by Rooturaj on December 31, 2009
In 2007 a company came up with a crazy startup idea. They were going to hire human beings to respond to online search queries. Yeah, you got it right. When you search for a particular thing on ChaCha there will be a human responder to replies back. What good does that do? I mean who will wait while another human Google and others for your query and returns the cream of the information. No doubt the plan did not fare well then.
But ChaCha evolved with time. They launched a mobile service. There are still more mobile phones than computers with internet connections. So finding a right service to utilize wide market should be profitable. ChaCha did just the same and the plan clicked.
When you are travelling or out of internet reach it hard to access information. So a simple SMS to which you get the exact information searched by a human is great. There will be of course some advertisements involved. For example ChaCha sends you a related ad just after you submit your query. It is shortly followed by the real search result.
ChaCha does not stop there. They innovated further. The plan obviously evolved from the idea of repeating questions. They started archiving answered queries on their websites. Like Yahoo Answers and Answers.com ChaCha archives tend to rank higher in search engines for being human edited and verified information sources. These pages come with a lot of ads that brings good revenue.
ChaCha Web Archives
Popularity: 82% [?]
Tagged as:
Startups
by Fardeen on December 31, 2009
Have you ever wished that you could somehow integrate your voice calls with web applications? Well, look no further as Twilio has just answered your prayers.
Twilio, a startup based in San Francisco takes the concept of cloud computing to the next level. It provides an in-cloud API for voice communications that leverages existing web development skills, resources and infrastructure.
The concept has gained rave reviews and the startup recently closed a round of funding raising $3.7 million dollars. Reputed angel investors such as Dave Mcclure and Albert Wenger have joined the board of directors for Twilio.
Twilio provides easy quickstart guides on its website on setting up your company’s accounts and writing the simplistic XML code to start off your application with a reasonable pricing scheme. They also provide a free trial with a simple and easy way to try out their APIs. You can check their tour guide before deciding to try it out.
Their Youtube channel provides helpful information on their products and integration with other applications as well. Give it a try!
Popularity: 92% [?]
Tagged as:
cloud computing,
dave mcclure,
Enterprise,
twilio
by Rooturaj on December 30, 2009
We all understand the value of promotion and marketing for our business. Especially the need for online and print promotional material is indispensable to stay in this competitive market. It is a common practice among business owners to employ professional designers for creating such promotional stuff.
But there are small business owners who cannot afford luxuries of professional designing service. They prefer to be creative with their own skill and ideas. But that’s not an easy task to do when it involves high end software with notoriously complicated working. There aren’t many tools around that have been designed for the common man to promote his own firm through designer advertisements.
Photoshop, Corel and other software including online designing tools are not a kids job. They need expert hands. Quark claims to address this issue with this new tool Quark Promote. It looks fairly easy to handle. Click to select a template, click to change a color/image/text. Even they have got readymade text that could suit your exact need. On request printing and delivery.
Some times it is very useful to have such tools and services around for a short notice marketing plan or tight budget and self design requirement. Feel free to try it out. It free to an extent.
The best part is they have ambitious plans of adding features where you can search and include photos from flicks with creative commons liscence. To top it up they have plans of deals with Betty and iStockphotos for getting images form their services to be used on our designs. Sounds Good.
Popularity: 86% [?]
Tagged as:
Software
by Rooturaj on December 28, 2009
by Rooturaj on December 28, 2009
Remember the Google-Admob deal that was halted by a Federal Trade Commission anti-trust scanner? Well there is no good news about the deal. I mean no good news for Google. Rest of you may cheer. Two prominent consumer groups Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy have raised concerns about the deal requesting FTC to cancel the deal under anti-trust issues.
Its not everyday consumer groups’ interests are heard by Trade Commissions. The world would have been a much better place if that ever was. Anyway this happens to be the right time to put pressure on FTC. Google has been asked by the commission to provide further details about the deal. In our opinion the deal will proceed exactly like the DoubleClick deal which took quite a long time to be settled in favor of Google.
You might even wonder what cause this furor from consumer groups. When we have multiple competitors in the market they have to innovate better products and services and reduce profit margins to stay in the fierce competition. But when there is only one company out there it’s called a monopoly and this company will dictate prices and technology. This is nowhere in consumers’ interest. As you can make out Google’s acquisition of the mobile ads market leader could spell such a monopoly. Hence the furor.
Popularity: 85% [?]
Tagged as:
Acquisitions,
Advertising,
controversy,
google
by Rooturaj on December 27, 2009
by Rooturaj on December 26, 2009
There have been many social networking creation sites around. I have personally tired ning.com, socialgo etc. Today I stumbled upon grou.ps. I liked its service and I am sharing it with you.
It was impressive from the beginning. The sign up process is one of the simplest I have seen. In a few simple steps you can get your own social network up and running in 15 mins. Your members can sign in using the Facebook connect feature, that is one of the most popular global identity platforms around. With the Facebook connect integrated your new users are prompted to invite more friends from their network to your own grou.ps network. So traffic and members can go viral with ease. There are other invite option like direct mailing and address book import too.
Look and Feel
- You have a host of themes and color schemes to choose form.
- But what sets this service apart is the fully customizable modules and ability to moderate different features.
- You have normal commenting and liking options as in Facebook. You can add multiple blogs and rss feeds. Even if you don’t have your blog you can create blog post right here.
- You can add photos, videos and discussions to the live stream.
- Finally I would like to mention the Wiki feature. You and your network can have jointly edited content like those on Wikipedia.
Custom domains
Not many would like urls like http://grou.ps/ursocialnetwork. If you have something like http://mysocialnetwork.mydomain.com on your mind then just change the CNAME records on your DNS provider.
Removing Ads, Monetization and Premium services
This service is free, so to cover the costs Grou.ps displays ads on your network. You may still prefer to stop the ads and run your own ads by paying around $10 a month. They have an uppercap on disk space usage. Once the disk quota is used up the revenue flows on to grou.ps. Extra space can be bought @$5 per 5GB
Me and three others got our social network site in 20 minutes - WOW
After working around for a while a few minor glitches did appear. For example some times the profile pics do not appear after you comment on friend’s updates or posts. In another instance I had the page loading for ever but these issues vanish on refreshing the page.
Grou.ps has now around 2 million users and its continues to grow every day. One million users have joined the sites in the past 6 months.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Tagged as:
how to,
Social Media
by Fardeen on December 25, 2009
IBM’s India Research Lab has been working on a very interesting innovative project for the past couple of years called the Spoken Web project.
As its name suggests, the concept behind the project is to make information technology accessible to the developing world through a speech driven process. The lack of literacy in several parts of the world inhibits the spread of IT due to a major challenge posed by the inability to read the content.
This is where the spoken project breaks down the barrier. After a lot of analysis and understanding IBM Labs have provided a solution by comparing the growth factor of the mobile phone industry in developing countries.
The concept applied here is that although the common man cannot read/write, they can talk & listen. An interesting fact noted during this observation is that although the internet has penetrated 17% of the world’s population, the mobile phone has reached almost half of the world’s population.
With this vision the spoken web project had been created with the mobile phone as the access device and voice as the medium. This results in the overcoming of the following barriers to the common man who cannot read/write – no need for a PC/laptop/notebook and no need for a connection to the internet.
IBM has developed a new protocol — Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) — which is similar to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which is the underlying medium for the project.
The key enabling technologies included in this project are as follows:
1. VoiGen – VoiceSite Creator
2. VoiHost – VoiceSite Hosting Engine
3. HSTP – Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol
4. WWTW Browser – World Wide Telecom Web Browser
An in-depth coverage of the above technologies can be found at the research project’s website. The spoken web is a network of voice sites conceived in late 2004 by Arun Kumar initially and joined by Nitendra Rajput later in mid-2005. The project has been in place since mid-2008. Some pilot projects have been implemented in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat in the form of Voikiosk and has met with significant success.
A brief preview about the technology can be viewed on YouTube. The spoken web project has found practical implementations in various sectors – business, healthcare, agriculture and public services. It would be interesting to see how this technology develops and what further implementations take place from here on. We would definitely hope to see it spread out to other developing nations as well.
Popularity: 95% [?]
Tagged as:
ibm,
spoken web
by Rooturaj on December 24, 2009
World’s largest internet advertising Google is now facing the last min hurdle before completing the buyout of Admob. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked for more information about Google’s plans to buy Admob, a company specializing in ads for small screens.
This is not the first time Google has to go through the federal scanner. Google had previously bought “DoubleClick” in a landmark deal. This deal took months for an approval. So both parties will be hoping this one takes much time.
Trade commission verifies such deals to make sure some companies do not forcibly gain monopoly of the market by buying out their competition.
Google’s group product manager Paul Feng is of the opinion that “”Closer scrutiny has been one consequence of Google’s success” and he assures that there are no regulatory issues involved.
Popularity: 92% [?]
Tagged as:
Advertising,
google
