StartupDunia » reviews

Kreeo - semantics based knowledge manaement

pranav — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:23:26 +0000

Kreeo is an interesting Bangalore based startup working on sematics based knowledge management. Their goal is to create a platform where users can discover new knowledge, share their knowledge and collectively harness the knowledge gained from the social interaction. Think of it as Mahalo, the human powered search engine, but with added semantics.

In Kreeo, the core concept revolves around a BOK - aka, a Body Of Knowledge. The BOK framework is simply a set of predefined common terms. Each BOK item is a knowledge item.

For example, consider the following screenshot about the BOK on AJAX Programming. Not only does it have various knowledge sections related to AJAX like Introduction, History of AJAX, Features of AJAX, advantages- disadvantages, popular AJAX frameworks etc, it also has various sections like Questions related to AJAX programming, quick examples, tips & tricks, links to external news and blog items etc.

Here’s the section for each BOK which adds the additional semantics:

While these sections add the semantics to the data itself, I wasnt able to figure out if the site is making use of actual semantic technologies (like RDF / Sparql etc.) and if so, how.

Kreeo is definitely a promising startup with some great technology. However, getting new, quality knowledge on the site will remain a challenge. Companies like Mahalo, Wikia, which fall in the similar domain are well funded and have some accomplished entrepreneurs behind them. Mahalo also has paid editors for content generation.

I have two main suggestions for the Kreeo team -

1) Simplify the concept and navigation on the site. It took some time for me to grasp what BOK was all about. I dont expect a technically less savvy individual to easily understand what the site is all about

2) The Site is pretty darn slow at times, but considering that they are in alpha, getting this corrected shouldnt be difficult. The sooner the better - not to alienate the early adopter crowd.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Comments

August 19, 2008, Sumeet commented: Thanks pranav for an encouraging review. Their are a lot of things still not in order, we are working on it continuously and updates are being made daily. We will soon introduce a animated demo to simplify understanding the BOK way of sharing. Kreeo has been brought to its current stage with minimal resources. We are just hosted on a c2d box. A small glitch was their that we have fixed, the site is now performing better. The current design is an outcome of suggestions of alpha users over the past 6 months, our development philosophy is to keep on evolving Kreeo based on the feedback and suggestions of users, so that professionals can ultimately create a platform based on their ideas and have the power to change it.
August 20, 2008, vBharat.com » Kreeo - semantics based knowledge management commented: From vBharat.com » Kreeo - semantics based knowledge management... Kreeo is an interesting Bangalore based startup working on sematics based knowledge management. Their goal is to create a platform where users can discover new knowledge, share their knowledge and collectively harness the knowledge gained from the soci...

InvestmentYogi, a personal finance and investment portal for India

pranav — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:16:09 +0000

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.

Comments

July 28, 2008, Reliance Insider commented: The site looks awesome and has meaningful content. However it will be be more useful once people start participating in discussion forums. I came to know about Investment Yogi around a year back in one Startups meet in Seattle. I guess they took pretty long time to launch. There are plenty of other site appeared in meantime like http://itrust.in, moneyyoga.com etc but from design and usability perspective investmentyogi stand out from rest of the crowd. Good luck Mamtha & Team.
July 28, 2008, pranav commented: I agree. They do face some stiff competition from iTrust.in, who have evolved and executed pretty well. However, Mamtha & her team does have some good industry experience - so lets see how well they can compete against the iTrust folks. Besides, personal finance is a big market and I think there's room for more than one player (assuming everyone executes equally well).
August 8, 2008, Madhavi commented: MoneyLIFE is a fortnightly personal finance magazine. Mr Debashis Basu is the Editor & Publisher and the well-known journalist Padmashri Ms Sucheta Dalal is the Consulting Editor. www.moneylife.in Investment for the ‘MoneyLIFE’ is not subject to market risks.
August 9, 2008, Gautam Kshatriya commented: I must say that investment yogi has some impressive videos - however I wonder whether other than impressing early adopters, whether the effort of scripting, producing, directing, and editing these videos is worth the effort, given the low penetration of broadband in in India. Gautam Kshatriya gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com http://www.moneyvidya.com/blog
August 14, 2008, Mamtha commented: Folks, Thanks for the feedback, we did move to India to launch the product. We do have a long exciting journey ahead of us and some serious contenders in this space. Mamtha
August 20, 2008, Safe-Hands commented: Terrific website. Submit similar sie ideas to http://safe-hands.blogspot.com

Navajo - word puzzle based addictive Facebook app

pranav — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:49:08 +0000

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.

Random Posts

Jobyantra - Affiliate based job board for Indian startups

pranav — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:54:24 +0000

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 toÂ 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.Â 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.Â 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.

In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges for Jobyantra will be to get bloggers / websites onboard its affiliate network. Especially considering that currently they offer no sort of revenue to the blogs that are part of the network. What incentive would a blog have to sign up for the service and display the job board ?Â The blogger might just as well opt for an open source solution like jobberBase.

If they’re indeed serious about Jobyantra, I’d suggest the founders to start considering revenue split options with bloggers. Till that happens, I remain skeptical about their success.

Comments

July 21, 2008, Vishal Kulshrestha commented: Really its a great idea and employer will get the relevant CV. Otherwise on other job portals you can get millions of CV but one has to spent the lot of time to find out the relevant one. Keep it up...
July 25, 2008, waqar commented: Hi Pranav, Waqar here ,I run this company called Sutra hr where we only hire talented people for Startups & Entrepreneurial driven companies.Currently we are working with some of the best startups in india like Komli,Burrp.com,Seventymm.com,Zoomin.com,Mkhoj,Iksula etc. Some of there core Business & Tech team have been hired by us.You can get more info at http://www.sutrahr.com. We have been covered in press also ,check out these links http://alootechie.net/Not%20mentioned?q=node/650&source=1 http://www.watblog.com/2008/04/22/update-new-launches-in-indias-webduniya/
July 27, 2008, Fresh Excel commented: Thanks for this.

Kindo - Genealogy aka family tree in Hindi

pranav — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:32:47 +0000

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:

1) Genealogy has never been very popular with Indians. True to Indian culture, Indians end up keeping close ties with family and even extended family. Due to such close knit families and stories from your grandma, its not too difficult to track down your anscestors. Unlike the US, where majority of the people can trace back their origins to an ancestor in Europe.

2) Current, low Internet usage - especially amongst the native Hindi speaking population.

As an aside, Ibibo also has a family tree service called OneFamily.

Tagg.in - another group microblogging service

pranav — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:37:16 +0000

Tagg.in is a new SMS - web based microblogging service for India.

With Tagg.in, you can

- 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.

Comments

July 13, 2008, vBharat.com » Tagg.in - another group microblogging service commented: From vBharat.com » Tagg.in - another group microblogging service... Tagg.in also runs several groups by themselves. Join these groups and youâ€™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 visibl...
July 27, 2008, Prakash commented: Ugaldo.com is another Free Form Micro-blogging Service in India.

MnemonicDictionary uses mnemonics to make learning simple

pranav — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:51:22 +0000

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.

The benefit of this approach may not be immediately obvious if you are already fluent in English. However, if you’re not fluent in English, the mnemonic approach can be prove particularly helpful. The site does have an interesting wiki like format for editing words and adding mnemonics. Mnemonics can be rated and added to private wordlists as well.

One of the things that is not very clear in how the site will make money. Advertising seems to be the revenue model currently, but I doubt if it will be sustainable.

Comments

July 8, 2008, Amit Aggarwal commented: Hi Pranav, Thanks for covering our website. Given the target audience of our website (not only Indian but global internet users - there is a language tag associated with every mnemonic like Hindi, English, Chinese etc), we can definitely sustain just on advertising based model though we are exploring other revenue sources (like some premium services for students preparing for GRE, GMAT, SAT etc.) as well. Amit Aggarwal
July 8, 2008, payal commented: It is good to see something about mnemonic dictionary on startup duniya. I am a regular visitor of mnemonic dictionary and this site has helped me immensely to improve my vocabulary. I like all the features in it. I like the mnemonic approach that is used here. The mnemonic approach has proved to be of great help in my case. Their daily free SMS word of the day is doing great. We get to learn a word a day with synonyms and usage. I appreciate their efforts of renovating the site and i am pleased with work that these guys are doing. I wish great luck to mnemonic dict. guys. you guys have made words learning so easy that was never before.

Haggle away for everything with LootStreet

pranav — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:05:55 +0000

Indian consumers are one of the biggest bargain hunters in the world. For all ye bargain hunters, there’s good news. LootStreet is a new startup that’ll hopefully satiate some of your appetite for haggling. Founded by two IIMA grads, LootStreet offers a marketplace for buyers and sellers to come together.

Unlike eBay, LootStreet is not an auction service. Instead, sellers list the product they’d like to sell and for what price. Buyers can then ‘haggle’ for a lower price with the seller. If both parties agree, a deal is struck. Else, the bargaining continues. Every quote that the buyer makes must be higher than their previous attempts. Currently, they dont charge for listing your products except for the 4% transaction fees charged by payment gateways. As traffic grows, they’ll take a percentage cut for listing the product.

While the biz model makes sense, the biggest challenge they’d face is from eBay. eBay is an established brand and most of the folks have gotten familiar with eBay’s auction model. Attracting seller inventory will be a challenge, but it seems that they have already signed up partners like GizmoBazaar, Gadgets.in, gadgetsguru.com etc.

One of the biggest plus for the startup is that they’ve managed to rope in Deep Kalra, MakeMyTrip CEO, as their mentor. That should not only bring in some savvy business acumen, but some great business contacts as well.

It will be good to revisit LootStreet in 6months time and see how well they’re faring.

Comments

July 8, 2008, Rabi Gupta commented: I heard of this one during the Eureka at IIT Mumbai this year. One of my seniors (and Entrepreneur) was talking about this idea. This is what he called reverse of Ebay (i.e. here the buyers have an advantage over the sellers, rather than sellers having it in Ebay)!

LifeinLines and LifeBlob - timeline for your lifestreaming

pranav — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:19:50 +0000

LifeinLines is a new app to record and share your life with others, aka your lifestream. Capture your thoughts, memories, observations, reactions - almost anything that you want, anytime, using any media.

As founder Ankur puts it -

It’sÂ like an ongoing autobiography- a medley of text, images, videos and voice that you can maintain rather easily.

You can post updates via web, email, SMS, GTalk or even your phone. You can also set per item level privacy and share updates with your friends or make them public. The UI is pretty cool but I could not find user level RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

Lifeblob is a Bangalore based service that competes directly with LifeinLines. In terms of the UI and features, Lifeblob appears to be more compelling and complete. The timeline UI is not only more intuitive, but you can also import photos from other photo sharing sites and import your existing blog into the site as well. Privacy settings allow your updates to be private or visible to the public or your friends only. Other interesting features like collaborative editing of a ‘lifeblob’ also seem to be in the works.

While both are pretty neat services, personally I dont see any compelling reason to enroll for yet another aggregation service. Probably its just me, but I’m suffering from an overload already.

Comments

June 24, 2008, Pranav Bhasin commented: Pranav, Thanks for your coverage of Lifeblob. While the post provides a good summary of Lifeblob, there are a few myths that I have tried to dispel in the blog post below: http://blog.lifeblob.com/2008/06/24/lifeblob-covered-in-startup-dunia/ Would love to hear your comments. Regards, Pranav
June 25, 2008, pranav commented: @pranav thanks for the clarification. the reason why I called lifeblob as an aggregation service is because of the importers for photo and blogs. So, if these features are only to jumpstart the user's profile, does a user have to manually upload photos to lifeblob later ? Or will lifeblob sync automatically with photos I upload to my existing account at flickr / picasa ? Same about a blog - would updates to my blog get synced or will I have to put manual updates to lifeblob ? thnx.
July 1, 2008, Rakesh Rajan commented: Pranav@startupdunia :) , Sorry for the late response. Currently we import the data only once. We will be enabling auto-syncing of data in the coming release. So one use case could be that, you upload your birthday event photos/videos on Flickr/Picasa/Youtube. We would sync it up and then you can quickly add people who had attended your birthday event, some tags and place where it happened. So this event would appear on all their timelines ( so no more sharing links to various event to your friends who were part of it ). Everything that happened in your life, would appear automatically on your timeline ( and thereby collaboratively building your timeline ). Rakesh Lifeblob
July 1, 2008, pranav commented: @Rakesh, auto-syncing makes so much more sense. because I wouldnt want to upload photos and then use lifeblob to like point to those photos. if thats the case, what value would i get from using lifeblob. thanks, -p
July 5, 2008, Rakesh Rajan commented: Excellent question. Let me answer by taking a simple example: Suppose you go to a trip with couple of your friends and then later come back and upload all the pics to Picasa. Now, the best you can do is to start sharing links with all your friends. ( Imagine what happens when there are lot of such events happening, every one will end up with lot of links to access data of various events). Now, supposing you use Lifeblob, we would sync that event ( with photos/videos etc) and then you can quickly add people who were part of that event, place where it happened and some tags. So that event would not only become part of your timeline, but also be a part of all the participant's timelines, the place's timeline and timelines of the tags. So everything that happened in your life would be right on your timeline ( which is built by events created by you or by events that someone else created that you were part of). Let me know if this explains the value prop of using Lifeblob. PS: Adding support for comment notifications on your blog would be a great addition!
July 7, 2008, pranav commented: @rakesh - that does offer some value considering that my friends are on lifeblob too. Somehow, this feature wasnt easily obvious to me.

Wowzio - A widget platform from Citipals

pranav — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:47:24 +0000

Citipals had launched BlogsJam, a feed reader with widget support in early 2008. Now, they are extending the widget suite and launchingÂ Wowzio, a widget platform, which includes a content widget, a photo slideshow widget and a tagcloud widget. The widgets are javascript and CSS based and can be customized to your own environment.

While the content and the tag cloud widgets might make sense, the photo slideshow widget might not be of much help to content-heavy blogs like StartupDunia.

None the less, Wowzio is a pretty neat product and has the ability to spread virally.Â Pending additional details, I’m not sure how Wowzio fits into the overall strategy of Citipals. Widget monetization, as a whole, also remains an unsolved problem.

Comments

June 23, 2008, Anonymous Coward commented: Does the Wowzio guy take us for fools? Go check out his site for a eye popping - " 3,254,596 widgets served! ". 3+ million widgets is the claim. Eye popping stuff. Now refresh the page and notice how the count increases by 2 or 3 on every refresh. I am sure the counter was seeded at 2.75 million or so. Sorry, but I haven't even tried out the product. Got discouraged by the cheating happening on the homepage of Wowzio. Yeah, I take these things to heart.
June 23, 2008, Nimit Maru commented: Dear Anonymous, The widgets served numbers represents how many impressions our existing widgets have gotten (including the same widgets previously under BlogsJam), and is indeed a live and accurate number! I encourage you to check our new and dynamic widget builder. If you have a blog of your own, try it out and let us know your feedback!

VidyaCenter - marketplace for coaching and education

pranav — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:54:56 +0000

VidyaCenter is a new Bangalore based startup, hoping to become the marketplace for coaching and education. Students can compare different institutions-teachers, read feedback, enroll for courses they are interested in. They can also take mock tests, compare results with peers and network with other students. If you are looking for coaching related to a specific topic, you can place an ad, alongwith the amount you are ready to pay for the coaching.

You can also sign up as a teacher/coach for a topic you are proficient with. Upload course content (can be text, video, presentation etc.) and quote the price you want to charge for the course. You can look up specific learning needs of students and if the needs match, contact the student about your course.

While the concept sounds cool, I have a few doubts about the service:

1) Can anyone sign up as a teacher ? Does the site weed out imposters ? Who determines if a person is qualified to sign up as a coach ?

2) How does the payment process work ? Does VidyaCenter act as an escrow, while the coaching is delivered ? How are

3) The site does have a feedback mechanism, but till there’s enough data to close the loop and collect substantial feedback data, what / how can students gauge effectiveness of a course/teacher ?

Coaching, especially CAT related coaching, has always been a mania in India. VidyaCenter does offer an interesting proposition, but till it gets a good chunk of users and good feedback data, the site will have its share of skeptics.

The site does have a bunch of pretty motivated folks behind it, so lets give them some time to build and grow the site.

Comments

June 14, 2008, Subhendu commented: Hi Pranav, thanks for writing about us in your blog. We are quite excited abt the feedbacks we are getting for the initial set of users who signed up. You have raised some good concerns, to address them, 1) "Can anyone sign up as a teacher ? Does the site weed out imposters ? Who determines if a person is qualified to sign up as a coach ?" > every teacher's profile is screened before activated. Also students if they want to connect, and transact we provide escrow service to protect their money. Also open marketplace approach also filter imposters thru community feedback/ratings. So eventually only 'good' people will 'bubble' up among the pack 2) How does the payment process work ? Does VidyaCenter act as an escrow, while the coaching is delivered ? How are > yes we provide credit card, bank deposits, DD etc. people can pay direclty or go thru us thru an escrow mechanism. 3) The site does have a feedback mechanism, but till thereâ€™s enough data to close the loop and collect substantial feedback data, what / how can students gauge effectiveness of a course/teacher ? Yes, untill enough feedback is there, it is difficult. We provide a platform where people can voice their opinion/experience. Presently information is scattered across in different forums and making it difficult Thanks Subhendu on behalf of VidyaCenter founding team
June 16, 2008, pranav commented: Thanks Subhendu for answering the questions that I'd raised. Is there a way that you determine the proficiency of the teacher / coach who is signing up ?
June 18, 2008, vBharat » VidyaCenter - marketplace for coaching and education commented: From vBharat » VidyaCenter - marketplace for coaching and education... VidyaCenter is a new Bangalore based startup, hoping to become the marketplace for coaching and education. Students can compare different institutions-teachers, read feedback, enroll for courses they are interested in. They can also take mock tests, co...

Yulop, Vakow, CommonFloor - A few startups that I wanted to write about

pranav — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:52:53 +0000

There are a few startups - Yulop, Vakow, CommonFloor - that I wanted to write about way back, but due to time constraints, never was able to do so.

However, considering the pace at which these startups are innovating, I thought it might be a good idea to revisit them and write a few words about them.

Yulop

Yulop is a portal for the city of Bangalore. Since its humble origins, they’ve added several great features like CityFind, CityEvents, traffic reports, mobile support, geotagging and Location Based services. They have close to 150K geotagged business listingsÂ for Bangalore and a fairly large number of event listings as well. I’m impressed by the way they’ve customized Joomla and how they continue to innovate at such a rapid pace. I guess the next step would be to expand beyond Bangalore as well ?

Vakow

Vakow is a sweet, microblogging service that packs quite a punch. “SMS blogging and sharing” is how they describe themselves. Vakow started out as a place for users to share interesting SMS’es.Â However, more recently, they seem to be evolving into a full fledge microblogging service as well. You can send updates via SMS / web, make friends, share interesting SMS’es, send personal SMS’es and even post Twitter updates (cheaper than Twitter’s India short code) using Vakow. They have a pretty neat integration into Orkut and Facebook as well. Check them out.

CommonFloor

CommonFloor provides secure online space for apartments and apartment associations, where residents can avail easy access to locality information and make apartment administration hassle free. Residents can post online notices, make club-house booking online, stay connected with events going in and around the apartment, find neighbors sharing common interests etc. Owner’s Association using CommonFloor can send SMS alerts of useful notices and updates to all residents; discuss issues and agendas concerning maintenance and manage expenses.

The concept seems a bit untractable at first. After all, convincing apartment associations and selling the concept of online management & apartment administration, is not an easy task. But from what I hear, CommonFloor is doing a pretty good job at getting apartments on board. If they can pull it off, it’d indeed be a great feat.

Comments

June 12, 2008, manuscrypts commented: ..and yulop is now on wap too... watblog had a story a couple of days back.. common floor, if succesful, would be useful to a lot of brands... a kind of one stop shop as far as apartment promos etc are concerned...
June 13, 2008, rg commented: Hey Pranav, thanks for the plug. cheers rg
June 16, 2008, pranav commented: @manuscrypts - i agree. If they can pull it off like how Redbus is doing, they'd deserve a standing ovation. @rg - you're welcome

Indimeme - meme tracker for Indian blogosphere

pranav — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:03:20 +0000

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.Â 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.

Comments

May 16, 2008, Sachin commented: wow..good news..thnx Pranav for sharing this site.
May 16, 2008, Paras Chopra commented: I've made a similar site on Indian Startup Scene. It currently aggregates content from 19 websites (including this blog). Have a look at it: http://india.startuplogic.com
May 16, 2008, Ram commented: Pranav thanks for the review. Yah you are right, it is different from techmeme, it just reads feeds. The problem with following links is i will end up with all blogs, not specific to India. The site is built on open source tools and developer APIs. One correction i am "Ram@Teknobites" not Raj
May 19, 2008, Debashish commented: Nice analysis. Any PHP based alternative to Carrot2 & Nutch?
May 19, 2008, Nikhil Pahwa commented: I've been through Indimeme twice in the last hour and a half, and the top story is still the same. frequency of updates is critical. secondly, they've got to get the timing sorted out. we did a story at around 8:50am, and others followed up, and yet we're not leading the news for that news.
May 19, 2008, pranav commented: @ram - sorry about that...will correct it later today. @debashish - dont know about php alternative to nutch..but you can use carrot2 in your php code via their REST interface. I had a working model for carrot2 quite some time ago - but never got the time to fine tune the noise. @nikhil - indimeme, in its current form, is definitely not a killer product. thats why i didnt give it a raving review. all the stuff that you mention above -- that is a part of fine-tuning the meme tracker...and it is lacking in indimeme currently.
May 24, 2008, Ram commented: @Nikhil "the top story is still the same." where is the breaking news in India, except you and 2 or 3 other blogs no one is reporting current news in the same timeframe (with in 24 or 48 hours). That is one of the reason the front page is not changing very frequently.

CafeStocks, another attempt at social investing

pranav — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:33:08 +0000

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.Â 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.

Comments

May 28, 2008, sameer commented: Well said parnav,, execution is what really matters as more and more palyers come in this space. Buth others are not doing that great as well. market hero have over done ajax and many things don't work on many browsers. I would say khelostocks is better that way. They are a simple and clean website with some content as well as you mentioned.

Mermaid metASO - P2P based multimedia broadcast

pranav — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:24:57 +0000

MetaASO has launched their P2P based suite of applications, labelled Mermaid, into public beta. Currently available products include solutions for realtime multimedia broadcast, radio, news broadcast, web conferencing, games and online collaboration.

Unlike traditional P2P, Mermaid products are completely serverless and require no centralized repositories like the ones needed for BitTorrent. One of the only product constraints is that they are IPv6 compatible only. Since the applications are built on a P2P based architecture, you do not need to invest heavily into server infrastructure and hardware. Using the ‘MultiSource’ product, for example, you can create your own secure,private network and broadcast any audio / video source connected to your computer to everyone connected on your P2P network.

Currently, Mermaid is used for corporate trainings, meetings, broadcasting surgical procedures, reporters from remote locations. Amongst early enterprise adopters are telecom and media companies, who want to extend their network reach online and use the IPTV/News/Radio Broadcast features from Mermaid.

Monetization occurs in two ways:

1) Ads displayed on free software

2) Revenue from feature / code customizations as well as branding requirements

The company was launched in 2002 and the products have witnessed a complete code rewrite for technical reasons.Â The company expects to reach revenue in the lower double digit millions of dollars by 2010.

Comments

May 8, 2008, Roshini commented: Nice Post ! You should use an Indian social bookmarking widget like PrachaarThis to let your users easily bookmark your blog posts.

Startup Updates: Improved Lipik.in, IndyaRocks goes mobile, Burrp TV launches

pranav — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:06:33 +0000

Lipik.in, which I’d covered earlier, has just launched several new, interesting features. To begin with, they have added support for Punjabi, Kannada and Tamil and several other languages are planned for this year. They have also added support for searching the web using multilingual queries - a super cool feature. Below is a screenshot showing search results for the term à¤®à¤¹à¤¾à¤¤à¥à¤®à¤¾.Â They have also added support for Blogger - so, you can directly post your Indic content, authored on Lipik, to your Blogger account.

I’m a firm believer in localization of content to Indian languages, and I think Lipik is taking the right steps in that direction. Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts.

Meanwhile, IndyaRocks keeps its innovation engine humming. They’ve released a mobile version of the site, which can be accessed at http://m.indyarocks.com. Almost all the features of the online version - people search, browser profiles, friend requests, messaging, graffiti wall, SMS - are available in the mobile version too. Meanwhile, they also launched friend updates (friend feed) for the online version.

Burrp has launched Burrp TV, a slick, TV listings guide for Indian TV lovers. They currently have a guide for 15 channels and have nice features like SMS reminders, broad searching related to TV shows etc. In terms of sticky content related to TV shows, I’d hope that they develop this content over time — passionate Indian TV fans form a strong community around such sticky content (See IndiaForums for an example). I’m not a TV aficionado and will hardly end up using Burrp TV, but it’d indeed be a pretty useful service to all the TV buffs out there.

LordsofOdds - Virtual Betting market for India

pranav — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:58:01 +0000

LordsOfOdds is a Pune based startup, which enables you to “bet” on outcome of Indian events.

Here’s how it works.

The site will float a new entry for an event and start accepting bets on the outcome of the event. Users offer their wager for the outcome they think is most likely. As the support (demand) for a particular outcome increases, so does the bet increment for that outcome. Conversely, the less the support for a particular outcome, the lower the asking price. At the end of the actual event, the bets are calculated and the user accounts tallied.

Of course, all this happens using virtual currency, aka ‘Loots’.

As an example, they have an open pool for the outcome of MTV Roadies 5.0. At the time of this writing, majority of the people think that Aashutosh Kaushik is the most likely winner of this season.

The top users (ie, with the best predictions) get bragging rights. I wont be surprised if they follow a business model similar to PicksPal, where for a small fee, users get access to the collective wisdom of the top users of the site. But considering that betting is illegal in India, it’d be interesting to see what other monetization avenues they come up with.

They are currently looking for angel - VC funding.

What do you think about LordOfOdds ? Will it click ? Will such a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ based startup be able to sustain itself ?

Comments

March 18, 2008, meterdown commented: errr.....pranav u said "LordsOfOdds is a Pune based startup, which enables you to â€œbetâ€ on outcome of Indian events." i check out the site.... they also have Premier league and Champions league in sports section ....
March 21, 2008, AFS commented: There is a really cool charity driven prediction market: www.bet2give.com you can bet on world events, sports and politics, and all of the winnings go to your designated charity!

MarketHero: Indian stock market investing goes social

pranav — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:52:46 +0000

MarketHero is a new startup, currently in alpha, hoping to bridge the gap between the Indian stock market and Web 2.0.

Here’s how it works:

On signing up, each user gets Rs. 10 lakhs in virtual currency. You can buy - sell stocks traded on BSE and build a virtual portfolio. The ask - bid prices are actual, delayed quotes from the Bombay Stock Exchange. The idea is to understand market movements and share knowledge amongst the community.

Of course, ones with the most successful portfolios get bragging rights and listed on the ‘Hero Meter’.

Other social features are planned, which would make it a true social investing site like Covestor, StockPickr et al.

I do have one suggestion for the MarketHero team - stop branding yourself as a ‘Online Indian Stock Game’ if your goal is to evolve into a social investment site (or something bigger).

Its great to see some innovation is this space finally - its about time we disposed off the crappy Moneycontrol. Bollywood, cricket and Share market - these are the three things that have wide, mass appeal in India. The former two already have hordes of players while the latter is still waiting to be conquered.

Here’re some additional recent initiatives in the stock market games market:

Zapak launches “Game for Money” , a Sensex based game (via CS)
Economic Times plans stock market based game

Comments

March 14, 2008, Vivek Puri commented: Pranav, Out of curiosity, which sites do you frequent for Bollywood? I haven't come across any that i can open without raising eyebrows at workplace or one that has the depth of imdb.com
March 14, 2008, Sanjiv commented: Hi Pranav, I completely agree with your suggestion to MarketGuru. They must be clear in their heads where they want to take this site. Its actually a good time to enter the market with this kind of concept as no one else is anywhere close to this. have u heard of www.paisawaisa.com?? Dont know much about the concept but it has something to do with finance. Excellent color combinations they have used...I must say..
March 14, 2008, VK commented: Moneycontrol has site MoneyBhai.com on the same concept, so it has a huge competitor. - VK http://www.marktetbuzz.in
March 15, 2008, sachin commented: copy of moneybhai which moneycontrol.com rolled out 2 yrs back....so may not really be a new kid on the bloc
March 15, 2008, pranav commented: @vivek - I dont frequently visit any b'wood sites. but the ones i visit occasionally are indiafm, buzz18, rediff etc. @sanjiv - paisawaisa seems to be targetted towards personal finance..a bit different from what markethero folks are aiming for @VK, sachin - moneybhai has been around for some time -- but they havent innovated much. it'll be interesting to see how markethero folks set themselves apart from them.
March 16, 2008, B.E.T.A. Daily commented: Indian Stock Market Game MarketHero.in launched... MarketHero is a social investing game which has been recently launched as reported by Startup Dunia. Right now the registration is through invitation only and as per their blog, they are adding new users slowly (actually very slow i.e. only 5 users ...
March 28, 2008, dhingana commented: social network around indian stock market sure has loads of potential. it will also help educate ppl who are new to buying and selling stocks
April 17, 2008, Scott commented: I happen to agree with Sanjiv... MarketGur's concept is unique.. it's the only rela tool for investors (!!) to actually make good investing decisions.. I agree the timing is right as well.
April 25, 2008, sameer commented: I agree with you pranav point is how much do they innovate. Social networking can give a new dimension to trading. checkout other virtual trading sites: khelostocks.com (has been arround for more than a year but not much publicity) tradecracker (paid site started by ex-director of IIMA and is laso part of curriculam there)
August 26, 2008, Pranav commented: Hi Pranav, Trying to hunt for Markethero founder info. The website draws up a blank. Can you help here. Please mail me if you can. Thanks. Regards, Rashmi

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