Google is bigger than Sex!!!

Now that was a surprise wasn't it. Graphs at Google Trends show that the number of people who searched for Google at the search engine was consistently higher than sex for the last year(With one exception of the Christmas holiday season). I tried finding another term that would go higher that sex but nothing that I could think of did!! Facebook and Myspace showed a phenomenal rise but did not quite beat it. Microsoft, blog, obama were not even comparable. Do let me know if you can find something.

Graph showing search density of selected keywords

And remember, Google knows what you did last Christmas!! *** Evil Grin ***

Cheers!!

Car deals @ carwale

I remember brainstorming with a friend about 2 years ago regarding the usefulness of a used car site in context of the Indian market. The biggest problem in and deterrent to thinking further along those lines was the potential difficulty in engaging sellers to come online to sell their goods. Another problem was attribution of the sales done through us. Carwale has definitely proven us wrong.

Search result at Carwale

255 Used cars to choose from in the Rs3,00,000 to 4,00,000 price range in the city of Mumbai is a huge collection. I do not have numbers to prove this but no physical dealer is likely to match up to that kind of a product catalog. The numbers in Delhi were even better. I'm putting up Mumbai as an interesting average search result for the site. The site claims to have more than 10,000 used cars on sale.

To say that sites like Carwale are inspired is an understatement. They are the genre of sites which pick up a successful model of business in the US and apply the same to the Indian market. Sites like Autobytel, Edmunds, Carsdirect have been successfully implementing on the same idea in the US for ages. While the ideas for these "inspired" sites may not be totally novel, good implementations of useful solutions can prove to be successful businesses.

Carwale: Inspired but useful

Carwale offers a comprehensive set of tools - To calculate the approximate price of a used car, dealer locator, Car comparisons, loan comparisons, approximate insurance premium calculator and EMI calculator are a few of them. A strong user community is actively contributing to car reviews and forums.

The site is good at narrowing down choices for the customer and moving him towards a purchase. The Recommend Car section asks questions like a dealer would ask - What is your budget? Are you more concerned with performance, resale value, comfort or economy? Are you very tall and would like a lot of leg/floor room? The tool then generates recommendations for buying a car based on your inputs.

Users would miss a similar tool for the used car section. A user will be highly lost on getting 255 cars in his budget to choose from!!

Carwale has their eyes on numerous avenues to generate revenue. They generate leads for new cars, car insurance and car finance. They charge various subscription and brokerage charges from used car dealers. The site displays ads for cars and insurance companies and will be valuable property to advertise at for these companies.

In all Carwale is a site all set to take full advantage of the growing base of Internet users in India.

Keep up the good work Carwalo!!

Cheers :)

Browser wars

Browsers are central to our web experience. The term web browsers are really an understatement for the application. They are application platforms for rich Web 2.0 sites, operating system for the world wide web would probably suit them more than the simple "browser".
Erik Larkin at PC World takes a look at 3 of the most popular browsers for the PC today as they push out a major release or will do so in the near future. He compares the newly released Apple Safari 3.1, Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Read on,I'm sure you'll find the article as engaging as I did.

Web browsers: which one works best

Cheers :)

ITasveer - Printing photos, a click away

Have you ever had a relative ask you to send them photographs of your last trip but you never bothered to get a hard copy of the same. I personally wondered for a long time last year of the pains that I would have to go through to get a print, then courier them to relatives. My solution to the problem was to keep delaying till both of us forgot about it. ;) Sites like itasveer and picsquare offer printing your online photos and delivering them at quite reasonable prices. In fact @2.90Rs per pic itasveer is cheaper than the friendly neighborhood studio. Add to that a 30Rs delivery charge and you're done.
Started by a group of 4 IIT Delhi alumni, itasveer offers two kinds of services - Photo sharing and printing. Printing includes printing of photographs as well as customized souvenirs.

Let me start with photo sharing. The site has substantial photo sharing capabilities allowing you to upload and share photographs with friends. Like a lot of other sites including the likes of flickr, there is no absolute limit on the amount you can upload. But there is a more subtle - upload allowed per time limit on your account. Personally though, I don't see a the point of them doing it. With the giants pumping in huge money in this space I do not see how itasveer will match Google on uptime, reliability and even features in the long run. Photo organizing and sharing should soon start to have capabilities to identify faces and software recognizing faces after training. Clearly this is not a space which a small company wants to enter without a distinct technological leap. Even if say itasveer was able to give service comparable or even better than flickr, photobucket or picassa, I would still be highly inclined to store my photographs on the servers of a large company rather than a small startup which may not exist 2 years down the line.

That's enough of what I believe is the bad side of their business, let me look at the good one. For one the photo printing definitely fills a void. Despite several players existing today, a good execution of the service should lead to a strong success story. The idea of souvenirs with custom photographs and themes made their case stronger.
The interface of the site is soothing and I was comfortable finding my way through the site. The importer from Picassa specially impressed me. The photographs seemed to be available to itasveer very quickly and they did not even ask me for my Google password in the process. The site handles photographs from Picassa and Flickr well but lacks importers from a bunch of other tools most notably Photobucket.
Doodlepad is what they call their tool to design various souvenirs. It seemed to work well in a way that it allowed extensive customizations to designs of cups, calenders and other items. The pre-existing themes are nice and the team deserves credit for creating them.

A calender page under construction using itasveer's doodlepad

One thing that did not seem quite right in the doodlepad was the ability to create items without extensive customizations. I wondered why someone who was so bad with designs was forced to go through so much customization to create a calender when giving the tool 12 pictures and selecting a theme should be enough to create a default one. This ability may prove to be tremendously useful for the artistically challenged, which btw constitutes the majority of the technology workers at least!!
Besides that there were a couple of glitches in the site but overall things were working smoothly. I think upon making doodlepad more friendly for the dumb folk like me should be a big leap forward for them.
Wishing itasveer the best of luck for the future!!

Weekly dose of desi internet

Time to time, the writer in me awakes and asks me to write my thoughts. Last time I tried(here), I could only manage a few posts over the course of almost 2 years. But this time, things are gonna be different. This time I'm a writer on a mission.
The mission is to cover internet startups from India. Internet startups are something that I read a fair bit of and this should only be a logical extension to a pre-existing hobby. Hopefully I will be able to provide my readers with a dose of exciting startups in the Indian context.

Forward March Mr writer!!! Forward march!!!


Inshallah. Is baar to Fateh hogi ;)

[Readers are most welcome to tell me about Indian startups and I'll cover as many as my weekends allow me. Post startup links in comments or mail me with their briefs at prashant.maskara at gmail dot com]