The day started with us rushing to find the place where we were suppose to catch the bus to attend the event. We finally did catch the bus and all our fears of missing the event were put to rest hahahaha nope if we had missed the bus I would have taken a rickshaw and gone there but would not have missed the event.

Well have written a lot about the event so lets fast forward to the evening part after the bus brought us back to the city and we then started our hunt for an ATM as sarvesh wanted some hard cash in his hands then we had a long walk back Abhimanyu’s place this gave me time to explore pune roads more and then on the way we had bhel puri at spencer’s it was close to abhimanyu’s place (the bhel puri was horrible and nothing like the one I have at Miramar beach here in goa). After this sarvesh did a bit of shopping at spencer’s and then we headed to Abhimanyu’s room there we rested for some time before we headed out for my return ticket to goa and dinner then after resting for a bit we headed off for my ticket got that done and then we went for dinner and we came to a place where we had dinner and for dinner I had nachos with salsa sauce and fried beans and carrot juice. It was filling and I could not finish the nachos and had to parcel the left overs and get them home.

After dinner we came back to Abhimanyu’s crib and then we chatted for some time about many different things and then we got some sleep as I could hardly keep my eyes open was too tired with the walking and event for two days so as soon as I shut my eyes voila was in dreamland .

So this is how my second day of vacation in pune ended.

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

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

At their stall I met Mukundan Krishnaswamy and I asked him how they were competing with craigslist.com and its entry in india in the classified space but he said that they are not worried as sulekha had a first mover advantage and now is turning into a social network and he mentioned that craigslist is not pulling any users (but users are fickle they are not loyal and move on to services which add more value).

The other thing that caught my attention on the stall was the availability of some deccan herald issues there so I asked Mukundan if they have a content sharing deal with them and he said they have tied up with them and the content taken from some of their top bloggers is actually featured on the print edition of deccan herald and the revenue generated from this deal is shared between the blogger and sulekha. This is a great way for bloggers to make money as they keep writing the editors at sulekha go through content and find the best one to give to deccan herald so this way there is encouragement for bloggers to write more and write better but as Mukundan said the content has to be edited and cut down to suit the print media (yes this is true bloggers are more colloquial in their style of writing and not suitable for written publication but the content has to be moulded to be suitable for print media consumption this is not true for all bloggers but true for majority of bloggers).

Overall they have a good offering for the local communities in places they are focussing on and they have very loyal following of NRI’s who sing praises about their classifieds service but their success will depend on not only keeping this loyal users onto their site but also attracting new users. Even though they are not technically a startup they are at the evolution phase from web 1.0 to web 2.0 just like Rediff.

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)

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)

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)