8/6/2014 Preena Patel
While studying at the University of Illinois, Tarun Malik had the idea to fill the gap between one’s address book and their LinkedIn account.
Written by Preena Patel
While studying at the University of Illinois, Tarun Malik had the idea to fill the gap between one’s address book and their LinkedIn account.
Bzula, as Tarun called it, is a network that allows people to easily manage business cards, keep in touch with their acquaintances and strengthen those connections by finding common people with similar interests that also live in the same area as themselves.
In 2011, Bzula was even selected to be part of the Illinois Launch Program, a campus wide, new venture accelerator program that was housed in the College of Business at the University of Illinois.
In November 2012, Tarun had another idea for a business venture. He created the website, Recomonk, a site for bloggers to sells the products that they recommend.
With this site, bloggers and publishers are allowed to “create a beautiful one-stop shop for the recommended content or items and automatically link blog’s text to those items, thereby making their discovery visual and in context.”
Today, as a Ph.D. graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Illinois, Tarun is an Intel Mask Operations Engineer at Intel Corporation.
Looking back on his time at the University of Illinois, Tarun says, “TEC's trip to Silicon Valley and several other events they put on were extremely useful in providing me with all the information (for my career) and also helped build a network of like-minded entrepreneurial students in Champaign.”