Go2IndiaWeb20.com

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

ZOHO is planning for a boat party in Boston. Major announcements will be made I believe. Stay tuned for the updates. Read more on this 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.

If you flickr (flickr is the best online and photo management and photo sharing application in the world) you could send photo prints to india very easily. You have two options

Picsquare - only flickr PRO accounts could do (read over coverage about picsquare here)
itasveer - flicks non-PRO accounts could also use this service. Flickr does not provide full resolution images to non-PRO accounts, so if you have non-PRO account, you could not order prints more than 5″x7″

NOTE: itasveer bagged the PCWorld’s best indain website for photo printing [PCWorld].

ZOHO offers a suite of online web applications geared towards increasing productivity and offers easy collaboration tools (read our previous story about ZOHO here). ZOHO is one of the finalists for Webware 100 awards. It’s listed under the Productivity category. You could also vote for ZOHO here is the link for that, Vote ZOHO. Information sourced from ZOHO blog.

Iam married and I live miles away from my parents. There are times when I thought how cool it would be to have a service, where in which you could upload your photos and send a print to your loved ones in India, with just couple of mouse clicks. I believe you would have also felt the same way. Well you could do that now by using Picsquare.com

Picsquare.com is an online portal for photography catering to photography related needs on Indian community both abroad and locally. Currently, Picsquare users gets unlimited storage capacity, photo management through tags, online sharing, they can order prints online and have them delivered anywhere in India. They can also create cool personalized photo gifts like t-shirts and greeting cards.

Picsquare is built upon open source technologies – Java, Apache, Linux, MySQL - this information is for geeks…anyway Picsquare provides features like

• Uploader tool – for easy upload of photos
• Tagging – for effective management of photographs - cool tagging… that’s interesting.. iam impressed
• Storage – unlimited storage capacity - unlimited uh? believe this is a way to attract users. Once you have enough numbers there might be a limitation.

burrp! is an online user-generated local review and recommendation tool focused on recreational activities and events. Your assumption is absolutely correct: burrp is just an extended form of burp. It’s the Indian answer for Yelp (US based review site). Interestingly there are not many review sites that focus on local content. Burrp, does exactly the same. It has localized content. Right now it serves the Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkatta area and planning to release it for Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Goa and Pune.

It has done a fantastic job on the UI design. I have not come across Indian sites that are very dynamic in nature. They have used a lot of AJAX technology in it. The search works great. You could even search based on a street name or an area name in a city. The UI is very clean and uncluttered. It’s hard to find such a very well designed UI from an India based website.

Burrp claims it’s unique because of it’s focus on strong local content and user-generated content which is always good.

Okay now look at what I have searched for in Bangalore…

I could also see the photos of the Pub (if it’s there off course). It’s a neat AJAX implementation. Overall iam very impressed by the UI design and how the content is presented to the user. A very good site.

Meet the Indian who is competing against the Google and Microsoft and not only competing but have proved to be a leader in their respective space. Iam talking about ZOHO. If you haven’t heard about ZOHO yet, you will. ZOHO offers a suite of online web applications geared towards increasing productivity and offers easy collaboration tools which could be used both online and offline.

ZOHO competes against Google Apps and Microsoft Office products. It’s not easy taking on the mighty Google. So, when you come across a man who has the guts to do that, you can’t help but admire the man’s spirit. Dr. Sridhar Vembu is the founder and CEO of AdventNet, the company behind the Zoho suite of services, a direct competition to Google’s hosted suite of office products. He attended Indian Institute of Technology in Madras for his undergraduate degree and Princeton

PC World has come up with 100 best products of 2007 list ranking the best PCs, HDTVs, components, sites, and services. And Zoho’s part of it! the interesting part is that ZOHO is at number 30 ahead of services/products like GMail, YouTube, Microsoft Office 2007, Firefox, iPod Nano, Skype, Flickr, MacBook Pro etc. Here is a snapshot of ZOHO offerings.

Travelguru is a pioneering travel portal catering to the travel needs of the Indian traveler. Modeled on the basis of Expedia and Travelocity the company aims to bring cheaper flight and hotel options to the growing mass of Indian travelers. Travelguru’s current product offering consists of airline tickets, hotel rooms, vacation packages and cruises. 

In the past one year, Travelguru has grown to become the largest hotel consolidator in India, with access to more than 72,000 hotels worldwide and alliances with 500 airlines globally, and a leading consumer brand in the travel market. Needless to say that the company has received a fresh infusion of capital commitment to the tune of $15 million from Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital India last year. The number of customers who use Travelguru for their air, hotel stay and vacation needs is currently at an impressive 70,000 customers a month. With a slew of promotional and strategic initiatives planned in the months ahead, the user base of Travelguru is set to grow by over 30% month on month.

Definitely a key player to watch for in the online travel industry in India.