TestFreaks basically aggregates product information/reviews from different sources – user reviews, professional reviews, prices, blog posts, forum threads, news, rumors, manufacturers descriptions/specifications, videos etc.; and for the India site, is sourcing reviews from Tech2, TechTree, PC World etc.

TestFreaks

TestFreaks raised $3mn in October 2008 and is aiming presence in 24 countries.

Few days back, we covered WisdomTap which too follows similar approach of collating reviews from different sources and rate revies based on user rankings.

Goes back to a basic question – is there something specific about ‘local’ reviews of global products? – after all, these product comparison sites focuses on electronic gadgets primarily, which are global by nature.

What’s your opinion? What factors influence your online research? Does it starts with Google?

The English news channel is largely dominated by CNBC and NDTV Profit – and there is surely enough space to innovate in terms of format and content.

The channel will also have startup focused programmes – so lets hope there is tighter integration between ET’s website and the TV channel.

What sort of news would you like to see in ET’s TV channel?

The Pakistani site runs on Joomla (can easily make out from the URL structure), interface is a lot cleaner (has a slightly NYT appeal) and is currently ad free (almost! though not sure for how long)

The site has made extensive use of Joomla components (JA Slide etc), uses Google translation api to support different languages – and is well structured in terms of showing relevant category articles.

This is quite interesting, as Ajit Balakrishnan earlier ‘termed the current UI of Rediff (the newsy style) as ‘horseless carriage’ and the new look sports of a typical magazine styled layout.

I believe the new look is primarily driven by ease of publishing and categorizing articles that CMS tool like wordpress/joomla provide – and hence (the carriage) can be better controlled by editors.

What’s your take on the UI of Pakistani portal? Any tip whether this is the same interface they will be launched in India?

Update: This was a false tip. Will Rediff take action against this site? It should.

DirecPay has partnered with banks for netbanking facility (withdrawal). TimesofMoney also has wallet365 , a consumer facing service,  but not sure how much traction it received as the service was essentially trying to build the entire ecosystem around itself (merchants had to implement the service in their e-store).

Other players in payment gateway business are: ccavenue,transecute, and banks like hdfc.

Recommended Read:

Size of India’s e-commerce industry | eBay India Census Guide

Aside, a reader wants inputs on online payment gateways.

Today Burrp has announced their first print foray

“..we have officially taken our very first baby steps into the world of print media.As should be expected, this is by no means over. In fact, we will be announcing some very big things and very early in the next year.” [blog]

Burrp City Guide

I believe, Burrp’s online service has reached some sort of ceiling, as they have launched the portal in all of the major cities and given their positioning, they won’t be able to monetize the way pure search players can (i.e. lead generation).
Infact, growing UUs (unique users) beyond a certain point is also quite a big deal – that’s why they have been launching new portals (movies is on the cards) in the name of lifestyle business.

Burrp Traffic (Comscore)

And that’s why a print guide (city guides for lifestyle businesses/events) will be a super good option for Burrp and given the great community that they have, they can surely be the ‘most credible’ choice for finding good restaurants and related services.

And guess what, people will pay for these city guides!

What’s your opinion?

In order to gauge the traffic, Komli has setup a representative panel (a downloadable app) of 10,000 in India.

The application will record the Internet surfing habits of the members. The traffic details extracted from the panel will be extrapolated to make them representative of the overall Internet audience in India. – (source)

Komli plans to increase the panel size to 50K within a year(Comscore has a panel of 16,000).

For starters, you can check pluggd.in data (according to Vizisense)

pluGGd.in Traffic

Few days back, I covered the top confusions in Indian digital space and lack of a common audience measurement entity was the most prominent one.

Comscore, Alexa and Google trends are still not very popular in India and Komli does plan to build an authority in this space (which will trickle to their core business, the ad network)

While one can always question the mechanism (and the results, as sample seems quite skewed towards Maharashtra), I think its a good start (though not sure why would any publisher will install Komli’s tracking code and not use Google trend directly).

Do check out Vizisense – Is it authoritative enough?

BTW, another fail-whale: ET reports that India has 81mn Internet users – goes back to the same old point of lack of authority in Internet audience measurement tool in India.

The received email will convert hyperlinks to email links, so that you can request subsequent pages as well.

Well, a similar service (called web2mail) was quite popular in the early days of web – I am not really sure what Rediff is trying to achieve via this service.

Maybe, whole lot of Indian companies have blocked Internet (Infosys blocked pluGGd.in) and a service like this can be useful to these users.

What’s your opinion?

[via centernetworks]

The product is basically an umbrella portal for Reliance’s financial products, i.e. Reliance General Insurance, Mutual Fund & Reliance Capital.
One can buy insurance, mutual funds as well as non-financial products like apparel, accessories, books/ magazines, gold coins, music CDs and DVDs from the portal.

RelianceMoneyMall also hosts subscription-based products such as technical charts, SMS packs, newsletters and research reports etc and is targeting 20% market share (business worth over Rs20,000 crore a year) in the first year.

Reliance Money currently has 10,000 physical outlets and is looking at online medium to strengthen it’s distribution.

What surprises me is their focus on selling everything which can be sold online! Case of confused positioning? Not sure, why would one buy shirts/movie CDs from a financial portal – given that there are no discounts, no great inventory to choose from?

What’s your take on RelianceMoneyMall?

Aside, Microsoft powers the technology side of RelianceMoneyMall and the portal uses Silverlight, MS’s flash product.

IBNKhabar has the regular ingredients of a content site (blog/poll/news etc) and one can also stream the IBN7 TV channel.

The site redirects to http://khabar.josh18.com/, while josh18.com is now being redirected to http://josh18.in.com/ – confusing enough to not notice the launch.

Josh18 is one of the least traffic site among web18′s portfolio and web18′s attempt, as we see is to get into ‘all content’ space (and maybe, clutter the entire experience with tons of content).

And yeah, web18 seems a little confused with all these redirections and new launches.

Update: Looks like this is old news, though the press release was done yesterday.

Recommended Reads:

• Understanding Web18′s Consolidation Strategy (Under In.com)
• The Secret Behind In.com’s Traffic

Once the subscriber dials in at the Tata Sky helpline, the subscriber now has an option of the Ubona IVR service which guides him through the process of choosing the required service. Additionally the system provides information on the monthly charges before adding the package and is also equipped to check for balance in the subscriber’s account. Alternatively the subscriber also has the option of speaking to the Tata Sky customer care executive directly for additional information.

The first two applications that has bee deployed are:
1. to provision all add-on packages or channel for which extra amount is charged. The subscriber can say the name of the package or channel (sports Gold, NDTV imagine) etc and the system provisions the request online in set top boxes after checking his plan and amount of balance
that is left in the account.
2. to provision pay per view movies which Tata sky showcases or its subscribers. The movies change after two/ three days. Here the subscrber says the movie name and day when he wants to watch the movie. The movie gets provisioned after he confirms the payment.

Ubona has raised Series A from Capital18.

The farmer is required to simply name the product and the district and he will be told the tehsil-wise rates.
There are 108 items of ranging from grains, pulses, fruit and vegetables, daily rates of which from any of our 247 mandis, can be availed by dialing this number and by following the simple voice command – source

What’s important to note is that the entire software works on voice-command, – so essentially, OnMobile is testing it’s voice recognition engine (OnMobile acquired Telisma SA, France based voice recognition player).

It seems the service is free now and will be monetized on subscription basis later.

Reuters (RML) too has implemented a similar concept in Punjab

Using a 6-step process, users of the platform can upload their manuscripts, format their books and covers and visualise every aspect of their book before they order prints (in as many copies as required) – detail

Lifeblob Update

Couple of weeks back, Lifeblob launched few interesting features like

• Timelines of 300,000 celebrities
• Gift yourself a topic timeline – Now you can create upto 10 timelines on any topic of your choice and invite your friends and family to contribute to it as well. This is ideal if you want to create a timeline for your college, or a timeline for your new born baby or just want to maintain different timelines for your personal and official life. – more

If you are a startup and have an update to share, please announce here: Updates from Startups

SocialReader brings you some perspective by reading the public stream of shared items/stories from Google Reader at friendfeed.com, there after processing,filtering this data to bring out the popular stories.

The service is updated frequently and at any given time, you can get a gist of most shared articles in Google reader (the only caveat is that it will show shared stories from users who have linked their account with Friendfeed).

While the service does not give you a 100% visibility into shared Google reader stories (since it reads the public feeds shared at friendfeed), it does give a good idea on what’s popular.

What’s your take on SocialReader?

SocialReader founders earlier launched httpfuse.

SImplyHired has couple of interesting features – facebook app, iGoogle widget, salary comparison meter, job market trend etc. and would be interesting to see if it can mark a dent in the already crowded Indian job market.

Similar service: bixee (acquired by ibibo).

Related: Indian Startups in Career/Job related domain

What’s your take on SimplyHired? Do they solve a pain in job economy (now that top 5 IT companies have slashed their recruitment by 36%)?

iShare APIs supports any app that is compatible with FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and has been launched with 3 apps:

• Dedicate a Song - an app that lets users to share the a song in audio or video format  that they find on Rediff iShare platform.

• Quiz app based on  popular Indian movies and a  popular fan club app,
• OMG! Its SRK – that lets users answer questions, watch videos, listen to music, view photos of the Bollywood superstar, Shahrukh Khan- oOne can add these apps to their rediff social profile.

Does Rediff has the ‘network effect’ strong enough for development community to build apps?

What’s your opinion?

The Story

In general, we have been connecting startups with VCs/other startups/service providers (like design companies, development folks etc)- and now is the time to take this entire story to the next level, to be a self-sustainable platform where the entities can come together.

The Indian Startup Ecosystem

“A neutral platform that brings together startups, VCs and other entities in the Indian startup ecosystem.”

The ecosystem consists of:

• Directory of Indian Startups
  We announced the startup directory sometime back, but later realized that a texty list is not fun – it has to be more searchable and explorable, based on category/location/ funding status etc. (for instance, SaaS startups in India, startups building mobile services etc)
  
• Indian VC Directory
  This answers your queries like – who are the early stage investors, growth stage investors and lot more – all for free!
• Startup Job Board
  Fresh approach to job board (the earlier one was forum based and not very friendly for companies), this one allows structured job postings. For e.g. Engineering Jobs, Sales/Marketing etc etc) – you need not share your email id (applicants can apply directly via the site)
• Tech Events
  Too many tech events happening for you to keep track of? Do keep an eye on this section (and of course, add events too)
• Startup forum
  Discussion forum for startups/techies.
• Marketplace
  Care to share?
  We have received whole lot of requests from startups that they want to share/trade resources with other non-competing startups -be it an engineering resource, a banner link..whatever.
  Use marketplace to announce what you wanna share.
• Useful links/data
  For instance, Incubators in India – will add more such stuff.

And now, the most important entity in the entire ecosystem:

You! Yes, you!

Any ecosystem is as good as it’s member’s participation – so, please participate in the startup ecosystem, be it about adding tech events, suggesting startups, VCs and of course, the startup forum section where you can discuss whole lot of things with fellow geeks/entrepreneurs.

Register here and get the party started!

As with any new product, we too aren’t yet perfect (UI glitches (yucky too!), weird error msgs etc..and that’s why the theta status ) – we are also adding couple of interesting features/updates in the next few days – which puts ‘you‘ at the center..

Do give ecosystem a spin and let us know what you feel!

Update: The earlier forum will be moved to the new forum.

On 56th independence day, August 15 2003, India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced. “Our country is now ready to fly high in the field of science. I am pleased to announce that India will send her own spacecraft to the moon by 2008. It is being named Chandrayaan-1″. In Sanskrit (language of Ancient India) “Chandrayaan” means “Moon Craft” – official website

Chandrayaan @ an estimated cost of INR 3.8 billion (US$ 83 million) will be launched using Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) weighing 1304 kg at launch and 590 kg at lunar orbit.

Interestingly, we (i.e. pluGGd.in team) are also announcing something very interesting, something that is much needed in the startup ecosystem tomorrow! – call it our Chandrayaan!

So stay pluGGd.in and here is wishing Chandrayaan a successful run!

The site is rich in content (for e.g. list of all radio stations in India: pdf) and has good amount of data that does surfaces the viability of advertising in radio vs. print/TV.

Related Read: How Local should FM Channels be?

CricketNext

Network18′s cricket portal CricketNext has gone mobile (in partnership with July systems’ Mi platform) offering mobile launcher for quick access from a phone, in-depth game analysis etc.

NayaBiz.mobi

While MyToday is a deep and wide portal, the NayaNaya family of portals is all about the theme of “breaking news, 24×7? in different verticals. They aggregate news headlines from multiple sources and show it in a light, mobile-friendly format [source]

Given all the clutter and umpteen sources of news, an aggregator approach is a winner, if they maintain the quality.

What’s your opinion?

The platform tightly integrates voice and telephony without having to know the intricate details of call-signalling, routing, billing etc.

Developers now get virtually the same out-of-the-box experience since using the TringMe platform. They do not require anything else besides Flash and Web technologies to create rich voice and telephony applications. Whether it’s speech recognition, DTMF or Text-to-speech, TringMe’s solution provides it all so that the application can be really rich is providing the best possible user-interaction. Given the presence of flash all around, the simplicity of ‘distributing’ such widgets without any additional software download or installation makes this solution even more attractive.

Alongwith Flash, the VoiceXML capability is also accessible from Instant Messengers, TringMe MobileVoIP, Phones. In other words, one can use a phone, IM, Browser or any such means to interact with VoiceXML and TringMe platform.

The product is currently in private beta and if you are a web/flash developer, request an invite by leaving your email id in the comment section.

Check out the demo here

FirstNaukri will tie-up with colleges and will enable candidates to apply for jobs/post resumes via the website (source)

Thanks to recession, the job market in general is on the downward spiral and Info Edge’s growth projection is much lower than the earlier qtr – initiatives like these are meant to capture specific markets (campus placement is one of the most affected from the US slowdown) and hopefully revive InfoEdge’s revenues.

But..

The BIG Question: Career vs. Naukri?

Naukri is heavily focused on jobs and to me, that’s one aspect of the market. The real big play is in the career space – which spans more than jobs.

I guess, InfoEdge is diluting too much in the ‘naukri’ space and might just get linkedin to capture the ‘career’ space (LinkedIn has a mn user base from India)

For instance, InfoEdge already has 4 offerings in career space: shiksha, brijj, asknaukri and of course, naukri.

So, why launch another portal? Why not integrate with Shiksha – Isnt’ first job part of one’s career decision? Or even have first job section as a microsite to naukri.com?

Moreover, where is the network building up, when you have brijj and naukri – all under different logins? Serving different intents (which are so tightly connected)?

Such launches can keep the sensex buzzing, but in the long run, creating so many brands is a challenge.

What’s your opinion?

Recommended Read: Brijj claims 8Lakh users (800 CEOs) and LinkedIn’s India focus

“Google SMS Channels is a free service that enables you to get premium content published by Google partners and websites with RSS/Atom support for free.

SMS Channels allows you to create your own channel(s) to publish content that other users can subscribe to.”

Google SMS Channels

Unlike smsgupshup (which, incidentally powers pluGGd.in’s feed-to-sms service), Google’s SMS channel is two-way and enables a discussion enabling subscribers to publish to the channel (an optional feature).

Why it feels half baked?

Because Zook is doing a far better job – they recently launched an alert service that enables one to track deals/movie updates (for instance, receive updates only for English movies playing at PVR @ Forum Mall, or track nokia deals in Bangalore etc..) and whole lot of other content like events, weather, traffic updates, cricket news/scores, etc.

Similarly, MyToday (sends 12 million SMS everyday) offers customized channels like astrology/cricket/news etc which are far richer in content and aren’t just reading feeds.

Having said that, Google’s SMS channel works great for publishers – they get a newer hook to keep users engaged, which none of the other services are offering.

The weird part about a generic service like this is that they may not get the community love (and very soon lose relevance).
Let’s look at it this way – Google’s SMS Channels will compete with Vakow, MyToday and SMSGupshup etc – all of these services have ‘initial mover advantage’ and serve specific intents, while Google’s SMS service looks more like a PoC.

I am not too sure whether Google’s SMS service will go beyond the geeky users/bloggers (and will ever reach mainstream).

Whats your take on Google’s SMS Channel service?

By the way, here goes pluGGd.in channel - subscribe to receive feed updates.

Jivox’s self-service advertising service (called AdSlate) enables businesses to create video ads and publish them across Jivox’s network.

BigAdda, quite lately is getting more aggressive in distribution space (launched mobile app recently) and this could be the initial impressions of it’s monetization play – claims 1.5mn user base and is targeting 4-5mn$ in a year.

Stats on Video Ads

Average CTR of YouTube InVideo ads is 5 times the text ads (on YouTube) and average CPM stands at $15 – much higher than display ads.

There surely is a big money lying on the table and would be interesting to see how Indian advertisers react to the new format of advertising.

What’s your take on video ads?

Recommended Read: Big B’s Blog Contributes 25% to BigAdda’ Traffic?

The game lets you interact with youtube videos and perform certain actions based on few conditions/clicks.

Check out the video for yourself:

What’s your opinion?

Think of it as a comparison engine with focus on what politicians/celebrities are saying with regards to a context:

These quotations are a valuable resource for understanding where people in the news stand on various issues. Much of the published reporting about people is based on the interpretation of a journalist. Direct quotes, on the other hand, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted.

Interesting concept – if they expose the APIs, it can turn into a discussion forum. What’s your opinion?

Interestingly, no development quotes (as of now) found from Lalu Yadav, and no congress related quote from sonia gandhi!

PeerPower is targeted towards senior level professionals:

PeerPower is an avenue for Senior-Level Professionals to build new business contacts and to keep themselves updated with the latest happenings in the industry..It has unique networking features that enhance the interactivity of an individual with his/her peers in current and previous organisations, professional institutes and area of specialization.

The product is currently in closed beta (i.e. ‘invite’ only mode).

PeerPower will face stiff competition from LinkedIn as well as Info Edge’s Brijj and HT’s Shine – what sort of product differentiation do you think can beat LinkedIn?

Recommended Read: Brijj claims 8Lakh users (800 CEOs) and LinkedIn’s India focus | LinkedIn’s growth in India