Go2IndiaWeb20.com

I believe you might have read the latest story in proto blog right now. If not here is the link

http://www.proto.in/proto2007se/blog/?p=19

Iam more concerned about the following statement in their blog

“….I do hope that you have booked your flight tickets to be here in Chennai during the days of July 21st and 22nd. If you haven’t yet, might I suggest trying out Ixigo, who made their launch just a few days ago, and are providing an excellent service in aggregating all the prices across the board and making the comparison and booking quite a simpler task……”

Are they biased and leaning towards IXIGO (If you don’t know about IXIGO, read my coverage about IXIGOI here). I agree IXIGO does a good job of it. But there is even better meta-search in travel space, check mobissimo.in (which Iam evaluating right now).

It would have been better, if they would have suggested a list of Travel Search and Travel meta-search sites catering India. This would have given a level playing field for other sites and would have encouraged the users to evaluate the services of different providers.

There are several announcements from Proto today. 

• Proto had a new look - check it out
• Check this link has a list of VC and Angels - check it out
• Extended the deadline for nominations it’s June 15ht now
• Registrations are open for attendees on June 15th entry fee is Rs 1000

An important announcement is that, Proto is projecting itself as an Asian event rather than an event targeted to Indian Startups. Proto has received confirmations for the participation of TeDD, the Malaysian incubation centre - a division of the government, who will be participating, along with their companies which will nominate for the stage of Proto.

Information is sourced from proto blog. Read the full story here.

Gone are the days where you could see only Ambassadors, Fiats and Maruti’s on the road. Now you could see zillions of new models on the road. The world came to know pretty late, that we Indians have a great taste for new Car models, though the road conditions are not that good. Automobiles market is in rise in India and many new startups have spun the Automobile industry and the Internet together to provide useful information to the consumer. Here are some of the major auto portals in India and the features they offer. I have also listed the Alexa rankings for them.

• You could buy either a used car or a new car
• You could sell your cars
• Apply for a Loan
• Apply for Insurance
• Compare between car models
• Get a list of Dealers by city
• Get detailed Car specs and features
• Tips and Advice
• Get reviews about the cars
• It’s only for cars not for other automobiles
• No certification for used cars – which will be really helpful for the buyer if they want to buy a used car

• It’s only for buying new cars
• Compare new cars with other models
• Get dealers information
• Has an EMI calculator
• You could create a profile and save your searches

• Buy new and used cars
• Sell your car
• Get certified before selling your car, definitely adds value
• Could shop for accessories – gets you to the customer service, no online interface
• Apply for a Loan
• Apply for Insurance
• Get information about registering your auto
• The web interface is not that good when compared to other competitors, it’s very basic

• Buy and sell any automobile (cars, bikes, commercial vehicles, etc)
• Buy and Sell Used and New automobiles
• Search for certified automobiles (but there is no information about how one could get the vehicles certified)
• Find dealers
• Apply for Loan
• Apply for Insurance
• You could do research and compare
• Find reviews and ratings
• Gets Tips and advice

• Free auto listing site
• You could get an RSS feed of the listings
• Dealers could also register and add their listings to the site

A comparison chart of the features they offer

  Alexa ranking comparison

AutoIndia clearly leads the Auto Portal space in India by providing all necessary features when compared to other competitors and also out-paces its competitors by getting most of the web traffic.

ZOHO already provides XML-RPC based access to the applications it has. Today ZOHO added REST APIs to the Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show. What this means is you could access data in ZOHO applications by just using a simple HTTP GET or POST. Want to know more about ZOHO read our coverage here.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a style of software architecture that outlines how resources are defined and addressed. The term is often used in a loose sense to describe any simple interface that transmits domain-specific data over HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP or session tracking via HTTP cookies. You could use GET and POST depending on the kind of operation (Read/Write) that is being performed. In return the user gets a formatted XML/JSON response from the called method.

Following is the screen shot of the presentation that I created in ZOHO Show.

To access ZOHO applications you need to get API Key and Ticket. API Key is unique for a given user. You could request one at ZOHO. Ticket is for the application you would like access. This is a great feature added to ZOHO, now you could integrate ZOHO into any application. Read more about the ZOHO REST API here.

Here is a simple example of how to access ZOHO Show. I created a presentation at ZOHO show called “ZOHO REST API”. And I got myself an API Key and Ticket for ZOHO Show (seems I should not share my API Key so not disclosing it )

This is the URL to get the list of presentations you have created

http://show.zoho.com/api/private/xml/presentations?apikey=[Your API Key]&ticket=[Your Ticket]

I used my API key and ticket and see what I got from ZOHO.