If you are an entrepreneur, emerging or established and looking at different online avenues to connect with potential investors or say other like-minded individuals, the most common way to do this is the old fashioned way, send an e-mail. The alternate way would be to either add on Facebook or connect through LinkedIn.  Now, Facebook and LinkedIn are very limited when it comes to facilitating collaboration and effective communication within people from the same eco-system. You can connect with other people with these platforms, but to go to the next step, which is to collaborate they often migrate to other platforms. Lava People aims to solve this pain-point. Lava People is a social network/ online hub for the entrepreneurial community to thrive and facilitate interaction.

We recently met the founders of Lava People, Bart Beukers and Ivan Roth, where they shared with us their vision on a platform that connects entrepreneurs and allows them to innovate and collaborate. As we all know, entrepreneurs drive growth, innovation and employment and changes the way we do things and it’s only by bringing them together we can create a major change and lava people aims to precisely make that happen through their platform.Lava people aims to facilitate engagement within the startup eco-system through three different levels:

Connect with like-minded entrepreneurs: Meet new people that are relevant for your business through Lava People’s matchmaking function. This functionality is useful to find someone to launch a new business, find an investor to finance your operations, or another entrepreneur to explore partnership opportunities with. The system has an automatic recommendation engine and it also gives users the option of choosing matches manually through their various filtering mechanisms.

Increase the interaction with your group: Stimulate interaction within your existing network and create more exposure for your group by leveraging the power of Lava People’s extensive social media functionality. Through the groups functionalities, you can set-up meetings and events and share knowledge. The “groups” function is especially interesting for existing groups and networks to create presence and awareness amongst like- minded individuals in an online environment. A group might consist of the members of a business incubation center, other existing organizations or just all IT entrepreneurs from a particular region. This group function really forms a communication device for existing groups and networks to establish their presence in the entrepreneurial community. In this context, e27 has been asked to participate in a pilot with its members to form an active group on Lava People.

Collaborate closely with your team: Collaborate closely with people in your team through our professional collaboration suite, which combines document management, content management, collaboration in communities and projects, groupware and workflow with other team members. Through their very simple and elegant UI, they make it easier for different entrepreneurs to collaborate together to form teams. This collaboration suite consists of virtual meeting environment, simple drop-box like system to manage the documents and time tracking facilities with hordes of other features. You can create meetings virtually and chat with other team members through this system along with managing workflows and milestones.

Lava people is in beta version now and if you are interested in giving this platform a try, please leave your comments here so that we can make arrangements with them.