Robot Co-op Launches 'Should Do This' - The Internet's Suggestion Box

Read highlighted portions ... this site is kind of a public bug tracker / feature tracker - lets users decide what features are more imp ...

From Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone

The small company knew it was useful to gather user feedback, but needed to figure out a way to distill suggestions from their more than 1 million users down to only the best and most popular. "We initially ran a public feedback site that worked well for gathering and prioritizing this feedback," said Petersen. "Over time we developed the Should Do This concept and thought the application would be applicable as a suggestion box for just about any company, non-profit, city, person or thing - not just 43 Things."

Indeed, Robot Co-op eats their own dog food and is using Should Do This to gather user feedback for their existing web sites, including 43 Things, 43 Places, and even Should Do This itself.

Like other Robot Co-op sites, Should Do This is dead simple. Users enter suggestions into two text boxes in the form of "BLANK should BLANK," as in, MySpace should release an API . Users can then agree or disagree with suggestions, vote on how likely they are to actually happen, vote on when they might happen, and leave comments or reasons why or why not something should be done.

Their monetization strategy -- a combination of contextual text ads and paid suggestion boxes -- is a smart one. In the past year, both Dell and Yahoo! have experimented with Digg-style community voting for gathering sugestions from users. Should Do This offers another innovative option for companies to manage user suggestions and sort the good from the bad.

google's hindi translator

http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/

TrackGandhi - follow the rupee

TrackGandhi represents an international group of volunteers who want to collect information about the spread and the use of the Indian rupee. This site is inspired by other currency tracking sites, in particular by the WheresGeorge site tracking US dollars. Similar sites exist for multiple other currencies, but not for the Indian Rupee, the currency of the country with the 2nd biggest population in the world.

As a member of TrackGandi.com, you will earn a point for every rupee banknote you register. The more notes you register, the more points you will collect for our awards!

Visit TrackGandhi.com for more details

Just sell the product

Popularity of Orkut, MySpace helped in marketing Minglebox: Kavita Iyer from AlooTechie

In an interview published in Deccan Herald, Kavita Iyer, CEO, Minglebox.com, has said the
popularity of Orkut and MySpace helped in marketing Minglebox better. "We just had to sell the product, and not the concept of social networking," she has said. According to Iyer, an average session from log-in to log-out on Minglebox lasts around 29 minutes. And the company is looking to increase this time by introducing new features like podcasts on the site.

Inventing Web 2.0 terms

Comment from RWW's Burying Digg Clones

Your entire business is building these Digg-clones, and the best term you can come up with is "social news/content network"?

This is a major marketing opportunity for you. Make a real term, one that is catchy and easy to say, one that perhaps includes your company name, and maybe it will catch on.

Nobody will ever refer to "social news/content network" sites, or "Social Content Networks". Horrible name. Does nothing for me. Sounds like a website that talks about feelings. Something social workers use. Yuck.

Try calling them CoRanking engines. That is more catchy. Or give them a fun acronym like SNOW (Social News Organized Network) and then call these sites SNOW balls (which makes sense because stories roll and get bigger as they pick up votes). That has a better chance of sticking in peoples minds than "social news/content network".

Google Mashup Editor

From Read/WriteWeb by Lachlan Hardy

The Google Mashup Editor is an incredibly powerful tool for rapid testing and deployment of mashup concepts, particularly those that utilize Google services or products. This opens the space to all those developers who don't have their own servers to play on and gives them a framework to kickstart development.

Like Yahoo! Pipes before it (our review here), the Google Mashup Editor provides a simple interface that enables developers to make basic web applications and mashups quickly. And again, like Yahoo! Pipes, it is very definitely aimed at developers.

iPhone means end for the mobile Web

iPhone vs Mobile Web from Read/WriteWeb by Richard MacManus

Recently a Forrester report was released stating that the iPhone "signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today". The report suggested that re-designing sites for the small screens of mobile phones would become "a thing of the past", because of the iPhone's advanced technology such as zooming.

Comparison of Office Productivity Apps

Thought titled Who Will Be Your Web Office Provider? this Read/WriteWeb article by Bernard Lu also has a comparison of which office productivity tools are more useful and which are not. Excel wins hands down and Word is a looser.

Let's now look at the question: what parts of Microsoft Office are replaceable with Web Office parts?
1. Word. It is often frustrating and it is the least stable of the bunch.  ...
2. Powerpoint. This is also becoming increasingly irrelevant.
3. Outlook. Replacing Outlook would give some withdrawal pangs, but I can probably deal with it.
4. Excel. This is one program where Microsoft did an absolutely outstanding job. It enables a very high degree of sophistication, without overwhelming the novice/occasional user. Lots of start-ups talk about creating a programming environment that non-programmers can use, but Excel is the one that actually fulfills this promise. It seems to be stable. It is also the most natural candidate for collaboration as version control; with say 5 people updating a forecast, is a real pain and it is so easy to lock at the cell level.

Classic Advice for entrepreneurs/ innovators

From: http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/03/too_many_companies.html

On a psychological level, I think a lot of people confuse fear of failure with not having enough confidence in the ultimate success of their idea. They thus conclude that they aren't confident enough in their idea or their strategy because it seems to have holes and flaws for which they don't have answers. This is a tremendous mistake. While I won't pretend to speak for the entrepreneurs I mentioned above, I bet if you asked them if they were confident on day 1 that they had a winner with each of their previous successes, they would look at you sideways and say "of course not". Speaking for myself, I can say that my cofounders and I try to find a market opportunity that seems like it will need to be addressed and for which we think we have some angle and then we just pull out shovels and start digging and figure other things out as we go.

Personally, I know going into any new company that there is a 90% chance we have the business model wrong on day 1. I also know that I have a historically poor track record for understanding what will and won't attract customers or defeat competition (I didn't get Twitter when Obvious Corp first launched it without an "e" in the name, I thought eBay would be out of business in six months after Amazon launched auctions, and I was certain Netscape would crush Microsoft in the browser wars because Netscape was more nimble). But the opposite of 'fear of failure' isn't confidence. The opposite of 'fear of failure' is just not bothering to think about failure (BIG difference between this and thinking about risk profile for your idea/company)...

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about "there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off" and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.

Google joins Band of Angels India as institutional member

Google has joined Band of Angels India, set-up by a group of entrepreneurs to invest in promising start-ups, as an institutional member. The internet giant has already acquired stakes in three early-stage funds -- Seed Fund, Erasmic Fund and VentureEast TeNet Fund in India.

techTribe gets funding from Canaan, TEF3, Miven Venture Partners

techTribe.com, a social networking site for technology professionals, has received funding from Canaan Partners. VC Circle has pegged the funding size at around $10 million.

I cant believe this Proxy Bypasser !!

When both Domain Name & IP Address are banned, Use Calculator to Access that Website from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

The trick is to convert the human readable website address that's blocked (like bebo.com) into an IP address (208.75.184.160) and again translate this value to a decimal address which is probably not blocked by the website filters.

Nexus invests 10 crore in MapMyIndia's owner

From AlooTechie

CE Info Systems, which owns MapMyIndia.com, has received an investment of Rs 10 crore from venture capital firm, Nexus India Capital. Following the investment, Suvir Sujan, managing director, Nexus India, has joined the board of CE Info Systems.

CE Info Systems has partnered with Yahoo India, Wayfinder and Airtel to offer mapping services to internet and mobile users in the country. With intent to reach out to a larger audience in the consumer space, the company has also launched India's first interactive mapping portal MapMyIndia.com.

These navigable maps are designed for use on multiple media including internet portals, car navigation, mobile navigation and several other location-based and GIS applications targeting the needs of consumers and enterprises.

CE Info Systems, a pioneer of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in India, has been focussed on the development of navigable maps.

Mahalo - the human search engine

From Read Write Web

Mahalo is a human-edited search engine that focuses only on popular search queries. Right now Mahalo has 8,800 pages, on what Jason calls "Fat Tail" search queries.The fat Tail is also the most competitive search area, for search engines as well as the hundreds of thousands of content creators who want to rank on the first page in Google for popular search queries.

Mahalo is launching a new Firefox toolbar, which displays a sidebar every time you do a search on a popular query in Google and other major search engines with Mahalo results. But the Mahalo toolbar is kind of annoying from a UI perspective. Having the sidebar pop up every time I search for something (including in Gmail!) quickly got tiresome.

Mahalo is also releasing a "synchronous search" feature called Mahalo Follow - which reads the keywords on the page. For example a search on "digital camera" displays these keywords: cameras, digital, models, new, camera, resolution, megapixels, small, zoom, electronics, ratings, take, health, our, few, range, buying, image, lens, slrs.

Using feeds for match making

Feedbuddy: RSS Matchmaking from Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone

Feedbuddy is a social network that was bound to happen: one built around RSS feeds. It's actually not a bad idea. As the site says, "subscribing to and reading special RSS-feeds characterizes you and your very special interests." Or in other words, the type of feeds you read has a lot to do with what interests you, so it follows that anyone with a number of feeds in common will likely be someone you share interests with.

Feedbuddy has a good idea; matching people's interests based on the feeds they read makes a lot of sense.

'Crossing The Chasm'

From Read/WriteWeb by Alex Iskold

The startups view of the chasm is that it does not matter, at least for now. Before you cross the chasm you need to get to the chasm. And these days a lot of companies can't even do that.

According to Wikipedia in 2006, Tom Byers, Faculty Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program, described "Crossing the Chasm" as "still the bible for entrepreneurial marketing 15 years later." It is certainly a powerful and proven theory, but it does need to be adjusted.

Expanding on how to retain the early adopters would be good thing to do in the next edition

Koonji - The Guide

From Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone

Koonji is a social website that allows anyone to create an interactive guide on any subject. For example, you could learn how to sell your house or how to toilet train your cat. Koonji brings to mind a number of comparisons. Like About.com it provides people-powered guides to specific topics, like Squidoo each guide contains links to relevant websites and products, and like Instructables the Koonji guides follow a step-by-step format.

Koonji also offers a toolbar (for Firefox and IE) which allows you to "clip" text directly from a web site and associate it with a Koonji.

--
Nikhil Kulkarni
KPMG | http://the-complete-man.blogspot.com|

Another Social Network ... ADAG's biG ADAa

Reliance launches BigAdda; hopes to get 10 million users in 1 year from AlooTechie

Reliance Entertainment, a part of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, has launched its blogging, media sharing and social networking site BigAdda.com. According to the company, BigAdda.com is expected to get about 10 million registered users in the first year of its launch. Reliance Entertainment plans to spend about Rs 5-6 crore in 2-3 months on the BigAdda's marketing activities encompassing all media including TV, outdoor, radio and internet.

NITIE develops volatility index

Local index to track volatility - M Venkateshwarlu

The National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE) has come out with an index for measuring implied volatility in the Indian stock market. The model calculates the market's implied volatility based on the Nifty index options. Although this IVIX (implied volatility index), as we shall refer it henceforth, is based on the method developed by Chicago Board Options Exchange, though some changes have been incorporated to account for the specific Indian market conditions.

The author is associate professor of finance, NITIE, Mumbai

Read full article: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Auto/Two-wheelers/Local_index_to_track_volatility/articleshow/2251738.cms