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Search Results for: blogs

  • fritz Says -> thanx to all who care about my welfare
    6:27 am on November 12, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Thanx to all the people who made phone calls sent sms’s and mails and had long chat sessions with me to know about my health and give advice and tips and even offered their cleartrip coupons etc hahahahaha.

    I really appreciate the concern shown and am really thankful for all the best wishes.

    Hmm from this episode I did come to know that there are a few people who want to see me alive hahahahaha yes from now on I am still pushing myself but not as much now I sleep for a decent amount and eat food on time and don’t skip meals anymore.

    But have not yet given up on pushing my mind and body but now do it a bit smarter like I told a friend few days back it is worth dying while trying in something you believe in and feel worth giving your body and mind rather then dying later in life repenting that you never had the will power to pursue your dreams.

    Well thanks once again on a lighter note the below image done by a close friend of mine selwyn is inspired by my the small incident in my life and no there are no prizes for guessing which incident hahahahaha :) so enjoy !!!!

    The image is not loading from blogger :( so here is the link chk out the selwyn’s blog and guess the image :)

     

  • fritz Says -> catching up with selwyn after a long time
    1:36 pm on November 10, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Well today was a fun outing in the afternoon when the four of us Me, Fonda ,Sarvesh and Selwyn all went out for lunch at Godinho’s it is a small goan restaurant here in panjim famous for its goan food. Since we all met in my office at campal and since sarvesh was the only one with a mode of transport he took up the responsibility of shuttling all of us to our destination thnx dude for the shuttle service :)

    So we sat down and continued with our chat and catching up with what is happening with one another I guess distance really pulls people apart and today I realized it since we had not talked like this for a long long time well if my memory serves me right the last time we were like this was on our trip to nagpur but then we had another monkey with us Satya hahahaha but now even with constant chatting and sometimes phone calls it is no supplement for a personal outing with the gang ;) but all of us are where we are because of the choices we made in our careers so it is all cool but whenever we are down we should make it a point to meet up (hmm am always up for it but the others come with a predefined schedule for their activities in goa and find it bit difficult to squeeze in old friends time in that schedule )

    Well after sarvesh made three trips from office to godinho’s to shuttle all of us there we got down and ordered our lunch (the service was slow it is because the place was full and they were short on waiters so it took some time for the waiter to come to us to take our order but we did take a lot of time to decide what we were having selwyn could not decide about chicken or squids hmm he was saved from his agony with the fact that there were no squids hahahaha and he has made bigger choices then ordering from a restaurant menu wonder how he made those choices ) Well finally we ordered I ordered pork balchao, fonda ordered beef fry with capsicum and sarvesh and selwyn settled for the chicken cafreal some french fries and some drinks two cokes and two 7up’s the food was not good not at all tasty like the normal godinho’s food maybe the cook has changed but then again we all had our lunch and then we headed back to my office for some more chit chat.

    There we talked about new ventures told them about my new comics idea and they could not stop laughing at my story but am sure its a billion dollar franchise and I will see who will laugh at it later hahaha (evil laugh). Talked about our jobs, where our lives are headed etc
    talked about movies, comics, games etc etc then finally we dispersed as selwyn had to get home and rest (that is the main reason he comes to goa to sleep hahaha) well it was quite a nice half day considering the fact that I was a bit upset with some office developments in the morning but the afternoon outing really cheered me up :) hopefully we will have more outings like this in the future with our lives becoming more and more work centric we find such things difficult to plan and execute as all of us are spread all over the place seperated by huge geographical distances and are no longer in a small place called Goa.

     

  • fritz Says -> Would Google buy RIM ??
    12:27 am on October 5, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    No No RIM is not Reliance India Mobile but the acronym for the Blackberry makers Research In Motion.

    Just stumbled across (this) found it very very fascinating but would Google make such a purchase who knows but In my opinion don’t think so my reasons being the price tag is too big even for a company like Google with huge pile of cash and they can easily raise a bit more if needed to fund such a acquisition but will they be able to digest and integrate this into their offerings is what would be interesting to see if this does go through with the $54.13B price tag it can go more then that too.

    Well with such an acquisition they would not just get a ready made hardware platform the blackberry but they also get a very important chunk of the corp clients who are users of the RIM platform so the only thing left for them would be integrating the hardware with their hosted applications for corporate domains and viola an enterprise class mobile collaboration suite and I guess that Google is bound to announce something huge since they have already taken their cash cow Adsense mobile so the Gphone is definitely on its way whether blackberry turns into a Gphone or there is another route Google will take only time will tell and their recent acquisition of zingku also shows their interest in the mobile space this is important for them in countries like India and China where the mobile penetration is more then PC penetration and they are definitely lagging in both this countries but so far Google’s mobile strategy has been a bit shaky am still wondering why they bought dodgeball some time back and their founders quit and left on an unhappy note with lot of media attention at their claims of how Google was not providing them with no resources to take the product further.

     

  • fritz Says -> updating my blog on star date 15 july 2007
    1:17 am on July 16, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
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    Well the last couple of weeks have been hectic. Have had no time to relax and put my feet up well today was a day with less tasks to complete and just plain lazy around and I just did that got some spare time off and checked out some of my friends blogs and commented on their posts.

    The last few weeks have been hectic as well as eventful in my life
    why you ask?
    well
    for one I quit my job yes yes I resigned from a nice 9 to 5 job (well it was a job it was not one of those cozy jobs where a person works from 9 to 5 goes home and at the beginning of the next month comes to collect the pay cheque for me the job was a lot more hectic then having my own venture)
    why you ask again?
    Well I suddenly got the bad uncontrollable itch of becoming a entrepreneur and so I did not with one venture but floating three ventures at a time yes yes I thought one would not be challenging enough so went ahead and started three :) yes if you are still in shock I said three ventures and more are in the pipeline but for the first year I just want to build this three up to become leaders in the sectors they are in and then move onto other challenges in other sectors.
    so the three ventures are in nascent stages now and will blog about them once the world is ready to know about them :) at present all I can say is one is local and will affect Goa and the other two ones have a global impact.

    Well what about the current company that I am working at since I did play a significant role in getting it on track (I would say I still have not yet made it reach all its goals and would have loved too continue to build it up but now I have a new challenge and would like to pursue that) so will continue to be on board till the new management takes over.

    Till I am totally out of the present employers company I am operating 4 ventures which is beginning to take its toll on me. I am in a totally f****d up state right now. physically and mentally tired need a vacation to revitalize myself but no time to take one :( and also cant afford one financially with me investing all my money in myself and also trying to raise more capital from friends first and then will try to raise some from the market (raising capital in india is a headache and will write a separate post on that later).

    the other fun thing I did today other then reading friends outstanding blog posts and commenting is did some good old fashion reading of a paperbook the book is Business Miscellany (it is a gem of a book and very informative) also went through the latest issue of business world and will read the latest issue of business today tomorrow as my copy is borrowed by a friend and will be getting it back tomorrow. Well normally also I do read a lot at nights I scour through around 28 sources of tech and biz news with all this information I consume in a day maybe that explains why I get only a few hours of sleep daily. But reading online and reading a physical book is totally different experience and I prefer a book to a computer screen anytime.

    Once I finish with this I have more books which I have bought from pune during my pune trip and have not had time to go through them yet but now will make it a point to read atleast half an hour from one of the books daily.

    Also the other things that I have been doing is putting together all the paperwork necessary for the new ventures and all I can say is it is boring and a total turn off to an entrepreneur it is a troublesome affair but I guess everyone has to go through it and makes the person wiser about the working of the govt departments and how to handle all the different officers whose sole purpose of holding govt jobs is not to do any work and occupy the chairs and get paid from the govt treasury.Well the paperwork is going on and hopefully will soon be complete.

    It will be difficult to get the blog updated frequently now but whenever I get time will write a few words about my journey through life and the new ventures.

     

  • fritz Says -> meeting with bloggingtofame.com team
    1:05 am on June 25, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    During the lunch break had a casual chit chat with Divya Uttam more info about her here. She is the founder of bloggingtofame.com and also the CEO of World Net labs the company behind bloggingtofame.com

    Well bloggingtofame is another startup related to blogs they are looking at publishing a blog magazine by pulling in content from ace bloggers and at present they are hunting for ace bloggers they have a contest running now more info click here the first prize is a cool 25k $$ a nice pocket change to have I must add.

    The teams visit there was to promote bloggingtofame.com and I Guess they must have done that well for me nope I don’t think I have the makings of a fame blogger so will stay out of the contest hahahahaha

     

  • fritz Says -> blogshowcase a Rediff product
    7:21 pm on June 24, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Well the big sponsorship for the event was because Rediff was launching their product called blogshowcase targeted at the bloggers. Well blogcamp pune was the right place to meet those bloggers who would test out their product. The product is a combined effort of a startup called WATConsult and Rediff according to this piece of info.

    The Launch presentation was given by Rajiv Dingra of WATConsult and Jasmeet Singh who is the VP of product marketing at Rediff.
    The Initial talking and showing of screenshots was done by Rajiv and then after the first few slides and intro there were questions from the public and Rajiv told the audience that it would be good if the questions were held till last when the presentation was over. Once the initial feature set and screenshots were shown the questions started pouring in most of them were valid questions and were rapidly fired by some of the people in the audience.

    The answers given to the questions were not satisfactory(not just my opinion many others felt this too) plus it was shocking to see the response of both Rajiv and Jasmeet of some of the criticism coming their way apparently they were considering their offering was god sent and bloggers will accept it with their eyes closed no questions asked. I was more shocked with the fact that Rajiv was also having a bit of a problem with criticism which is not at all good for a person in charge of a startup being open minded to criticism helps in survival in this fierce competitive world.

    The problem with this product is that it adds to the problem of information overload affecting all us net junkies.
    Personally there were lots of issues which were not good for the users of the service things like them using the content from the blogs onto their portal and with mainstream content. pulling stuff from blogs and putting it without modification does not work as bloggers tend to be colloquial in their writing.
    Plus the fact that the meta content generated around your content was Rediff property plus it pulls your rss feed so if you give full post in your feed you wont as that will not get traffic onto your site so the question is will you maintain two feeds one for full post and one special one to submit to blogshowcase.

    The Logic behind the entire product is you give us access to your feed and we give you an audience but the question is will be audience be willing to go through hundreds of posts everyday (it is a well known fact that most users just go to the Digg homepage only) the product will fail if not positioned properly for both bloggers and rediff users.

    Well me being a blogger would not use the product why you ask?
    Simply because my doubts about the product have not been cleared and also with the fact that if you sign up and once they crawl your feed and copy the content onto their servers and what do you know how they will use your content?
    apparently Rediff is so dumb they didn’t even bother to put a terms and conditions page they just expect people to come there and submit their details with no assurance.

    Overall from this launch I have learned some important lessons

    • never launch a half baked product
    • be open to criticism
    • come up with better way of presenting to target audience
    • research well to see if there is a market for the product
    • always think about monetizing if you cant find a way don’t get into it

    The product did not create any much buzz in the blogosphere also plus the main stream media also didn’t cover it much.

    To read the blogshowcase teams blog read this they are trying to explain here how their offering is different from digg

     

  • fritz Says -> fropper.com at blogcamp pune not a impressive showing
    1:18 pm on June 23, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Fropper was one of the sponsors for the blogcamp pune event and were showcasing the new feature they have launched ezblogs and they were giving out caps white caps with their logo and caption on it.

    Well now to my thoughts about them well I didn’t attend their demo and talk on ezblogs as I was attending another talk then but abhimanyu and sarvesh did attend their talk and I dont think that they have even tried out their service yet even after attending their talk but I interacted with their team on the stall (basically a table and some chairs with their banner) the questions I asked were basically like

    Q)what is fropper all about?
    A) It is a social networking site

    Q)who is your target audience you are big on dating is that niche you’ll want to pursue?
    A) No we dont want to be a niche market player we want to be a india centric social network

    Q) how different is your offering from orkut or any other social network used in india?
    A) We are working on making our social network india centric that is what we want to do

    Well after all their replies I lost interest their team was like why are you annoying us we are here because my boss wants me too and he is worried that we are not burning our VC money at a fast pace and that is why we are giving you caps here and why the hell are we bothered about orkut?? They are not India centric we are india centric and that is what the indian web community needs not a global social network but a indian one (then why the hell are tatas.

    YEAH RIGHT ( my advice to companies who send teams to such events send people who are enthusiastic and can interact with people since for a consumer oriented company it is important to maintain a good face towards the consumer for your success if you cant do that then say good bye to your startup)

    Well fropper is one of the services offered by people group interactive their other famous offerings are shaadi.com and mauj they have other not so well known offerings too like an indian astrology site called astrolife.com. People group is funded by VC’s but I guess the VC’s are looking at only shaadi and mauj to get back good returns on their investments as even though the team on site said they are moving away from dating and onto the social networking space and competing with sites like orkut.com etc their parent company site still introduces them as a dating site hahahaha so much for knowing how a parent company is controlling the future of one of its groups offerings.

    Well I like their TV ads they are humorous(in my perspective they are) their users are so frustrated that they jump in the sea to commit suicide and they are rescued by fisher folk with fropper accounts (hahahahahhaha this is my interpretation of the ad)

     

  • fritz Says -> blogcamp was not a resounding success because
    12:19 pm on June 23, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    This post is too show why the recently held blogcamp pune which I attended was not a resounding success is because of a few basic issues like the difference in the veteran bloggers (who were few in number) and new bloggers was huge I mean it was like two diff segments attending one event too learn one segment who is learning how to blog and the other which is hardcore talking about stuff like microformats,fighting comment spam etc.

    Every talk and every veteran was interested in giving the new people the feeling that if you want to blog then the ultimate nirvana is to become a celebrity blogger and get yourself interviewed on TV and print media and that is what you should aim for which was quite shocking actually since there is a segment of bloggers like me who don’t do any marketing for their blog no link building, SEO,SEM etc etc and are happy with just a few friends and family members who keep themselves updated about you from your blog. All this must have been a definite turn off for the newbies as it will make them weary of getting onto the blogging bandwagon with fears like my english is not good, what do I write etc etc

    I think the notion that a blog is a personal diary is lost somewhere in the web 2.0 social media hype that is building up now.

    The walk out attitude is still not there in India if something is being discussed which you don’t think is adding a layer to your intellect you should walk out and attend some other talk that is the basic thing everyone attending barcamps do they jump talks, jump threads and since this was the first time such a event was held there should have been like a 5 mins break between talks which gives people (who think it is impolite to walk out when someone is talking ) the time to leave gracefully.

    The reasons I attended the blogcamp are I am working with a few others on Two products which will be a great in assisting bloggers everywhere and I wanted to feel the pulse of bloggers their fears and their doubts and what do they want and the other reason was to see if anyone got any demos of any blog related products they were working on. I was so tempted to give a demo of my product there which is in late alpha stages now but then it would have been premature but one thing I Learned from the rediff launch of their blogshowcase was HOW NOT TO LAUNCH A PRODUCT(the blogshowcase will be a seperate post)

    But overall a few things done right would have made this event a success I guess this same mistakes wont be repeated for the barcamp to be held at pspl pune more info found here (this also I will try to attend if time permits)

     

  • fritz Says -> babys day out at blogcamp pune
    11:19 am on June 23, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Well The excitement begun with the three stooges me, abhimanyu and sarvesh catching the bus from one of the symbiosis institute to the symbiosis center on the outskirts of pune where the unconference was to be held.

    We were a bit early for the event (by the indian standard but according to the clock we were on time) as when we reached most of the people had not reached and we reached there on time mentioned on the wiki when it would start the sponsors were putting up their banners and setting up their banners. so we just moved around and finally got ourselves registered for the event and got my t-shirt.

    The event started with the introduction of all the attendees it was very informative and nice got to know that a few bloggers were born recently in the blogosphere and few were about to be born (one blogger who was born on that day is abhimanyu the photoblogger hahahahaha his blog can be found here now the blog is looking more like a one night stand with no further involvement on the side of the blogger hmmmmm).

    The sessions that I attended that day

    • sulekha portal peoples talk about blogging on their platform
    • rediffs launch for a new product for bloggers
    • how to grow you blog traffic
    • podcasting

    Yes I just attended four events and rest of the time went in interacting with other people outside in the corridors and sponsor stalls met a very few interesting people met akshay who maintains a very popular photoblog/ blog on blogspot called trivialmatters and is in the process of organizing some event now called the rickshaw run (I had never heard of this till I met the guy but apparently sarvesh is very well informed about the happenings in indian blogosphere and knew much about this race)

    Also met another blogger who’s blog I read on and off and sometimes when I have a few minutes to spare just go to her blog and read some of her new post whichever ones catch my attention this blogger is apparently a mini celebrity blogger hahahahha and wants to become a celebrity blogger she does have all the ingredients for making it into the blog celebrity hall of fame (all the best) and the reason I stumbled upon melody’s (yes she does have a sweet name and a cute face too and not to mention she is a d’souza too now they don’t come any better then that do they??) blog is because she has goan roots and I talked to her about it she said she don’t know much but she believes she hails from divar (a beautiful island located in the mandovi river) Melody’s blog can be found here .

    The lunch was sponsored by Rediff.com as among all the sponsors they were the biggest in terms of moolah the lunch was good and I was not the only one disappointed with the fact that the lunch was only pure veg there were others disappointed too.

    During the lunch time got some free time to interact with a few other people and met another fellow goan working as a techie for a startup in pune called bookeazy his name is Nigel Fernandes he was proudly wearing his bookeazy t-shirt and (yes it is easy with a ‘z’ in it ) when I saw him I was a bit sad for not wearing my Intelgrate t shirt (damn I missed a great oppurtunity to promote intelgrate well there will be many more oppurtunities for doing just that in the near future) also interacted with the divya uttam of bloggingtofame (yes it is another startup in the blogging space). The other person I met was Rajiv Dingra the founder of WATConsult it is a startup to guide other startups (yes It sounds odd but that is wat they do ) he seems very enthusiastic about what he does which is very good for a founder but the success depends not on enthusiasm but a very sound business model and good core team for execution about the business model am not sure(this is topic for a seperate post).

    At the end of the day it was a nice experience and all thanks to the sponsors and the organisers the organisers were a bunch of fun guys with whom I chatted with for a few mins met tarun during lunch break and parag at the end of the event
    but there is no such thing as the perfect event or a perfect day out I was disappointed that the wifi was not working, the event was held at a educational institute and was totally disappointed by the fact that there was minimal participation by students considering the fact that Symbiosis Center for IT (the venue for blogcamp pune) is suppose to be a place for IT people who should be curious about the waves sweeping in the IT space.

    What did I lend up with at the end the day

    • it was a mixture of good and bad outing
    • met lots of people got some new ideas and met people from far off places like chennai, bangalore, noida etc
    • a t-shirt of blogcamp pune
    • a fropper cap (yes fropper was one of the sponsors giving out caps)
    • a notepad for taking notes at blogcamp
    • a free lunch
    • a free ride back to the city (yes we took the bus back but while going for the event we were charged 20 bucks a person and while coming we were not charged at all so I guess the ride back was on the house for the three stooges)
     

  • fritz Says -> marketing frenzy for indian email players
    1:07 am on June 12, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Well I will focus only on the two Indian players who are pushing their email solutions via a marketing blitz on TV they are Rediffmail and zapakmail.

    Rediffmail is an offering by a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq called rediff.com.
    They have many offerings like personal blogs,auction site,shopping etc etc but their focus has been on creating an Indian portal and their main offering has been their email service. I have been a user of their email service for four years now and even though I have moved onto gmail now for my emailing needs I still do maintain my Rediffmail account.
    They have recently been carrying ads to promote their new rediffmail interface which says it is fast and they providing unlimited storage space.
    well the new interface is a standard three pane interface
    their javascript engine is ok i guess they have picked up scripts for their ajax interface engine from sites like this and I think rest of the thing is written in house or just the notices from the code taken away from the code snippet.
    but their search sucks big time it is painfully slow

    Well next one for review is zapakmail

    This is also a standard three pane but frankly looks like a rip off from the new aol mail interface but under the hood this is a programmers delight with goodies like dojo ,trimpath going into the making of this ajax interface engine and also they use google analytics to track their user behavior but the thing that i found irritating was that once you login for the first time you are taken to a plain old web 1.0 interface for the email system and then you are given an option to move to the new power mail beta zapakmail ( I mean WTF is the point of having a app in a web 2.0 era which is brand new with two interfaces traditional web and ajax based one )

    This offering is by zapak who also have a casual gaming portal called zapak.com and am sure have many more offerings up their sleeves they have ads which are served by themselves so it looks like zapak is going after the lucrative advertising pie in the Indian market and looks like rediff is also doing that coz the ads are served from rediff servers itself

    Well rediffmail is trying to pull users because it is lightning fast and unlimited storage
    and zapakmail is trying to pull users because it is simple and fast and unlimited

    What can I say with the entry of now even aol in the Indian market i think the above two vendors are fighting a losing battle as the users who are currently using their services will move to better services being offered by others if they cant improve their offerings to meet the expectations of the users who will outgrow them at a faster pace then the service providers will be able to innovate.

    Till this Indian players grow up and offer more innovative offerings to pull users to their service the TV channels will enjoy the money they are getting from both the vendors trying to showcase their offerings to seduce the Indian web user.

     

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