Sarbojeet Jana turning an abstract idea into a startup: Abstract Tube

There is no doubt that transforming an abstract idea into a reality takes some effort and in the end, if the idea catches a significant number of to-be customers’ attention, it deserves to be called as worthy of a startup venture. Sarbojeet Jana is in a mission to bring his idea of a dedicated portal for image and video sharing for students, researchers and professors alike, into reality by introducing Abstract Tube. An Ed-Tech startup based in Columbus, Ohio, is trying to simply scholastic publications via the usage of media-rich content sharing. It is no way to refute that the demand for media among Millennials is growing rapidly. If analyzing from that perspective, this company is hitting a key market niche for sure. But the question is if it will really scale up and flourish or not.

Is Abstract Tube trying to become “Imgur” for academic community? Or is it just another “Youtube” for academic community? But the core idea of Abstract Tube is far better than ResearchGate and Academia.edu to the very simple fact that it will be enriched with digital media in the form of images and videos. If considered that the videos and images are better than slideshows, then Abstract Tube is also better than SlideShare too.

Development of video abstract in scholarly publication is gaining popularity among researchers and graphical abstract submission has become a must for most of the journals. Abstract Tube portal being the confluence of all publishers’ and authors’ to-go site, a good community could be built if the business is well-managed in the long run. The citation proposal of Abstract Tube is unique and could place it to another height if it is to compare with traditional media uploading sites. All the features in Abstract Tube are unknown but this startup is surely putting more emphasis on “keywords” found in the whole article or thesis etc.

Abstract Tube is also engaged into producing video abstracts at a minimum charge of $300, which is 5X less the cost of current service providers such as “ChemistryViews”, and “ResearchSquare” etc.

One important thing that strikes the most is that if the contents in Abstract Tube will provide any monetary gain to the authors or the users. If this is something really happens, Sarbojeet Jana surely has an extra edge in moving this business further. It will be awesome to make some revenue from a video abstract of the thesis or posters presented in conferences as well as building citations on these contents. If the content monetization comes along, a lot of content creators mostly students will take content creation seriously and there will be a craving for doing better every time.

The idea of getting citation on failed-experimental graphs is also intriguing, the founder says, “Failed experiments also has some value and should be discussed in literature review”. It makes sense that every failed experiment paves the way to a successful experimental design.