TechGazing

Advertisers in India seem to be a harried lot. Even as they get bigger budgets to spend on digital media, there is little to guide them on where and when to spend their money. The options all seem to come around to a handful of websites, with little market intelligence on how to get a bigger bang for their buck.

In such a scenario, will Yahoo’s Behavioural Targeting (BT) offering, now available in India, change things? Will it mean advertisers signing cheques assured of better performance of their ads, and Yahoo’s smile getting bigger all the way to the bank? Read on to know more about what BT is all about and if it will work in India

Forums like Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers see hundreds of answers being posted in response to questions asked by users of these sites. And the amazing part is this interaction takes place between people who are mostly stranger to one another. Why do they do this? What motivates people to spend their time and effort responding?

When I asked these questions around, the most interesting reasons came from an employee of Yahoo Singapore: he does so because he LOVES HIS COUNTRY and wants to answer any questions related to Singapore. On another note, he added that he does so to come out top ranked on Yahoo Answers and because he generally wants to help around. Read on to know what others have to say

The much awaited laptop under the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ finally came out in 2007, although not quite at the targeted price of $100. Despite the hype, the jury is still out if this will address the shortage of computers amongst the resource challenged. The order book still seems to have a lot of blank pages left.

A more practical alternative may actually be from NComputing, winner of ‘The Wall Street Journal 2007 Technology Innovation Award.’ What does this product do? It enables many users – each with their own monitor, keyboard and mouse – to connect to and harness the power of a single PC. Most desktop PCs being very powerful, a typical user only uses a fraction of its processing capabilities. Depending on user needs and the PC, up to 30 users can be connected to a PC. And the cost to enable this can be as low as $70 per user according to Raj Shah, Chief Marketing Officer, NComputing. This is only the price of the NComputing hardware – the peripherals are naturally extra. Read on to know why this product makes sense

I wrote a piece in The Hindustan Times, Delhi’s No. 1 daily newspaper and one of the leading ones in the country. The title of the same was ‘Making Money in a Mobile 2.0 World.’ You can read the online version here, or continue reading the text of the piece in this post itself.

For nearly a decade now, the mobile has been promising to deliver much more than just voice and text messaging – only to have its true potential always being two years away. So while the operators have been having it good with over three billion subscribers globally, democratisation of this platform has not been possible in the true sense allowing other application and service providers to make inroads and make money. But this may finally be changing. Welcome to the Mobile 2.0 world, offering commercial opportunities in a way even the old desktop Internet could not.

Why is this sounding possible? To put it simply, the dots are getting connected to make a pretty picture for all involved. This is how: Continue reading »

They say men don’t stop to ask for directions. Or was it women who do that? Either way, neither may need to anymore in India. Yahoo! India has introduced driving directions and community search on its existing Yahoo! India Maps. What this means in theory is you could be driving in a country of poor road signs and no longer land up in Ranthambhore when you are headed to Bharatpur.

A feature available for many years in developed countries, you could call this somewhat revolutionary in India. The service enable users to search for directions between 179 cities, 4767 towns and 226114 villages – as well as search for about three million points of interest marked by Internet users from around the web. Continue reading »

Do you use Salesforce? And Google’s AdWords as an advertising medium? How would you like to connect to your AdWords account from Salesforce, correlate web clicks with inbound leads and be able to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your Google campaigns? It is possible through the ‘Salesforce for Google Adwords,’ a highly rated and one of the most downloaded application on Salesforce AppExchange On-Demand Marketplace.

While it is interesting enough to be able to do so, what is even more significant is the fact that this application could have been developed independently outside of Salesforce and offered on this platform. Because, with Facebook and Google showing the way, the big trend that could unfold in the coming years is that of independent developers plugging in their applications on existing platforms. And Salesforce, the world leader in on-demand CRM services, is ensuring it is not left behind. Continue reading »

The Indian blogging and new media landscape has been highly fragmented so far, with little information available on who is doing what. In an effort to bring this community under one roof, the recently floated Delhi Blog and New Media Society is organizing a meeting of all stakeholders in New Delhi on Saturday, January 12, 2008. The event is sponsored and supported by 20:20 Media and Microsoft.

The expected audience will include professional/part time/fun bloggers, fringe/yet-to-start bloggers, PR/corp communication professionals, blog/ new media/ social media consultants and service providers and mainstream media. The event is open to all, and there is no registration fee. Click here for more details

The year 2007 was the story of social media: networking sites got bigger than ever, and attracted valuations one could not have imagined. But is being big the way to go in the future? Or will smaller, niche sites be able to offer greater value to users, especially for those looking for professional gains? To shed some light on this issue, TechGazing has the following following guest post by Avneet Jolly, Founder and CEO, Insightory, - a knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking platform for management professionals, academicians and graduate students:

In my view, mega social networking services (Facebook, MySpace) as well as professional networking services (LinkedIn, Xing) have grown big simply because they provide the ‘basic’ tools such as online profiles, message boards, alerts, ‘connects,’ social graphs etc. These never existed before – certainly not in a big way. Continue reading »

If you publish a blog, or any other form of online media, you would know the effort is takes to churn out quality content on a regular basis. Getting content from other sources can be an option, but it costs money. Now imagine having access to high quality syndicated content from sources like The Associated Press, Getty Images and Hearst Magazines – and this is not only free, but it comes with an opportunity to earn money.

Sounds too good to be true? Check out exactly such an offering from Mochila. Continue reading »

Could you imagine a style factor being added to the ubiquitous USB pen drives and portable hard drives? Companies like SanDisk, in partnership with Ducati MotoGP Motorcycle, seem to have done so. And you also have Kingston adding not only colour, but a rugged body of titanium coated stainless steel. I wrote a feature for Rediff.com on some of these drives; click here to access the same.

YouTube may be big, but it seems a lot more is waiting to happen in the online video segment; it may well be the big story of the next couple of years. But while the Bulls may be riding on the future of video, the sentiment is still bearish on another front: how do you monetise video on the net?

Current formats of ads like pre-roll (where an ad plays before a video starts) seem to be intrusive and a turn-off for viewers. Who wants to be forced to see an ad before the actual video starts? Banner and text ads on the site tend to get missed as attention is on the video itself. InSkin, invented by Patrick Knight, may have resolved the debate by being able to frame the video player with an interactive ad, positioned in the consumer’s line of sight.

I got an opportunity to interact with Patrick, also the company’s Founder and CEO, at AdTech, New York recently. Excerpts of our chat: Continue reading »