Honestcollars

honestcollars is a startup based in Bangalore, India that focuses on organising the interior design sector. It uses SMW as the main software for its site.

About the startup
The idea behind honestcollars is to improve the customer experience while doing interiors. Honestcollars identifies good modular companies and interior designers and partners with them. They also standardise the materials used and pre-negotiate the prices with these partners.

About the founders
The founders of this startup, Nischay and Rajat, were friends from school and always thought of starting up something new, so when they came up with honestcollars they wanted to fast-forward from idea to public-beta phase. They decided that MediaWiki with Semantic MediaWiki and other extensions was the best choice for this. The site was created on August, 2014 and has been live since then.

Nischay Nahata is a programmer and has done a lot of work on wikis. He started working on Semantic MediaWiki as a Google Summer of Code student in 2012, with the project "Green SMW". He then worked with the Wikimedia Foundation for a short time. He has also contributed to existing MediaWiki extensions and created new MediaWiki extensions as part of many freelancing projects. Rajat Garodia comes from a commerce background with a lot of experience in field work with taxation, subsidies, etc.

Usage of SMW
The site uses a very simple structure for its data, with templates for partner's profiles. Most of the data is stored as property values. All of the data comes from one source, so it is stored locally in spreadsheets and then entered using custom scripts which parse CSV files and create pages using the MediaWiki API.