Here's a bit of Friday fun...
Have you ever felt the urge to know more about the culture of a country when you are on a personal or business trip?
Meet CultureDude, a Helsinki-based company, that educates travellers about various cultural elements of countries via a game.
To make the learning process interesting, the company has adopted an online game approach where users will be presented with a question and multiple choice answers, all in an animated style.
Every country's cultural aspects such as currency, capital, emergency numbers, behavioural habits, etc, are explained in the game.
CultureDude was founded by Siva Kumar, an entrepreneur from India who has been living in Finland for many years now. Kumar explains why he started CultureDude:
"You sit on the metro, and no one makes eye contact, no one talks, so you begin to think that they don’t like foreigners. But soon I understood that Finns appreciate silence, privacy and one’s own space."
Based on this experience, he created CultureDude that could teach people about cultural differences between countries.
Kumar adds:
"Lack of cultural knowledge can impact the operating income of corporations seeking to expand their activities to foreign markets. Many organisations address this pitfall by providing soft skill training to their employees with the help of cross cultural consultants who provide classroom training to the employees. But, this is often time consuming and expensive in terms of money and human resources to organize a training."
The game is designed for 100+ countries and 6000+ cultural situations catering both International organisations with global workforce and for individual travellers and business people.
Currently, the company is selling this online service to small companies with a global outreach.
The company plans to convert 10, 50 and 100 companies in its first, second and third year of operation respectively.
With the "Cultural Perception Dashboard" employers will be able to measure their members/employees' cultural knowledge, according to CultureDude.
The service is priced based on various factors such as the number of accounts needed, target group and content. CultureDude says the approximately cost will be EUR 10-50 per account per year.