CitiPals has released an interesting, new feature called MovieMatch. The concept is simple – once you sign up, you are presented with a random set of 25 movies (comprises of both Bollywood and Hollywood movies). You are supposed to rate the 25 movies. Once you are done rating the 25 movies, they have a fair idea of your movie tastes. So, the next time you read a movie review by another user, you can check their movie tastes, and more importantly, know how much they vary from your tastes. The more your movie tastes are aligned, the more likely you are to trust this user’s review.
Check out MovieMatch and let me know what you think.
Reffster is a recruitment site, which offers cash awards to users for every referred candidate who gets hired. It looks like the objective is to get as many applicants as possible. Weeding out the candidates will then be done manually. Operationally, seems more so like a headhunter. I think this site makes more sense to a placement agency than a candidate.
FirstPhera is a new startup entering the highly lucrative and fiercely competitive Indian wedding website or, as they label it, the ‘wedsite’ market. While there isnt a great deal of novelty in the idea itself, the founders seem to have done a pretty good job at the implementation. For instance, not only can a couple skin their wedding website to their liking, they can also add any sort of widgets and background songs that they want. Privacy settings can also be enforced on the site. All in all, I’ve hardly seen anyone offering the bundle of features that they are offering. Since I wasnt sure about their monetization model, I questioned them about the same. At this point, for competitive reasons, they’d like to keep mum about their monetization and marketing plans.
SneakCast (intentionally unlinked) is a new video search engine from India. In an earlier life, SneakCast existed as a movie streaming (illegal, AFAIK) website. Personally, for a site with such a background, I’m a bit circumspect about why the sudden transition into a video search engine. None the less, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. I ran a few queries on the site to test the quality of their ‘algorithm’. It didnt take long to make a judgement. Simply put, the site sucks. A simple query for ‘cricket’ yields videos related to cricket the insect and hardly any good, cricket the sport related videos. Considering that the site is still new, it can explain the low number of search results returned. What it cant explain is the poor quality of search results returned. I dont do video search. But if I were to search for a video, why would I use SneakCast over Dabble ?
Video search – check out Blinkx – I found it way better than Dabble.
Hmm… Did go to SneakCast. Was fine, i searched for ‘twenty20′ had a nice result. Can’t say the site sucks.
Nikhilesh, Blinkx and Dabble has $150 million and $800,000 investment behind them. I did get in touch with SneakCast team and they have done oit on their own. Fresh graduates man! benefit of doubt has to be given. They are looking out for investment currently.
So I think it was a bit hard review on them.
@Nikhilesh
Yep..I’ve heard a lot abt Blinkx. for some reason, I’ve never had to do a ‘video search’.
@Atul..
If they feel that Sneakcast could be much better with funding, they shouldnt be releasing a half baked product in the first place and then make a PR pitch.
I just tried moviematch….seems like a good idea…but what I like better is the concept of the website….I always wanted reviews from regular people rather than professionals…
Yea Abhishek….i too like the idea of getting reviews from other users like myself. Professionals will most likely have vested interests. Also, i can meet up people who have movie or restaurant tastes as mine…this way i can actually filter out the bad movies and ‘not worth’ eateries. They are thinking like an actual user. Cool…keep the good work going Citipals.