I tried to find more over the web about this but nothing substantial came out. He finally told me that there are certain “agencies” who give Adsense approved account for Rs.500-600. The account mostly lasts for 6-9months until it gets blocked due to some quality/spam audits. The Rs.1K account is for specifically getting your application approved through internal connections with Google employees. How it really happens? We will leave that for the big G to figure out.

The adsense approval mafia is still alive and all the more active. I did a search last night and it seems the approval market is seeing some good competition and the rates have fallen down by a good 30%. Adsense approved accounts are available for as low as Rs.399 ($8.86) with a 24Hr turn-around time guarantee.

Till date i have got about 4-5 accounts approved (not the black hat way) but the times that it got dis-approved completely reveals the low quality of quality check at Google. For 1 particular instance i changed copy for the “About Us” section for a dis-approved account and re-applied; to my delight it got approved. The content on the site was the same.

Talks of technology being able to stop corruption might need a re-consideration. If the big G can’t stop it how can we expect this not to happen in govt. controlled organisations like Indian Railways or passport applications. Don’t forget almost the whole web is a franchisee of Google.

What do you think is happening with Google lately? When was last good thing you heard about Google?

Credits – Post trigger and snapshot Annkur. Pricing info Umang.

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

Imagine if you had to make a sales pitch to that jack-ass manager from the rich company who never bothers to reply your mails but you could run a $5 ad campaign that targets only him. So that you can show your brand to him everywhere he goes, from his Gmail account to web searches or even when he is on this blog you could shout out “Hey Jack Ass manager -reply to my mails”.

Or it could have helped you target the crush of your life to be your valentine by throwing your name on every site that she visited. Yes that is what Google’s ad platform could help you do. Help you do right now, if only it wanted to.

Zoom out a little and say if the new Groupon clone could target ads to only SnapDeal users and say, “Hey, We got better deals”. Sounds familiar? Haven’t you done that already on Facebook? Did you not target your Facebok ads to all those who “Like” your competitor?

Google does allow you to target your ads to show on pluggd.in but why not target the ads to show it to Pluggd.in readers where ever they go? Why not on your demography, why only context? Wouldn’t it perform like it does now?

Google ads have always been contextual and little about demography. When i am searching about a fridge doesn’t mean that i don’t have the house that i want to buy at the back of my mind. I am more likely to be influenced with this because i know it is not being pushed to me, and would help build the advertisers brand with me overtime. It may not have a high CTR but the brand message is conveyed.

Even with its strong hold on online advertising, what Google hasn’t been able to achieve is a mindshare of brand managers who want to build their brand and spend most of their ad budgets in “branding”. Google isn’t yet considered a branding or engagement platform but that is where most of advertising $ goes. Brand managers would love to embrace such a targeting platform even if they had to pay per impression and not per click.

So is it Evil to do that? Does it dis-respect your privacy?

Take another case of Google’s almost dying social network, Orkut. Google never released the data of Orkut users on Google search. Imagine the if your Orkut data was searchable by your potential employer on Google, wouldn’t you keep it clean. Wouldn’t Orkut still be a top of the mind recall when we looked for anyone?

Are the web users going to reward Google to maintain their privacy? Or is Google waiting for Facebook to take step 2 in killing privacy before it takes step 1?

Your take? Do you really believe there is anything private about the web anymore?

img credits

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

From the Orkut blog

For Orkut users in Mumbai, we are giving away tickets to the latest movie releases on the 19th and 20th of February at PVR Juhu and Mulund.

All you have to do is follow these simple steps:

1. Be in Mumbai on Feb 19 and Feb 20
2. Log onto www.orkut.com/boxoffice
3. Post a comment, a funny story or a movie review
4. Get an email/scrap from us telling you the day, date and time of the movie and instructions on how you can pick up your free tickets!
5. Pick up your tickets from the movie cinema at least 30 minutes before the show

Isn’t this too desperate a move from a technology product?

Or wait a minute, are they testing a new movie marketing feature? Or have they signed up for this one special campaign for this movie only?

BTW, we at Pluggd.in are giving away an Android Tablet to show your love to us. Hop in here to know more.

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

To speed up the tagging process, we’re launching a face detection feature on all new photos uploaded to orkut. With it, orkut is now able to automatically detect when faces appear in photos (by recognizing features like eyes, noses, mouths, etc.), but without actually identifying specific individuals. The algorithm is not perfect, however, so things like eyeglasses, difficult lighting, poses, etc. may ‘fool’ our system from time to time. If that ever happens, rest assured that you can always tag photos as you normally would, and of course change or remove any tags that you’re unhappy with. – blog

So many companies have tried and failed at Face detection – do you think Orkut can make it work?

Google in 1998

The Problem:

• For Consumer:

How do I find what I need among billions of pages of Text and Image?

• For Service Providers:

1. How do I maintain a searchable database of exponentially growing information, which can produce relevant results quickly ? (Technology to crawl wasn’t the problem, maintaining the relevancy was).

2. Users are not clicking on advertisements, why should a user be interested click on a dog-food advert who is looking for “the price for a network switch rack”

What were Competitors doing?

• Yahoo! Search: It wasn’t a direct competitor as they started as a web directory of website organized in a hierarchy. Their model wasn’t sustainable with the exponentially growing amount of information. As a matter of fact, after Inktomi in 2001, Google provided search results to Yahoo! till 2004. At 10% market share they are currently the third largest service after Google and Bing.
• Excite: Another startup from Stanford University, found in 1994, its search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) were acquired in 1996. The company from the start was not found with the sole focus of search. By 1998 Yahoo! was planning to acquire it and finally @Home Network acquired excite in January, 1999. By 2001 they were Bankrupt.
• AltaVista: Lack of focus can be attributed as the biggest reason for the fall of AltaVista, which was arguably the first full-text Internet search Engine. A cluttered interface combined with slow loading time and excessive advertisements in the search results were the primary reason for AltaVista’s demise. The current page, resembling Google.com is a late attempt to rectify the error’s mentioned above.

What Google Did?

• Innovation & Mathematical Rigour:

They turned their biggest disadvantage, the exponentially growing amount of information, into their biggest asset. Before we move on, a quick overview on Google’s “PageRank” algorithm (Larry Page, hence the etymology) to provide search results.

“PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

–from Corporate Information page, Google.

Also the graphic and the explanation at the Wikipedia link of PageRank should help if you want to further understand how PageRank works.

So effectively each website by putting a link of “a particular website” casts a vote in favour of that website, and the ‘weight’ of that vote is determined by the importance of the website which is casting that vote. Hail the holy democracy!

They didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, but choose for a clever implementation of a real world system of citations and references among academic texts.

• Focus:

It should be noted that the first service launched by Google beyond search, was in January 2004 and then Gmail in April 2004, a full six years after they first launched them, compare this to Excite and Lycos as shown above.

They also didn’t just sit on their laurels, implementations of NLP (Natural Language Processing) for answering “200 USD to INR”, reduction in crawling time of new pages and many others were constant innovations being showered into the engine.Their simple search page, is also another indication of their intention on being focussed on “providing the best possible search results”.

• In-House Development

One important feature to note is that most of the critical technologies at Google have been Developed in-house, including their own file system for storing cached web pages. Google has not acquired a search engine/crawler technology unlike Excite even now, when they can pretty much afford any.

• Human Resources

I shall not bore you about writing the importance of ‘People’ , but consider this, even the first chef that this company hired was the previous chef of “The Grateful Dead”, a music band. It is important to note, that they have maintained the consistency in everything they do, even today a full 11 years after the company was found Google attracts the best talent, courtesy its work culture and environment, proven by its ranking as one of the most favourable destination to work at.

• Respecting the User:

Most Industry experts consider one of the primary reasons as the downfall of AltaVista was its interface cluttered with advertisement and real results being mixed with sponsored with. Don’t Be Evil

• Notes:

But it should be noted a success of startup is a function dependent on ‘n’ number of parameters being used correctly, doing one thing right will not suffice, but doing one thing wrong can prove fatal. More like the application procedure for a MS in MIT/CalTech etc, you need your CGPA, SAT score, SoP and Extra-Curricular to be all right at the same time. For example there was another search engine “RankDex” who was using similar back link votes algorithm, but failed to get the rest of the things right, and hence went into oblivion.

It should also be noted that Google Founders have 10x voting rights in the Board, reflecting their and investors confidence in them.

I have touched upon some of the several reasons as to what distinguishes Google from others. Various points over here don’t intend to serve as exhaustive analysis but more as pointers for you to further ponder upon. Feel I have missed out something, mention them in the comments section below.

Google Translator toolkit integrates Google translation, WYSIWYG editor, and one can covert/edit documents, Wikipedia and Knol entries (Google claims to cover 98% of the global Internet population language).

Translation of pluGGd.in page

Here’s what you can do with Google Translator Toolkit:

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols.
• Use previous human translations and machine translation to ‘pretranslate’ your uploaded documents.
• Use the simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation.
• Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• Download documents to your desktop in their native formats — Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML.
• Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol. – source

If you are wondering how is this different from Google Translate, the translator toolkit is human powered, aided by translate technology.

Google uses Translation Memory concept to store translations:

A translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores segments that have been previously translated. A translation-memory system stores the words, phrases and paragraphs that have already been translated and aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”.

How does Google Translate Toolkit Work?

When you upload a document into Google Translator Toolkit, Google automatically ‘pretranslates’ your document as follows (from support link):

1. We divide your document into segments, usually sentences, headers, or bullets.
2. We search all available translation databases for previous human translations of each segment.
3. If any previous human translations of the segment exist, we pick the highest-ranked search result and ‘pretranslate’ the segment with that translation.
4. If no previous human translation of the segment exists, we use machine translation to produce an ‘automatic translation’ for the segment, without intervention from human translators. – link

Watch this demo video

Also see: Type in any language/any website using Transliteration Bookmarklets

“Recently we decided to move the location of ads on your homepages to a more prominent position: the top right of the page. While we know this is a bit of a change from what you’re used to, we’ve found this to be the best way to strike a balance between making ads more visible and maintaining our focus on providing you with a great user experience.” – blog

Orkut Demographics

- 79% Male

- 53% Under the age of 25.

-

While Orkut has shown a strong growth, social networks are all about intents and navigational elements of the site results in bad CTR numbers.

Orkut earlier did brand campaign for IPL and would be interesting to see what sort of advertisers and how many non-CPM advertisers would be interested in this.

Coming back to the question – why a blog post about advertising? It does speak of state of online advertising and the falling CPM rates.

What’s your take?

Also see: Online Ad Networks in India – Complete List

Google filed a case few months back and WIPO has instructed Herit Shah (who registered the domain, googblog from GoDaddy in Sep 2008) to return back the domain to Google.

More Details

Google’s claim:

• The Complainant has used the name “GOOG” as a NASDAQ financial stock ticker since 2004.
• The Respondent registered the disputed domain name on September 25, 2008.
• Pre-Complaint correspondence between the parties failed to resolve the dispute.
• The Complainant petitions the Panel to issue a decision that the disputed domain name be transferred from the Respondent to the Complainant.

Herit Shah’s reply:

“I was in a bad faith that i can legally keep the domain googblog.com but when i kept myself in the place of google i understood i really did very unfair to google. since two weeks i have been trying to delete the domain googblog.com, but i am unable to because godaddy has put my domain on hold, on your consent godaddy may delete the domain or unhold it. I sincerely apologise to Google for infringement, misuse of their intellectual property (GOOGBLOG.COM).” – source

So, if we are friends, please click on join the site link (widget near footer)
Google Friend Connect is quite a simple-yet-powerful utility and is quite easy to install.

All you need to do is upload two files on your webserver, generated javascript code and you are done!

One can add member gadgets as well as social gadgets (wall gadget, Review/Rating, OpenSocial etc) to one’s site.

Essentially, Google is creating a social graph using it’s network (and not relying on any socialnetwork per se) – smart way to combat Facebook (which launched FacebookConnect few days back!)

Coming back to the topic, are we friends?

Take it with a pinch of salt (as with any ‘pitchy’ presentation).

via TC

There has to be a basic template for profanity checks as well as banned keywords and looks like Google failed to add ‘terrorism’ in the list. (pic via sanyam, credit)

I’m sure many of you (especially you social butterflies with hundreds of orkut friends), are concerned about being bombarded with chat requests every time you go online. Not to worry!
To get you started, we’ve come up with a formula that automatically predicts which of your orkut friends you probably want to chat with, and only tells those people that you’re signed into Google Talk. Our formula takes a bunch of things into consideration, giving preference to people who you’ve labeled as ‘best friends’ or written scraps to recently, and people who have friends in common with you. – blog

Well, it’s time for Orkut to control spam otherwise the product is turning irrelevant.
Watch this video:

Are you still on Orkut? Or moved to Facebook?

The SMS search (send your queries to 9-77-33-00000) is available across all the operators, is charged the standard SMS price (no premium charges, unlike Indiatimes and others); and integrates local queries as well as different data types like weather/railways pnr search/cricket etc.

This is also a head-on competition with Indiatimes and other content portal’s sms subscription/alert service

In the past, cricket scores and astrology updates on SMS brought a smile to a lot of us until seeing the premium charges associated with short code services. And this was after we had to remember a complicated set of prefixes for different types of information.
Now send all your queries to 9-77-33-00000 without paying any premium charges! SMS Search offers an easy-to-use way to type in free-form searches. No longer will your questions require complicated prefixes or a tight syntax. – blog

For a service like this,mass adoption is a big challenge (no matter which brand you are) – and that’s why Google is resorting to traditional way of marketing (they even have hoardings in MG Road, Bangalore).

Will it fly?

What’s your take on Google’s SMS search service? Did you find it useful?

While Google India promptly changed it’s logo to reflect the Diwali mood, Orkut team added the Diwali theme, 3 days after the event – not sure whether it was intentional or simply a bureaucratic failure.

Also, what surprises me is how Orkut brushes off it’s responsibility of controlling spams in the product:

..official orkut themes are available only from the ‘Orkut Themes’ directory under your own ‘Edit Profile’ page. Scraps and messages that promise colorful themes with celebrities, etc. asking you to click certain links or copy-paste code into your browser window usually spell trouble. (In general, it is a bad idea to copy-paste code from unidentified sources into your browser window — even if it promises to increase cell phone battery life or grant access to the fountain of youth.) So stay safe and keep orkut beautiful!

Simply put, they should say – “we have failed to keep spammers out of Orkut – so use it with own care (don’t come back to us)”.

Apart from scraps, do you use any other feature in Orkut? What’s your fav. app, if any?

A look at comscore data does suggests Orkut’s stagnant traffic. Is Facebook gaining traction?

TNC is a blog platform that’s used by Korean A-bloggers and the startup also was heavily involved with the open source community- so guess it’s more of a community acquisition.

Google (for that matter, every big player) is facing hurdles in most of the Asian/emerging economies and the easiest way out (rather ‘in’) is to acquire a community player which can help them expand their footprints.

..our company was a fairly good acquisition target for Google. First, we had a killer product: Our previous work, Tistory blog service (now property of Daum as we sold the service to the Korea’s #2 portal), made to the top 10 Korean web destination in less than a year from launch, showing some 30,000% growth over the initial 8 months. While other blog services seem to be exploring the idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. – Chang

Is there an Indian player you think could be a good target for Google?

Google Chrome is finally live and is almost showing the middle finger to Microsoft and Mozilla.

Lets track back and understand where did Google fail in it’s bid to conquer the world (reality check: apart from search and gmail, no other Google product is doing amazingly great):

• Search: Bundling deal with Dell or other manufacturers failed to give Google the much needed traction.
• Apps (the next big revenue source): Google’s reliance on Firefox alone to promote it’s apps has gotten them some traction, but that’s not enough when you want to take on the M$ giant.

Perspective

Microsoft has 72% browser market share, of which IE6 still holds close to 25% market share.
What does that mean? The long tail is hard to crack. The long tail is too tech unsavvy for even Microsoft to crack (and till date, they are supposed to ‘know’ the business).

• Google Gears is the basic ingredient that Google needs to embed in the browser. While Firefox can be a good option, it’s still an add-on.
• All said and done, Google doesn’t own FF. They do fund them (FF relies on google searche rev sharing), but the reality is that Google needs that gears ‘plantation’ to each and every user’s desktop.
  • And if they need to do all this in partnership Firefox, why not launch their own product?

Also do understand that IE’s market share has fallen down from 83% to 72% in just few years.

“Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly” – wired

What’s the biggest challenge for Google Chrome then?

In the immediate run, it’s not IE. It’s Firefox.

• Firefox market share is ~20%
• Firefox, instead of being the ‘easily tamed goat’ (once it-used-to-be), is turning independent (announced deal with Yahoo to serve search in few Asian countries).
• Both FF and Chrome will compete for the same developer love.

So Google first needs to shift these developers from Firefox to Chrome, and in the process make FF redundant (slowly, otherwise they will face the heat from open source community).

Open Source – Who the F**k Cares?

Chrome engineer, Ben Goodger worked on FF for few years before moving onto Google Chrome (he was paid by Google to work on FF part-time as well). The story doesn’t end here, it has interesting twists that possible shows how corporates use open source for their own purpose:

Several key engineers – Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher among them – devoted considerable volunteer time to Firefox before joining Google’s browser project..Mozilla’s CTO, Brendan Eich – a veteran of Netscape – removed Goodger as a Firefox “module owner” in September 2006. Being the “owner” of a module, while a volunteer position, carries considerable cachet. Goodger subsequently removed himself from the Firefox project, as did colleagues like Fisher and Pam Greene.

Wired now reveals the motivation behind Eich’s move: By June 2006, Goodger and others had created a prototype of Chrome. If Lilly wasn’t worried about Google’s browser, why would Eich take Goodger off Firefox? In any event, removing Goodger played into Google’s hands, making him all the more willing to take on Mozilla. [source]

Leaving the open source story aside, whom are we left with then?

Microsoft,  a company losing out on the web battle and may soon see the impact on it’s cash cow – the office suite application.

MS’s basic challenge is that it just doesn’t understand the Internet evolution. IE is meant for browsing, but not for the clouds. And that’s where MS needs a push.

Why Microsoft should acquire/invest in Firefox?

• Microsoft needs to open up – they are realizing this fast and the best way to do this is get into the open source world by sleeping with the darling, i.e. Firefox.
• FF gives MS access to open source developers.
• Let both IE and FF exist – MS’s immediate threat is not just the browser market share, but the battle over office suite – and only FF can help them stay in the battle.

Questions like FF will lose all developers if it gets closer to MS is more of a PR game (for that matter, even Chrome is an open-source product, that belongs to a corporate called Google).

Do remember that Google is targeting colleges and schools by giving away it’s apps for free (which will now include Chrome) – in order to catch them young (and hook them forever). If it’s successful, the next generation will read Microsoft in history books only.

And that’s a good enough reason for Microsoft to sleep with Firefox.

What’s your opinion?

Google today announced Chrome – their own version of a browser (via TechCrunch). Everyone on the Internet is talking about it. And here is my two cents on it. I dont know a lot of things from the technology perspective but the browser from Google makes a lot of business sense.

1. Search Business. Search is the biggest cash cow for Google and with every new app or product, they try to integrate search with it. With a browser, they can do it even better. Every-time a user writes something in the URL bar, Google can suggest links (paid and unpaid). Every-time a user wants to click something, Google can suggest alternatives. (More on search here)
2. Integration. Better embedding of all Google tools including Gmail, Calendar, Groups, Spreadsheets, Docs etc. in the browser. It will help users, developers and Google itself make better and effective applications. I can envision functionality for each Google app built in the browser.
3. The Platform. In fact we might see the browser actually becoming the next platform. Developers will now make applications for the browser and all the applications can then be easily ported to all systems, devices and machines where ever that browser can be ported. The speed of application development would be very very rapid (I am assuming that it will be easy to make applications for Chrome).
4. Thin Clients and Cloud Computing. We are getting closer to the thin computing. Everything (data and preferences) would reside on a server and will be accessible from everywhere you have a Google Chrome. All Google needs to overcome is the adoption bump and the network effect. With the kind of clout and fandom Google enjoys, this should not be a very difficult task. In all probability Google will add Chrome to their famous Google Pack before pushing it with other things.
5. The Start Page. Everyone is trying to battle it out to become the start page for the user. From the New Facebook to Windows Live to iGoogle. Chrome can now become the start page. And in fact if things like TechCrunch’s webTablet becomes a reality, we can see a monumental change in the way Internet as we know it today. From applications to usability to accessibility.
6. Analytics. More data and more analytics. Google would be able to collect data easier, faster and be more accurate. This data can then be used to come up with more business applications. Its like yet another positive feedback loop. Use of browser makes life easier for users. And use of browser helps Google collect data. With this data, Google comes out with more applications that help the users. So on and so forth.
7. Artificial Intelligence. With a browser that Google owns, they can mine into the browsing patterns of people. How long to they spend on each page, how do they navigate the links. Which links are clicked most. With their Analytics software, they were already doing this for all pages that have embedded the code. Now they can do without the use of the Analytics code.
8. Death of Mozilla. A large part of money at Mozilla comes from the Google Search Box (the default home page on Mozilla). With Google pushing Chrome, will we see the fund-flow drying for Mozilla? Can Mozilla survive in the browser market with two giants in Microsoft and Google? Does Chrome translates into death for Mozilla and Firefox?
9. Internet Explorer. How can a rant be complete without talking about the rather infamous Internet Explorer? Already losing ground to Mozillas and Safaris and Operas of the world, Google Chrome would present a formidable challenge. And since the future is all about Internet (refer to thin clients and cloud computing above) rather than software residing on the hard-disks, this is another battle where Google and Microsoft would compete head-on. Who will win, only time shall tell.

Of all the above mentioned things, I am really excited about the browser becoming the Start Page, Thin Client and above all a Platform for everything that we do on the Internet. This for me is a New New Thing and I am really looking forward to how Chrome advances.

What is your take? What do you think is the business side of Google Chrome?
Crossposted from New New Thing

Google Map Maker lets you:

• Add line features (roads, railways, rivers, flyovers, underpasses), region features and points of interest.
• Add features such as roads, parks, and buildings for unmapped rural areas
• Tag small businesses and help users find them
• Collaborate with others to map neighborhoods that interest you

Essentially, this is also one of the ways for Google to increase the relevance of it’s local data (which to date, isn’t great)- but largely, it seems the map maker product could be a take on Wikimapia (i.e. after Wikipedia:Knol?)

The product is not available for US market (i.e. map isn’t editable) and is mostly meant for emerging markets (LatAm etc) :

• Because of the already rich data available in US (thru’ data partners)?
• It could be that these geographies are the testing ground for this product and might be rolled out in US later?

What’s your take?

Have a look at the product demo:

GIve Map Maker a spin and do share your comments.

After Google India’s Labs site, another Google group – Barcamp Ahmedabad has been hacked [link:highly nsfw,nsfs].

Hackers, it seems have got the better of Google and the company doesn’t seem to do anything about it – worst, there was no blogpost/acknowledgement about the hack (origin etc) on any of Google’s official blogs.

Looks like the entire Google Group is up for hacks and hope user credentials don’t get compromised.

Update: The issue has been fixed (as always, with no apologies/acknowledgement from Google).

Uhuroo

Couple of interesting features:

• Plugins for Information Collection (for e.g. outlook plugin/browser plugin)
• Smart Tags for Efficient Content Organization
• Group Management to enable Information Sharing
• Content Aggregator for Information Consolidation & Codification

In essence, Uhuroo is Google notebook meets enterprise collaboration service (and a lot more) and takes collaboration to the next logical level where participants’ responses do not remain fragmented but get consolidated for further analysis and classification – all hosted on one’s premise.

The team is incubated in IIT Mumbai, raised seed fund from seedfund and has conducted pilot study with few companies.

The “Enter” link is a NSFW – porn site!

Update: The issue has been fixed.

Related: YouTube India’s porn “suggestions”

tip: raxit

The company has filed a lawsuit against Google for hosting a series of articles on its blogging site, campaigning against its mines in Mozambique. In an interim order, the Bombay High Court has asked Google India to furnish information about the blogger. The case’s outcome will have far-reaching implications for the development of cyber law in India. [ET]

The blogger wrote a series of articles ( between January and February) titled “Toxic Writer” that were posted on Google’s Blogger tool . The article amounted to a “hate campaign” against the company.

This is not the first time Google is facing legal hassles in India – earlier, with Orkut, they happily shared IP address of users – but this case is relatively important for blogging world itself.

And hopefully, it will help define the cyber law in India (which I hope will not be the same as China’s).

Most importantly (and given govt’s ignorance about web world/blogging et al), I won’t be surprised if they try to curb the freedom of expression, that blogging entails?

What do other bloggers think?

Also, Supreme court has issued notice to Google , Microsoft and Yahoo for displaying ‘sex determination’ ads [source]

Lets look at an example:

• Restaurant category is a highly searched topic (relative strength: 72, above sex (66), railways (79)
• In the region interest, Karnataka tops the chart.
• Look at the map – majority keyword queries are from Western and Southern India only.
• Top 5 search terms are – bangalore restaurants, indian restaurants, delhi restaurants, mumbai restaurants and restaurants in bangalore
• Rising search terms – restaurants in pune, chennai restaurants etc.

Did you get the drift? If you are a local search player – you know what sort of queries (and most importantly, category) you need to cater to?

Most importantly, you get an idea of the target geography and queries  – so define your strategy accordingly (i.e. you can always say Bangalore is hot and serve this market, or say Delhi is growing and serve that – point is that you can get a good idea about the market and top category keywords people are looking for.

Similarly, look at ‘hosting’ query::

• Kerala, Delhi and Karnataka top the chart.
• What are people looking for? web hosting, free hosting, etc.

Again, home loan is more searched than bank loanm which is way above personal loan! – Haryana tops the regional interest (Punjab among the least)

How to use this data?

• SEO - Optimize your site for these queries.
• Prioritize - You will get a fair idea of your target market/segment – and with any market research, decide what you want to do with the data.

In the past, the only other free/easy way to conduct such market approximation/keyword volume was through Google Adwords tool (i.e. approximate the keyword volume based on a keyword tool).

Google Insights does opens up ways to conduct online market research. What’s your opinion on Google Insights?

Word of caution - Like any market research, this tool too has it’s limitations – Indian state IPs do not yet map well.

Look at this:

YouTube is a ‘community service’

“It’s a service for the world. In the last two years, Google India has done just that: built communities. It has done that by actually embracing India – rather than just paying lip service to the idea.This is evident in the way the company talks about YouTube’s India chapter. Both Rao and Arsiwala emphasise that the focus is not on revenues but building a community. “Passion for video is deep-rooted in India. Everyone loves story telling. Everyone uses video cameras. The home video phenomenon is just taking off in India. We want to be there when it takes off,” – BS

And now, Google has approached West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to showcase age-old Bengali classical literature and movies on Google/YouTube.

All famous books written by eminent Bengali authors will be available online through Google and movies would also be shown through Youtube,” Das said.

“Google also offered a proposal to maintain all the mail accounts of all ministers and top state government officials.” – West Bengal IT Minister Debesh Das [source]

If you watch the keywords, they talk about things that sounds like

‘community service’ – while in reality, these are distribution of apps (i.e. Google apps for mail etc)/user acquisition or content acquisition (i.e. youtube).

The obvious PR lesson for startups is to create a community cause – something that media wants to highlight!

For example, if you are a local search player, tell media that ‘girls use your recently launched mobile search service (available on blah number) to look for police stations/emergency numbers, when they are under some sort of danger!’)

Cool. Isn’t it?

Wanna try out some other ‘community service’ punchlines?

Not sure whether this is happening for all the users, but I guess these tactics are part of bucket testing (a testing typically carried out during non-peak hours, for few user ids spread across certain geographies – to test few site changes).

Clicking “classic home” takes me back to the search home page.

iGoogle even though it’s one of the wildly growing properties of Google hasn’t matched with MyYahoo and driving traffic could be one of the strategy (or the only strategy?) to increase awareness/adoption.

Google is testing ads on iGoogle as well, so very likely that they will try out more such strategy to increase adoption.

Is it me only or somebody else has also faced a similar redirection?

As YouTube fails to protect copyrighted video being uploaded, Google blames Viacom for attempting to threaten user’s freedom of expression!!

So much of arrogance? or a losing war?

Freedom of expression does not mean that one can allow copyrighted material to be uploaded (and hurt publishers) – and if Google is so serious about "being clean", why do they allow porn content in YouTube India site?

Though the person who created this group (called “We hate Sonia Gandhi”) hasn’t been charged, this techie (Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid) is being held for posting “vulgar” comments.

If proved guilty, Vaid could be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs 1 Lakh.

Well, its okay for Orkut to share the IP address/details when requested by police, but the basic qn is what kind of checks and balances does Orkut has?

I don’t see any filtering of obscene words (twitter does it, btw). If Google is so particular about “blocked” freedom of speech, why can’t they filter what goes inside orkut?

I know and understand that not everything can be allowed in the name of “freedom of speech“. But I find it ironical that orkut wants all Indians to use Orkut, and the moment somebody goes out of the way in “expressing themselves”, Google simply hands over the IP address to the police?

Any commercial platform, no matter how neutral it sounds, is always skewed towards the ‘law of the land‘, and hence needs to have basic checks and balances in place. Frankly speaking, I don’t see the case with Orkut.

A “safe” socionet product requirement is to have atleast a “report abuse” section – Does Orkut give a damn to that?

Definitely No.

What’s your opinion?

As far as my experience with Hello is concerned, I never used the service (even though I use Picassa) – it was a small feature in the entire product and somehow lost it’s identity over a period of time.

What’s really commendable is Google’s decision – how many companies have the ba**s to take quick decisions on services that are not getting enough traction?

Very few.

Apart from political battles (within the team), there are lots of other issues involved while sunsetting a product – for e.g. what about users who are using the product? Whom do you migrate them to? What about pilferage? etc.

Bye Bye Hello. You won’t be missed!