Indimeme - meme tracker for Indian blogosphere
If you closely follow technology news, TechMeme has gotta be in your daily reading list. Indimeme is a similar effort at developing a meme tracker for Indian blogosphere. The ‘hot’ stories from Indian blogosphere are presented in a semi-clustered way. The site is a project by Raj @Teknobites and currently includes 100 Indian blogs with plans to include additional blogs later.
The site is a good start but is different from Techmeme is several respects. The biggest difference is that Techmeme follows links and trackbacks from blogs and uses this link structure to build its clusters. Indimeme, meanwhile, seems to read the blog feeds and uses text summarization to build the clusters. This method does not always generate good quality clusters and a lot boils down to how effectively the text is summarized.
It isnt very difficult to build a site that uses document clustering. Using open source software like Carrot2 & Nutch etc. you can put together a similar site as well. Its the quality of the clusters and the fine-tuning that actually matter. If document clustering sounds interesting to you, see my earlier post on document clustering algorithms and related technology.
CafeStocks, another attempt at social investing
CafeStocks is yet another startup trying to marry social features and Indian stock market investing. The goal is to use wisdom of the crowds for buying and selling stocks. Users can collaborate and seek out opinions and ask questions related to any particular stock. Each user can maintain their virtual portfolio and based on the performance of their portfolio, earn karma points.
While there’s little novelty regarding the concept, the problem lies with CafeStocks’ poor execution. Be it design, content or utility, the site feels somewhat lacking - I guess they should have waited some more time to seed content before opening it to the public. Without proper focus and execution, it may vanish into oblivion, especially since others seem be executing quite well.
Dhingana launches games, awesome new UI - interview with founders
Dhingana has just launched a games section with games like Cricket, Holi Tamasha etc and have refreshed their landing page to a great new design.
As popularity of Dhingana soars, I thought this would be a good opportunity to interview the Dhingana founders on their entrepreneurial experience thus far. As per Compete, US traffic to the site is down ~5% from January 2008, but is up by about 700% over the last year.
Interview follows:
1) How old is Dhingana today ?
More then 1.5 years old.
2) Can you share any interesting insights into your audience - like which are the top 5 countries you are seeing the traffic from ?
Sure. Our user base is spread over the world in more then 185 countries. Top countries are India, US, UK, Canada, UAE, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore, Germany & Japan
3) Any interesting info related to how many monthly hits / pageviews ?
4) How many MB/GB’s are you currently streaming a month ?
This is a very exciting time for us. We are experiencing phenomenal growth rate and we have grown by more then 880% in terms page views over the last year.
Loconomy - your hyper local marketplace
There are many startups hoping to tame the local search market in India. At first glance, Loconomy seems no different.However, on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Loconomy offers some subtle, interesting features, which may very well set it apart from some of the other players.
Some of the generic local search related features offered by Loconomy:
- Search and find information related to local businesses
- Rate and review businesses
- View local business locations on a map
- Access and share information online or via mobile
Beyond these vanilla features is where Loconomy actually gets interesting. Instead of providing just a one way interaction from consumer to business, the site also offers businesses the opportunity to reach out to customers. Businesses can claim their entry and add product catalogs, menus, deals-coupons, audio-video brochures etc. to their profile. Besides ads, the company makes money by offering premium packages to businesses, which include premium features like featured placement, microsite development, very own dashboard, analytics, review alerts etc.
AdvocateKhoj, Indore360, AllIndiaDeals v2
AdvocateKhoj is a new service, where advocates compete for your business. Here’s how it works:
- You post a short description of your legal needs by answering a few questions
- The service then notifies available lawyers about the new case posting
- They can review your case and then respond to you about your case details
- You can review their responses, view their profiles and then decide which lawyer to hire
The service is pretty much similar to LendingTree, ApnaLoan, albeit for legal services. One of possible issues that might arise is whether users will be able to trust the lawyers via the service. Till the service sees some user adoption and builds feedback data related to the lawyer profiles, users may be apprehensive in using AdvocateKhoj for major legal jobs. The service, however, can be of good use for startups, who need to be frugal on such aspects.
Indore360, as the name suggests, is a Joomla based portal for the city of Indore. It has events, forums, maps, classifieds, yellow pages etc - all you’d expect from a city based portal. Some parts of the site dont work too well in FF v 3.
AllIndiaDeals, which I wrote about earlier, has refreshed their design and launched some nifty features like “Local deals”, “Deals for NRIs”, user forums etc. Check them out.
Desiji - Yet Another Social network for Indians
As if there arent enough social networks already competing for the Indian audience, Desiji is yet another social network targeted towards Indians.
The site has the regular fan fare you’d normally expect from a social network such as user profiles, friends, groups/networks, events, videos, classifieds etc.
As per the founders, here’s how they think they’re different:
1) We think Indian as a global then just a local
2) Offer 1 to 1 as well as 1 to Many peer social networking just made for Indian
3) Concept : “Connect, Share, Market”.
Users connect by joining unique concept called Network, which could be
1) regional 2) school 3) college 4) professional and 5) group/interest
4) Focused on Indian between age 15-65
Honestly, I dont think these are any differentiation factors at all. I think Desiji does not have the extra punch that would be needed to compete in a market dominated by Orkut, Facebook et. al. Lets see how long they can stay alive and take a shot at the Indian social networking market.
Exit strategy and revenue model for Indian startups
Startups and the startup ecosystem in India are making impressive strides. Just going by the number and quality of startups that launched in 2007 as compared to 2006, I can vouch for the fact that both are getting progressively much better.
But there’s one thing that I’m trying hard to find an answer to - how these startups intend to sustain / are sustaining themselves. Most of the the Indian startups follow either a transactional model for revenue generation or rely on the advertising model (pimped by the Web 2.0 world) or have no business model at the time of launching. While revenue generation isnt an issue in the former, its the latter two that baffle me somewhat.
Startups need a means to sustain themselves till they find an exit strategy. A successful exit strategy would normally translate into either an IPO or getting acquired by a bigger player. But till that happens, the startup needs money - to keep the servers running, pay bills etc. Most of the current breed of Indian startups seem to be bootstrapped. A few lucky ones might have secured angel - VC funding. But for the others, how long would the bootstrapping work ? Would an advertising supported business model work for them ?
The trend for ad supported business models has originated from Silicon Valley, but the dynamics in the Valley have been quite different. Buoyed by the number of successful M&A/IPO exits, VC’s have been pumping money into Internet startups. Others have found success through the advertising model and can independently sustain themselves.
Myntra.com partners with IndyaRocks for personalized merchandize
Myntra.com has announced partnership with Indian social networking site, IndyaRocks. Via this partnership, IndyaRocks users will get access to Myntra’s services.
Users can use any of the photos uploaded to IndyaRocks to order personalized merchandise like t-shirts, mugs, calendars etc from Myntra.
Myntra seems to be pretty aggressive at signing up such partnerships. Earlier, they also announced similar partnerships with Ibibo, HolidayIQ and Chakpak. They seem to be making all the right moves - forming as many channel partnerships as possible.
Amitabh blogs on BigAdda - what a shitty gimmick from BigAdda
Scene 1, Take N:
Execs at BigAdda, R-ADAG’s social networking site, nervously thinking of ways to counter MySpace India’s launch.
Exec 1: “Quick…We need something to counter PR efforts from MySpace India’s launch today. Can we pull off a rabbit from the hat ? ”
Exec 2: “Hey, why not ask Amitabh Bachchan (who happens to be Anil Ambani’s buddy) to start a blog on BigAdda ? It seems really creative and will help counter MySpace India’s announcement.”
Exec 1: “But will it work ? Will BigB be open to the idea of blogging ?”
Exec 2: “Who cares ? We’ll have what we need to make big announcement for the day.”
So, BigAdda comes up with the shitty idea of having Amitabh Bachchan to start a blog.
The entire concept seems to have been put together in a jiffy in a totally lame manner. Here’s why:
1) Even though BigAdda has a ‘blogs‘ section of its own, the BigB blog is hosted on a separate, WordPress MU install.
2) If you want, you can join BigB and sign up for your own blog on BigAdda - click here to signup - and then flaunt to your mom-GF that you blog alongside BigB. Apparently, the WordPress install is configured to accept signups - see the screenshot below (click for bigger version):
More on this topic in follow up post tomorrow.
More than 50% of online Indians have uploaded a video to YouTube
So says a global study on social media done by Universal McCann.
Results from the study indicate that Internet users in the US and Western Europe are passive participants on social media sites. Meanwhile, users from Asia and South America rank big on creating content on social media sites like blogs, social networks, video sharing etc.
While only 25% of US Internet users have uploaded a video to YouTube, 68% of Brazil’s Internet users have uploaded to video to YouTube.
Several other interesting highlights in the story here.
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