Go2IndiaWeb20.com

Admanya.com is the India’s first consumer education and advocacy website which claims it has brought new hopes to the Indian consumers to raise their voices against a consumer product or a company. It completely depends on consumer participation. Admanya revolutionizes consumer rights by empowering Indian consumers to take action against companies and firms that sell inferior goods and provide poor service.

In this website you could read reviews about a product and can get educated about it before making a decision to buy a product. You could also submit reviews about a product and also comment on other reviews. There are over 700 products currently listed in the website. One good part is you don’t have to register to read or write reviews about a product. You could stay anonymous and could participate in the website. There are also forums where you could discus and debate about hot topics of interest.

I believe this is the first ever C2C (consumer to consumer) portal in India.

For those of you who don’t know what Digg.com is, it’s a web application/platform that allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page. When a user submits a news article it will be placed in the “unpublished” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page.

Recently I came across two new sites DoctorWorld.NET, a Digg for medical news and Talkingtarmac.com, a Digg for aviation industry in India.

DoctorWorld.NET is a user powered medical news portal. On this social content voting site, all news is submitted by its users. The content will be promoted or buried depending on how much it is liked by the community. It’s powered by CoRank. CoRank allows to create your own social content site like Digg.

TalkingTarmac 2.0 is a site for the aviation industry in India. It’s a Pligg implementation. Pligg is an open source content management system which will allow you to create sites like Digg. And it’s free. Pligg is based on PHP and MySQL.

With CoRank.com and Pligg.com you could easily create social book marking / voting system, like the ones mentioned above. And it takes no effort.

JupiterResearch, claims that social networks and online communities have little effect on influencing online retail sales. The study finds that social and community sites are driving about 12 percent of online shoppers to buy more than planned. (sourced from tekrati). Some interesting facts

• 53% of online shoppers go directly to the retailer website while they are shopping
• Only 3% of online shoppers utilize blogs to gather information about products
• Social networks are suitable for branding

As it’s said above, JupiterResearch claims  that “From a branding and advertising perspective, social and community sites are garnering a great deal of influence online,”. This is well proven by Yahoo India and HUL creating a branded knowledge video search for Dove hair care campaign. Here is our coverage about the same (link here).

The only site, I know of, that utilized the social community to drive its sales is Threadless.com. Here is the link (link here) of our previous coverage about Threadless. This research shows that social media and social community are still treated as entertainment rather than to get information about products and to make informed decisions.

There are lot of Job search engines in India, however Gladoo.com if the first ever meta-search engine for Jobs. Gladoo searches across multiple job portals, classified sites, agencies and company web sites for job vacancies and provides a unified search interface. Gladoo is from the team that built TolMol.com, a comparison shopping site.

Gladoo is more than just searching for job vacancies. They had setup a community called Career Canteen which allows Gladoo users to ask any career related question and get it answered by Gladoo community. Users could build their professional network by exporting the Yahoo and Google contacts to Gladoo. Users could request for endorsements on their profile from credible resources in the professional network. More interestingly Users could tag their profile.

Overall Gladoo is the first ever meta-search engine for jobs and also provides a real good social networking feature.

Sulekha.com an Indian community portal adds “Click to Call” feature to its site. Using this service the users could get connected with the advertisers by just entering their phone number. And it’s a free service. Look at the snapshot below.

Seems like, a user from any part of the world could get connected to the advertiser who is in India. And interestingly this feature is only in India and not for US based classifieds or other countries. The idea is very similar to what Google tried to do with its Google Maps and locating businesses on them. However I believe it’s a neat of connecting the users to the advertisers. Not sure whether Sulekha charges the advertisers for this service.

Source ContentSutra and exchange4media

Rediff launches a new social media platform called Rediff iShare. You could share your Videos, Photos and Music with friends. The site is neat and really sleek. Personally I have never used Rediff, the only time I went to rediff when they launched the Rediff Bblogshowcase. However I’m really impressed by the UI design of the iShare platform.

Some of the key features of iShare

• Easy upload, drag and drop upload using the Uploader tool. Very fast.
• Unlimited storage. However you can upload only five files at a time. You can upload video files of size less than 50 MB and audio files of size less than 10 MB.
• You could keep some of the content as private
• Tag your content.
• You could vote on the content in iShare
• Book mark content

The only one thing, that I didn’t like about iShare is, it forces me to create a rediff email account. Why can’t it accept other email account for registering in iShare. See Orkut, you could create profiles without a gmail account.

Rediff is the first Indian Portal getting big time into the social media space. Now you could see many following the same foot steps.

Yahoo India Answers in association with HUL (Hindustan Unilever Limited) created world’s first Branded Knowledge Video Search (source indiaprwire). Yahoo India is chosen as the launch pad for HUL’s Dove to launch the Dove Hair care campaign in May 2007. I believe this is the biggest ever online campaign in India. Here is the link for the Dove promo site (click here).

As per the report Yahoo India interviewed 250 women in 3 cities - Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, asking questions about hair care in a span of 9 days. They have also created 1,000 minutes of video footage of the interviews. Launched on May 16, 2007, users spent over 830,000 minutes on the dove promo site of which close to 69,000 minutes were spent only on viewing videos. Over 2000 answers were posted by Yahoo! users, making this the largest ever branded campaign on Yahoo! India Answers.

This is the first ever success story that I have heard in India, which effectively used the social media to create a successful online campaign. I certainly believe that we will be seeing more such campaigns in India.

A few days back I was blogging about HolidayIQ.com (here is the link). I seriously believed that there are no competitors for them in the Travel 2.0 space. However I recently came across another site, called oktatabyebye.com that competes in the same space. I did some comparison and here it is..

HolidayIQ.com (Alexa ranking 29,902)

• + Hotel reviews. Users could add their reviews about a hotel
• + Reviews about destinations
• + You could upload their trip photographs.
• + Reviews about an Airport
• + HolidayIQ refers you to flight search engines to get some good deals
• + Cross linking is perfect here. When you are searching for a destination you will see information about the hotels in the destination as well.
• - I would have loved to see Tagging, an easy way of organizing content

OkTaTaByeBye.com (Alexa ranking 334,500)
I have to admit the name is really catchy. I love it. And about the ranking, remember that oktatabyebye.com is still in beta. So I’m not judging here by ranking. There are lot more functionalities here when compared to HolidayIQ.com. Here are some noticeable ones

• + Add Reviews about destinations
• + Add Reviews about a Hotel
• + Upload your trip photos and share it with others
• + Find travel buddies. You could search for some trip that’s been planned by the members. You could either jump in, if it’s open or could request for joining the same.
• + Find events based on destinations
• + Get Travel directions, though it’s not that detailed. It’s a new feature added to the site
• + Ask questions about travel.
• + I like the home page design. Neatly designed
• + You could Tag anything and everything. That’s good.
• - You cannot information about flight deals here
• - No reviews about the airport
• - No cross linking between destinations, hotels, etc

Here is Alexa comparison between the two sites for the last six months.

The following are some features that I would love to see in Travel 2.0 based sites. However it’s not there in the above two sites.

• Bookmarking favorites hotel and destination
• Providing a plug-in for getting photos from Flickr and other top photo sharing sites
• How about sharing videos?

However I believe both the sites have pretty good shot at getting users given that the Travel industry is exploding right now.

Just about 2 days back, I got a comment from a reader to one of my earlier blog post titled “Travel 2.0 - Is that what’s next for the Indian Online Travel Industry?” (link here). The comment was about a site called HolidayIQ.com, and it mentions that HolidayIQ is based on Travel 2.0 model. Needless to say I immediately jumped into it and Yes as the comment said it’s exactly a Travel 2.0 model.

HolidayIQ is clearly India’s largest travel and holiday information portal. It also has a community based structure where in which users could register and could write about their travel experience.

To be clear it’s not a Hotel booking or an airline booking site. It’s an information portal driven by the users. One could get a lot of information about a Hotel, a destination of interest, about an airport and many more useful tips which will allow travelers to make some wise / informed decision before traveling. It’s very neatly presented.

One could search for Hotels and resorts. Once you get a Hotel / Resort page you could read the users reviews of the same. You could see photos and read about all the information before one makes a decision. The same applies for places of interest as well. And you could also share your travel experience by reviewing a hotel you stayed, places you visited and uploading photos of those places.

Right now there is a great amount of growth happening in the Travel industry like online booking and travel planning. With the rapid increase in number of Indians traveling on vacations, within India as well as abroad, this segment is set to explode over the next decade. In such a scenario, Holiday IQ is positioned to be the ultimate independent advisor to Indians going on vacations.

It’s a great informative site and a good example of a useful Web 2.0 tool that’s properly deployed and perfectly targeted.

The number of Indians traveling abroad for vacations and holidays are going to be doubled by 2001, reports TimesofIndia. As per the report it’s due to the increase in disposable incomes, more affordable air packages. The forecast says that the outgoing tourism expenditure will reach a value of $21 billion by 2001.

Okay now this all brings a great opportunity for the travel industry. Definitely the major online travel sites will be set for big growth as the traveler’s increase they might be set for doing comparison shopping. And online ticket booking will be a destination where travelers might go in search for cheap deals.

I do also see a great opportunity for Travel based social networking sites and travel blogs. Not only do travelers go online for getting good deals, I guess they will definitely go online to look for information about different travel places, photos, videos and blogs so that, they could make a wise decision on where to go and what to see in their travel.

In short the following travel based online services will be set for a bigger growth

• Online air travel / hotel / car rental booking system
• Travel based social networking sites
• Travel based blogs