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Do you want to be a Successful entrepreneur ?
2008-07-18 07:11:00
I just stumbled upon an excellent post by Neil Patel. He is all of 21, but is one of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs I know of. He has written an excellent article called ?10 Reasons You Are Not A Successful Entrepreneur ?. If you are serious about becoming an entrepreneur, this is a must read. All the ten points he has mentioned are extremely important, but the 1st point - You don?t know how to manage money and 2nd point - You don?t have multiple game plans are of paramount importance if you are taking a dive into entrepreneurship !

WiZiQ: Platform to teach and learn live, online | 50 passes worth $50 avail
2008-07-17 06:50:00
E-learning is fast gaining popularity in India . With Internet audience and broadband connections growing in India, e-learning is becoming a viable option to many. Number of Internet startups have come up in recent times to cater to this growth WiZiQ is one such startup that has come up with a free e-learning platform. With WiZiQ, teachers can create their own virtual classroom and impart knowledge to interested students. It could be a private or a public classroom and can be scheduled at a fixed time and date. WiZiQ does not limit itself to be just a e-learning center, it also serves as a collaboration tool where teachers and students can interact at various levels and even conduct tests online.
More About: Live , Online , Worth , Learn

After Passat, its time for Jetta
2008-07-17 02:13:00
Volkswagen, the German car manufacturer yesterday launched its ever popular compact sedan ? JETTA ? in India. The car will come between the range of 13 to 17 lakhs for various petrol and diesel variants. Jetta has been consistently ranked in top 10 best-selling compact sedans worldwide for last few years and there is a reason to it. Like most German cars, Jetta has very good built, strong on safety features and top-of-the-line engines. In US, Jetta?s are popular with select segment of people, especially those who want a solid car that will serve them for very long years. I think they are a perfect fit for tough Indian road conditions.
More About: Volkswagen , Time , Passat

Mergers and Acquisitions fall sharply, but PE activity grows
2008-07-15 07:40:00
2007 will go down in history as the year of Mergers & Acquisitions in India . However, 2008 has not kept pace with the momentum gained last year. This year has not been good for India overall, Stock Market today has come down to nearly 12,500 points - a 15 month low -, investors have lost thousands of crores of rupees, the rupee has lost the fight handsomely against the dollar - last 6 months have seen rupee plummet from high of nearly 38.5 to a low of 42.75 against the dollar, real estate which grew at astonishing pace last year has seen tremendous slowdown. Inflation, which was hovering at less than 4% last year has nearly tripled to 11.5%. The total number of Merger & Acquisition deals too have seen huge negative growth. During the first six months of 2008 total M&A deals stand at 265 with value at $18.54 billion as against 335 deals amounting to $ 43.97 billion in the corresponding period in 2007.
More About: Fall , Mergers and Acquisitions

Guruji spreads its wings with music search
2008-07-15 06:42:00
India had been long missing a good music search engine (aka meta aggregator). I was always surprised that this niche had never been tapped very seriously. However, in a gap of a week, we seem to have 2 very good music search engines serving loads of Hindi songs for Indian Audience. Just couple of days back I wrote about Phulki, and was quite happy with their offering. Close to their heals, guruji, India's first homegrown search engine have launched a Music aggregation site. They too, like Phulki have done a great job of music aggregation. They claim to have aggregated songs and albums starting from 1932 till date.
More About: Search , Spreads , Guruji , Wings

Want to get home early from work? Spend some time on looking good !
2008-07-14 09:40:00
Yeah..that's what has been revealed in a recent Synovate survey on beauty. More than 55% of the people think that well groomed and good looking people can get away with less work at workplace than their peers. Now, I have my doubts if this holds true in India ? you can make your judgements :) I?d be more inclined to say that girls do have advantage of being just that ? girls. They do sometimes get away with lesser work at office, and its not only at workplace ! Think about any situation ? lets say you are in a long queue to get tickets. If a girls approaches you saying she is in hurry, most of the you may allow her to go ahead and feel good about it. But if guy approached you, it very unlikely that you will allow him to get ahead of you. Unfair advantage? you take a call !
More About: Business , Time , Home , Work , Early

Contentsutra parent company ContentNext gets acquired by The Guardian Media
2008-07-11 08:07:00
The parent company of ContentSutra, ContentNext Media , has been acquired by Guardian Media Group for $30 million plus. It was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002. ContentNext media has paidcontent.org, MocoNews, , PaidContent UK and ContentSutra under its wings.   Here is what Rafat has to say about it: Almost six years after our company started with paidContent.org, we have been acquired by Guardian News & Media (GNM), the news media division of UK-headquartered Guardian Media Group (GMG). Guardian itself is owned by the Scott Trust. GNM publishes UK national newspapers ? the Guardian and the Observer ? as well as the Guardian.co.uk and Media Guardian. We will be part of Guardian Professional group, which is the B2B media division for GNM, and runs targeted sites such the MediaGuardian, as well as online data businesses and conferences.
More About: Company , The Guardian , Acquisition

Phulki: A neat music search engine
2008-07-11 06:16:00
There are very few startups who stick to the K.I.S.S principal and Phulki is one of those startups that have followed it to the T ! What does Phulki do? Very simply, Phulki is a search engine that allows visitors to search and play any Hindi track or Hindi Album without leaving the website. Go ahead and search for a song by giving parameters like movie name, song, singer, star, year. On search results page just click on the ?add to player? and start enjoying your favorite music.
More About: Music , Search , Search Engine , Engine

inviziads: Monetizing solutions for flash game creators
2008-07-10 09:06:00
Online gaming is big, there is no question about it. Comscore recently reported that almost 1 out of every 2 users on the world wide web plays an online game. Even in India, last couple of years have seen emergence of gaming sites like Zapak , Game s2win, Indiagames and many more. However, one of the main drawback these flash game developers face is that, their games can be easily copied. As soon as a new game appears on one site, you can see them popping on other sites as well. So even if the game becomes popular and is played by hundreds and thousands of users, the developers of game don?t really get much benefit out of it. Inviziads addresses this pain-point of flash game developers very well ! It has launched an ad network network that will help flash game developers to monetize the game if it is being played on a different site other than its origin. Now the game developers will actually want their games to be copied !
More About: Flash , Monetizing , Solutions

Onmobile introduces audio ads on mobile platform: IS it too intrusive?
2008-07-10 02:58:00
Mobile VAS company OnMobile launched an audio advertising platform for mobile operators. Called AdRBT (ad ringback tones), the service will play audio ads to callers when they dial a mobile number. To put it simply, when a caller calls a particular mobile phone, he/she will hear ads while the phone is ringing. In return mobile operator will offer incentives to the mobile user who subscribes to this services. Offcourse, the mobile operator will require a permission from subscriber to activate the service on his or her mobile phone. The ads can be targeted based on the location and VAS usage of the caller. The VAS usage data gives information such as what handset the caller is using, whether he uses the roaming service, how often he travels abroad, the types of ringtones he downloads and the services he uses. OnMobile will also play ads in regional languages. Apart from choosing the profile of the customer, advertisers will also be able to specify the number of times they want t...
More About: Mobile , Audio , Platform , Onmobile , Mobile Platform

Microsoft bullying Yahoo : Ready to talk only with new board
2008-07-08 07:54:00
Did you think Microsoft - Yahoo deal was over? Far from it. It is now looking like a bollywood drama. Microsoft now says that if the current yahoo bosses go away and the new board comes in, it is ready to re-enter the negotiations ! Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has written about it in detail and is not too happy with the way Microsoft is bullying Yahoo ? just because it is now in a position to do that. Yesterday Microsoft released a statement clearly mentioning that it is not interested in talking with the current management and do not trust that they can take this forward.
More About: Board , Bullying , Talk

Indian Internet Audience Growth highest in Asia-Pacific region
2008-07-07 08:21:00
Comscore recently published the growth in Internet audience for Asia Pacific region, with India registering highest growth for the first time. According to the figures, India stands 3rd after China and Japan in the total number of Internet Audience. Internet Audience Growth in the Asia-Pacific Region April 2008 vs. April 2007 Total Asia-Pacific - Age 15+, Home and Work Locations* Source: comScore World Metrix   Total Unique Visitors (000) Apr-07 Apr-08 % Change Asia Pacific 280,418 318,623 14 China 90,274 102,848 14 Japan 53,685 ...
More About: Indian

3g Iphone to cost 16000 to 18000 in India
2008-07-07 08:06:00
The much talked about 3g Iphone is going to cost you between Rs. 16000 to Rs. 18000 as per the report published in Business Standard today. This is probably the first official news for 3g Iphone pricing. I had expected it to be in that range, as neither Vodafone or Airtel could subsidize the cost of the handset as AT&T has done it in US. The US carriers can afford to subsidize the handset cost by tying up users with a 2 year contract costing $50 upwards per month. Here is what BS reports:
More About: India , Cost

7 grand challenges facing IT
2008-07-04 09:13:00
I came across this report by Gartner while writing my previous post. It talks about major challenges faced by IT Industry that have not been resolved as yet. I am reproducing that report here for readers benefit. Here are the seven IT Grand Challenges as identified by Gartner. Never having to manually recharge devices: Today, the ubiquity of portable computing and communications devices powered by battery means that many people would find it highly desirable to either have their batteries charged remotely or their devices powered by a remote source, bypassing the use of batteries altogether.  Despite more than 100 years of research since the invention of the Tesla Coil in the late nineteenth century, the most notable progress to date was achieved by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in July 2007 in their experiment to transfer non-radiative power. By this measure, any commercial application of wireless powering still seems a long way off. Parallel Progra...
More About: Business , Information Technology , Facing

alabot: Enabling human interaction with applications
2008-07-04 04:01:00
Now this is a startup which I think really makes life easier for users. Pune based startup alabot aims to bring the power of natural language processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to our regularly used applications like Instant Messengers and Mobile phones. According to Gartner, there are 7 grand challenges facing the IT Industry for which we need solutions. One of them is Non Tactile, Natural Computing Interface. Here is what Gartner has to say: Non Tactile, Natural Computing Interface: The idea of interacting with computers without any mechanical interface has long been a desirable goal in computing. Some of the many challenges that remain in this area include the ability to detect gestures, developing a gesture dictionary and the need for real-time processing. Another set of challenges relate to natural language processing, which include speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, machine translation and transl...
More About: Applications , Human , Interaction

Email is still the most popular way of sharing articles from a blog / websi
2008-06-06 14:33:00
While carrying out routine admin tasks of my blog today I came across some very interesting statistics that I thought of sharing with my readers. Nearly a month back I installed a plugin called ishare that helps readers to share articles published on trak.in blog. Now-a-days, having social bookmarking buttons on your blog is commonplace. It helps to bring in traffic to your blog. ishare is a neat plugin that not only allows you to share the articles through social bookmarking sites but also allows you to email the post, convert it to pdf or word document and even print it. When I installed this plugin, I thought more than 3/4th of users will use it for sharing articles on social bookmarking sites. But I was wrong ! The traditional way of sharing articles via Email still rules ! Here is the snapshot of how readers have shared articles using button.
More About: Articles , Blog , Popular , Sharing

The No.1 brand in India comes to Second Life
2008-06-05 14:26:00
Amul is planning to buy eight-10 islands, equal to 160 acres of virtual land, in Second Life to set up a simulation of its production and distribution facility. The objective behind launching a virtual setup is to demonstrate its functioning to the consumers, and experiment with any change in the production or distribution system virtually before executing it in the real world. [source]
More About: India , Second Life , Brand

Reliance Retail winning battle against Bharti- Walmart !
2008-06-05 13:56:00
Last year I had written about interesting Test match between 2 retail giants who had announced their plans to open hundreds of stores across India . Bharti Wal-Mart had announced their wholesale cash-and-carry and back-end supply chain management operations in India. Close to their heels, Reliance Retail has announced their plan of entering the same business segment with plans of supplying to kirana stores and institutional buyers.
More About: Business , Battle

kwippy: Close network nano-blogging through Instant Messenger
2008-06-05 09:00:00
Microblogging as name suggests is extremely condensed form of no-frills-blogging. Best example of this is tumbleblog, where a user shares his content, videos etc...etc within minutes without spending time on going through routine of writing a whole post. Nano blogging is even more condensed form where the content shared is in form of short messages. This has been hugely popular thanks to Twitter. Now an Indian startup - kwippy - brings you nanoblogging with couple of interesting twists. Users can actually send messages via their favourite Instant messengers like Gtalk or Yahoo. The messages send through IMs are stored on your personal page or nanoblog in threaded discussion format. The user just needs to add kwippy as a friend in his/her Instant messenger. All messages and status updates will reflect on the personal page.
More About: Blogging , Network , Messenger , Close

Trak.in May Roundup: Statistics and more?.
2008-06-02 17:43:00
May was the anniversary month for Trak.in blog and it was a bumper month from stats point of view as well. Trak.in registered high level of traffic this month. Here is a look at stats for May: Trak.in blog saw close to 115,000 unique visitors and 336,000 pageviews, a record of sorts. This kind of pageviews were really unexpected. The factor that has surprised me over last couple of months is the increase in pageviews per visit which stood at nearly 2.94. Trak.in has always been clocking close to 2 pageviews per visit, but this time it has jumped to nearly 3. I am really not sure of the reason for this jump.
More About: India , Traffic , Roundup , Statistics

The best management lesson
2008-06-02 13:39:00
This excerpt is taken from the speech of Former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam given at Wharton India Economic forum in Philadelphia on March 22,2008. A Leader Should Know How to Manage Failure Question: Could you give an example, from your own experience, of how leaders should manage failure? Kalam: Let me tell you about my experience. In 1973 I became the project director of India's satellite launch vehicle program, commonly called the SLV-3. Our goal was to put India's "Rohini" satellite into orbit by 1980. I was given funds and human resources -- but was told clearly that by 1980 we had to launch the satellite into space. Thousands of people worked together in scientific and technical teams towards that goal. By 1979 -- I think the month was August -- we thought we were ready. As the project director, I went to the control center for the launch. At four minutes before the satellite launch, the computer began to go through the checklist of items that nee...
More About: Management , Lesson

Buzzar.tv: Virtual Exhibition space for Brands
2008-05-31 16:09:00
Last November I had written about Indibiz.tv, which was an online directory for brands showcasing their ad commercials on the net. Now, Pixelkraft Media solutions, company behind indibiz have launched another site - Buzzar.tv - which is again very similar to what indibiz.tv is offering. Here is how Pixelkraft differentiates Buzzar from Indibiz:
More About: Space , Branding , Virtual , Exhibition , Brands

Trak.in popular post digest
2008-05-29 16:34:00
I really don't have much to write today and I am also not in a mood to really hunt for stuff, so here are some of the popular posts in last few weeks published on trak.in.
More About: Post , Popular , Digest

Trak.in Poll Verdict: Indians prefer female bosses, only just
2008-05-28 14:29:00
I had written about ASSOCHAM survey couple of weeks back which concluded that more than 68% men and women prefer male bosses at their work. I did not really agree with this survey and decided to carry out my own small survey on Trak.in. There are about 202 trak.in readers who have participated (till this point) in the survey and it reflects exactly what I feel. Out of 202 poll voters, 42% prefer female bosses at workplace, 37% prefer male and 21% said they have no preference.
More About: Indians , Female , Poll , Verdict

twistory: What you love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish on Twitter
2008-05-27 16:05:00
Time for some fun, not the regular business/startup related stuff :) Now this is for all you twitter addicts out there. Twistory is a scrolling mashups of twits (messages) on what you love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish.
More About: Love , Hate , Twitter , Feel

India: Regaining the lost glory !
2008-05-26 12:42:00
I came across this slideshare presentation, that I think is a must watch for readers. This well researched presentation was presented during "Duke GEMBA'08 - India Panel Discussion". This presentation talk about where India stands currently and the key highlights of current and future growth of India. India: Regaining the lost glory... (Please view the presentation in full screen mode)
More About: Lost , Growth , Glory

The new mantra of PR: Marketing through blogging and Social Networking
2008-05-26 10:27:00
Indian blogging scene has grown quite a bit over last 12 to 18 months. Last year in May when I started blogging, there were hardly any blogs that one could name which were even remotely popular, other than Labnol and couple of others. However, over last year or so Indian blogging scene has grown and now we have number of blogs that command decent traffic. I see exponential growth in Indian bloggers in coming months  , thanks to Aamir, Amitabh and host of other celebrities (latest being Salman Khan ) embracing blogging quite seriously. Yes, it is may be money making source for some, but these celebrities are bringing "blogging" into Mainstream media. Not a single day passes by without some or the other blog content being quoted in our national dailies. With blogging becoming popular, most PR agencies are looking at bloggers as a serious marketing avenue. During early days of my blogging I used to get standard PR material mailed frequently, most of which could be termed...
More About: Marketing , Social , India , Social Networking , Indian

Top 25 great places to work
2008-05-23 10:26:00
It has been many days since I have published a top list. So here are the top 25 great companies to work for in India . This list has been published by Indian arm of Great place to work Institute. The list has been compiled based on the responses given by company employees' to a proprietary survey developed by the Great Place to Work ® Institute. In addition, materials submitted by the company are evaluated, including the company's response to the Great Place to Work® Culture Audit©, any accompanying materials submitted by the company for consideration, as well as information gathered from other reputable sources such as media stories about the company.  List of Top 25 great companies to work for in India (only top 25 companies are ranked and others are in alphabetical order) :
More About: Places

IndiaShines: Another Indian social network ! but why ?
2008-05-22 13:31:00
Yes, another social network ! What are we supposed to do with so many social networks? Okay fine, it is a city based network, but so what? How is it going to make any difference? Okay so you allow everything from making new friends, sharing photos, posting jobs, blogging, uploading videos, etc etc etc…. I have specialized popular ...
More About: Social , Community , Indian , Network , Social Network

GreenMango: Marketing platform for small entrepreneurs
2008-05-22 13:02:00
I had covered an Indian Startup few months back called Babajob and was thoroughly impressed with its idea and execution. I would call them "A startup with a noble cause". GreenMango is another Hyderabad based startup in similar mould. GreenMango is started by 2 women entrepreneurs - Nandini Narula and Yasmina Mccarty. It was born to cater to two challenges faced by the working poor: information paucity and market inaccessibility. GreenMango is designed to provide tailors, electricians, carpenters, domestic help and all other working poor labour in urban India with a platform to demonstrate the quality of their work and earn a fair price for their services. While babajob was more of a job site for poor working class, GreenMango is a platform to demonstrate their work through personalized storefronts for them.
More About: Marketing , Small , Entrepreneurs , Platform