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Proto has started a road show and their first stop is in Bangalore on June 16th and 17th. It’s a great opportunity for entrepreneurs in and around Bangalore to meet Vijay Anand. Read the full story at Proto’s blog here.

What’s up with these major Indian portals? When you open them you get a lot of pop-up advertisements. To me pop-up advertisements are an age old concept. I’m talking about the www.financialexpress.com and http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/. Try opening them you will get lots of pop-up ads. Once I got 5 of them and it really annoyed me. Are these major Indian portals don’t have enough money? Are they looking to make money by just annoying the users? I could understand the inline advertisements, why pop-ups?

I read this article from Startup Dunia about Deal Maadi (click here for the article), a Digg like community voting method for shopping deals. I agree with the story that the success of this startup depends on building a strong community who not only vote on deals but also submit new deals.

Here are some random thoughts that came across my mind after looking at this site

• When I registered in the site it asked for the City where I live. Good, I thought that, when logging in, the system might recognize from which city I’m and would display the deals in my city combined with online deals. However it didn’t do that. Rather it just populated the city name in Search by city field and displayed all the deals which I might not be in a position to avail as I’m from a different city
• Now I went on to submit a new deal. The URL (deal link) is optional. That’s good as not all deals might be online based
• Again in the ’submit a new deal page’, I was looking for a place where I could select the city. I was looking for a drop down box of all possible cities. It was not there. Rather they are asking us to enter the city name in the Tag. Yes you read it right, in the Tag. It would have been better if the site presented the list of cities rather than asking us to enter in the tag. I for sure can tell you that many people will miss that information and the entire posting can go waste.
• To test it I added a new deal and tagged it as Chennai. Yes it appeared in my search results when I asked for Chennai based deal. That’s good.
• I would have expected to have a bookmarking feature here. I would like to bookmark a deal and would like to take the decision later. No such feature is available, however they provide functionality to add the link to other famous social bookmarking site
• Deals are time sensitive information. What I mean by that is, they are normally available for a day or 2 or maximum a week. I mean most of them. When I go to DealMaadi.com, it takes me to the Popular Deals. Popular deals could be really old. Which may not be applicable anymore. I would recommend taking the user to the New Deals section and if the user wants they could see the popular ones by clicking the Popular Deals
• Another key point is personalization. How about asking certain preferences related questions to the user (which might be optional by the way), when the user registers. And when the user logs into the system, show only relevant Deals based on the preferences. If the user needs other than what she/he normally prefers, then they could search for the same.
• I understand that this is based on Pligg. Anyway why do I need social networking features like View my friends, view people who added me as friends, etc. If I’m a serious deal hunter, I would come here look for deal or post a deal and get out of it as soon as possible to go and get them. So what’s the need of social networking features?

So key things to consider are

• Personalization - Preference based deal display, Users City based display
• Presenting New Deals rather than the popular ones in the home page
• Bookmarking feature
• Totally depends on Strong Community that could keep posting new deals and voting the same.

Anyway I understand that DealMaadi is in beta but those are my thoughts on the site. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Look at www.allindiadeals.com thats a good site to get deals. My opinion is that a site providing information about deal should not be built on Pligg based content management system

42% of the corporates in India are planning to recruit more in the Q3 2007. The hiring is expected to be driven by the industry sectors like BPO, IT and Retailing. Read the full story here (via FE)