Inc.com did an annual search for the nation’s coolest young entrepreneurs and guess what there are 2 Indians listed on it.
Raj Lahoti
Rank: #9
Age: 25
Location: San Diego
2006 Revenue: $11.5 million
Employees: 15
Year founded: 2003
After a few years dabbling in Internet domain acquisition and traffic brokering, Raj Lahoti set out to build up one of his brother’s domains in order to provide meaningful content in an area that, well, generally lacks it. DMV.ORG, the “Online Unofficial Guide to the DMV,” aggregates information from the (often dreaded) Department of Motor Vehicles in each state — all in one place. Users can access information on everything from applying for a license to ordering a driving record, without the aggravation of standing in the DMV’s endless lines.
Mangesh Hattikudur
Rank : #23
Age: 28
Location: Birmingham, Ala.
Employees: 12
2006 Revenue: $1.7 million
Year founded: 2001
Mental Floss magazine offers a fun, irreverent look at knowledge and facts. As Pearson put it, “Our mission is to find anyway we can to blur the lines between education and entertainment.” The founders started the venture at Duke University as a campus publication and quickly turned it into a national magazine. But they have pushed the brand further than the magazine — producing books, board games, and soon a series of children’s books
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site which lets you to manage all your bookmarks in one place. You could also share them with your friends and could see what other people are bookmarking. Do you want to create something like del.icio.us? try Scuttle. Scuttle is an open source social bookmarking engine that you can run on your own site. It’s based on PHP and supports most of the del.icio.us protocol. If you want to get started on your own social bookmarking site right away, you can download Scuttle’s source code at SourceForge.
The installation is really easy. All you need to do is upload the files, create a new database, import the .sql file that comes with the download to create the required tables and change some default configuration values and off you go. You got yourself a social bookmarking site. I have never come across a site which uses Scuttle so far. I just tried this in my personal computer seems to work fine. And here is a screenshot from scuttle.
So far you could send animated e-greetings from your PC with an internet connection now you could do the same in your mobile using Mobilewish. MobileWish is world’s first complete mobile greetings messenger in Adobe Flash Lite, which allows users to send and receive the greetings to almost anyone around the world on their mobile handsets. The software is developed by Samir K. Dash, who currently works as a System Consultant (Creative Content) at Enterprise System Solutions Pvt. Ltd, Bhubaneswar (India).
All you need to do is download the Mobilewish software (from here) for your smart phone and immediately you could start sending animated greetings to other mobile phones.
August 22, 2007 at 2:37 am
· Filed under Miscellaneous
Google, Yahoo, MSN and Skype have been offering telephony-like facilities through their messenger software, may soon come into the service tax net, reports HT. All these services are currently offered free. Once required to pay taxes in India, their services may no longer be available for free.
And here is the argument from Yahoo and Skype on why they do not fall under the service tax net.
Yahoo did not provide voice-based services through its servers (network computers) in India, and therefore it did not fall within the ambit of service tax
A spokeswoman for eBay said Skype was not registered in India.
Google is now offering an easier way to search in 14 Indian Languages. You don’t need to have a special keyboard or software all you need is a web browser and you need to add the Indic On-Screen Keyboard iGoogle gadget for your language. You could get those iGoogle gadgets here (link here). First select a language and hit “Add to Google” button; this will add the gadget to your iGoogle home page.
And look at what I searched for.
Now you could search Google in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kanada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinahala, Tamil or Telugu by the same way as I did above.
Google has released a transliteration feature into an independent product of its own. This tool will let you type in Hindi, using an English keyboard. Type out words phonetically, and let Google convert them into the correct Hindi word. This is also available as an iGoogle Gadget. Check these new features out at the Google Labs India web page, yes a separate page for Google Labs India (link here)
August 20, 2007 at 3:11 am
· Filed under Miscellaneous
Are you a NRI, thinking of going back to India? Then you might be interested in attending an Indo-US Job Fair organized by ClickJobs.com. I have already posted about this news a month back. However want to post it again, as the Job Fair is this week end, August 25th and 26th 2007. The fair will be conducted in Hotel Hilton Woodbridge, New Jersey, USA. Following are some links where you could get more information about the same.
Since the day Tim O’Reilly coined the word “Web 2.0″ it has become a widely-used term to describe the perceived ‘second generation of the Internet’, focusing on new collaboration technologies such as blogs, social networking and user generated videos. In early 2007, Clearswift did a research to establish how popular these new Web 2.0 technologies and sites really were among office workers to determine the scale of the potential threat to corporate security. Here is the link to the complete 24 page report (click here). Following is the summary of the same.
Before I get to the summary of the report, read the following news. Apple In 2004, websites PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret published details of unreleased products, code-named Asteroid and Q97. Apple sued the sites in an attempt to force them to reveal their sources. (actual news link here)
Google Mark Jen left Google under unclear circumstances less than a month after joining the company after candid comments on his blog about life at Google caused controversy. (actual news link here)Waterstone’s Joe Gordon, an employee of eleven years, became the first blogger in Britain to be dismissed because he kept a personal blog, which occasionally included entries about bad days at work and satirising his boss. (actual news link here)
Delta Ellen Simonetti was sacked from Delta Airlines after posting images of herself in her Delta uniform on her personal blog. (actual news link here)
So it’s somewhat clear that the sensitive data are getting outside of corporate walls by the increased number of employees using the social media and web 2.0 technologies and sites. Here is the summary of report that took place in two phases
Phase 1
Aimed to explore how popular social networking media are in a corporate environment and whether users are discussing sensitive work-related issues and therefore posing a threat to corporate information.
In the US, 83% of office workers have accessed some form of social media from their place of work.
Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia (46%), video-sharing sites such as YouTube (26%), IM (24%) and blogs (23%) are all accessed by significant numbers of workers.
While using these social media, almost a third (30%) discussed work-related issues, potentially putting sensitive company information at risk.
Almost two thirds (63%) of office workers accessed social media at least once a day – with 82% having admitted to accessing them at least a few times a week.
50% of those polled felt they should be entitled to access these sites from work, whereas only 36% felt they shouldn’t.
Phase 2
The second phase of the research explored whether businesses are aware of the popularity of social media and whether they were deriving business benefits from Web 2.0 technologies. The respondents were also asked what IT security measures they had in place.
IT and business decision makers were broadly aware of the popularity of Web 2.0 social media among their employees
9.1% of those polled saying their staff did not access any social media
A small 4.9% admitted to not knowing whether their employees accessed social media or not.
A significant number were not taking action to protect themselves by educating their staff
19.1% of those polled admitted to not maintaining a best practice policy which provided staff with written guidelines on using the Internet, including social media sites.
35% of companies didn’t monitor employees’ Internet use
Almost half of (48.3%) the IT and business decision makers polled didn’t know whether they’d lost confidential corporate information via social media.
Only 32.1% of companies had content filtering solutions in place that allowed secure access to social media sites.
Over 40.8% considered social media to be relevant to today’s corporate environment yet only 11.1% were already making use of it from a business perspective.
14.6% of organizations were not aware of social media and had no policy on it.
11.7% were encouraging employees to blog in order to benefit the business
41.6% actively discouraging or forbidding staff to blog and 46.7% not having a policy either way.
What really bothers is that, almost half of (48.3%) the IT and business decision makers polled didn’t know whether they’d lost confidential corporate information via social media and only one third had content filtering solutions to allow secure access to social media sites. Here is the conclusion of the report
Never before has it been more important for companies to consider controlling use of the web as well as email and protecting against outbound threats as well as inbound. There is no doubt Web 2.0, in the form of social networking technologies, is a growing phenomenon and popularity among users continues to increase. The Web 2.0 world brings with it significant data leakage risks and the research clearly shows that the scope of the mass usage of Web 2.0 tools by employees. While it is cause for concern, it is not cause for alarm. By taking a smart approach to web security, businesses will be able to unlock the power of these new Internet services for competitive advantage.
I’m right now reading a report about the impact of Web 2.0 on corporate security. It’s really interesting, will write details about it in my next blog post. As I was reading I came across information about companies such as BMW, Shell, General Motors, IBM, British Airways and French Newspaper Le Dauphiné Liberé are already using social media and podcasting strategies to reach out to the rapidly expanding community of consumers that expects companies to engage with them. And here is what they do.
BMW
BMW created www.bmwfilms.com which it uses to showcase its Hire film series – eight short films made by acclaimed Hollywood directors. It also has www.bmw-audiobooks.com where customers can download exclusively commissioned audio short stories for free.
Shell Shell uses webcasts, downloadable video and forums on its website.
General Motors General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz communicates directly with customers by writing a blog. Here is the blog link (click here).
IBM IBM has a website dedicated to its several wikis for the IBM community, where questions and comments can all be posted.
British Airways British Airways added a Google Earth mashup to its website to provide customers with more information about their destination. Also, Google Earth users can add the BA layer which provides details of the airline’s flights to destinations around the globe.
Le Dauphiné Liberé The newspaper organized a debate about the French elections in virtual world, Second Life.
SlideShare.net is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web. It’s based out of Mountain View (California, USA) & New Delhi (India). The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies published a list of the Top 100 tools for learning professionals and Slideshare shares the No 26th spot along with FaceBook, Wikipedia & Ning. Here are links for further reading about this information
LinkedZone.com is the professional networking site for Indians. You might have seen many general social networking sites popping up in India lately; however this is the first ever professional networking site for Indians. I got myself registered and played around a while, in this post I will be talking about the features in detail and also about what features I think will be beneficial for LinkedZone community. If you have anything to add please do so by leaving it as a comment.
Registering / Creating your Profile
As to do with any social networking site, you have to get yourself registered. As soon as you register you have to fill out your profile, the only difference here is that the profile is more towards your profession / career. Once you have registered you could invite your fiends to LinkedZone either by providing their email address or using the automatic address book importer which works for Yahoo, MSN, GMail, AOL and Outlook.
Public Profile Page
You could have a public profile page. Public profile is your own personalized web page displaying your profile. Your profile will have a permanent URL customized by you. Anybody could view your profile including people who are not part of LinkedZone.com
Your digital Business Card
LinkedZone also creates a digital business card for your profile. You could exchange your business card with other LinkedZone members.
And here is my public profile page and digital business card
Member Search and Network
You could search for other members in the network and could request to add them to your network. As I said above you could also exchange business cards with other members.
Posting / Searching Jobs
Any member could post a job, search for a job in the listing, add a job to your favorite and also apply for a job.
Features in the pipeline
LinkedZone will provide a widget, Business Card Widget, which you could place it in your blog or website. Viewers of your website could exchange their business card right there, if they are LinkedZone members.
Features that I think would be beneficial for the LinkedZone community
You cannot upload your photos to your profile right now. Adding a photo to a profile adds value.
How about tagging people in my network? Right now there is no tagging concept. I would like to tag people in my network, like Ex Colleagues, College Friends, etc.
Same way tagging my favorite jobs
Since it’s a professional network, how about a section in the profile where people could add their professional / career achievements. It could be like information about a paper you published or a speech you gave at a conference
Adding a way to mention the member’s blog URL / web site URL. May be a RSS reader which gets the articles from the member’s blog and displays in their profile.
A recommendation system, other members recommending / vouching for a member
A Q&A area where members asking questions and answering to questions
I definitely see a lot of potential for a social networking site like LinkedZone.com in India. And I could see techtribe.com as the only competition so far. And finally, while reading through this I bet you would have thought LinkedZone as an Indian version of LinkedIn.com. Well you might be right; however I would like to end by asking, “Don’t we want an Indian version of professional networking site?”
Del.icio.us
SlideShare.net
LinkedZone.com
