StartupDunia

Its been about two weeks now since the news about Rediff API, Sociali, was leaked.  The formal announcement about the API was made by Rediff during Proto. As part of the effort, Rediff will provide funding upto Rs. 2.5 lakhs for interesting applications. While I read about the API, I wanted to check it out for myself before making any comments about it.

The Good:

Opening up the data via API is definitely a strong and a progressive move by Rediff. As simple as it sounds, taking down the walled garden is not an easy job to accomplish, both conceptually and technically. I’m just surmising here, but I definitely think that the success of Orkut and Facebook applications had at least a small role to play in Rediff’s decision to open up their API.

Let’s take a closer look at Rediff’s API from a technical perspective. Aping Facebook’s approach, Rediff has provided three ways of accessing their API:

1) API exposed by a REST interface

2) Sociali Markup language (RBML)

3) Sociali Query Language (RQL)

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httpfuse is a great new, topic based social bookmarking service based out of Hyderabad. The idea is simple. Bookmarks are grouped by topics. As an example, consider a subject like MySQL. Instead of a personal bookmarking service like Delicious, httpfuse aggregates all user bookmarks (or links) related to MySQL. See the below screenshot for an example. Links are nicely categorized under various topics related to MySQL.

On the surface, the service appears no different than some of the other content discovery services like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Wikipedia etc. However, once you give the service a spin, the differences become apparent.  Think of httpfuse to be like Wikipedia, only difference being that instead of housing the content itself, it has links to interesting content elsewhere.

The Magnolia groups feature is something similar to what httpfuse is offering. The same can also be accomplished by searching for the topic on Delicious. None the less, httpfuse is a pretty neat and on the whole an awesome product. It offers an interesting twist to the ’social’ bookmarking scenario.

Do try it out and let me know what you think.

Ever since Scrabulous became a superhit Facebook app and got coverage from leading media (about how they were making more than $20k per month), controversy has always followed it everywhere.

After Hasbro (who has rights to the Scrabble game) launched its own Scrabble application on Facebook, it slapped a lawsuit against Scrabulous and its founders - Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from Calcutta.

It seems that the brothers have caved in and the Scrabulous application has been shut down for Facebook users from US and Canada. The application is still available to facebook users from elsewhere.

Cuil, a new search engine built by a team of ex-Google employees, launched earlier yesterday. Ever since,  I’ve been hammered by the news of the launch everywhere - RSS Feeds, New York times, Techmeme. Even before I got a chance to try it out, folks were already talking about its 120 billion index of web pages and how Cuil could be a major threat to Google.

As the day passed, folks got sufficient time to try out the search engine and the reviews have been mixed. I tried out the service myself and couldnt agree more. While Cuil does offer some neat features, its nowhere near to usurping Google’s reign anytime soon. The search results seemed mediocre at best.

So, why and how exactly did Cuil end up getting so much hype in spite of having such an okay product ?

I attribute it to three reasons:

1) The core team behind Cuil are ex-Google employees and well respected search experts. That gives them tremendous credibility right from the get go. Building infrastructure and the ability to index 120 billion pages in such a short time is no mean feat by any regards

2) Great stealth and PR tactics by Cuil and the gullibility of the A-list bloggers who took the bait

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InvestmentYogi, a personal finance and investment portal for India, launched in public beta early last week. The site features a lot of useful content, how-to guides (based on the FinanceWiki platform), community forums, mutual fund evaluation as well as tools for tracking your portfolio.

The idea is that InvestmentYogi helps a user

• learn (via how-to guides and articles) about personal finance and investment
• share experiences - opinions (via the forums or videos)
• grow personal wealth (using ’sample plans’, ‘ask the expert’ etc.)

The site also features a tax filing application called TaxYogi, which is fully integrated into the portal.

As per Mamtha, CEO - InvestmentYogi,

“InvestmentYogi is the first personal finance portal for India to weave social networking, analytics and video into traditional tools and services for financial planning, taxes and investing. Simplicity, personalization and relevance are the foundation of our product and this leads to a unique experience for the user.”

Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts.

Accel Partners has teamed up with Erasmic Venture Fund, an early stage venture financing firm, to launch Accel India Venture Fund. The fund will be managed by the current partners of Erasmic Venture Fund. Erasmic’s portfolio includes HolidayIQ, Kaati Zone, Myntra, Chakpak etc.

Accel Partners has invested in BitTorrent, BrightCove, comScore, Facebook, Glam Media and several such companies.

Accel India Venture Fund will focus on early stage investing and delivering hands on strategic and operational guidance to entrepreneurs.

Congrats to the Erasmic team on the successful transition.

Ringtones are a big business in India, the worlds 2nd largest mobile market. They in fact make up for more than 35% of all mobile VAS revenues.

Isnt it time that companies stop charging for ringtones ? Why even pay the Rs. 7-15 for a ringtone ?

If you want to stop paying for ringtone downloads and want to create your own ringtones from your MP3 files, here’s a step by step guide for doing so (this is an old story - I recently came across it while doing housekeeping on my delicious links). The process involves installing a couple of open source softwares, so the inintial setup might take a bit longer. But once you have that in place and get a hang of the steps, creating subsequent ringtones should be darn easy.

So go ahead - create ringtones from your favorite Bollywood flicks - be it Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na or Kismat Konnection and share them with your friends.

Comscore has released numbers related to the Indian Internet usage for May 2008. As per the report:

• 28 million users in the age group 15 & older accessed Internet from home - work locations
• This indicates a 27% jump in the Internet usage from last year 
• India has one of the fastest growing Internet populations among the countries listed in the comScore world Metrix service
• The 28 million still represents only 3% of the population leaving room for tremendous growth (I’ve talked about this before)

Some additional bits from the report:

• Average Indian visitor is online 25 times a month with each visit averaging 28 minutes
• Users in the 15-24 age group spent 12 hours online and are the heaviest users
• Fastest growing web site categories include Map (64%), sports (60%), movies (55%), finance & news (52%)

The network of Google sites ranked highest in terms of visitors with nearly 20 million visitors.

• Orkut had 9.3 million visitors (up by 39%)
• Blogger had 7.3 million visitors (up 102%)
• YouTube had 6.3 million visitors (up 131 %)

Only 6 of the top 15 sites are indigenous websites.

Read the release here.

Its been almost three months since Orkut apps went live. It seemed like a good time to visit and review some of the most popular Orkut apps and see how well they’re faring.

Orkut has the largest Indian audience amongst all social networks and not surprisingly, it seems that Indian apps seem to the dominate the top 10 list. At the time of this writing, six out of the top 10 Orkut apps were either targeted towards the Indian audience or were built by Indian companies.

Lets look at three of the most popular Orkut apps below:

Chakpak Movies: This Erasmic funded company’s Orkut app seems to have caught up with Indian Orkutters like wildfire. Install the app and you can rate - review movies, view celebrity wallpapers, compare movie tastes with friends etc. One of the most popular and engaging features of this app is the quizzes — I’ve seen so many friends within my own social graph taking the Chakpak movie quiz.

As per Chakpak folks, below are stats related to their app:

Number of app installs: about 0.5 million users have installed the app

Average daily signups: 20 - 25 10,000 - 20,000 average new signups daily

Time spent on the app (engagement): exact number not provided, but in the lower double digit minutes (ie, between 10-20 minutes)
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US based Rocketalk has launched their social entertainment focused mobile app in India. The app runs on Java and Symbian based phones. Application features include:

* Social networking

* MMS

* Communities

* IM & Chat

* Music & video downloads

* Content & premium services

Rocketalk has raised $7.1 million from iSherpa Ventures, EDF Ventures and Mission ventures.

MobMe, the Trivandrum incubated startup, already has a good headstart & so Rocketalk will definitely need to step it up a notch to compete.