TwitPay - payments via Twitter
TwitPay has come up with a great new service to make payments via Twitter. The idea isnt new and has been floated around several times. However, this is probably the first such service to go live.
The concept is simple. You fund your TwitPay account using Paypal. You can then make a payment to any other Twitter user using the regular Twitter syntax. For example:
@startupdunia twitpay $10 thanks for the service
The service is tightly coupled with Twitter. For instance, you dont need to sign up on Twitpay and can simply use your Twitter username to access your Twitpay profile. TwitPays (what others have paid you) will appear in the replies tab on your Twitter account. How simpler can it get ?
BankBazaar - comparison shopping for loans
BankBazaar is another another online loan comparison engine for the Indian market. Users can apply for personal and home loans and lenders compete to earn your business and provide you a loan. Within minutes of filling your application, you are presented with offers from various lenders, alongwith what each lender is offering, including a breakup of repayment info.
There are already several players in this market like ApnaLoan, Deals4loans etc. However, unlike its competitors, BankBazaar doesnt redirect you to a sales agent and instead provides you the results instantaneously. The other players mainly act as simply a lead generator for various banks, where your loan request is forwarded to various banks, and then a bank rep contacts you for details. Instead, using BankBazaar, you are contacted by a bank rep only during the final stage, when you’ve made up your decision of which loan offer you’re gonna go with.
The site seems to have focused well on the user experience and with the current ecnomic scenario, might see a surge of folks looking for loan offers.
Sunoh.fm launches Orkut app, Nunook launches widgets
Sunoh.fm has launched an Orkut app, which probably makes the best sense and strategy for them going forward. This move will most likely provide the social context to the site - be it social sharing or social discovery. I havent tried the app myself, but I hope the user interface is a more pleasant experience than my initial testing of the service. You can access the Orkut app here.
Nunook, the social gaming network that I profiled earlier, has launched widgets for publishers. Widgets might be a win-win solution for Nunook, which gets viral traction alongwith additional distribution channels, as well as website and bloggers, who can increase site engagment via the widgets. I’ve emailed the founders to see if there’ll be any revenue sharing option available for widget publishers. Wonder if they should be considering an Orkut app as well ?
NearHop finds you the best possible travel plan
NearHop is a Hyderabad based startup, which hopes to provide you the best possible itinerary. Once you enter your trip details, NearHop will discover all possible routes to your destination, which includes travel via air, train and bus. So, for instance, if I am searching for a trip from Ahmedabad to Bangalore, the NearHop engine shows me that I can either travel by air or by a bus-train combination (take a bus from ahmedabad to pune and then take a train from pune to Bangalore or take a train from Ahmedabad to Mumabi and then a bus from Mumbai to Bangalore).
Each itinerary also lists the estimated price and also provides you the option to book the ticket. You can also filter the results by the number of hops you’re willing to take (3’s the maximum). I may need a refresher of my algorithms course, but I think this is an example of the classic Travelling Salesman Problem. And while the engine forms the core feature of the site, the algorithm does need some additional tuning.
Locomi nails the local search for India
There are some services which give really give you an ‘aha’ feeling when you try them out. Locomi is one such startup. Locomi has developed a Facebook application, which leverages your social graph on Facebook and marries it with location based search for major Indian cities.
Once you add their Facebook app, you can set your location. With the location set, the app maps restaurants, shopping and other landmarks in the vicinity of your location. You can discover new places and also rate and review places you’ve visited. You can see all the places that your friends have been to and the reviews left by your friends for local places. You can also see other people in your vicinity and see the reviews they’ve left for local places. Additionally, you can add listings and plot them on the map.
New Feature Update: LifeBlob and InkFruit
LifeBlob has released some interesting new features, alongwith a Facebook app. New features include SmugMug & YouTube integration, post by email, zoom effects have been launched, and they’re currently working towards a major revamp for the service.
Gotta hand it the LifeBlob guys — they’re innovating at a break neck speed.
Inkfruit has also recently gotten some cosmetic changes, and now looks too Orkuttish to me.
SnappyFingers - a Question and Answers search engine
SnappyFingers is a new startup out of Bangalore and calls itself a search engine for Question and Answers. Their crawler crawls and indexes Question and Answers and FAQ’s from across the Internet and provides a convenient, single point of search from their website.
The site is currently in beta and as per Chirayu, the founder, they have a database of 3 million questions in their search index.
The concept is really nice and has some pretty good potential but in its current form, there are a few shortcomings.
Guitarati launches online Antakshari like game
Guitarati has launched an online, Antakshari based game. You can invite friends from Gmail, YahooMail, 
Hotmail or you can play the game with the site bot itself. Once you select the language of your choice (used to match players), here’s how the game works:
1. On your turn, a letter is assigned to you. You find a song starting with that letter and play it.
2. If your opponent thinks you picked a wrong song for that letter, they can raise objection.
3. If objected to, you can accept objection or sort it over chat if you think the objection is invalid.
4. If you cannot think of a song before your turn expires, you lose turn, miss points.
5. If you cannot think of a song with the assigned letter, you can ask for a new letter once a turn.
6. Game ends when 12 turns have been used up.
Read more
BatchBuzz is…..confusing
I’ve been trying out BatchBuzz for the last 20 odd minutes but still cant figure what it’s actually supposed to be.
To quote the founder’s pitch:
BatchBuzz is an online magazine where you are the reader, writer and editor of the content. The site offers unbiased unedited no-spin content, brought to you by our maverick member reporters willing to do whatever it takes to bring you the coolest your city has to offer — from new places, parties, events, trends, style and opinions.
OK, so probably the site along the lines of a citizen journalism community.
By showcasing the lives of people, BatchBuzz allows you to relive memorable moments, just like flipping through a journal or magazine. BatchBuzz is about personal experiences.
Hmm.So, is it a personal blog ?
Confusions aside, I decided to sift through some of the stories on the site. They range from “partying in vegas” to “software engineer jokes” to a few travelogues. I really didnt feel motivated enough to click through a fourth story.
I feel that the founders should better define what their site is all about. A single tagline should communicate the message clearly, lest the fickle, Web 2.0 user may wander off elsewhere. Finally, what is the value provided by this service ? Why would a user use the service ?
When Food beckons - FoodieBay, NeedGrub answer
Food - restaurant - home delivery related portals seem to surprisingly popular in India. Joining the genre of other startups like OrderMonger and HungryBangalore, are FoodieBay and NeedGrub.
FoodieBay is a new startup by IIT D alumni, which lists about 1200 restaurants and food joints from the Delhi - NCR region. Each listing also includes actual scanned menus, aggregated r
ating from other sources like HT, ToI, whether the restaurant does home delivery and what the average cost for a meal for two would be. The site has a simple navigation and UI and has been categorized pretty well according to the localities.
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