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The Courts Programming

Indian Coding Startup WhiteHat Jr Sues Critics (techcrunch.com) 32

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Karan Bajaj, an Indian entrepreneur who teaches meditation and in his recent book invites others to live a life away from the noise, is going after the most vocal critics of his startup. From a report: Bajaj, founder of coding platform WhiteHat Jr, has filed a defamation case against Pradeep Poonia, an engineer who has publicly criticized the firm for its marketing tactics, the quality of the courses on the platform, and aggressive takedowns of such feedback. On Monday, WhiteHat Jr, filed a similar case against Aniruddha Malpani, an investor who has shared unflattering feedback about the startup. Most of the customers of WhiteHat Jr, which is aimed at kids, live in America, and demand for its one-to-one classes has surged nearly 90% this year, according to the startup. In the lawsuit against Poonia -- in which Bajaj is seeking $2.7 million in damages -- Poonia has been accused of infringing trademarks and copyright of properties owned by WhiteHat Jr, defaming and spreading misleading information about the startup and its founder, and accessing the company's private communications app.

[...] The lawsuit, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, appears to be also indicative of just how little criticism WhiteHat Jr, owned by India's second most valuable startup Byju's, is willing to accept. According to internal posts of a Slack channel of WhiteHat Jr shared by Poonia, the startup has aggressively used copyright protection to take down numerous unflattering feedback about the startup in recent months. The suit also raises concern with Poonia accusing WhiteHat Jr of "murdering" an imaginary kid that featured in one of its earlier ads. A 12-year-old child named "Wolf Gupta" appeared in earlier ads of WhiteHat Jr, which claimed that the kid had landed a lucrative job at Google. The kid does not exist, the lawyers of Bajaj say in the suit. Ironically that was also the argument Poonia, who spent a long time trying to unearth more information about this supposed poster child of WhiteHat Jr, was making in his tweets.
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Indian Coding Startup WhiteHat Jr Sues Critics More

Indian Coding Startup WhiteHat Jr Sues Critics

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  • Perhaps... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday November 23, 2020 @01:08PM (#60757864)

    ...he should meditate more.

  • Getcher popcorn here.

    (pulls up lawn chair)

    "syntax and grammatical errors" ... like most communications with tech support, then.

    • Getcher popcorn here.

      (pulls up lawn chair)

      "syntax and grammatical errors" ... like most communications with tech support, then.

      Okay, who had "Bobs and Vagene" as a likely post?

  • ...paging Miss Streisand.

  • Will the Indian Barbra please pick up the white courtesy phone?

  • The lawsuit, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, appears to be also indicative of just how little criticism WhiteHat Jr, owned by India's second most valuable startup Byju's,

    Who apparently isn't rich enough to afford a paralegal. Or a browser that can load Grammarly. :-(

  • He must be one of those snotty nosed Indian brats my brother complains about when he flies
  • Trump used to law to harass critics and avoid justice. Just another a**hole abusing the law because they have the money to do it.
  • I get a lot of spam for apps which are pushing meditation / fasting etc. I don't believe they're not being pushed by some cult or another which has decided to hide behind these apps as a way of earning cash and new recruits.

  • And so this is called (Score:3)

    by Joe2020 ( 6760092 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @02:43PM (#60758254)

    the Streisand Effect, am I right?

    The more I read Slashdot the more I pick up all these new trendy expressions!

  • Fake news. It cant be true (Score:3)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @02:52PM (#60758282) Journal
    They wont sue. They will call the critics home and claim IRS agents are going arrest them. They need to withdraw money and buy Apple Gift Cards from Target ...

  • Experience with WhiteHat Jr (Score:5, Informative)

    by ciurana ( 2603 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @03:07PM (#60758348) Homepage Journal

    Hi.

    I'll play Devil's advocate because my 8-year old kid has been training with WhiteHat Jr during the pandemic. My experience is colored by having enrolled him in a couple of kid coding camps before (e.g. MVCode) and additional coding advise he gets from his much older brother (professional security consultant) and me.

    Context: 8-year old strong-willed kid who likes to do things on his own. He asked explicitly to have lessons, not from dad or brother, so he can feel it's "his endeavour" and we agreed to proceed. He finished the first two coding units, and started mobile development last week. He takes two guided sessions/week, plus a homework project after each.

    Comparison points:
    Bay Area elementary school coding classes were a joke; a bit of Scratch once every couple of weeks, not enough in-depth, he didn't realize (nor anyone explained to him) that he could install Scratch on his computer at home (2012 MacBook Pro Retina -- still going!) - near-zero learning from that.
    Bay Area coding camps - meh. He learned a lot more Scratch over a 4-month period, started on JavaScript, played a bit with Minecraft coding, but the curriculum wasn't structured enough and he abandoned it.

    WhiteHat Jr:
    So far he loves it. He has the same instructor for every lesson, we are able to reach someone by email, WhatsApp, Instagram, or phone 7x24 if we need to re-schedule a class, kid can shoot questions to his instructor by messaging any time (and she's very responsive). There is a lot of copy/paste learning, but it's well structured and kid started writing his own games in Scratch and the Google Code Scratch-like environment, independent of teacher and course. On his own kid asked about basic shell programming, and he learned a few things like simple flow control, but decided that JavaScript or Python would be better for him; still very much a work in progress.

    WhiteHat Jr provides a dashboard where you can track kid's progress, and based on what I know about my kid and what I see him do on the computer I'd say it's fairly accurate. They don't inflate the grades "to keep you on the meter" and his instructor reached out to me a couple of times when kid was slacking off. The instructors and the organization take their classes way more seriously than other kid coding camps (e.g. MVCode).

    In general I feel happy about the service, kid wants to continue at least until he finishes the mobile dev module, I see no reason to stop.

    Cons:
    The WhiteHat Jr CRM and sales crews are harder to shake off than the mafia. They have high pressure sales as the end of a course package approaches (around 6 classes before the end), and they have other somewhat annoying cross selling / network marketing bits like trying to get referrals and granting prizes for X number of referrals. To their credit, I sent a single email asking them to stop pestering about class renewals until a given date, and they obliged.

    Last con: when they start calling, they will call 2-3 times in a row, several times a day, until they're told to stop. A bit high pressure, but I see it as a cultural (have dealt with Indian companies before) as well as a sales technique. And they do stop the first time you ask them. They're also good at returning the call at a convenient time -- I've told them "call me back on Aug 20 at 19:00 PST" and they are punctual, and stop calling until then. The sales pestering can be annoying.

    Overall:
    I wouldn't consider WhiteHat Jr for a professional coder or for kids who have a stronger programming background. I expect my kid to grow out of it in the next six to nine months, as he explores programming on his own. For the time being I feel happy with kid's progress, enjoy the interactions I had with his instructor, I like the dashboard reports, and I feel unhappy about the sales pressure; overall it's been a net positive. But I also think it's not for everyone. I don't care about the lawsuits beyond the effect they may have on classes and instruction. I agree with Poonia's position that the marketing is a tad aggressive, no idea about whether there's infringement or other issues.

    I feel curious about others' experiences as well.

    Cheers!

    pr3d

    • I agree with all of this ... My eight year old loves the class and making the various games. He is so proud to show off his work every week and he is learning quite a bit about logic and so on.

      I agree that the marketing is somewhat deceptive but...whatever the other coding camps were not as good. I tried 4 different ones. WhiteHatJr was simply the best coding camp that I have come across.

      As far as the phone call spams...After I told them to stop, they stopped and they have not contacted me at all unless I c

  • *I* remember that study, that found that *everyone* just sits there, thinking they are doing it wrong because it doesn't do anything and they just sit there, and faking it to everyone else, so they think they must be doing it wrong too.

    Aka the Ponzi scheme version of a mind virus.

    I'd love to see that "teaching". Get Borat in there. It'd he hilarious!

  • My son was interested in the idea, and we signed up for the one free trial class session. At the designated time, we logged in, but there was no instructor present. After about 20 minutes we gave up waiting and logged out. To my surprise, in email we received a detailed personality profile about my son, who was determined by the instructor's assessment to be INFJ - An Idealist Personality. He is 75% introvert, 70% intuitive, 76% feeling, 83% judging and there is a mroe detailed report to download and review

    • Also stop wasting each other's time in emails, as well as on phone... (Sorry, can't seem to go back and edit my post to add that bit there)

  • They call, a LOT (Score:3)

    by Honest Man ( 539717 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @06:20PM (#60759360)
    I have an autistic child that is interested in coding after finishing high school and we tried their free class.

    They canceled the 1st session after the teacher did not show up.

    On the rescheduled appointment, the next teacher was very helpful and my child liked the class but had a hard time understanding (I thought the teacher had a really good English speaking ability but the accent was hard for my child to understand. Also the terminology being used was above my child's day-1 understanding of coding so there's that learning curve as well).

    After the class they started the hard press on taking their classes and insisting that we start scheduling classes right now, I advised them the child needs to finish high school 1st before we do more, this was a test to see how we liked the feel of the class and how we liked the quality of what they were going to teach our child. They said they understood but then they kept trying to get a confirmation to pay for classes now, advised we were not ready yet so the call was able to end respectfully.

    After that call we received multiple calls & multiple emails, different people each time, each trying to get us to accept their deal. They don't listen to what you're saying, they just keep doing the hard-push sell. I'm sure my kid would have liked their classes but I wouldn't consider them anymore after their ignoring my saying we have to wait till after my kid graduates.

    I know they don't like negative reviews but if they're going to hound people for posting honest reviews, they should consider a less aggressive sales tactic.
  • If one receives a check/deposit from Google for an app that they publish on the Google Play Store, perhaps that is the so-called "lucrative job at Google" and a very stretched and twisted truth.

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