Are you New Here ? You might want to:

   1. Take a look at some of the most popular posts
   2. Subscribe to the RSS Feed
   3. about StartupDunia
   4. Leave me a tip by email

Look Mama, its SERaja

October 19, 2006 · Posted in reviews

SERaja - pronounced as either ‘C-Raja’ (as one word) or ‘Es E Raja’ (as three words) - is the conception of Ramesh Jain (entrepreneur, Professor in Computer Science at UC Irvine) and Rajesh Jain (entrepreneur, remember Indiaworld ?). The tagline for SERaja is “The EventWeb”.

At first glance, I got the impression that it is a listing board for upcoming events (aka Upcoming, Eventful clone). Digging further into the site made me realize that it is a cross between EventBlog and kind of wiki for events.

From their website:

SEraja â€“ The EventWeb is a free service that lets users publish events of choice and associate documents and reports on the web. The documents can be in the form of image, video, audio or text.

In addition, SEraja uses a specific object identification technology to automatically scan the Web for any other data associated with the published event. Through text, multimedia and other interactive formats, the allied data is made available along with the published event.

Seems to be highly convoluted, but I’ll try to make sense out of it. In layman terms, it seems that there are two ways that events get added to the site - 1) user posted events 2) The SERaja bot that searches the web for events and parses that information to add events to the site. Any metadata / media associated with the event are also indexed and added to the site.
After doing a couple of searches, I decided to create an account to post an event. For some reason, login took forever — after entering the username - password in the login pop-up box, it took approximately 4 minutes for the system to log me in.

Posting the event went smoothly, without any hiccups. Then came the option to add maps, images, video etc. related to the event. This is where I hit a roadblock. I tried to add an image to the event. Doing so pops up this box for entering the details about the image.

The site does not allow for any upload of photos or videos. The only option available is to hot-link a photo/image hosted elsewhere on the web. Ditto for videos and maps.

Searching for events is also easy. You can either enter a search query in the search box (incidently provided at the bottom half of the site) or you can browse through the popular tags on the site. I clicked on the ‘Delhi’ tag and below are the results:

Once logged in, you can click on any public event and modify it — add images, video, maps, reports, comments to the event. You also have the option to bookmark an event, set reminder alerts, email the event to a friend and flag the event as offensive or inappropriate.
The site also has a mobile section (http://m.seraja.com) that can be accessed from any internet-enabled cell phone. Just enter the above url in your internet-enabled cell phone and browse through the event listings of your choice.

I have some feedback for SERaja and hope that they take it as constructive criticism

The site is painfully slow. I was appalled by the poor performance of the site in every aspect - from the initial loading of the site, searching for events to logging in. In an age when Internet users are getting comfortable with blink of an eye site downloads and have a short attention span, it would be difficult to have a large user base if the performance of the site stays so poor
I’m certain that you may have reasons for geo-targetting when the website is first accessed - but till the performance of the site improves, I would suggest turning it off.
Make it insanely easy for users to understand what your site is about. The ‘About’ section of the site has very convoluted information about the website:

Created to initiate users into a new level of experiential web surfing, SEraja helps users assimilate, comprehend and reinterpret information from diverse sources on the web into informative insights.

Anyone can assimilate a simple set of facts. However, people in this age prefer to derive information from multiple perspectives and relate upon their individual experiences in order to reach appropriate conclusions. This is the kernel of the idea called SEraja!

SEraja facilitates an experiential search environment for exploring different events, no matter how temporal or spatially separated they are! In addition to a comprehensive collation of related online information, the service is also fuelled by people power.

In particular, the last quote seems to be an abstract of an article from an IEEE paper. The above descriptions seem to baffle me - a Computer Science graduate. Considering the average joe user, this type of description is not going to help. I would suggest having a short,sweet description and keeping it uniform across the entire site.

4. I failed to see why SERaja has a provision for creating and searching events across the world (read any country). There are existing sites that serve the purpose already. Confining to India and making an entry to an untapped market would make more strategic and even technical sense

5. Provide the ability for users to upload photos / videos directly to the site - instead of requiring hot-links to images/videos hosted elsewhere.

6. You may want to consider a better name. I am sure many others will make the same mistake as me — interpreting SERaja has something to do with ‘Search Engine’

There isnt anything new in the concept behind SERaja. However, India remains an untapped market when it comes to ’social events’. Broadband access has just started to tick upwards. I am sure that the SERaja team is aware about some of the problems on the site and are doing the needful to address it. With those resolved, they may get the advantage of being the first mover in this space (There is another player in this space: IndiaEvents - their site is simple to use, but SERaja trumps them when it comes to features). The access through cell phone feature, by itself, can make SERaja a huge success — considering the cell phone penetration and pervasive usage of cell phones in India.

For more, you can check the company blog or the founder’s blogs here and here.

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading ...

Similar Posts

Comments

2 Responses to “Look Mama, its SERaja”

Neeraj Kumr on November 4th, 2006 1:09 pm

I wanted to learn ruby and rails and created an events program. That has turned into EventsInIndia.com slowly. Since I’m the only person working on it, the addition of features is slow but it’s coming up slowly. Would appreciate your feedback on EventsInIndia.com.

Thanks
- Neeraj
Ashvin Talgery on November 23rd, 2006 1:20 am

We thank you for the valuable feedback. Many of your suggestions are valid and we’ve implemented extensive changes, with more coming up by the end of this month. Please take a look at the site now. Hope you enjoy using SEraja as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it.