Rajesh Barnwal

“Your new design is painful for readers to locate news and comment. The search option is also not working properly…. try searching.”

“I wish you had not deleted the old articles. The archives are very valuable to readers like me. When can we expect to see all the old articles and comments?”

“I have tried to put my comments on one of the articles and I found a security code ‘Captcha’. Although this is a good initiative and will help fight spam, but the code is too small that I could not read it and have to enter it thrice and failed all the time. At the end, I gave up as I don’t want to spend too much time in sharing my views on an article…I would appreciate if you increase the font size of the security code or device any other method by which users will not have problems reading it.”

These are some of the feedbacks that I have received from the AlooTechie.com users since the site was revamped a fortnight ago. What has not been said is why AlooTechie still doesn’t have a newsletter registration form to allow its new users subscribe to the newsletter. Why there is no RSS feed for the job posts? Why ‘Email the Story’ feature is not the way it should be? Why the comment section on the site has not been executed well, like the way it was in its WordPress days?

Obviously, we are aware about the challenges and difficulties that our readers must be facing while using the site. Through this post I just wanted to say that we, at AlooTechie, are doing what we can to see the issues get sorted out and the bugs get fixed as soon as possible. Unfortunately, in spite of my being the editor of the site, I don’t know exactly how long the timeline “as soon as possible” is going to be! Till then, please bear with us.

yashomati maiya se bole nandlala
radha kyun gori main kyun kala

boli muskati maiya lalan ko bataya
kaali andhiyari andhi raat mein tu aaya
laadla kanhaiya mera ho…
laadla kanhaiya mera kaali kamli wala
isi liye kaala
yashomati maiya se bole nandlala
radha kyun gori main kyun kala

boli muskati maiya soon mere pyare
gori gori radhika ke nain kajrare
kaale naino wali ne ho…
kaale naino wali ne aisa jaadu daala
isi liye kaala
yashomati maiya se bole nandlala
radha kyun gori main kyun kala

itne mein radha pyari aayee ithlati
maine na jadu daala boli balkhati
maiya kanhaiya tera ho…
maiya kanhaiya tera jugse nirala
isi liye kaala
yashomati maiya se bole nandlala
radha kyun gori main kyun kala

Not long ago, I used to have five blogs on Google’s Blogger platform. But, one day I just lost my patience with Blogger because it was not letting me publish my flagship blog on my personalised domain name. I even tried the Blogger Help Group but there too I could not find any positive help.

And so I decided to check WordPress. I got in touch with one of my friends, Payal. She helped me in setting-up a blog on WordPress.com and also in getting it published on my personalised domain name. Then I imported the content of my old blogs hosted on Blogger to the new one that I had created on WordPress. But I didn’t delete my old blogs.

After a few days, while I was browsing through my RSS reader, I chanced upon an article which mentioned about how Google penalises duplicate web content and that in order to get good search ranking one should try to remove duplicate content. I had also noticed that Google continued to give more weightage to my old blogs in the search ranking. And so I decided to delete my old blogs hosted on Blogger platform. But now I realise I should not have deleted my old blogs, at least till I had checked the content that I had imported on my new blog. Here is why!

Recently, while searching for an old post in this blog I just noticed that it was displaying only the first paragraph of the post. At once I felt a choke because the post was a copy from my old blogs. I began wondering if the mishap had happened with just this particular post or with all the entries that I had imported from my Blogger blogs? And so I checked a few random posts and realised that the WordPress had failed to import my blog posts in entirety. I became very irritated but realised I could do hardly anything to make amend.

Now, I can only regret for not inculcating the old lesson which says, ‘Look Before You Leap!’

This is an interesting time for the Indian online industry. Whether one looks at the number of internet users, the ad spend on internet, the value of e-commerce, the total size of venture capital funds invested in the online ventures, all of them have been growing year on year in the country.

Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of Mumbai-based search engine marketing firm Pinstorm, estimates that the internet attracted over Rs 600 crore of advertisers’ money in 2007 which is about twice of what it was in the previous year, and about half as much as what it would be this year.

According to a joint study by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB, the consumer internet market in India is expected to grow by 30 per cent and touch Rs 9,210 crore by the end of March 2008, as against Rs 7,080 crore estimated for the fiscal year 2006-07.

The entry of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group is only going to accelerate the growth of the Indian online industry. The group has allocated Rs 100 crore to be spent on its online gaming venture Zapak, and a similar amount to be spent on its social networking site BigAdda and online movie rental business BigFlicks.

Also, there is no dearth of venture capital fund to help the online entrepreneurs execute their plans and scale their online ventures as and when possible! The year 2007 witnessed a good number of Indian internet companies receiving VC fund. These included online advertising company Komli and social networking site Minglebox.com both of which received $7 million of venture financing.

The online medium currently attracts less than 2 per cent of the total ad spend in the country but the good thing is that the Indian online advertising market is believed to be growing 60 per cent year on year. Mark Read, CEO, WPP Digital, recently said, “In India we expect strong growth in the digital medium though access remains the limiting factor.”

What Mark Read left unsaid was the fact that less than 5 per cent of India’s population have access to the internet. But again the good thing is that the picture is getting brighter with the passage of time. According to IAMAI, the number of internet users in India has increased by 40 per cent at 46 million in September 2007 as compared to 32.2 million in September 2006.

The government of India has taken an ambitious initiative to set-up 1 lakh broadband internet kiosks in the countryside to enable rural Indians access the internet. This move is only going to widen the reach of internet in the country. Already, 41 per cent of the total internet users in India are from the smaller towns and cities with less than 1 million population, according to IAMAI.

There is significant excitement for the shares of Indian online companies. The unexpectedly huge success of the Info Edge (Naukri.com)’s IPO launched a year ago is just a case in point. Not surprisingly, a number of Indian online companies including MakeMyTrip.com and People Interactive (Shaadi.com) have already expressed their intentions to go for public listing in the next 12-24 months.

Corporate houses are increasingly leveraging the internet to create brand awareness and reach their target audience. Many companies have launched brand specific websites such as SunsilkGangofGirls.com and micro sites like MentosHelpline.com. Virals, an online version of the words-of-mouth marketing, an example of which is Betano1.com, have recently gained huge traction in the country. Some of the Indian companies have also launched corporate blogs to establish an online communication channel to interact directly with their current and prospective customers.

It’s interesting to know that Google-owned video sharing site YouTube.com is one of the top 10 most visited websites by the Indian internet users. And this is when the country has less than 3 million broadband subscribers. Now, it remains to be seen how online video content is going to be leveraged by Indian marketers and recruiters for their benefits.

Advertising is going to be the main source of revenue for online publishers. Subscription model for online content is very less likely to find the netizens’ favour. The India Today group, for example, has already jettisoned the subscription model and has started making its online content freely available to the internet users.

Many people believe that the real potential of internet lies in the mobile space for the sheer number of mobile phone users in the country. But one view is that personal computers and laptops would continue to be the predominant medium of accessing the internet, at least till the mobile operators start allowing their subscribers to access the internet through their mobile phones freely and without any restriction. Interesting, let’s wait and watch!

Reliance India Mobile (RIM) network is down in my home town (Siwan, Bihar) since this morning and a customer care executive of the company says the company will investigate the matter (that effectively means they don’t even have a clue why the network is down here!) and try to restore the network in the next 72 hours!!! That means three days

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs 10.

The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at Rs 10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at Rs 20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to Rs 25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs 35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell it to him for Rs 50.”

The villagers squeezed up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!!!

Welcome to the “Stock” Market!!!

Source: Internet

Fake Steve Jobs: Hard to believe PodTech is going under, because they seemed to have such a solid business model. Find people who don’t have much of anything significant or entertaining to say; film them doing this; then sell advertising against the content.

Mashable: PodTech is in the business of taking really important topics and making them as uninteresting as possible. [No wonder, PodTech founder John Furrier has already left the company.]

TechCrunch: 90% of PodTech content is just slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry. [Interestingly, PodTech has received $7.5 million over two rounds led by US Venture Partners and Venrock Associates.]

“We’re going to collect $10 in advertising to pay $28 in bandwidth? Who said video is a great business? We’re losing money… Heck, yesterday’s lunch session had three of us working on it for an hour, then Eddie encoded it, edited it, and published it. That took him four more hours. Let’s assume you can get smart people to work for you for $30 an hour to do video. That right there is $90 just to shoot for an hour, plus another $120 for editing and publishing. $210 in fixed costs just to start, then the bandwidth. And you haven’t even started paying for my camera, my new Mac.” — Robert Scoble, vice president, media development, PodTech (Btw, Scoble is also the author of Naked Conversations)