StartupDunia » Tech tidbit

Why pay when you can create your own ringtone ?

pranav — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:04:14 +0000

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.

Comments

July 23, 2008, Gaurav commented: Pranav, Do you really want Tseries to come after you? ;)
July 26, 2008, Raru commented: I also do this. I could never justify paying for ringtones, especially when I can edit/make my own ring tones, at http://mp3mer.com for example.
July 28, 2008, pranav commented: Gaurav, Yeah, I'd better watch out :-D On a serious note, ringtones as a mobile VAS revenue source should die. Look at the numbers from Airtel's latest quarter (excerpt from Medianama.com): Growth in Non-SMS VAS (Ringtones, CRBTs, GPRS, Voice Portal Services etc) has been as high as 20.7 percent in the last quarter, increasing to Rs. 133.56 crores Even if ringtones make up for 10% of these VAS revnues (highly low estimate), you are talking about about ~ 13 crores.

Geek Alert - a good primer on GPS technology

pranav — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:58:45 +0000

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.

Will Twitter go the Friendster way ?

pranav — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:26:40 +0000

Twitter, who recently secured their second round of funding, has fueled the microblogging phenomenon. As more people caught on to the “What are you doing” culture, folks at Twitter have hardly kept up with the increased load. The site has faced several prolonged downtimes, which have gotten only worse over time. Not a week goes by without someone whining about Twitter’s downtime.

It makes you wonder about why frustrated users havent already switched over to other competitors ?

Well, truth be told, there werent any worthy alternatives out there to which people could switch to. Jaiku seemed a formidable foe, but new signups were closed after the service was acquired by Google. Pownce emerged as a likely alternative, but wonder why it was never able to take advantage of Twitter’s problems and cannibalize on that.Â Inspite of the problems, Twitter grew like crazy, while traffic to Pownce seems to have stagnated.

Lately though, it looks like Friendfeed has emerged as the most likely Twitter alternative. Several high profile users have already given up or are on the verge of giving up on Twitter and moving over to Friendfeed.Â Friendfeed may not be excatly the same as Twitter, but offers the same value as Twitter - the value of conversations.Â As soon as more conversations shift from Twitter over to Friendfeed, more people will make the jump.

This scenario is eerily similar to Friendster way back in 2003.Â While Friendster was having scaling issues, MySpace swooped right in and capitalized on Friendster’s woes. In other words, MySpace grew at Friendster’s expense and went on to become the world’s largest social network.

Unless Twitter folks make corrections, address the scaling issues and add some much needed features, I see the cards being dealt in Friendfeed’s favor. Not only are the Friendfeed guys releasing great new features, they also have the much needed positive momentum from users and blogosphere.

What do you think ? Do you prefer one service over the other ? Would you switch completely from Twitter to Friendfeed ?

Comments

July 1, 2008, manuscrypts commented: While i'd still grumble about twitter being 'stressed', i think it scores on simplicity.. yes, friendfeed does offer way more than twitter plus services, but then again, a lot of users don't need all that 'complication' about multiple conversations and multiple locations, since many on twitter are only using it for mini conversations and not serious debates..and there's always the lethargy of moving to a new neighbourhood :)
July 1, 2008, Gaurav commented: "since many on twitter are only using it for mini conversations" Most of the times mini-conversations between your friend and some other person you don't know about get annoying. I am a regular twitter user and created FF account a couple of days ago. Initially it looked confusing, but I get it now. I think there shouldn't be any comparison based on scalability between Twitter and FF at this time. Twitter has way too much traffic than FF http://tinyurl.com/6ee9rs
July 1, 2008, pranav commented: @manuscrypts -- "lethargy of moving to a new neighborhood" -- I agree. Since folks have spent time and effort to build their social graph on Twitter, moving to FF makes it a bit more difficult. you have to again build your relationships etc. @gaurav - I agree. traffic to ff is still peanuts as compared to Twitter. but then, the monthly % change for ff was way up than that of Twitter (as per compete)

Should you lead a double life on the Internet ?

The top open source social networking platforms

pranav — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:51:10 +0000

Here’s a list of some of the most promising open source social networking platforms for those of you who might be interested.

1) BuddyPress

BuddyPress was started by Andy Peatling as a series of plugins for WordPress MU that will turn it into a fully functional social network. It was acquired by AutoMattic, founders of WordPress, and has been launched as a standalone open source project. Features include extended profiles, personal blogs, messaging, friends, groups, albums etc. Few of these features have been launched already while several others are under active development.

While BuddyPress still has a long way to go, it definitely seems to be the most promising open source social networking platform out there. Not only do the founders have the success of WordPress under their belt, the total number of active WordPress installs provides a ready made base forÂ BuddyPress installs as well.

2) Insoshi

Insoshi is a Ruby on Rails based, open source social networking project and has been incubated by YCombinator. Michael Hartl, the founder, is the author of Railspace: Building a Social Networking Website with RoR. While Insoshi is also under active development, current feature set includes activity feeds, extended profiles with comment walls, friends, forums, blogs, messaging etc.

While Insoshi is awesome, one of the aspects that probably may hamper public adoption is that the project is RoR based and there still arent enough folks with RoR skills (I speak relative to number of folks with PHP skills).

3)Â Elgg

Elgg started out as an open source social networking project, focusing on the education niche. While the platform had a lot of cutting edge features like support for OpenID, FOAF, API, extensibility via plugins etc., an Elgg powered site wasnt very easy to install and configure. Having tried it out myself, I ran into several issues related to feature and version compatibility. Based on my use, I got the feeling that when Elgg started out, it was never meant to be a social networking platform and was merely stretching itself to fit itself into the genre.

Having said that, Elgg seems to be relaunching this summer with a complete rewrite of its core engine. Lets see how the new version pans out.

4)Â PeopleAggregator

PeopleAggregator is an open source social networking platform from Marc Canter’s BroadbandMechanics.Â Users can either opt for a hosted version or download and host it themselves. Features include APIs, widgets, blogging, groups, profile pages etc. Marc has been a staunch supporter of open standards and hence, PA does provide support for several open standards like OpenID, FOAF, media RSS, OpenEvents.

iTimes, the recently launched social networking site from Indiatimes, is based on PA code.

5) AroudMe

AroundMe is an open source social networking project with Swedish origins. The project has changed substantially since the last time I tried it out. It now comprises of three products - the Personal Identity, the Identity Server and the Collaboration Server. OpenID is at the heart of the project and all identities seem to be using OpenID for authentication.

6) PHPizabi

PHPizabi is a freeware social networking product that has been downloaded about 172,132 times already. While the core engine and a few modules can be downloaded for free, a community marketplace has evolved on the site, where users can buy special modules developed by other community members.Â The company also charges a fee for removing their branding.

7) OpenPNE

OpenPNE is a Japanese open social networking platform. While there are English instructions to install OpenPNE, rest of the project will not make much sense unless you know Japanese.

8 ) MediaWiki based social networking

Wikia, the for profit search engine launched by Jimmy Wales, released some of their social networking components as open source. The components extend MediaWiki (one of the most popular Wiki platforms - WikiPedia is based on MediaWiki) with several social networking features like profile creation, avatars, friends, comment wall etc. You can see some of these features in action on some of the sub sites hosted on Wikia.

Comments

May 28, 2008, rajesh moorjani commented: thanks, this is a great list. even though it is not a direct open source "social networking" tool, i think drupal deserves a mention in this list too. drupal has all the social networking features as modules, and one can make an orkut-like portal using drupal with hardly any programming. rajesh
May 28, 2008, pranav commented: @rajesh, I intentionally left out Drupal and Joomla, since they're more CMS than social networking engines. Yes, there exist modules for drupal and joomla has the community builder component, but I've tried my hand at both -- and customizing these modules / components to my needs resulted in some real ugly code. In other words, building a social networking site using these modules - components is not a very easy - straightforward task. That's why I chose to leave them out of this list. But yes, Drupal - Joomla - either of them can be used as well.
May 28, 2008, Brent McConnell commented: Great list of new and upcoming software. I would recommend that ICEcore be evaluated for inclusion in this list. ICEcore is the open source equivalent of Novell's Teaming + Conferencing and has some really cool collaboration and social networking features. Each user has access to their own set of knowledge tools (blog, wiki, discussion forums, file folders, etc). Plus, users have the ability to create teams that have access to a similar tool set and invite others to join and collaborate. All these features are also indexed and searchable from one index (even attached files) which makes finding things a snap. The next version of ICEcore (now in early Alpha and available from SourceForge) comes with Twitter like features so that users can track one another and share content with other ICEcore users. Again, thanks for a great list and continue the good work.
May 29, 2008, Sudhir commented: Thanks Pranav, A very great compile..
May 29, 2008, pranav commented: @sudhir, glad to help :-)
July 26, 2008, Ramesh commented: Thanks Pranav, for the effort. Its really good. I didnt find Dolphin in the above list mentioned by you? Looking to hear more such articles from you. Cheers!!

How should you plan for hardware while launching ?

pranav — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:39:06 +0000

Say you bootstrap your Internet startup and are on the verge of either making a public announcement or pitch media-bloggers about the impending launch of your startup.

My question is - how do you anticipate the traffic load and how do you plan accordingly for any contingency? Assuming that the pitch was successful and you get a moderate to sizeable amount of traffic, if you are on a shared hosting plan, chances are that the site may cripple under the load.That would be a nightmare for any Internet entrepreneur - getting all the coveted user traffic, but hardware resources fail to keep up.

On the flip side,Â you might be faced with the scenario that you opted for a dedicated hosting plan and the traffic just never came. And now the 100-300$ + monthly costs for the dedicated server are a strain on your pocket - at least till the traffic to the site builds up.

Probably, this isnt as big an issue –and more so, I’m just curious to find out what others think about the same. If you’ve already been through such a scenario, what decision did you finally opt for ? Did it work out to be the better decision ?

Comments

May 12, 2008, Abhinav commented: Well the safer side seems to be a cheaper hosting plan . It has got two advantages . 1st it lets you put more money on the site development . 2nd you are testing the response of the market , it is less likely that you hit a close to million a day in the early days. As on when when you see a consistent rise on the traffic so that you are losing some business/popularity move on to a dedicated hosting .
May 12, 2008, pranav commented: abhinav it doesnt take a million hits a day to bring a site to a screeching halt.. depending on the application memory allowed on your shared hosting plan, you might hit the threshold even if - say 30 users are trying to sign up at the same time...or upload photos etc..
May 13, 2008, Shabbir Husain commented: I will opt for deploy -> monitor -> upgrade.
May 13, 2008, sunil commented: The middle path between shared hosing and dedicated hosting is Managed VPS. Most of the VPS offer sufficient enough disk space and bandwidhth and cost in the range of $40 - $70.
May 13, 2008, Vikas commented: This is where private betas help. Start off on shared, then upgrade to VPS and then Dedicated. On dedicated, storage was our first bottleneck, so we made the switch to AWS. Most decent dedicated plans I have looked at require at least a 3-month commitment, so is better to do a soft launch in private beta, test the market, and then do the big splash.
May 13, 2008, pranav commented: @sunil - managed VPS isnt offered everywhere. if i remember correctly, webfaction didnt offer managed vps @vikas - thanks for sharing your experience. 1st hand advice always helps :-)
May 13, 2008, Suraj Jain commented: Yeah .. very well said .. We had been running a site .. with 10,00 Page views per day on a shared hosting server...soon We ran out of space we ran out of email quota we ran out of database size limit we ran out of almost everything .. finally we decided to move to a dedicated server... I have got some tips 1. Dont straightway pull out your Credit Card and go for a dedicate server . Coz the cost and the maintaince is always an issue with it . So it better to start with a shared hosting always. 2. Ask your developer to code in such a way that u wont face any difficulty in moving to a newer place. For example if you site / blog creates a static page then u wud need create the same again in your dedicated server too .. so be prepared it .. 3. Plan your day for migration carefully .. may be during night time .. altough it may vary depending on type of your site . Do a trial run on the newer server with some other domain or ip .. so that u get used to the environmet .. 4. carefully choose a dedicated server. don't always look our for offers... Uptime and Support shud be the main criteria ... http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ is a good site which can help you in takeing decision 5. Server location is thing of concern .. but not for us.. coz we didn't mind speed difference of micro sec .. And also the rates quoted by indian biggies were too high compared US based dedicated servers thus just out of question . 6. If ur new to dedicated server environment .. i would always suggest to go for a Fully managed server coz here all the updation , maintainence and patching for the server are done by the hosting company .. Shifting sites can be a military exercise ... so everything has to be planned and executed well.. make it sure that thier no loss of any data as it may hamper yur goodwill .. have a nice time
May 13, 2008, Anshul commented: For people who don't mind some network latency, getting VPS hosting from US is a good option. With plans starting from $10/month (eApps.com) you wont be digging a hole in your balance sheet. Moreover using a VPS lets you experiment a lot with your configuration, you can increase the ram or may be add more processor or more network cards just by asking your host on nominal charge. Once you pass that initial steep growth phase, move to Colocation at a datacenter and have your own infrastructure. By that time you will know your exact needs in terms of CPU, RAM, disks etc. I know a lot of Indian sites which cosume 4 times the resources they would actually need if coded properly. Spend some time on server optimization and you might save a lot on hosting. PS: If anybody has a price estimate for managed hosting in India (Tata Communications formerly VSNL) please share
May 14, 2008, sunil commented: Anshul, Is network latency a function of geography (usa) or of the nature of server (vps/shared)? In other words, are you saying VPS in USA will have network latency and VPS from other countries wont? I'm in process of finalizing VPS to host my site and thought it would be faster & better in all respects over shared hosting (can't afford dedicated at this point) Can someone share some good gyan on VPS hosting please? Also, if someone could recommend good hosting providers in the range of $40 - $60 would be helpful.
May 14, 2008, Shishir Jain commented: In the case of cafestocks.com, we did experiment with a VPS hosting from RapidVPS. However being programmers ourselves (coding on laptops with more than 2GB of RAM), we were very uncomfortable hosting on anything less than this. The VPS plans at rapidvps were not scalable. So we finally moved to dedicated server with them just before beta. I would never have started with a shred hosting plan because they usually do not provide any failover support and stuff like this. Agreed, a startup with just a beta does not need 5 servers to load balance, but it does need mirroring of the disk, lest something fails. Also, complete control never hurts. Whether is works out well will depend on the traffic that we can attract. We are keeping our fingers crossed.
May 14, 2008, Chandra commented: Better to go with some hosting provider who can add servers when need arises without halting the domain for few days. Initially I think its better to go with a VPS and then migrate to Dedicated servers if traffic increases. I think, Google's AppEngine will be the best way to deploy the applications combined with Amazon EC2 for image hosting. Unfortunately Appengine now supports only Python. When we get PHP support in AppEngine that should end the troubles of scaling, performance and a hell lot of other hardware/software issues for Internet startups. At least those startups with less budget!
May 14, 2008, pranav commented: this is turning out to be a fantastic dicussion. thanks all for providing your input -- i'm pretty sure something will come of this that will be of help to the rest of the community as well.. @sunil..check webhostingtalk (url posted by suraj above). it should explain vps to you..some good providers (media temple, theplanet, serverbeach etc.) always check for rating / reviews before getting locked into an year of hosting.. @chandra - appengine still doesnt work as smoothly as expected.. i've tried it out...and before going live on appengine, i'd prefer to wait till it gets polished some more @suraj, you've posted some really useful tips...can you share any additional info you may think might be of help to the readers ?
May 19, 2008, Kenney commented: If you are hosting any multimedia content, its better to move it on to a CDN like amazon S3 from the beginning itself. It will save you a lot of effort if your site becomes a successful in a day or two.
May 24, 2008, Anshul commented: @suraj: I meant network latency. With my tests, sites hosted in US had sround 355ms RTT (including server delay) whereas for sites hosted in India had only around 50ms RTT (again including server delay) @Kenney: I don't think you can call Amazon S3 a CDN. They don't have whole lot of flexibility. Moreover their servers are located only in US and Europe which again defeats the purpose for Indian user as being CDN

Vodafone to launch iPhone in India this year

pranav — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:41:53 +0000

As per a release, Vodafone will be launching the iPhone in ten countries later this year, including India. Unlocked iPhones have been available in Indian gray market for some time now.

It’ll be interesting to see if these unlocked phones will get blocked now that Vodafone is officially bringing the iPhone to India.

Should you lead a double life on the Internet ?

pranav — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:16:00 +0000

After procrastinating for a looong time, I finally opened a Twitter account today. I’d put it off till now due to all the information overload I suffer on a day to day basis (ok..partly because I was lazy too).

Signing up for Twitter however got me thinking - with the rise and increasing popularity of so many distributed services today, what really happens to my privacy ? Thanks to my blog and my accounts on Orkut, delicious, Facebook, Twitter, LinkeIn, Digg, MyBlogLog,YouTube - I end up leading a pretty public life on the Internet. On most of these services, I have set up pretty lax privacy settings in the hope of networking with other folks, outside of my personal circle of friends.

It is a bit difficult to keep a disconnect between my personal and professional/blogging friends using a single account on most of these services. Yes - services like Facebook do have pretty good privacy controls - but setting a per object level privacy setting is often a pretty tedious task.

It makes me wonder - whether I should keep two user accounts for some of these services - one that revolves around the social graph of my friends & family while another, which revolves around the social graph of my professional and blogging friends.

What say you ?

Comments

April 25, 2008, Varun Mahajan commented: Well, I see a business oppurtunity here in your argument. Something like ProfileSplit..something like plaxo with a dividing line between profiles..Not sure if I am able to convey my thinking...but I think you got some idea..or anyone reading this comment...may implement this idea...a buzzword for this can be 'professional-private split'

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest results

pranav — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:53:46 +0000

The results from the recently concluded ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are out.Â St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) secured the first place, MIT came in second, followed by Izhevsk State Technical University (Russia) in the third place.

The list is dominated by Russian, East European and Chinese universities.

The first Indian contestant (IIT-Madras) appears way down the list at position 47, where it is tied with Chennai Mathematical Institute.

I wonder why we cant see any Indian colleges higher up in the list. Are Indian colleges just ignorant about the presence of this competition and not participating or does the quality of our education need to seriously improve ?

Just something to ponder about.

Comments

April 17, 2008, amit commented: As far as i know, people in IIT don't take it seriously.

Unravel everything about a website

pranav — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:06:04 +0000

Amit@DI has an amazingly helpful post how to find out everything about a website - what hosting company is used by a website, is it accessible from China-Japan, what other sites are hosted on a web server (reverse IP lookup), what web technology is being used by a site etc.

He had another bookmark-worthy post a few days back - “How to completely test your website“.

Check out these posts and bookmark them - they’re an invaluable resource for all ye geeks and non-geeks alike.

Thanks Amit for compiling these lists.

Comments

April 1, 2008, sunil commented: Thanks a lot for sharing
April 4, 2008, tushar commented: Thanks for the link .It really contains very good information
April 6, 2008, Kunal commented: Fantastic n Thank you!!!
April 12, 2008, web analyst commented: How can I find the number of hits on a website... I know Alexa provides the ranking but there hit rate graph formula is quite confusing and then it only records the data from those who have Alexa tool bar installed.. is there any other way to find the number of hits on different website which don't belong to me???

Naming your Internet startup

Yahoo collaborates with Tata Sons on Cloud Computing Research

pranav — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:22:12 +0000

Yahoo has announced a collaboration with Tata Sons Ltd. owned Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to support cloud computing research. As part of the agreement, Yahoo researches will get access to CRL’s EKA, the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world.

With 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory and a peak performance of 180 teraflops, EKA is only one of the top 10 supercomputers, that is privately funded and available for commercial use.

Random Posts

Portfolio interviews Arrington

pranav — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:49:20 +0000

Portfolio has a good interview of Mike Arrington, Techcrunch founder. Its a bit more detailed than some of the others I’ve seen.

Read it here.

Indian computer sales soar by 20%

pranav — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:00:11 +0000

Indian computer sales jumped by 20% last year as per a survey by market research firm IDC India. PC sales rose from 5.4 million units in 2006 to 6.5 million units in 2007.

Laptop sales surged to 1.8 million from 980,000 units.

HP led with 21% of market share, HCL came in second with 13% while Lenovo filled up the 3rd spot with 10% of the market share. Consumer PC sales grew by 23%, overtaking commercial PC sales, which grew at 19%.

The Rs. 14000 laptop from HCL Infosystems launched in January 2008 should give an additional boost to the number of shipped units this year.

via release and here (pic courtesy: AFP)

An additional interesting tidbit from the release: India is the fastest growing market for SAP, which doubled its customer base to 3000 in 2007.

Event: BarCamp Mumbai 3

pranav — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:19:16 +0000

BarCamp Mumbai 3 is scheduled for March 29th in and around the School of Management, IIT Bombay.

Registration and other details here.

Comments

February 27, 2008, Balaji commented: There is no contact information available in the barcamp site, whom to contact :O ---- Startupdunia blog is awesome :), hats off to the people behind this.
February 27, 2008, pranav commented: @balaji, no need to contact anyone. just sign up if you will attend the event. this is a barcamp - an 'un'conference type event. and thanks for the kind words.
March 1, 2008, Kunal commented: @Balaji, What info do you need about the BCM3? Yes we are aware that the wiki is not completely updated but it will be soon. you can write to me if you need any more info kunals75 at gmail.com
March 11, 2008, Anjali commented: Hi there, Hey thanks for the info friend! There are many such events coming up in Mumbai. Finding info on such events was really difficult earier, unless youâ€™re moving in the right circle. But for those who are unaware I wanted to share some info on some of the websites that enlist all he events on particular areasâ€¦.or cities. Earlier, if a great restaurant has come up near our house, the only source of knowledge for that to us were common friends. It was also difficult to find like-minded crowd around us. But not any more. There are many events specific websites have come up that enlist and also inform us about the hottest upcoming events, movies, entertainment along ticket booking facilities in our area. Among the many sites we come across one of the most prominent one with a humongous list of events, is www.buzzintown.com. This website has many other features that are really unique. I was quite surprised to find the facility of organizing my own event, which i've already done once. I organized a clarinet playing session and even invited my friends through the website. Cool nah? I suggest you to check out this site. You'll be pleasantly surprised at the extent of content and information they have. Keep buzzing folks!

Some super cool open source projects from India

pranav — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:05:36 +0000

Twenty of the best open source projects were declared winners of the FOSS India Awards 2008, at the recently concluded Open Source India Week 2008.

The top honors were taken by “Hindawi”, a project that enables system level programming in Indic languages. It supports C, C++,lex, yacc, Assembly in Hindi, Gujarati, Assamese and Nepali.

Zmanda Recovery Manager, a recovery manager for MySQL server came in second while “Dhvani”, a framework to develop Indian language text to speech conversion (supports Hindi, Kannada, Malyalam) took third place.

There are some equally amazing finalists in the top 20. Check out the entire list here.

Its awesome to see such super cool open source projects emerging from India.

Now everyone wants to offer Internet services

pranav — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:48:44 +0000

First was the news that Railways is planning to offer free onboard Internet on select Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains.

Next was that the DLF group is planning to provide Internet access via Wi-Fi across DLF buildings all over India.

Today, Kingfisher Airlines signed a deal, which makes it likely that they may soon offer Internet and telephony services onboard.

Wow - suddenly, everyone is on an Internet high ? Never mind if you’re still having problems getting that BSNL connection you ordered 4 months back.

Comments

February 20, 2008, Akshay Vasudev commented: >>Never mind if youâ€™re still having problems getting that BSNL connection you ordered 4 months back. Its not that bad actually. Some alternatives are available now and usually you can get a working connection the next day. I understand you are probably exaggerating for a laugh.. i just wanted to add my 2 cents. Cheers.
February 20, 2008, pranav commented: akshay -- no. my friend recently went through a 4 month ordeal. the area he moved to is not serviced by airtel. so, he had to opt for bsnl. and the entire experience was a nightmare for him.
February 21, 2008, Akshay Vasudev commented: yeah i understand, internet penetration is certainly not up to the mark, but i think its improving (if you compare with what we had a couple years back).
February 21, 2008, pranav commented: akshay - definitely..that is not debatable. the service and quality have come a long way.
February 25, 2008, Sudhanshu commented: On the contrary, I've got a great deal from BSNL. It look about 6 days to start functioning, and just doesn't go offline at all. Even when you don't pay the bills!!! Now who could match that?
February 25, 2008, pranav commented: @sudhanshu, that indeed sounds like an awesome deal -- no one could beat that ;-)

Undersea cable cuts - Act of sabotage not ruled out

pranav — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:05:59 +0000

The International Telecommunication Union has claimed that it is likely the numerous undersea cable cuts were an act of sabotage. While it was possible that one cable could have been damaged by a ship’s anchor the others were too deep. Besides the chances of five cables being cut within a two week period was unlikely.

With the increasing impact and reliance on technology, especially in the Indian economy, it is essential that there are contingency plans in place. While India definitely avoided a total meltdown, the incident definitely caused a dent in the Internet connectivity in several cities.

Comments

February 19, 2008, John Dowdell commented: The Inquirer linked to an article which said that ITU hadn't yet ruled out sabotage. You amplified a journalistic distortion. http://news.smh.com.au/saboteurs-may-have-cut-mideast-telecom-cables-un-agency/20080219-1sv3.html

Are Indian companies undermining the significane of uptime ?

pranav — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:59:19 +0000

I recently needed to book an air ticket to travel domestically in India. Since most of the Indian travel portals limit purchases to those bearing a credit card issued in India, my choices were limited. I decided to book my flight via Jet Airways, one of the few airlines that allows booking using a US based credit card.

To my frustration, the Jet Airways reservation system was down for 2-3 days. No flashes from the company acknowledging the problem on their website. Finally, on the 4th day, I was able to successfully make a ticket reservation.

This, coming from one of the top airlines in India. From the winner of the Web 18 Genius of the Web 2007 award.

This makes me wonder - are Indian companies taking their uptime seriously ? And dont even get me started on the usability issues. Its like, if you’re using Firefox, you’re doomed.

Comments

January 9, 2008, Prabhu commented: I would like to add bandwidth to the list. These websites load times are incredibly high sometimes. And our air deccan site sometimes doesn't load at all!
January 9, 2008, Sudhanshu commented: Hmm.. I recently wrote a post about the uptime of the IIMs servers when the CAT results come out. Update is a real issue I think..
January 10, 2008, pranav commented: @sudhanshu, I believe you meant uptime.
January 11, 2008, Vikas commented: Forget the website, I have been trying to get in touch with the corporate group over the phone and it hangs up on you suddenly and mysteriously every few mins.
February 16, 2008, piyush commented: FYI now even OTAs like cleartrip also allow international credit cards and they have decent uptime

The web metrics voodoo strikes

pranav — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 04:15:12 +0000

While defending Ning’s position on allowing porn and adult content, founder Marc Andreessen touches upon the flaws of current web metrics companies.

Fourth, bear in mind that you can’t believe any of the Internet measurement companies for any kind of accurate external analysis of Ning usage and traffic — or, for that matter, usage and traffic of any web site other than perhaps the very largest.

I’m talking about Compete, Quantcast, Alexa, and even Comscore — none of their data maps in any way to numbers or patterns we see in our own server logs and activity metrics.

This is a well-known problem in the Internet startup world and isn’t discussed often enough. It’s also a very complicated problem due to a whole hornet’s nest of issues, including toolbar adoption, demographic spreads, technology variations, international usage, and domain mapping.

Spot on Marc. When startup valuations are increasingly being determined by page views and other metrics, its time we start discussing this issue in more detail.

As an aside, in case you missed out - here are my recent posts on web metrics.

Comments

January 7, 2008, Harshal Vaidya commented: I totally agree with Mark out here. The worst of all is Alexa. I mean c'mon how many of us internet users have Alexa toolbars? Their way of measuring Internet traffic is absolutely flawed and useless. I have lost several advertising deals with small time advertisers coz' my website http://www.goolti.com shows up somewhere in Oblivion on Alexa. They fail to see that in its sector it appears 3rd or 2nd on a google search!
January 13, 2008, sunil kumar commented: I am an Direct sales executive of Vsnl broadband services for retail business (individual customers) for immediate connection in Bangalore. Please call the following numbers for any queries 09242368086 09243108958 We have a good offers for first 2000 customers,pls hurry up.

Comparison of Web Analytics sites

pranav — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:35:42 +0000

In the first part “The voodoo of web metrics” of this series, I talked about the various methods for computing web metrics. In this post, I’ll cover some of the players in this industry and the methods they employ for metrics calculation.

Alexa:

Alexa is the grand-daddy of web analytics. Alexa has been around since Web 1.0 days and is often used by several bloggers as a quick reference to statistics related to popular websites.

Methodology: Alexa data is collected via the Alexa toolbar that is installed by willing participants. Their methodology for calculating the statistics is fairly well documented. Based on the classification in my earlier post, Alexa employs user focused, browser toolbar based method for collecting data.

The two main things working in Alexa’s favor are:

a) Alexa data and graphs are free to use. Hence, the service is used by a lot of bloggers to get an insight about traffic details for popular websites

b) Alexa is one of the few website analytics companies that provides international data. For instance, you can view the top websites in India over here.

The main drawback is that Alexa data is unreliable. There is unanimous agreement about this. Ever wondered why ? Well, it is because Alexa provides the ‘Alexa toolbar’ only for IE on Windows. While there are 3rd party extensions for Firefox, they arent the same as the official toolbar.

HitWise:

HitWise employs network centric data collection methods. They have developed proprietary software that is used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect anonymous data. ISP’s from several diverse geographies are used in data collection. The data is then aggregated from all the ISPs and used to compute the final statistics.

HitWise methodology and privacy practices are audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

HitWise data is not free and the company makes press releases from time to time.

ComScore:

Comscore employs user focused, panel management based method for data collection. They have a user panel consisting of 2 million participants worldwide. The panelists are recruited through a variety of random recruitment methods. The data gathered from the panel is coupled with surveys and then statistically sampled to yield the final results. You can read more about their methodology here.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, Comscore has enjoyed an upswing in its popularity as it is used as a reference by some of the top tech bloggers. They also recently released statistics related to India.

However, the interesting thing to note is that Comscore data has not been audited yet. They began the process of an audit just recently. Till the audit completes, you’ve gotta take Comscore data at its face value.

Moreover, I’m wondering about how they recruit users for the panel. After all, if I’m a tech savvy user, I’d never be interested in participating in a panel and install some dubious tracking software on my computer.

Compete:

The exact methodology used by Compete is unclear. However, it seems that they use a combination of user panel, ISP based and browser toolbar based methods for data collection. They have a 2 million strong user panel and focus mainly on the US market. Their basic service (with limited options) is free. Additional options are available for paid users.

Since Compete mainly focuses on the US market, it cant be used reliably for websites, whose main user population resides outside the US.

Quantcast:

Quantcast uses a combination of panel based and website based pixel tracker to gather data. Their exact methodology is not very clear at this time. The problem with their approach is that not all websites agree to using 3rd party tracking code in their website. As a result, I’d say they rely more on the panel measurement for data collection.

Now that we’ve reviewed how each service calculates website statistics, the million dollar question arises -

“Which service offers the most reliable data?”

Sadly, the answer is none.

The problem with browser toolbar based approach is obvious - it relies on willing participants who agree to install the toolbar. Moreover, if the toolbar is specific to a browser/platform, it leaves out data collection from other browsers-platforms.

The problem with user panel based data collection is in the details - how are the panel of users recruited ? How does this panel represent the overall Internet population as a whole ? Are users in the panel are aware of how their surfing habits will affect the panel data ?

The problem with website based tracking data is that not all websites would be willing to install the tracking code.

The problem with ISP based data collection is that the data collection depends on which all ISP’s are participating in the data collection process and to what level. Moreover, ISP based data collection doesnt include SSL traffic.

Here’re a few good examples of the web analytics mess.

It’s a shame, but web analytics is at best, just a form of voodoo. Make a best possible guess and if it falls flat, come up with a story to explain the goofup.

Comments

January 4, 2008, webmaster commented: We were able to take up our Alexa Ranking by over 1000% in under three months. To learn more on how we were able to do this: http://blog.ourwedding.in/?p=7
January 5, 2008, Pranav commented: Hey Pranav! iam surprised to see what's written in the post! and i beg to differ Here's my views. "Title Says: Comparison of Web Analytics Sites!" Your not comparing Web Analytics Sites.. alexa, Comscore Hitwise all are competitive intelligence sites and no way can be considered as Web Analytics Vendors or ASP Providers. Alexa is the grand-daddy of web analytics: Untrue, they do not fall under Web Analytics service providers, Web Analytics Evolved from the log file analysis from web server. and none of these even should be considered as a way to measure your website performance! only web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, ClickTracks, Indextools, Nedstat to name the major player should be used. So iam afraid the post should be named more on comparison Competitive Intelligence rather Web Analytics.. coz if you just use one of the above Web Analytics Tool.. you will just love the data and the kind of information you get from these tools...!! the best definition for me is, Web Analytics help understand the Pulse of your site visitors.. Cheers Anil
January 6, 2008, pranav commented: @Anil, Call it web metrics / competitive intelligence / internet measurement / web statistics / traffic data - whatever you feel most comfortable with. the goal of the post is more towards comparing the various services.
April 10, 2008, dev commented: great comparison!
April 12, 2008, Rushik Shah commented: Absolutely I completly agree with Pranav The top Web Analytics companies are CoreMetrics, Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, etc.

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