Foradian Technologies is a privately held

software provider A software publisher is a publishing company in the software industry between the developer and the distributor. In some companies, two or all three of these roles may be combined (and indeed, may reside in a single person, especially in the case ...

of ERP Solutions for education institutions. Foradian is based in

Bangalore Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore (List of renamed places in India#Karnataka, its official name until 1 November 2014), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the southern States and union territories of India, Indian state of Kar ...

, Karnataka, India. The technical office of the firm is situated in

Bengaluru Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore (List of renamed places in India#Karnataka, its official name until 1 November 2014), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the southern States and union territories of India, Indian state of Kar ...

, Karnataka, India. The company's flagship product Fedena is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

school management software that is used in over 40,000 schools and 20 million users in over 100 countries. A notable implementation of Fedena is its use in over 15,000 schools in the state of

Kerala Kerala ( , ) is a States and union territories of India, state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile ...

, India. The Education Department of the

Government of Kerala The Government of Kerala (abbreviated as GoK), also known as the Kerala Government, is the administrative body responsible for governing the Indian States and territories of India, state of Kerala. The government is led by a chief minister, who ...

has used Fedena in a state program named

Sampoorna Sampoorna is a school management system project implemented by the Education Department of Government of Kerala to automate the system and process of over 15,000 schools in the state. Sampoorna is implemented by KITE (previously IT@School Project) ...

to automate the system and process of over 15,000 schools in the state. Uzity is a

virtual learning environment Virtual may refer to: * Virtual image, an apparent image of an object (as opposed to a real object), in the study of optics * Virtual (horse), a thoroughbred racehorse * Virtual channel, a channel designation which differs from that of the actual ...

and course management system developed by Foradian that assists teachers and students to collaborate and learn the contents of different courses. Foradian is also known for popularizing the joke character Tintumon, via the provision of an online identity and releasing rupee font for

Indian rupee sign The Indian rupee sign ⟨₹⟩ is the currency symbol for the Indian rupee (ISO 4217#Active codes, ISO 4217: INR), the official currency of India. Designed by D. Udaya Kumar, it was presented to the public by the Government of India on 15 Jul ...

which was reported in major national media and newspapers

History

Foradian Technologies was started as a

web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...

firm by a group of young people in India from the states of

and

Karnataka Karnataka ( ) is a States and union territories of India, state in the southwestern region of India. It was Unification of Karnataka, formed as Mysore State on 1 November 1956, with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, States Re ...

. Products include Fedena Opensource, Fedena Pro, Uzity, and Fluxday.

Products

Fedena

Fedena is an

school management software based on

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pa ...

framework. It was selected for a presentation at International Rubyconf held at Bangalore in March 2010. Fedena is also presented in the

Debconf is a software utility for performing system-wide configuration tasks on Unix-like operating systems. It is developed for the Debian Linux distribution, and is closely integrated with Debian's package management system, dpkg. When packages are ...

2010. Fedena v3.5 was released on 15 February 2016, and Fedena is available in 22 languages, including English. Foradian Technologies also provide Fedena related services, Fedena – PRO and Fedena Enterprise.

Uzity

Uzity is a

and course management system developed by Foradian Technologies. It is a

collaboration platform Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them." Regar ...

for students, teachers, administrators and management of an institution. Uzity assists in

knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the set of procedures for producing, disseminating, utilizing, and overseeing an organization's knowledge and data. It alludes to a multidisciplinary strategy that maximizes knowledge utilization to accomplish organ ...

of the entire institution and functions as a repository of course, information and collaboration data. It is developed by the same team who developed Fedena.

Rupee Foradian Font

As soon as the new

Indian Rupee sign The Indian rupee sign ⟨₹⟩ is the currency symbol for the Indian rupee (ISO 4217#Active codes, ISO 4217: INR), the official currency of India. Designed by D. Udaya Kumar, it was presented to the public by the Government of India on 15 Jul ...

was approved, Foradian technologies published a free digital

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts " Roman" (or "regul ...

named "Rupee Foradian" on 16 July 2010. The font and the blog became a

viral phenomenon Viral phenomena or viral sensations are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. Analogous to the way in which viruses propagate, the te ...

. The font was created using a

vector image Vector graphics are a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from Geometric primitive, geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian coordinate system, Cartesian plane, such as point (geometry), points, Line segment, ...

and its mapping is to the

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...

key of the keyboard, which was chosen because the grave accent key is often not used by computer users. The font received some criticism for the mapping to the grave accent key, and per being released much ahead of its approval for

unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. The Rupee sign may be made visible on some word-processors also where the font is not installed in the system, by choosing to embed the font in the document in file saving options. However, embedding the Foradian Rupee Font renders the document read-only, i.e., the document cannot be edited on a system where the font is not installed.

Recognition

For the development and support of Fedena, Foradian won the MIT TR35 2012 India award for innovation in education domain. Foradian also came fifteenth in the Deloitte Technology Fast50. Foradian received the IT Innovation Award – MSME Category at the Express I.T Awards, 2014.

References

External links

* * * {{cite web , url=http://rubyconfindia.org/speakers.html , title=RubyConf India 2010: Get involved , publisher=Rubyconfindia.org , accessdate=22 October 2011 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100901015402/http://rubyconfindia.org/speakers.html , archive-date=1 September 2010 , url-status=dead Information technology consulting firms of India Software companies of India Technology companies established in 2009 Information technology companies of Bengaluru Indian companies established in 2009 2009 establishments in Karnataka