Go2IndiaWeb20.com

Activeciti.com is an online event management platform which lets you create events and manage them extremely quickly and easily. After registering, you could easily create new events and invite your friends to your events.

Some of the key features are

• Once you log in it displays the list of events that you have created
• Invite people directly from your friends list
• Invite non ActiveCiti members by specifying their email address
• Add polls to your events - to ask the opinion of invitees on any topic you can think of
• Track the responses of your invitees - whether they will be attending the event, not attending, etc
• Specify tags for public events, by which your event becomes easily searchable
• Add organizers to your events who can better help you organize
• Discuss event details with other organizers in the private forum
• Discuss other details with all your invitees in the public forum
• When important details of an event are changed - an update is sent automatically to your invitees
• Choose whether the invitees can see others that are invited

I really loved the UI design. It’s very neat and here are some screen shots of the application

And finally, I just have one question to you. Do we need another application like evite.com? Evite.com is also an online event management platform which has more features that activeciti.com.

DiscountsIndia.com is another deal site for India. It provides the online deals and as well as in store deal information. It has all the regular stuff a deal site provides. You could register for free, search for deals using keywords, and submit deals to the web site. You could also add reviews to a deal and view reviews. The features like setting an alert, emailing a deal are missing. The UI is neatly designed.

DiscountsIndia.com joins the following deal sites in the Indian Market

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

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.

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].

I have seen a lot of travel sites in India, since the travel industry in India is booming. However I have never seen a travel meta-search engine for India (just like mobissimo in the US). Here is a difference between travel sites and travel meta-search sites

travel sites - travel sites like travelguru (read over story about travelguru here), makemytrip, cleartrip, etc all have tie ups with majpr airlines and search for the best possible rates on these airlines and often the travel sites take a cut from the air fares. Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity are some of the examples in the US

travel meta-search sites - these are aggregators. They aggregate content from airlines and also from other travel search websites. Have you every searched for best fares in different travel web sites, if you have done that, then it’s a pain to go to different sites and look for it. Travel meta-search sites does the same thing for you in one place. They search for best possible rates in air lines and also in other travel web sites

iXiGO, is the first ever travel meta-search sites for indans. It’s launched yesterday it aggregates content from all 14 airlines and 3 travel websites.

 The air line are

• Air Decan
• Air India
• Air India Express
• Air Sahara
• Go Air
• Indian Airlines
• Indigo
• Indus Air
• Jagson Airlines
• Jet Airways
• Kingfisher
• MDLR Airlines
• Paramount
• Spicejet

the travel web sites are

• Yatra
• MakeMyTrip
• indiatimes

The key features of iXiGO

Zero booking fees - free to use

• 100% transparencey - shows all the hiden fees and taxes
• sort and filter results

Overall the first ever travel meta-search for Indians. You will have a great user interface experience. A great web 2.0 experience. I would consider that iXiGO is well positioned to advantage of the booming Indian travel industry.

 I just recently stumbled upon this site, IndianPad. An excellent site, like Digg (I would say even more that what Digg does) for Indians. It’s a social bookmarking and blogging site. Here are the features that are in IndianPad but not in Digg

• Users could disable their story
• When you submit a story with the URL it gets the title for you and displays on the top.
• No URL is needed to submit a story. You could write the story in IndianPad and submit it
• You could submit your music

Things that I would like to see on IndianPad

• Video Submit
• Podcasts Submit
• API interface for IndianPad

Overall I just love this site. It became one of my favorites to get Indian Content.

In my previous blog (read the full story here), I was talking about various Indian blog aggregators and how they were poorly designed. Only one of them was comparable to Blog Aggregator like Digg (though they copied the Digg style and called it Buzz) and Technorati. Here are my thoughts about what features a blog aggregator must provide and how it should be designed.

For those of you who are active in Web2.0 will know that Blog is a concept of Web 2.0. Blog aggregators are, as the name aptly says, aggregates the blogs, that are basically a concept of Web 2.0. Being said that what if the blog aggregators are themselves not Web 2.0. Many of them which I have listed are not collaborative enough they are just aggregating and providing those information, more like Web 1.0. Anyway here is what I would look from a blog aggregator

• provide a way for a user to claim their blog
• user must be in a position to add blogs to their watch list
• user can submit a story (an article, which is not a blog) and provide a way to comment on the story
• users can vote on stories or blogs
• user can see how many votes and who voted to their blog entry or story
• user could share the watch list to other users
• users could create communities and these communities must be based on one or more blogs
• home page must be like Digg
• must have a search which searches for articles and blog entries
• must have a search to search only Blogs
• must have a search to search communities
• must have a search to search people
• Once the community page is opened the front page must list the top stories and or blog entries that are of interest to that community
• users ‘my community’ page must list the top stories and or blogs combined from all the community that the user is part of
• must have a ping service to blogs like Technorati

Okay I just compiled my thoughts together, please let me know what you think.

I have been looking for some blog aggregator exclusively for Indian Blogs. I just want to submit my blogs under the intention to get some recognition in the Indian Blogosphere. I found many of them, and they are not close to Digg or Technorati. I was looking something similar to that. Here is a list of Indian Blog Aggregator that I found so far, it’s worth a try.

• UI is not that great. Simple and Clean, very static in nature.
• Total 83670 blogs are registered
• The front page lists the categories and the Blogs in that category. It would have been nicer if it had a Digg style display in the home page or displaying the top blogs in the Home Page
• Search is really slow

• enewss was far better than this one
• very basic UI
• The front page gives emphasis to on newly added pictures. This over shadows the Blogs that are listed
• No Blog count is provided
• Overall it’s very very basic.

• Finally a site somewhat similar to Digg. Here it’s called “Buzz It!”
• No way to know what Blogs you buzzed

• This is just a List of Blogs based on category.
• Does not display the Blog articles. Just the list of Blogs
• Very basic

Alright here you can either be a paid member or could use it for free. Why on earth you need to have a paid membership for a blog aggregator or for creating communities online. And top of it this is their claim “…WebRing, a pioneer in social networking. Since 1994, our members have created over 40,000 communities visited by three million people a month. What can you do with WebRing..” I seriously doubt that. I don’t want to talk more about this one.. iam getting outraged.

• Indian Blog list by Technorati… blogs that are tagged as India are listed.

• Just a List of Blogs

• Home page has a list of Categories and also tells about the number of blog links in that category
• Poor UI design. When navigating over the menu the page flickers

Iam planning to write another blog about what I would expect in a Blog Aggregator site. Please look for it and provide your thoughts on the same.

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.