A truly local, Local Search

Local search is a nascent stage at present. Not so long back I wrote about guruji.com coming up in the same area. What Guruji has done is just take the format of Google and extrapolate it over local search. We hardly see anything new. No doubt it makes life easier for all of us who use internet, that is just 13% of the urban population (if we consider the number of people who have ever used internet in their life, active users are around 8% of the urban population), what about the rest?

Just Dial, again an Indian entrepreneurs venture, has come out with the solution for just the same. Telephone penetration is India is 17.16 per 100 persons; this is including the rural areas as well, which might not be in the target segment of local search as of now. Just Dial has shown true application of thought by adopting the local search feature to Indian conditions.

A question of small or big

I just have one small question running in my mind since long...why do you hate MS and Yahoo!....just cause they are big??? just cause we are bored with what they are giving us right now?? just cause our empathy, sympathy and all the related feelings are with the supposed strugglers and smaller fishes like Google???

Lets ponder over it for a moment...look at the history of any big company in this world...they haven't been made big overnight, there was a time when even these companies were strugglers, they broke all the conventions and gave the consumers something new and bring about a revolution in the world...Don't you think Google is in a similar phase right now?? I guess we shud give the other 2 companies some credit too...what say guys and gals????

Barcamp in Pune

Finally!!! I might get to attend my first barcamp. I came to know about the barcamp concept just a couple of months back and have been dying to witness one for myself. If i manage to go there will write in detail about the whole experience...by the way this Barcamp is being held at SICSR no 16th and 17th Dec.
For those who are coming across "Barcamp" term for the first time...Barcamp as they say is an "unconference"...its where people meet and talk about new things in the tech sphere and their applications...well this is all as i have read and heard about it from friends...will give a detailed description only after i experience it...
***********
I missed it again :( guess will have to catch it someother time and some other place...

Google getting into Print Ads

How would all of you here react if i say that Google is on its way to become a full fledged ad broker and who knows in future it might just become an ad agency. Google is planning to become a mediator between the newspapers and the companies bidding for adwords. when a company bids through the adword campaign, Google will send it to the papers and then it is the decision of the papers to accept that bid and design that ad. I doubt the feasibility of this step.

1. its not in sync with what Google represents at present

2. we all know that companies are leaving newspapers and turing to internet advertising, then why would a company want to go back to newspaper advertising.

3. arent there enough companies already who handle the print medium and TV medium ads?? what is Google offering as a differentiator.

One thing Google can do is place the ads in online version of the papers, but then these papers take so much time to upload and offer almost no benefit over the normal news websites, that they are going to obsolete very soon. I wonder what is Google's logic behind this decision....

Wink

A new social network search engine called wink has been introduced. At present the site just includes contacts from bebo, myspace and linkedin. Here you can just put in the name and it lets you view the people by that name and wink them, i.e. send them messages from the same place that is wink....
Initially i thought it allows you to search everyone on a network but thank God i was wrong. You can search even if u are not a member, but only those people who have signed into wink are in the search database. It also allows people to bookmark good links, or to store good links about a particular subject, which in wink parlance is called "collection". I would say its just an ofshoot of the social networks mania.

Social networking or Spamming???

For all those, who have been flooded with invitations from their friends to join Gazzag, have a look at this article.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/11/gazzagcom_is_my_new_enemy.html

Google and Yahoo! targeting mobile phones

Google and Yahoo! are planning to target mobile customers for advts. The advts. might be text based, images or video clips. This will just increase the clutter that is there on our mobiles. Already there are a lot of calls advertising about credit cards and what not. I don't think this measure will be much effective as the customers are bound to object to advt. messages disturbing them every now and then. I guess the companies will have to come out with something like a "Do not Disturb policy for the customers. Lets see what happens in near future.