WikiReader: Wikipedia On Portable Device, Original Webaroo's Idea!!

WikiReader is $99 portable device which stores all the Wikipedia articles for the offline browsing and searching. WikiReader uses two AAA batteries, a low-power CPU and monochrome touch screen, and standard microSD cards to house all the articles. WikiReader is not a connected device and hence not very useful in keeping updated with real-time news. WikiReader can be just used as a pocket-reference when you are not online.
Remember Webaroo, which originally came up with similar idea 3 years back. Webaroo released desktop and mobile applications for content caching which can be used for offline search later. Webaroo also had bundled the wikipedia slices on laptops, mobiles and SD cards but it never became popular, probably because the content was not real time.
WikiReader also faces the same challenge as webaroo, except that it has its own hardware. WikiReader allows you to update the content either by downloading th latest content from their site or can recieve updated SDcards by paying an annual fees. WikiReader will be available shortly on Amazon.

Will WikiReader go Webaroo way? What do you think?

Hoonur: Talent Platform From Balaji Telefilms

Balaji Telefilms Ltd a well known name among Indian household for their TV serials and films has launched Hoonur. Hoonur means talent in hindi. As the name suggest, hoonur is platform which helps people with talent in acting, dancing, singing and modelling in getting a break.

Any upcoming actors, models, singers, dancers can create their portfolio on hoonur.com for free. Hoonur is also integrated with Facebook connect. Hoonur, basically offers three features:

• Create Portfolio : Upload talent clips, videos, photos
• Post a Casting Job : List Your Casting Requirements
• List Your Business : List your business or services offered

Ibibo has been conducting talent hunts but Hoonur has an advantage of being launched by Balaji Telefilms which is in this industry for long time. It would be interesting to see how they will be monetizing this platform.

Do let us know what you think of Hoonur!!

Indian Startup iMo at TechCrunch50

iMo is an innovative Indian startup which got launched at Techcrunch50. iMo is an iphone app which aims to convert your iphone/android into a joystick. My first impression was its an amazingly crazy idea.

About iMo:

iMo is Gurgoan based startup with two employees (Himanshu Baweja & Pankaj Meena)

How it Works:

iMo is an iphone app which reads the keystrokes and other actions from iphone and transfers it to the PC through wi-fi/blue-tooth, the windows application on the PC reads these signals and sends them to the game.
Himanshu Baweja says "Extra hardware such as joysticks cost not just in terms of money but are an extra burden during travel, storage and maintenance. iMo addresses these needs by morphing an existing piece of hardware i.e. the iPhone/iPod Touch into a powerful game controller and giving it a Nintendo Wii like capabilities."
While the idea is crazy, it will be interesting to see how it does in market. All the best iMo. We will try to get Himanshu on TechI@Malliks soon.

Bit.ly Reduces By 2 Characters, Can Now Support 3 Trillion URLs With Current 19 Chars

In this 140 character twitter world every single character counts. In order to solve this problem many URL shortening services have come up and today its a very crowded space. Bit.ly is one of such popular service and Twitter's default shortening service. Bit.ly(chars:6) has now launched j.mp(chars:4) which means a reduction of 2 characters. These 2 character can allow bit.ly to support 3 trillion URL within current 19 characters. Here, we explain how we arrived to this 3 trillion number.
bit.ly when launched initially the URL would have been some thing like
http://bit.ly/X where X can be {a-z,A-Z,0-9} i,e 62 Urls using 15 chars and next it grew to http://bit.ly/XX i,e it can support 3844(62*62) Url using 16 chars. finally now they grew to http://bit.ly/XXXXX i,e it can support 916 million with 19 chars, but still it can happen that soon they may have to increase by one more char. Bit.ly has good foresight and so they have reduced the 2 characters in base URL which can now support 3 trillion URLs using current 19 characters (http://jm.p/XXXXXXX).
They also have maintained compatibility between bit.ly and j.mp so, both http://bit.ly/87HKW and http://j.mp/87HKW take you to same URL. They can reduced the url further by trimming http://, but that may need support from Twitter where they have to identify even bit.ly/87HKW as url and hyperlink.

FeaturedUsers.Com: Adsense For Twitter

Google Adsense is way to monetize for many websites and blogs. But the revenues out of google adsense many times are too low as they are mostly CPC (cost per click) based. Dusty Reagan, a twitter application developer who built friendorfollow, soon realised that google adsense is not bringing enough revenues to even pay for the server, so he came up with featuredusers.com, which he first used for just his application, but as the advertizing inventory grew he opened it up for other twitter applcations as well.

Featured Users works on CPM (cost for 1k impressions) model. Users will have to pay 10$ for 1k impressions. Basically impression will have a link to user's twitter profile. Users who want to increase their followers see featuredusers as better alternative to Adsense as they will be advertizing on Twitter Apps which is very contextual as people using twitter application are already twitter users and follow for them is just a click away.

Publishers can show featuredusers ads by just add a javascript code snippet on their twitter applications. Publishers get $5.64 for 1k impressions provided they have atleast 0.6% CTR(click through rate) that is atleast 6 clicks per 1K impressions. With increasing application using featuredusers ads it has run out of inventory so its not necessary that you see ad impression on every page view of application. Earlier featureduser was showing house-ads when they ran out of user-ads and paying $2 but they soon discontinued payment for house-ads as it wasnt feasible for its founder.

Try out FeaturedUsers and let us know the feedback. We will try to bring the Founder on TechI soon.

Financial Planning before Starting Your Venture

Starting your own venture is an easy job but making it success is tough. It good to see young India is striving to achieve their dreams. Many people come up with an exciting idea and plan to start their own venture. One thing you need to ponder is how long can you sustain with your current bank balance. Many people start their venture and somewhere in middle of execution they run out of money and start looking for alternate job there by losing the focus on startup which will eventually end up in dead pool.
Proper planning is needed before starting a venture and not always everything goes according to the plan, you may start with one million Rupees and believe that you can sustain for 2 years but it can happen that you drain money within a year. So ideally you would love to have consistent flow of money even when you are working on your own startup. Here are some of our thoughts:

• Married people have an advantage if one of the partners is having a regular job. Its ideal for other partner to start a venture. Infosys was built this way.
• If you are in regular job then you can start working on your venture and quit the regular job only when needed. Basically it will be better to build atleast initial prototype before quitting the job and ofcourse it means burning mid-night oil. This will put you in better situation once you quit as you have better bank balance and also you can either get funded or make revenues soon as initial product is already built. Youtube was supposedly build by its founders while they were still working in regular jobs.
• If you think that building your product is time consuming then to keep money flowing in you can get into software services which will get you fast cash. But you need to focus on your core product and services is just a way for you to sustain.

All the above thoughts are valid as long as venture is not well funded.
Do let us know your thought on the same.

Mobikwik: Easy Mobile Recharge Online

Prepaid mobile recharge is still an unorganized market in India. Most of Indian mobile users use prepaid service. Mobikwik is Delhi based startup founded by IIT/NID alumini and is in alpha-stage testing. mobikwik helps you manage the mobile budget in better way. Most of the people use prepaid service to control their mobile billls. But its painful when you run out of balance in middle of some important discussion, and you need a quick way to recharge you mobile and ideal one would expect is via SMS.

In mobikwik, you can pay a bulk amout at one go which get translated into mobikwik balance. You can recharge your mobile via SMS or call using the mobikwik balance. You can also subscribe to mobikwik Kwikplan which automatically recharges your mobile monthly from mobikwik balance. Payment to mobikwik can be made via various credit cards, debit cards or internet banking.

Will you be using mobikwik service?

Website: mobikwik.com

Location: New Delhi, India

Funding: Private Funding

Founders: Bipin Singh, Sunali Aggarwal

Malliks Review: TweetMeNews Tweets Personalized News

TweetMeNews is a product created by privately funded nobosh labs which is into building news personalization engine. Nobosh is founded by Brett in 2007.

TweetMeNews is a Twitter application build using Twitter API's. The app asks you questions about what genre of news you are interested in (business, technology, advertising, venture capital and health) and what types of publications you’d like news from (blogs, newspapers, video, magazines) based on your selection they find the appropriate news from twitter. Further they also analyze your own twitter feed so as to ensure that the news they send is not already present in user feed. User can also limit number of tweets he like to receive daily from the service. These tweets are posted to user as Direct messages to the user. User can also read these tweets from the TweetMeNews page by signing in.

TweetMeNews is implemented well but its questionable whether the product has any real value add to the user. Some of the drawbacks of this approach are delay in the delivery of news as we all know delayed news is no more news. Users who generally are fond of Technology news may be following all the technology bloggers on twitter or via RSS feeds and they happen to get real time updates anyways. TweetMeNews also lacks any monetization model only option is to append a small advertizement along with every news alert.

TweeMeNews have just 200+ users that too after being covered by TechCrunch. This number is deduced from number of followers of @TweetMeNews.

Malliks Rating: 1/5

Website: tweetmenews.com

Location: Mountain View, CA

Funding: Privately funded

Twitter's User Name Change: Creation or Confusion!!

Any user using a web service which needs signing in is identified by the username. For example, my identity on yahoo mail is mallik_y2k2 and I cant change it. Generally these kind of systems doesn't allow you to change user names, only option is to discard the old user name and create the new one. But Twitter on other hand allows users to change their username.

Technically twitter uses an id for every user and this id is different from the user name. @Malliks has an id as 25659077 since twitter uses the id they treat the username just like any other field location or description and so its easy to allow the change. But generally the twitter links are of the format http://twitter.com/Malliks and all the @Malliks on twitter are pointed to that link and if some user changes his username all these links to his old user name will become a dead links. So am not sure if Username change was provided by Twitter as just another feature and was it overlooked completely.

Also Twitter app developers keep in mind that you need to use the id to uniquely identify the twitter user and not username and also need to keep in mind that usernames can be changed at any point of time.

Malliks Review: diMdiM, poor man's WebEx

DIMDIM is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and conduct a session via webcam. DimDim is open source web meeting company. Dimdim is backed by the original investors in Skype, Hotmail, and MySQL. Dimdim is based in Boston,Massachusetts with offices in New Hampshire, Canada and India. Most of the engineering work is done in Hyderabad India. DimDim offers the service for free for upto 20 users & 1 webcam in meeting. For more features you can use the Pro version which is still much cheaper than Web ex.

Malliks Testing:
DimDim has been tested thoroughly by me and application is cool but you need good internet bandwidth for things to work as expected. Below are the some of the bugs found as part of Malliks Testing.

• HTML/JS injection(XSS) is possible at many places on DimDim because of improper handling of html & js code.
• Some of the cookies are storing the passwords in plain text format which is not appreciated from security perspective.
• Member knowing pptId and meetingId can open the presentation even without being member of meeting which is not appreciated.

Malliks Rating: 4/5



Website: dimdim.com
Location: Hyderabad, India and Massachusetts, US
Funding: $8.4M (Last funding of $6M on July 9th 2008 From Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards.)

Create Public/Private Communities (Knots) using TweetKnot

I couldn't blog for sometime as I was extremely busy with TweetKnot. Being one of creator of tweetknot its not fair to review it myself. Already many startup blogs have given positive reviews for tweetknot. I would just like to take this oppurtunity to give brief introduction to features of tweetknot.

• TweetKnot is Community of Twitter users who share common interest and use this as platform to share the short messages across them.
• Every member of Knot can send the message to all other members of Knot.
• TweetKnot provides support to create private Knots.
• Owner of Knot can specify sources (twitter users, twitter hashtags, RSS feeds) whose messages appear in the Knot automatically.
• No registration required, you can sign-in via twitter. Just allow TweetKnot to access twitter, its absolutely safe.

Already many users have started liking TweetKnot, I would like all you guys to try it out and let us know the feedback.

SMS Apps From Mazic Using SMSGupShup Platform

SMS GupShup (Webaroo company) has released its platform for developers to build their SMS applications. The platform is very easy to use. SMS Application is an application that can be used to provide services by communicating through SMS. It can be built using any programming language like Java, C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python etc. You need to register, a Keyword and Appurl with Sms GupShup. When any user send an SMS Keyword Query, the app url will be getting the user phone number and Query as the Query parameters. The response from the app url should be in form of XML or JSON which contains the phone number and content to be posted to the phone number. App cannot send infinite outgoing responses. The outgoing responses from the an app can be upto 5 times the incoming messeges.
Mazic India has built couple of SMS apps using this platform, SMS Dictionary and SMS News.
SMS Dictionary:
SMS DICT pasta and sends it to 56767888 to get meaning of Pasta as response. Usage: DICT Query

SMS News:
SMS Khabar Satyam to 56767888 to get latest news related to satyam. Usage: KHABAR Query

Let us know what kind of services you would like to access via SMS.

Guruji Launches Finance Search

Guruji, launched finance search engine, similar to Google Finance for Indian companies. Using Guruji Finance, you can search for quotes and get the stock trend, related news, competitors trend etc, Guruji earlier launched music and movie timings search. Guruji is a sequoia backed startup, same VC which also backed Google. Moneycontrol currently rules this space in India, Will Guruji be able to compete with Moneycontrol?

Startup Saturday: Honeywell and Logica's Startup Initiatives

Honeywell and Logica have announced their startup initiatives in co-ordination with HeadStart at Startup Saturday Bangalore. Honeywell has announced that it is ready to partner with exciting startups and it has already done that with couple of startups in rural healthare and microfinancing space. While Honeywell is clear that it will not invest in any startup but would be ready to make a strategic partnership which would be a win-win situation for both the startup and honeywell. Logica also has announced a startup contest, they are basically looking for startups which will add value to logica's business. The contest will be run by logica in 8 countries, one startup would be selected in each country and a final winner across 8 countries as well. Country winner can use services of Logica's coutry sales whereas international winner will have access to the global logica sales. For more details on logica's startup intitiatives click here.

Startup Saturday: LifeMojoPro Demo

LifeMojo gave the demo of their B2B product at Startup Saturday in Bangalore, LifeMojo has a B2C product as well which you can try out here. LifeMojo is basically a weight and lifestyle management and tracking tool. The B2C version allows you to track you body weight online. In B2B model lifemojo sells their Pro version to the nutritionists as SaaS. Using the pro version, nutritionists can keep track of their patients online. Nutritionists will be paying Lifemojo cost per user per anum. At the same time the patient can log-in into the nutritionists site [LifeMojos Whitelabel] and read the comment/subsriptions given by their nutrtionist and there by also track the food they are taking, online. Lifemojo also provides a payment gateway to allow patients to pay the nutritionists online.
Lifemojo also have a mobile J2me application where in patient can track the food he is taking and activity he is doing. J2me app needs GPRS connection to connect to their servers. They also have way to access it via SMS. As per the founders fitness industry has huge market and growing rapidly in India. With queries like "How to lose weight", "How to gain weight" appearing in the google zeitgeist 2008 many people seems to be taking fitness seriously.
All the best LifeMojo!!

Zapak.com in Association With Pringoo ....

Pringoo, custom T-shirts and gifts portal struck partnership reliance's gaming portal zapak.com. As a part of this partnership pringoo allows you to create the gaming related custom merchandise. The partnership is similar to asklaila-msn partnership.
Zapak shopping has the custom pringoo page as an iframe. Basically pringoo is counting to get more traction from zapak's partnership and zapak may be looking to make some revenues out of this deal. Zapak recently has closed down the bangalore office and is in cost cutting mode. These kind of deals will help zapak raise some money to sustain, Zapak spent a lot of money on marketing initially and in process got brand image and now they should use that image to get back the money :).

Bug: If any user visits http://shopping.zapak.com the header shown will be that of zapak, now open http://pringoo.com in same browser session, you will still be seeing the zapak header (it should have been pringoo's header). Pringoo may want to fix this thing, you may want to look at way you are handling the cookies.
Guys, what do you think of this partnership?.

Also read: AskLaila powers msn cities

Hiraj : Track Your Child's Growth Online

Hiraj, is an online way to track the child's growth and in process record the wonderful moments and share them with friends and families. Hiraj allows parents to track child's growth day by day. Site has regular features like photos, videos, blogging. Hiraj also has features like tracking the medical diary and growth plans. The child's profile on this website can be a good gift to child once he grows up.
Indian Internet users are mostly in young age group and parents in this group are constantly growing. So, this site seems to have potential. Hiraj is a startup by UK based Indian couple.
Do try out Hiraj and let us know what you felt about the same ?

Google Adsense: How to Block the Competitors Ads?

Recently, we have seen the incidents wherein competitors ads are appearing on some of the web portals. For example, an Ibibo ad appearing on Yaari's website and Mypopkorn ads appearing on BigAdda, All these Ads were displayed using Google adsense. I just wanted to make this posting to let people know that there is way to block the competitor's ads on their webpages and how to use it on google adsense.
Basically while setting up the Adsense unit, there is an option called Competitve Ad Filter under Adsense Setup. In Competitve Ad Filter you can mention the url of your competitor whose ads will be blocked on your site. So Basically if Yaari.com wants to block Ibibo.com ads then they can just mention ibibo.com as one of the url in competetive ad filter. But Ibibo still has way to show up its ads on yaari using a hack. Google blocks the ads based on the destination domain name, so if I create an Ibibo ad which points to say xibibo.com which again gets redirected to ibibo.com then Google will not block such ads. Alternate way is to use Allowed Sites option under Adsense setup tab where you can mention the list of domain whose ads can appear on your site. People using Google adsense should use these features of Adsense and at same time keep adding the competitors domains to the compettetive ads.
The domain names used are just for example and this post is not meant to malign there image.

Earn While You Search: Microsoft's Continuing Effort to Win Search Battle

Microsoft has launched winwithsearch competition where-in you have chance to win the free talk time. All you need to do is search for a term and along with the results two dice gets rolled, you will be winning free talk time if both the dice show 6's, So the probability of winning in each search is 1/36. Each session lasts for 10 minutes, so if any user wins in 10 minutes the competiton would be stopped for that 10 minutes and next chance to win again starts after the end of that session.
Microsoft has to now spend 144 talk times in a day, I am not sure how much they are offering as talk time, lets say they are offering a talk time of 5$ it would mean they have to spend maximum of 720$ a day for this campaign. I don't understand why Microsoft didn't launch this as part of their live.com.
Do try this and let us know what you feel about the same? If you win let us know how much talk time you got as a gift?

mybanglore.com: Very Well Designed Portal

mybangalore.com a newly launched portal for bangloreans. I am impressed with the simple and cool design of their website. mybanglore.com is covering various areas like events, education, lifestyle, Q&A, Photos and Gallery. The content of mybanglore.com is editor driven which will ensure the quality and authenticity. Any registered can submit a story to the portal.
But in this search-age where people prefer to search rather than browse, we need to see weather people will use mybangalore.com for local guidance than using service like asklaila. On the other hand it faces the stiff competition from news driven sites like in.com. mybanglaore has an advantage of being a single city player so they can concentrate better.
Do let us know what you feel about mybangalore?