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TringMe.com - convergence calling?
2008-03-30 16:57:00
We spoke to Yusuf Motiwala from TringMe.com recently. The conversation covered various aspects including the technology involved, the revenue model, funding and staffing. iLeher: How did TringMe come about? Yusuf: We were looking to build a Voice 2.0 platform. This was the TringSwitch that we were planning to push to enterprises so that they could support all ...
More About: Convergence , Calling

Revisiting some old favorite topics - eCommerce and web2.0
2008-02-11 07:16:00
Yes I know, things have been slow at iLeher for some time. As Vivek pointed out earlier, the team members have been busy individually in their own stuff. Anyways,`I wanted to assure our audience that we are not fading away. The Internet activity in Indian space is as buzzing as ever. I was catching up ...
More About: Ecommerce , Topics , Favorite

VAKOW is not international; good it is social !!
2008-01-08 07:54:00
I wrote about VAKOW earlier and how much I liked their interface; but I could never use it to forward these awesome jokes to my friends in India. This new year I wanted to wish family/friends in India through SMS. I wanted to do the same thing around Diwali. Every time I want to do ...
More About: Social , International , Good , Not I

Interesting comments @ older posts !!
2008-01-06 08:45:00
I have been approving some interesting comments on our earlier posts. But I have seen that they do not usually stir interesting conversation. If the comment is a direct question to the company/people mention in the post or some earlier comment, they usually don’t get replies. We do show the latest comments in the sidebar ...
More About: Interesting , Comments , Posts , Eres

Analyzing my 2007 predictions
2007-12-31 08:55:00
Its time to take a look at my 10 predictions for 2007 before I can welcome 2008. Here is what I think how things shaped against my predictions. I will put (*) in front of the prediction number where a single (*) means not worth talking about in 2007 to (*****) meaning the prediction is ...
More About: Predictions , Anal

Guest post by Ranjith Pavithran - founder of web consulting firm Kapston
2007-11-14 09:21:00
On “web-to-store” shopping behavior Research by Kapston.com, an Internet business consulting firm in association with GadgetsGuru.com and HolidayHangouts.com on products listed online and websites in India indicates that people spend 10 - 20% more on products they don?t research online. Indian consumers are embracing Internet increasingly to research products, before making a visit to a local store; ...
More About: Consulting , Founder , Post , Guest

Vakow - it is all about execution !!
2007-11-02 04:05:00
I cannot stress the title enough. I wrote about SMS forwarding back in January. Here is an excerpt from the post “sms backup and storage“. “- Service should be dirt cheap, almost free. This needs innovation at multiple levels.  - Service should be transparent to the end user. Something like automatic backup at the gateway. Just like an ...
More About: Execution

IndiaKaHero: Scaling online talent contests.
2007-10-29 01:31:00
India Ka Hero is trying to ride the popularity of TV reality contests and taking it online. It has four talent contests and it is offering prizes in each contest. Users will vote for each entry and they will select a winner based on these votes. Votes can be casted only by registered users and ...
More About: Contests , Online , Talent , Lent

Is there room for another photo site?
2007-09-16 12:44:00
A new photo printing site called ZoomIn was launched last week. Sunny Balijepalli, the fabled co-founder of Half.com (which was sold to eBay for $350 million in 2000) is the CEO and co-founder of the company. I for one am surprised that people still see an opportunity in the crowded online photo printing space. From ...
More About: Photo , Site , Room

A social approach for protecting privacy
2007-09-09 19:29:00
Here is an interview submitted by one of our readers Ullas Sankhla. He talked with the founders of BanKaro, a recently launched social mobile spam filtering service. BanKaro is trying to build a community of trusted individuals for sharing phone numbers of unsolicited marketing callers. The service has just launched, so it remains to be ...
More About: Social , Privacy , Prot , Riva

Interivew with Sandeep Murthy at Cleartrip.com
2007-08-24 23:00:00
The online travel business is a fast growing market segment due to increased travel in India as well as growing number of travel service providers like airlines and hotels. This market segment is also competitive with multiple players including travel agencies like Yatra, MakeMytrip and travel search portals/aggregators like iXigo, Zoomtra. Apart from these startups, ...

Indiatimes? push into personalized home page
2007-08-14 20:38:00
Do we see Indian portals opening up? And trying to cater not only to masses but also to niches? A personalized home page, according to me, helps us consume the content we are most interested in, at one place. It also enables us to decide the way our stuff gets displayed. Most importantly, ...
More About: Home , Page , Home Page , Sona , Push

?We are sitting at the verge of a perfect storm? - Darpan Munjal on ecommer
2007-08-05 08:05:00
Ecommerce has been one of the recurring themes here at iLeher. On this topic we have have covered various stats, strategies, and new ventures. The reason why its so interesting to study this area is its at nascent stages, its upcoming and most importantly its rise will create new avenues for generating revenue for Internet ...
More About: Storm , Perfect , Perfect Storm

Interview with Aloke Bajpai of iXigo
2007-07-22 21:43:00
Aloke Bajpai is a founder of iXigo, an Indian travel search engine that currently serves domestic airline bookings. The online travel business is a fast growing market segment due to increased travel in India as well as growing number of travel service providers like airlines and hotels. This market segment is also competitive with multiple players ...
More About: Interview

India Internet - status check
2007-07-17 09:15:00
comScore recently came out with a report on the India n Internet industry. Here are some of my observations and thoughts: Search engines - One of the popular category of sites. This category pretty much reflects the global trends in terms of the popularity of search engines. (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask). The interesting thing to note ...
More About: Venture Capital , Check , Status

Picsquare tags along with Flickr
2007-06-25 08:54:00
Update: My bad - I missed this somehow, but I’ve just been informed that iTasveer also provides integration with Flick r . This is great stuff, expect to see more from these two companies! In a business like online photo printing there is only so much you can do to acquire customers. Not much scope for any substantial ...
More About: Tags , Along , Square

Ziva/Zook - mobile search
2007-06-18 03:52:00
Have you been Zooking lately? Did you Zook that movie? If not then try it on your cell phone or you can give it a shot at http://www.zook.in/ . This mobile search based service is an offering from Ziva. Ziva has been in the press/blogs for several reasons since its inception. Read this buzz from ...
More About: Mobile , Search , Mobi , Mobile Search , Bile

Are we ready for answers?
2007-05-06 05:37:00
At each stage of life, we use different resource for questions. Starting with parents (when we were kids), then teachers, then friend(s), Professor(s) and the list goes on. We seem to be broadening the answer set. As internet becomes more prevalent, a new group is being introduced which potentially provides a forum to tap into ...
More About: Answers , Ready

Chat with the founder and CEO of Seventymm
2007-04-22 07:22:00
[Update: Seven tymm has given a special discount code for the readers of iLeher. See how to avail the offer at the end of the post] Bollywood is big. It produces more movies than Hollywood. It sells more tickets worldwide compared to Hollywood. It has more more than double the annual growth rate compared to Hollywood. It ...
More About: Chat , Founder , Vent , Under

Widget Marketing: Can Dhingana pull it off?
2007-04-17 10:07:00
A recent case study on YouTube emphasizes the role that widget marketing played in the phenomenal growth of YouTube as a destination site for video sharing. YouTube was not the first mover in its space, but in a market that was fragmented and plagued with sites with poor user experience, it quickly made inroads with ...
More About: Marketing , Widget , Gana , Mark , Pull

Motvik
2007-04-10 08:28:00
For those wishing to see more of the Silicon Valley breed of entrepreneurism in India, Motvik would sound like a good example. Motvik was co-founded by Naveen, Deepak, Ramu and Rajan in September 2006. All four of them were working with eMuzed when they decided to venture into the market by themselves and set up ...

Internet and Mobile Connect
2007-03-30 08:23:00
Got a chance to attend the ?internet and mobile connect? in Mumbai — the panel and audience stirred some interesting thoughts and I would like to throw them open to the audience of ileher: Is the boom in Indian internet space real or just hype? There was a consensus among the panel that even though internet population ...
More About: Internet , Mobile , Inter , Connect , Mobi

Opportunities in rural India?
2007-03-26 06:07:00
According to this study, when the question “Have you heard of Internet?” was thrown at few people from lower socio-economic class India n society, around 75% of population responded with a NO. I bet this number would be much smaller when the question asked is about phone/mobile rather than Internet. Internet has been around in India ...
More About: Port , Opportunities , Rural , Ural

How important are sites in vernacular languages?
2007-03-18 22:41:00
Internet penetration growth rate is among the fastest in the world in India. But everyone knows its going to hit a plateau if the main Internet language remains English. Sure enough, there are portals like rediff, yahoo, msn, google and others who have started offering content in Hindi and other languages. But if you go ...
More About: Site , Port , Sites , Languages , Language

Community driven local search marching ahead.
2007-03-11 21:19:00
After we did our last post on local search, comments & discussion indicate that people are not convinced, if community driven local search adds any value against the algorithmic ones. Here are some data points that I found very interesting.   LeeAnn Prescott says “Based on traffic to Local .com, Yahoo! Local and Live Local Search , it does ...
More About: Community , Drive , Muni

Comparison shopping in India: Current state and what?s in future
2007-03-09 04:26:01
Background With the increasing Internet penetration, ecommerce is steadily growing in India . In the travel sector, it has reached a tipping point where buying tickets online has become quite commonplace. I believe it hasn’t reached that stage yet in the other sectors, but it is surely inching there. The number of sites selling stuff online is increasing at a good rate too - there are at least 150+ decent sites doing retail over the Internet. Surely, a lot of these have started off with focus on NRI customers, but it is not difficult for them to switch gears and start focusing on the customers in India, when there is demand. Start of the concept As the number of sites increase, how do you know where to go and buy stuff. Surely ebay is the current leader, but as other sites start becoming more and more competitive, it becomes a pain to find out the site offering the best deal. In comes the concept of comparison shopping sites. These guys build an index from the product inventori...
More About: Shopping , Future , Current , Comp

Interview with Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspirations
2007-03-05 16:24:04
Amit Agarwal, the author of the the Digital Inspiration s blog, is India’s first professional blogger. Recently, we asked him a few questions and the answers, like the man himself, are simple and straightforward. Aspiring professional bloggers (we know that there are a good number of you out there) would do well to keep them in mind. Once you have read the interview below, please leave behind a comment or send us an email to let us know what you think about the professional blogging scene in India, the technology blogs out there and what value these add to your life. Also, if you know of other Indian bloggers who are blogging for a living, please let us know. Now, to the interview itself. iLeher: In your view, what is professional blogging? How would you describe what you do in terms of it being an economic function? Amit: When you are not posting pictures of your cat sitting on the couch or not writing about what you had for dinner last night. iLeher: Many of us consider a pro...
More About: Inter , Interview , With , View

iTasveer+Vista=Ease of access. (online photo site)+Reliance=disruptive?
2007-03-02 16:23:03
iTasveer is in news as they recently announced a deal with Microsoft. If you have Vista , you can order photos right from Windows explorer, without needing to visit any website at all. Pretty neat. They also announced Doodlepad, a new feature with which you can custom design your own tshirts/mugs and order them online. Good to see some innovation in this space. Clearly, these features make them stand apart from others in this crowded space. However, digital camera + decent Internet access + Windows Vista is not a combination that is prevalent at least today in India, so it will be a little while before they start reaping real benefits from this. (esp. with all the steps Microsoft is taking to prevent piracy in Vista). Obviously (its hard to not imagine mobile while speculating the next disruptive innovation in the Indian context), the next question is - will we see someone striking a similar partnership with Airtel, Reliance or some other mobile network? So that people can just click...
More About: Photo , Site , Online , Access

Will you bet on Local Search ?
2007-02-27 04:20:03
Local search has been a very interesting challenge and alot of old and new companies are taking a stab. Lets look at this entire continuum and where each player sits. Radical idea is to find information that is geo tagged. This information can be as granular as lat-long or as coarse as a city name. So when you setup a shop to solve local search, first question is how do you collect & tag this information? How do you present this informaton so that it creates the most wholesome experience? How do you make money from this high investment business? You can start with smart-crawling the web. I call it smart crawling because you dont crawl everything like a general purpose search engine. You need to identify and extract local information given a webpage. Dedupe listings that occurs on multiple pages. Lets says you write a kickass neural network that labels & classify this information. How does it know which one is real address? How do you verify the information you have is corr...
More About: Search , Local , Will , Loca

tolmolbol - newest entrant in your local community
2007-02-25 16:19:02
We recently spoke to tolmolbol, one of the newer players in India trying to make a mark in online local community/search space. This space is already crowded with the names like Ilaaka, Burrp, Onyomo, Sulekha. Ourcity and Guruji. Not to forget Google, Yahoo and Live search are/will be joining this game in India. This space now officially qualifies for “Indian fragmentation syndrome” similar to travel & DVD rental. Opportunity is there but not enough to attract a national play. Lot of smaller companies will trail the blaze and accumulate disjoint information about various localities in India. This should eventually get consolidated and customers are going to be benefitted with yet another addition. Here is tolmolbol (this name reminds me of tol-mol-ke-bol - the famous game show based on Monty hall problem), but that is just me. 1. What motivated you to start this venture? The biggest motivation for starting tolmolbol stemmed from our frustration with not being able t...
More About: Community , Muni , Rant , Your , West