new entries on those who are not presented in the database yet.

How much capital have you raised?: None

Founder(s) Name: Valery Tsepkalo

Website: https://prabook.com/web/home.html

Twitter: @prabook_news

City/Country: New York, NY, United States