StartupDunia

So, I was searching through the TechCrunch archives looking for a specific post. While surfing through some of the archives, I noticed that TC has reported several tech scoops and acquisition rumors - some of these actually turned out to be true. That got me thinking - a tech scoop - acquisition rumor is such a win-win situation for any professional blogger. An insider passes on the scoop to the blogger. The blogger reports about the possible scoop. If the rumor turns out to be actually true, the blog gets a huge spike in traffic and most possibly an increased subscription base. And more the traffic on the blog, the pageviews and consequently, the ad rates keep increasing.

So, does the tipster actually stand to gain anything out this tip ? Unless there is any undisclosed compensation involved, I dont see any gains for the tipster. So, why not have a service where insiders / tipsters can actually post their scoops. The identity of the tipster is kept anonymous. Each scoop has its own auction and the interested bloggers compete and bid for the scoop. The winning bid gets exclusive access to the scoop. Revenues from the scoop are split with the tipster.

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Seems that Rediff has opened its eyes to the video phenomenon and has added several videos to its Movies section.

Here’s an example. I love the song by the way. Big B rocks the song.

Visual medium is the most powerful and effective means of communication. As they say - a picture speaks more than a thousand words. Video takes the game to a whole new level. The success of YouTube and proliferation of video on the Internet has opened the possibilities of applying this powerful medium to new avenues.

Enter Geobeats - video tours for tourist destinations. I checked them out when they launched last year and in the short time that they’ve been in business - they’ve managed to generate a sizeable amount of content on a variety of international tourist destinations. No, Geobeats in not your typical video sharing site. Neither do they rely on User Generated Content. Rather, the videos are created by professional filmmakers and feature a host (local to the destination), who walks you through the interesting things that the destination has to offer to travelers - be it tourist attractions, local etiquette, local transportation, local food etc. Unlike amateur tourist videos, the videos on Geobeats are very well shot and edited.

I think Geobeats offers a lot of value to tourists in several ways:

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In the year 2000, 94 per cent of the transactions happened at the branches. It was early days for Internet banking. Just 2 per cent of transactions were over the Net. In fiscal 2006, transactions at the branch were down to 22 per cent of the total while Net banking transactions rose to 18 per cent. That number seems to have gone up further during the last few months.

Says Mr Kamath, “Technology is proving to be a winner. The customer is signalling to me that he or she is comfortable using technology. We have more transactions on the Net than in the physical space (branches). I would not have thought it possible just 3 years ago.”

via Hindu

Yatra has partnered with 50+ international airlines to offer global ticketing solutions and are targeting revenues of $120 million by year end (via The Hindu).

Now where did I hear that figure earlier - aah yes - Did’nt MakeMyTrip recently announce that that they are expecting full year revenues of $120 million ? For MakeMyTrip, I can understand the $120 million considering that they have been operating in the international ticketing market for the last 3-4 years and have the biggest market share (And I wont be surprised if the international market contributes a sizeable chunk to this revenue). But Yatra hoping to reach $120 million by year end ? Sounds overly exaggerated considering that they launched only in September last year. Yatra co-founder claims current revenues of $5 million a month & I’m still trying to make sense of it. Is Yatra so popular in the Indian domestic travel market ? Can anyone comment on how popular Yatra is in the domestic travel market ? In my opinion, this may very well just be a marketing move to respond to MakeMyTrip’s announcement last week.
As part of the same news release, they announced the launch of Raahi.com - a social networking site that aggregates content related to travel advisory and other support functions. A social networking site !!! - for heavens sake - all they have is blogs, photos and are hoping this will translate to travel journals for users. The site is based on Joomla - a popular PHP based Content Management System - they left the default favicon.ico (the small image that appears in FireFox in front of the url - when you bookmark a site, this icon appears against the bookmark). They use the community builder component of Joomla in the hopes of building a social networking site.

If anyone from Yatra is reading this — If Yatra is making $5 million a month, spend some of that money in building a “real” social networking site. Or if you want to pass of a PHP CMS as a social networking site, at least try to do a better job at it.

BBC seems to be using and reusing the images when its comes to any article related to India and the Indian mobile market. Here are three articles on BBC which illustrate my point: story1, story2, story3

Here’re the images they keep recycling.

             

Whats up with that ?

Ok…Totally off-topic but I couldnt help posting this…

BBC News

Here’s a CNN-IBN video on how the Internet is transforming lives for village farmers — they use the Internet not only to seek high quality seeds but also to directly contact the wholesale buyer, cutting the middleman.

Video.

I mentioned why MyBlogLog makes me uneasy due to privacy concerns. Along the same lines, for all you know, Google may be tracking & recording my every online move. Yes, I know I sound paranoid - but let me try to explain why.

Besides using Google for search, I use Orkut,Google Desktop Search, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Reader, Google Sitemaps, Google Analytics and GMail. So, Google knows what I’m searching for (Search), who are in my network of friends, where I live (Maps), what stocks I’m interested in, what my stock portfolio looks like (Finance), what blogs and news sites I track regularly (Reader), what sites I own / host (Sitemaps and Analytics) and what emails I get and from whom (GMail).

Phew !!! They can pretty much capture and describe my lifestyle,likes-dislikes etc. to the T.

No matter how much Google emphasizes that they dont track and record all this data, I just dont feel comfortable about one company having access to such much of my personal data. Where ever possible, I choose to turn off the option where the service contacts Google servers for recommendations / reporting statistics etc. Example - The Google Toolbar - it has an option in the ‘Options’ menu which reads ‘Send usage statistics to Google’. By default, it is checked, but I choose to uncheck it and not have any statistics sent to Google.

Google announced the Google Apps Premier service yesterday. And Marshall (over at TechCrunch) highlights some of the reservations that businesses may have from using the Google Apps service:

Other skeptics have raised concerns about Google’s growing ubiquity and previously unfathomable access to information. Such power undoubtedly carries a political risk that no one can take lightly.

If you subscribe the TechMeMe, you would have noticed a lot of posts discussing this apprehension on behalf of the customers.

Any thoughts on this ?

Rashmi Bansal, author of the popular blog Youth Curry and editor of JAM Magazine has launched a job portal called JobOkPlease. As per Rashmi, JobOkPlease aims to target an underserved niche category:

A job site whose USP is opportunities for students and fresh graduates.

True, there are many job sites in the market - and they do a great job. But if you are a young person looking for a part-time/ freelance or summer job, these sites don’t necessarily serve your needs.

With the popularity of JAM Magazine, I’m pretty sure they wont have any problems in marketing and content generation. And considering the market that JAM Magazine currently serves (youth), I think such a job portal would be a perfect extension for them. However, portals targetting part-time, freelancing jobs often tend to get cloaked with the spurious looking ‘Mystery Shoppers Wanted’ variety. I already noticed several such listings on the site.

Such a portal would be a strategic, sensible buy for big players such as Naukri, Monster India etc. My gut feeling tells me that the portal will get bought in an year or so - assuming the hit the right nerve with the target audience.
I wish Rashmi and the JAM Mag team all the best in their new endeavor.