Kerala Blogcamp to be organized on a house boat
Is that awesome or what !!
Yes, Kerala’s first Unconference event - BlogCamp Kerala 2008 will be held on 16th August at Alleppey, Kerala. The event is hosted by Kerala Tourism, who has provided the event venue - a houseboat. Yes, the event has the distinction of being the first such event to be conducted on a houseboat.
More details about the event here.
Navajo - word puzzle based addictive Facebook app
Navajo is a neat little word puzzle based Facebook app. It is a multiplayer word game, which can be played in a public room, network room (only has friends from your social graph) or a private room. Essentially, you are presented with a jumbled word in an IRC style chat room. You get two hints to get the word right (remember, other players are competing too) - the hints appear at specific intervals if the correct word hasnt been guessed already. The more the correct words you can guess, the higher you rank.
There are different types of rooms based on the difficulty level of the words as well - easy, medium, hard and GRE level. The app is entertaining and pretty addictive. In no time, I ended up spending more than 45 minutes on it. Simple and entertaining - with some luck and wishful thinking, the app has the potential to become popular like Scrabulous.
Jobyantra - Affiliate based job board for Indian startups
A short while back, I did a post related to hiring for Indian startups. The sentiment that emerged from the discussion related to that post was a no brainer - hiring for startups still remains a daunting task !! Job portals like Naukri yield mixed results and end up requiring a considerable time weeding out candidates. In short, Naukri and other job portals are probably not the best resources to hire startup employees.
Jobyantra is an affiliate based job board solution that hopes to provide an alternative to hiring for startups. Here’s how it works. Employers post job openings via the Jobyantra website. Jobyantra then posts the job across the sites that have joined its partner affiliate network. Blog and website owners can sign up to the affiliate network and get Jobyantra’s job board integrated into their site / blog. The design of the board can be customized to integrate into the blog’s theme.
The concept isnt new, and has been successfully executed by several similar job boards in the US. Most of the prominent technology blogs have integrated a job board solution into their blog with good results. The benefits of the approach are obvious - employers get to target jobs to exactly the audience they’re hoping to target. That translates to getting the right candidates without spending large amounts of resources for the job search.
IndyaRocks launches Eros Entertainment channel, integrates Google Maps
IndyaRocks has partnered with Eros Entertainment to launch a branded community channel. The deal is a win-win scenario for both parties involved - IndyaRocks gets access to new, interesting content related to movies and for Eros, this is just another channel for movie promotion and branding.
Eros Entertainments YouTube channel is here.
IndyaRocks will also launch another feature next week, where all your friends can be plotted on a map. This gives a nice perspective of how your social graph is geographically spread across the world, and you can find - make friends based on a particular region.
Kindo - Genealogy aka family tree in Hindi
Kindo has launched a Hindi interface to their popular genealogy service. Now, you can interact and build your family tree entirely in Hindi. Hindi is among the top 5 spoken languages in the world, with about 500 million native speakers of the language.
As per Nils Hammar, co-founder of Kindo:
“We believe Internet access and usage will grow among Hindi speakers over the next few years, and that many Indians will want to use the service in their mother tongue. Apart from connecting typical Indian homes, Kindo will provide great assistance to families of many Indians who are based all over the world.”
Here’s a screenshot showing Sachin Tendulkar’s family tree in Hindi:
While the UI and the service is top notch and the Hindi implementation is awesome, I am skeptical if such a service would be popular in India for two reasons:
Some interesting reading
Found some interesting reading stuff over the weekend. Take a peek:
1) Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL:
Very interesting technical presentation in PDF format.
2) Early YouTube engineer talks about scalability and outages:
via GigaOM
3) The audience for US websites is becoming increasingly international. Sites like Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc. not only get US visitors, but they also attract a significant share of international visitors also. This story from Wall Street Journal digs a little deeper into this scenario and how the sites need to gear ads targeted towards these international visitors as well.
Tagg.in - another group microblogging service
Tagg.in is a new SMS - web based microblogging service for India.
With Tagg.in, you can
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- create a TAGGivity (group)
- update your TAGGivity
- invite members to the TAGGivity
Just follow the command format and send updates to 99801 99801 and your TAGGivity will be updated.
Tagg.in also runs several groups by themselves. Join these groups and you’ll get the latest business news, stock updates, cricket scores etc directly on your mobile. You can also set a particular group public or private so that the updates are visible only to those who are part of the group.
Tagg.in will face an uphill battle competing against the increasingly popular SMS GupShup, which recently was close to securing their 2nd round of funding.
Geek Alert - a good primer on GPS technology
I did a mini primer on Location Based Services and its state in India a couple of weeks back.
While I barely touched the surface, if you are looking for some serious technical knowhow, I came across an interesting story related to GPS technology - what its all about, how it works etc.
Check it out here. I’d definitely recommended bookmarking the article.
Madhouse founders starting Morpheus Venture Partners
WATBlog reported yesterday that Sameer Guglani and Nandini Hirianniah, founders of DVD rental company Madhouse.in (acquired by Seventymm), are starting a YCombinator like incubator called Morpheus Venture Partners, to assist other early stage startups.
Ashish has a good QnA with them about their latest venture.
At this point, it looks like the incubator will be more targeted towards mentoring, strategy and advise for startups as opposed to seed funding the startups.
Our primary value add to the startup teams is the advise, mentorship, guidance, access to the right network, creating opportunity to meeting relevant people, team strategy, product strategy, launch strategy, fund raising strategy (intros and more), getting the right advisers onboard with the right kind of terms, etc.
In the current scenario, there is definitely a lot of need for such an entity. Someone, who can closely work with other entrepreneurs and help them get off the ground and get the ball rolling.
At the same time, I cant help but reminisce about a similar effort called DreamzHunt, that was launched in early 2007 by a Chennai based business group called SGS. The idea was to launch a competition where the top 3 teams will be selected and receive a funding of $20k - $100k for 15% stake in the company. The effort fizzled out and it seems that only 2 teams were selected out of all the applicants. Thus far, I havent seen any update on how those two teams are doing. Or if SGS ever invested the quoted amounts in the ventures. If you have any updates about DreamzHunt, leave a comment below and let me know.
However, based on Sameer and Nandini’s entrepreneurial success, I’m more optimistic and wish them the best with this new venture.
MnemonicDictionary uses mnemonics to make learning simple
MnemonicDictionary is a startup that hopes to use mnemonics to make the task of learning and remembering difficult words easier. Mnemonics normally can be in any format - a visual cue, a list, an audible or a special word. The goal is to associate the word with something you already know, which makes the learning and retention process easier.
As an example, consider the following two words and their mnemonics:
abase - to degrade
Mnemonic:Â abase means without base and without base things fall down — so degrade (just imagine a house without a strong base
laconic - crisp, curt
Mnemonic: lac..lack, so lack of words in her speech, specify that she used very few words to say her ideas.
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