StartupDunia

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 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.

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

Registration and other details here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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It looks like thats exactly what Google is building.

Google recently launched Google Profile - a centralized profile system that will be integrated into most of the Google services and will provide a coherent identity across the Google network. You control how much information is shared as part of your public profile. Several products like Google Reader, Google Maps have already integrated Google Profile into their service.

Why do I say a distributed social network ?

Let me illustrate with an example.

If you use Google Reader, you’ll now see shared feeds from your friends

Click on any of your friend’s shared feeds and you’ll see their profile and actual feed itself. The same goes for Google Maps as well. By providing a single profile across all these services, now you can easily view and track what a Google user is upto. Do they have a Blogger account ? What sort of personalized maps have they created ? What local businesses did they recently review ? As an example, see my GMaps profile here. It wont be long before you’d be able to see a user’s entire activity stream across all Google Services (constrained by what all info they choose to share).

Instead of being in a closed-wall, centralized social network, your activity is distributed across the various Google services. And it all comes together in one place - your Google Profile.

You really need to look at the big picture ‘to see’ the distributed social network that I’m talking about. Imagine MyBlogLog (the most notable distributed social network) where each blog is a separate Google service. The blog community page on the MyBlogLog website is equivalent to your Google Profile.