Final Post!

This is the last post on this blog and this blog is moved to thoughtsinprogress.co.in. Pls do visit me there!

And thank you wordpress for hosting me all along.

India’s Amazon for books – pustak.co.in

One more start up – pustak.co.in. This is an India (Bangalore) based online book store start up.

While I am yet to a buy a book online, the book catalogue is very comprehensive and most importantly functional – most titles I searched for are available.

The website is very organized.  Unlike Amazon, it is difficult to get lost here and no other distractions – only books . Navigability can be improved – for example there is no “cancel” button on account settings page. It’s not possible to return to main page in case you don’t want to save your changes.

Am sure this will be a successful website to reckon as internet adoption increases in India. While the idea of online book store is as old as .com biz itself, this start up differentiates itself due to the geography (India) it operates. I would love to see books of regional languages also to be available on the website – this makes it easy for people like me who wait to go on my annual vacation to my native place to buy books . Huge business potential !!

Btw, per the website itself, the founder & CEO Mr. Anand Rao, is a founding member of Amazon India as well.

Video Maps for Driving Directions – vidteq.com

I came across this very innovative website – www.vidteq.com - that provides driving directions & locates businesses in Bangalore. While providing online driving directions is a very old idea, this website takes this seemingly simple idea to a whole new level by providing entire video of the road from source to destination – along with audio & annotations on all landmarks/businesses on the way. The website calls this as “Video Maps” technology. While all the roads are yet to be mapped – this seems way too cool. 

Add this for a topping – you can sms the source and destination to a given number and the directions will be smsed back to you!

Go through the “tips” section of the website to know various other features.

I really loved this site and look forward to a full fledged launch of this (right now it is in Alpha stage and the website design could be improved).

Kudos to the founders (Chandra, Ravi and Muralidhara!) for this innovation and wish them all the success!

Portal for offbeat places – namastay.in

Namastay.in is a webportal for searching/booking accommodation at off beat places – like homestays, guesthouses, resorts etc anywhere in India. The portal has very good number of listings and has detailed reviews of all the listings. The highlight of this portal is probably the video clippings of the home stays/resorts/guest houses etc. Very innovative and very useful.

I first saw a print advertisement of namastay.in portal on Corner House in Koramangala. I was mighty impressed by the poster. I visited the portal as soon as I came back home. Alas, the website was down. I tried multiple times the next day and every time it was down.  A very bad thing to happen for some one who is spending money in advertising thier website. May be the money should first be invested in proper web hosting provider.

Any way, after repeated attempts one fine day, I was able to access the website. It looked sleek. But felt that the landing page seems too simple.  There is no link for even registering one self. There is only a “sign in” link and it does not even tell how to register. Looks like the registration is possible only at the time of payment (not sure as I did not attempt any payment).

Overall, a very useful portal, except that the landing page can have more content and site map can be made slightly better from usability perspective.

I read at http://www.metacafe.com/channels/namastay.in/ that, Ashish Mehra and Rekha Goyal, folks who started this are able to sustain themselves with this!

I am really happy to learn that and it only gives me inspiration to start doing something I am more passionate about, than spend entire life in a full time job.

alphainventions

Not really sure how alphainventions.com works, but trying to see if it really does what it claims , which is increasing the hits to this web site

How to start a .com business in India?

In continuation with my earlier blog on apartmentadda.com, I did some research on that particular website and read more about Mr. Venkat , founder of this website.  He has actually put up all his experiences in starting the venture online in his blog – “art of starting“. It has been quite a learning experience for me from what he has posted.  I already bookmarked – browsershots.org, site24×7.com, uitest.com/en/analysis/, eapps.com,  enbase.net/db/Main_Page – hopefully they will be useful to me when I start something

Thank you Mr. Venkat for sharing your experiences – it is inspiring and I can definitely feel how you must be feeling running this venture and wishing you all the best!

Apartmentadda – One more eCommunity

Few days back, I wrote about a blog on CommonFloor for digital age gated communities. Now, I found one more portal offering similar service – apartmentadda.com. They have very same features as CommonFloor, they charge the apartment socities for this service on thier “premium” offering -  wonder how successful this business model is.