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Packaged Software to cost even more in India
From: http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/feb/29prices11.htm.... the Budget 2008-2009 has not been favourable for the software industry. During his Budget proposals in the Lok Sabha on Friday, Finance Minister P Chidambaram proposed raising the excise duty on packaged software from 8 per cent to 12 per cent. The finance minister took this step to bring packaged software on par with customised software.Domestic Software makers (Tally, Quickheal etc) will benefit from this announcement as imported packaged software will become more expensive. Open Source software might also get benefited in terms of consumption ....
Freeconomics
Beware of Freeconomics from Read/WriteWeb byEven more problematic is funding. How do you fund a startup that a priori can not charge the user?
... how do you compete with free? Suppose someone has a great idea for improving web mail. Entering the market is really difficult. ... Not that long ago the concept of better and cheaper allowed startups to make the bet. But now that cheaper has been replaced with free, that axis is shut out.
One might argue that we're now living in an ads-only monetization world, which of course we are, but things are not that simple. First, how many startups are actually making money on ads?
Inspiration for Bootstrappers
Advertising People: Pitch Us from Signal vs. Noise bySo… We've managed to build a really successful business through word of mouth. We've dabbled in text ads here, and a couple display ads there, but it's our customers who are responsible for spreading our word far and wide. In four years we've probably spent less than $25,000 on advertising.
Facebook cluttering ... an example
Is your Facebook cluttered? --- the more "friends" you have, the more likely you are going wind up with a very long page. For example:Searching Tags
Nice service - tags are the lifeblood of the structure of the web .....A service from Keotag is a great tool for bloggers and those researching a topic in the blogosphere. The site lets you just search for items that are tagged with a particular keyword. To use the service, you enter in your keyword and then select the search engine to use. The engines available are Technorati, Blinklist, Del.icio.us, twitter, Google, Icerocket, BlogDigger, Tailrank, MSN, Bluedot, Newsvine, Blogpulse, Blogdimension, Bloglines, Digg, Reddit, Yahoo, and YouTube. Those results can then be subscribed to as an RSS feed or saved as an OPML file.
Source: How To Manage Your Online Reputation from Read/WriteWeb by
ZFS - an overview
After a long time, I have found a text regarding OS-concepts interesting . ...Sun ZFS breaks all the rules from Infoworld
The innovative Zettabyte File System soars to new heights in scalability, reliability, and flexibility
Perhaps the easiest way to communicate the underlying concepts of ZFS is a comparison the Sun developers drew during the design stages of the file system back in 2001. When you add RAM to a server, you don't partition it and allocate one DIMM to this application and another DIMM to that application; you throw all of the RAM into a pile and let the memory manager decide who gets what and when. That simple, pragmatic view forms the basis of ZFS: There are no partitions and no fixed block sizes, no file system consistency check, no RAID initialization procedure, and no inodes – there's just a pile of disk with ZFS in between.
Digg - dominated by few?
Digg Gets More Mainstream; But Are Their News Sources Too Narrow Now? from Read/WriteWeb byat the same time that Digg is becoming more mainstream, the variety of its sources for top news has dropped. Is this a good thing? Obviously not for some of us tech blogs. But I'd argue it's also not good for digg readers, who are not getting the diversity of tech stories they used to get.
Lesson for Entreps
Net-acquired hipster dating/social site Consumating announced that it will close down in mid March. Movie reviewer Ben Brown founded Consumating some time between 2003 and 2005, as a joke.
.......
Add this to the list of reasons that getting involved with bigger companies is not pure fun. Presumably no one central to Consumating, or other startups acquired then shut-down, is too heart broken since this risk is part of the deal. If you sold the company then the money was more important to you than the future of the company and that's ok.I want to see a user-centric model emerge with strength on the web but it's going to have to be either economically viable or go on in a nonprofit environment - and nonprofits tend not to be much fun. Such is life, whatever happened to Tribe (?) and thanks for reading.
Measuring Engagement
NuConomy Announces the Death of the Page View from Read/WriteWeb byMeasuring Engagement
When looking at criteria like number of visits, recency, and depth of visits, you can't really determine a user's engagement, either positive or negative, with your site. According to NuConomy CEO, Shahar Nechmad, "engagement" has become somewhat of a buzzword lately, often used synonymously with "attention," so he wants to be clear that his product truly measures engagement, in the real definition of the word. Engagement is not only how many pages someone has viewed, but how engaged they are in the site's brand and activities.
The engagement levels are measured by using the combination of user interactions on the site, which includes things like purchases, media, uploads, ratings, comments, share with friends, and more, all depending on the nature of the site. These interactions are measured then combined to get an "engagement" rank for each one of the web site's users or content pieces. Since every business is unique, everyone will need to measure different things. With NuConomy, the formula of what engagement means to you can be adjusted, giving more wight to some things, and less to others.
Financial product comparison website
Now thats a Web2.0 app targetted for India ...ECompare…. the simple, easy financial product comparison engine from www.webyantra.net by
ECompare works like a financial price comparison service. It contains financial details about home loans, credit cards, bank deposits, personal loans etc offered by different Indian banks. You can use the web interface to do product comparisons, select what's suitable and apply for the product. Your application will be forwarded to the respective bank (or its DSAs) and followed up by them.
The data is simple, but not easy to find all at one place for direct comparison. Ecompare gathers the product information on a daily basis using a combination of manual and screen scraping processes. They have just launched a mobile plan comparison service as well.
Founded by an ex SBI banker with 20 yrs exp based out of Hyderabad and
Alertle - a new RSS reader
Alertle Wants to Make RSS Mainstream from Read/WriteWeb by Sarah Perezhttp://www.alertle.com/
A web-based RSS reader at its core, Alertle is really a new way of surfing the web. The service allows you to "visit" various web sites by clicking on the web site's icon which is located in a panel at the top of the Alertle home page. The 3-panel layout of this page, with icons at the top and what is essentially an RSS reader below, makes it easy to find and read content.
Make your own "TV Show"
itsmy Launches Personal Mobile Broadcasting from Read/WriteWeb byWhat itsmy has done is create a way for any registered member with at least 10 content items, like pictures or video, turn that content into a mobile "TV show" with one click.Content items are combined with ready-to-use sound files as well as ten different "TV" designs, using themes like "Rock," "Comedy," or "Love." Every show is between 30 seconds and 2 minutes and can be viewed by streaming or download. Users can promote their show by sending out invitations to their friends via SMS or email. By surfing with their mobile phones to their personal itsmy.tv address (for example: http://yourname.itsmy.tv) users' friends will immediately find their TV show.
Tiinker - Recommendation Without Organization
:-( ....Tiinker is the Anti-Digg from Read/WriteWeb by

Whereas the social news service from Digg relies on members to select and rank content, a new startup from Sydney, Australia, tiinker, does just the opposite: it treats each member as an individual and learns what he or she likes.
You don't have to create an account to try it out. Tiinker will remember you for a while using a browser cookie. You can click "try it now" from the home page to start rating stories up or down without ever having to log in. If you like the service, though, you'll want to create an account to save those rankings.
Media player that integrates with all web video
Interesting thought - why have your own video storage? Better build a good sourcing model ...Requiring users to navigate from page to page on multiple sites isn't as intuitive as what we're used to from television. Instead, users should be able to browse multiple videos from multiple sources from within a single player.
His goal with the media player framework is to build a single media player that is capable of sucking videos from any online source and display them in a way that is TV-like and familiar to users. Yanez also hopes to create a player that can be used on multimedia devices like the Nintendo Wii.
"My goal is to build a media player that integrates with all web video, be easy to use, have a television style feel and have capabilities to be fully integrated with multimedia devices such as the Wii and mobile phones," he writes. "The television without a doubt was one of the biggest inventions of the 20th century. I believe web video is going to be one of the biggest breakthrough's in the 21st century."
Beginning is more important!!
The important thing Signal vs. Noise[This book] isn't intended to be a comprehensive guide to ... I certainly wouldn't say that my way is the only, or the "correct" way to do things. .... you'll want to explore many other approaches. The local library, quilt guilds and stores, bookstores, and the Internet are all great places to look for information and inspiration.
The important thing is to begin.
Sound advice, whether you're quilting or coding!
Ed - I think sustaining a beginning is more important and even more difficult to do ... experiencing it myself ..Fwd: It's never too cold to burrp!
Check out the newsletter from burrp - cool thing!!burrp and Sanpshots are two web2.0 ventures who have got the newsletter thing right! I always appreciate every newsletter of theirs ...
Amazing content
Just right depth of content and announcements
the proper dose of website buzz mixed with new incoming features
... and all this complemented by a perfect layout and color combination
From: burrp! plugged-in <pluggedin@burrp.com>
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February 2008 | Issue VIII (M)Browse our archives | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Welcome to the February issue of the burrp! newsletter, plugged-in!Even as Mumbaikars continue to brave record low temperatures, nothing stops them from providing co-burrpers with real, honest reviews of what's hot and what's not in Mumbai! So this month, whether you're heading out for a bite to eat or a swig of the good stuff.. don't forget to burrp! tried-n-tastedJust know it to be great when rated excellent on the burrp scale! We've pulled out 10 of the best burrp! experiences this month that you ought to indulge in!
look who's cool
It's never too late to be cool on burrp! To feature on this section, all you need to do is start writing reviews right away smashed on burrp! Cafe Ivy For disppointing mystimysti with pathetic service, tiny portions of food and cheap Re. 1 Kissan sachets Hard Rock Cafe For serving diluted drinks to gandhi and their terrible service standards Urban Tadka, Kandivali (E) For bad management and not giving gjmatrix the discount he rightfully deserved Busaba For serving quayler a bad fillet of lamb, arguing its beef, terribly slow service and ruining his evening Moti Mahal For disappointing spitwideopen with their exhorbitant rates and losing that authentic touch Indigo Deli For letting cockroaches crawl around the dinner area, being unaffected and unapologetic and marring mystimysti's overall impression of such a fine place Cheers to all you guys for telling us about your unpleasant experiences. High time these places get their act together! | did you know? burrpers are watching movies at our expense!!! Literally, burrp! rewards the best reviewer every week with FREE movie tickets to ANY show of their choice across the country! Here's this month's winners! You can win too! newly added | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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burrp! is a registered trademark used under license © 2006 - 2008 Burrp.com. All rights reserved.
Wiki in an organization
Supply and demand 2.0 from Transparent Office byThe Web 2.0 orthodoxy might lead you to believe that a nebulous entity, "the Community", magically organizes content once it shows up in a wiki. But that rarely happens. Emergent structure happens only when individuals spend time doing the organizing.
Here's a simple four-step process:
1. Get a small group of core community members to whiteboard a high-level information architecture in the form of a few categories (not more than 4-8) and subcategories (not more than 1-2 levels deep)
2. Create a series of blank pages or "stubs" hyperlinked to reflect the category structure
3. Assign each category to an individual member of the group to flesh out
4. Reconvene in 1-2 weeks to review what everyone has done, share learnings, and revise the category structure
Citizen Journalism
MTV Election Coverage is a Coup for Citizen Journalism from Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone
As part of MTV's coverage of the 2008 presidential elections in the US, the media network assembled a "street team" of 51 amateur journalists -- one in each state and the District of Columbia -- to file blog reports, photos, videos, and audio podcasts about election issues during the course of the campaign season. The videos are being syndicated to MTV's mobile web site, social network, and to the Associate Press Online Video Network. Members of the street team have been outfitted with laptops, video phones, and other popular tools of the citizen journalist via funding from a $700,000 grant from the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge.
On recruiting
Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant. As long as applicants have 6 months to a year of experience, consider it a moot point for comparison. Focus on other things instead that'll make much more of a difference. Platform experience is merely a baseline, not a differentiator of real importance.In turn that means you as an applicant can use requirements like "3-5 years doing this technology" as a gauge of how clued-in the company hiring is. The higher their requirements for years of service in a given technology, the more likely that they're looking for all the wrong things in their applicants, and thus likely that the rest of the team will be stooges picked for the wrong reasons.
Who designed your blog template?
Here's one of them - http://simplebits.com/work/blogger/As a part of a large Blogger relaunch, SimpleBits was contracted by Google (by way of Stopdesign) to design two templates, free for Blogger users to apply to their own weblogs.
Google Speaks!!
From :
... Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?
We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.
Software company cum Seed fund?
Interesting ....Curious Office is both a seed stage investment firm and a software development company. We make early investments in the web sector and we choose to build our own companies at the same time. We have worked with many great technology entreprenuers over the last 15 years and we have accrued extensive experience ourselves working for or starting our own great software and web companies. Learn more about how Curious Office could possibly help your company grow to the next level.
Another interesting thing about their website is that - it defaults to their blog first and you can browse the rest later - courageous step for a company!!
Photoshop Tutorials
From: http://laughingsquid.com/you-suck-at-photoshop-by-donnie-hoyle/Donnie Hoyle has created a hilarious series of "You Suck at Photoshop" tutorials:
Volume 1: Distort, Warp, & Layer Effects
Volume 2: Covering Your Mistakes
Volume 3: Clone Stamp and Manual Cloning
These are amazing tutorials - makes sense to keep following the series on YoutubeStartup stages
Ask the Wizard: Business Models- "All startups should think of the long road in front of them in three phases: during phase 1, you need to be passionate about the product (or service); during phase 2, you need to be passionate about your customers (and the product); during phase 3, you need to be passionate about revenue (and customers and the product)."
For the Minimalistic design lobby
http://www.slate.com/id/2182744/fr/rss/http://www.43folders.com/2006/12/21/mb33-distracted-mac
Distraction free desktops
http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-distraction-stoppers-311387.php
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spaces.html
Against minimalistic design ... this guy has a different solution to clutter
Why gigantic screens are the best computer upgrades ever.
A text editor without distration:
http://they.misled.us/archives/501
http://they.misled.us/dark-room
Saving a Webpage or Bookmarking content
Dynamic Bookmarking with Iterasi from Read/WriteWeb by
Iterasi is a new browser-based tool ....[which] captures the content of a page as it appears at that particular moment in time. This kind of bookmarking is best for dynamic web pages that could change over time. Iterasi addresses is the condition of "linkrot." This occurs when a page you've bookmarked disappears from the internet forever.... the page is immediately transferred to a secure personal account, where a copy of the web page is saved including all images, forms, transactions, receipts, confirmations, and personalized content. Your private Iterasi account is accessible from any web browser. Within your account, you can view your saved pages, organize them into folder, add descriptions, or tag them.
Apple AIR Design
Holding the future in your hand from Signal vs. Noise byAnyway, enough pouring my heart out in love for Apple's industrial design and ability to capture that feeling of future so perfectly. I'll try to live with the machine over a week and report back with findings.
Is it "Industrial Design" any more? I think its sin to call Apple's product designs as 'industrial' - they are up close personal for sure - thats what this post also says.
M$FT and Yahoo!
Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.
Invitation to SugarSync Beta
For all the beta testers out there - I have a few invitations for Beta of sugarsync - the early 7 will get to use it ...https://www.sugarsync.com/entercode?code=KECINF
Image Credit: http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/invitation/sugarsync
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