Archive for June 3, 2007

iXiGO - well positioned to take advantage of the booming Indian travel industry

June 3, 2007 at 5:01 pm · Filed under Travel, Website

i-logoI have seen a lot of travel sites in India, since the travel industry in India is booming. However I have never seen a travel meta-search engine for India (just like mobissimo in the US). Here is a difference between travel sites and travel meta-search sites

travel sites - travel sites like travelguru (read over story about travelguru here), makemytrip, cleartrip, etc all have tie ups with majpr airlines and search for the best possible rates on these airlines and often the travel sites take a cut from the air fares. Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity are some of the examples in the US

travel meta-search sites - these are aggregators. They aggregate content from airlines and also from other travel search websites. Have you every searched for best fares in different travel web sites, if you have done that, then it’s a pain to go to different sites and look for it. Travel meta-search sites does the same thing for you in one place. They search for best possible rates in air lines and also in other travel web sites

iXiGO, is the first ever travel meta-search sites for indans. It’s launched yesterday it aggregates content from all 14 airlines and 3 travel websites.

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 The air line are

the travel web sites are

The key features of iXiGO

Zero booking fees - free to use

  • 100% transparencey - shows all the hiden fees and taxes
  • sort and filter results

Overall the first ever travel meta-search for Indians. You will have a great user interface experience. A great web 2.0 experience. I would consider that iXiGO is well positioned to advantage of the booming Indian travel industry.

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IndianPad - A great site like Digg for India

June 3, 2007 at 5:01 am · Filed under Social Networking, Website

indian_pad I just recently stumbled upon this site, IndianPad. An excellent site, like Digg (I would say even more that what Digg does) for Indians. It’s a social bookmarking and blogging site. Here are the features that are in IndianPad but not in Digg

  • Users could disable their story
  • When you submit a story with the URL it gets the title for you and displays on the top.
  • No URL is needed to submit a story. You could write the story in IndianPad and submit it
  • You could submit your music

Things that I would like to see on IndianPad

  • Video Submit
  • Podcasts Submit
  • API interface for IndianPad

Overall I just love this site. It became one of my favorites to get Indian Content.

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New way of advertising a dotcom company - - only in India

June 3, 2007 at 4:13 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Look at the pictures below, they are advertisements on auto rickshaws in India. For those of you who don’t know what an auto rickshaw is, it’s a three wheeled vehicle for hire and it’s the cheapest mode of transport in India. (Read more about auto rickshaw here).

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It all started with mouthshut.com, an online forum where consumers get to chat with each other over a range of products and services, in 2001 when owner Faisal Farooqui test-marketed the auto-rickshaw concept scouting cheap and effective means to advertise his website during the dotcom bust. Many sites claim that they have 40% surge in traffic after going behind the auto rickshaw marketing. With a total investment of 20,000 rupees (US $ 500) one could get their web site name listed on 1000’s of auto rickshaw in the city.

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