Webupvan… showcase of the best designed Indian Web 2.0 sites

Tags: design

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Webupvan is a web gallery for the best designed Indian websites. Built on the line of the international design watering holes like CssGalleries, CssVault, CssElite, CssHeaven etc, WebUpvan aims to showcase and promote websites that can serve as an example to other Indian web developers. In a country that can safely be described as “design challenged“, surely this is a laudable effort. Webupvan is the initiative of Amit Mandaliya, a web designer and flash developer.

You can use this form to get your website featured on Webupvan. The requirements are fairly simple - it has to be built by Indian web developers, it must be CSS (xhtml/css based table-less layout) or Flash based and if its an application, it has to be Web 2.0 (thats subjective though). And oh yes! - it must measure up to Amit’s exacting standards for design aesthetics and efficacy.

The gallery is categorized into these sections - Application, CSS, Flash, Art, Blog, Bollywood, Business, NGO, NRI, Portfolio, Resources & Web Design Company.

Webupvan is not necessarily meant to be a money spinner, though it has some slots for google text/banner ads.

Whats missing from Webupvan is a voting mechanism for the gallery exhibits, so as to surface the most popular ones.

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Barcamp Delhi 4 is happening!

Tags: barcamp, delhi

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After being postponed atleast a couple of times, Barcamp Delhi 4 is finally happening.

For the uninitiated Barcamp is an un-conference where people come in for various reasons (freebies, free wi-fi included). Those who are willing to present/speak on a topic add their names in the wiki and they are allocated a time slot to present. BarCamp is the place where talented geeks and entrepreneurs meet to discuss, learn and share their knowledge and experience about Technology. Hot topics include latest trends in web-development, mobile technologies, hacking with Linux, Social networking and other related areas.

This time, two new events called BugTales & Web Tweaks are being introduced, where you stand to win Free iPod(s) if you share the most interesting Bug / Problem / Hack / Tweak that you have worked on.

If you are either a geek, blogger, internet junkie or an entrepreneur, BCD4 is an event which you should not miss. Please make sure you register yourself before attending by adding your name to the wiki to help the volunteers plan out the space and food requirements better. You can help spread the word by blogging about the event too.

BarcampDelhi 4 takes place on 17th May,2008 at

Amity Innovation Incubator
Auditorium, Block C, Amity University Campus
Sector 125, Noida

Written by Gaurav Gupta

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Desiwiki… community aggregated resource for startups & entrepreneurs

Tags: startups

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Desiwiki is a wiki that aggregates resources/info about how to set up and run a startup in India. Started by Prabhu Subramanian (who blogs at DesiStartups), Desiwiki is trying to leverage the power of community knowledge sharing in a structured way. Most people who run startups & also write a blog, would have at some time or the other, blogged about the task of running their companies. I have done that extensively on my personal blog- here’s a post about how to tackle red-tape in the ROC office, here’s another one about putting together a simple, low cost conference room for your resource constrained startup. Satish Talim (who runs the Pune Ruby group) has an EXCELLENT series of blog posts detailing the entire process of registering an IT company in India… I am sure a quick google search will throw up really useful resources elsewhere on the Indian blogosphere as well. These resources if bunched together could be very helpful to first time, budding entrepreneurs. Hence getting people to aggregate their experience on the wiki is a great idea.

The wiki can become a valuable resource for information about legal, financial, operational aspects of running a company, specially in the initial phases.

So if you have something to share, register here for an account on the wiki and start contributing… Needless to say, this is not an advertising platform, so any surreptitious attempts to market yourself (or your company) is likely to get an immediate cold-shoulder by the administrators.

I just wish the wiki had a more imaginative name … the word ‘desi‘ sounds not just sickening, but also downright misleading as well.

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Update: TiE Canaan Entreprenurial Challenge 2008 date extended (plus additional rewards)

Tags: canaan, contest, entrepreneurship, TiE

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Just a quick note that the last date for submission of entries for the TiE Canaan Entreprenurial Challenge 2008 (covered previously here) has been extended till the 20th of May.

Canaan & TiE have announced additional rewards that makes participating in the program even more compelling. Apart from the earlier prizes & benefits, here’s a topping to sweeten the offer-

Microsoft Award: At least one finalist will be invited to join the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program where they will get access, guidance and support on the Microsoft Platform as well as market development support from Microsoft. Microsoft will promote these companies in their ecosystem.

ISB Programs: A representative from each of the winning teams will be invited to attend a free course (Accelerated Management Programme - Increasing Managerial Effectiveness) at the Center for Executive Education at the Indian School of Business (ISB) (the course costs app 3 lacs)

Media Coverage: The winners will be featured in Business Today, enabling them to build awareness about their companies & products.

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StartupCity- startup showcase, conference, unconference all under one roof….

Tags: bangalore, event, startups

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The Smart Techie (the technology magazine) is organizing an event called Startup City- this is a potpourri of a conference, unconference (birds of a feather gatherings) and industrial exhibition style startup showcase booths. The event is slated for the 24th of May in Bangalore. The formalized conference is a day long event and features prominent industry members, VCs etc (the agenda is here). Startups wanting to exhibit their product or conduct live demo sessions would have to pay 30K for a 3X2 metre booth. Quite a few startups have signed up already - Sloka, Netcore, Pramati, mChek etc). Attending the event is complimentary for technical professionals- they have to register using this form and once approved, the invitation will be emailed back. Alongside the conference & the startup exhibition, there will be a closed door CEO conclave, to be attended by CEOs and Managing Directors of over 150 startups. This is to facilitate an informal discussion amongst the senior management about best practices.

The event is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Nokia & Amazon.

To facilitate networking during the event, the event organisers have created an online tool called Smart Connect. Attendees can log into the tool and find out who else is attending, send them messages and even connect with the speakers before the event itself. Sounds quite an idea.. lets hope this actually works out well.

I am a trifle intrigued by the idea of startup showcase booths. While I am not attending the event itself, I’d be interested in knowing how this actually works out. We have all become used to the idea of startup presentations, live demos etc in a conference or unconference style setting. Can startup demo booths prove more effective in catching attention and creating awareness? Do any of the readers of this blog have any prior experience of this? How does this actually work out? Do share your feedback in the comments section.

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Entrepreneurship storytelling with Nasscom’s Friday 2.0 sessions

Tags: delhi, nasscom

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If you are a technology entrepreneur and based out of Delhi, you should book your date with NASSCOM’s Friday 2.0 sessions. These experience sharing talks are organised on the 2nd Friday of every month at the NASSCOM office in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. The idea is to get people from emerging companies to share their best practices in the areas of technology, marketing, business strategy, entrepreneurship etc., so that others could learn from them without having to reinvent the wheel. These talks are free to attend (unlike the talks that TiE organises) and are open to members & non-members of NASSCOM alike. NASSCOM wants more and more people (startups & emerging companies) to be benefit from these talks, hence they have been kept free of any attendance fees. The sessions are archived on the NASSCOM Emerge blog, and lately, they have also started shooting videos and sharing them on one of the video sharing sites for others to follow remotely.

These talks are not new- in fact, they have been organised for a couple of years now, but given that 2.0 is the ruling flavor these days and symbolises maturation, growth, repositioning, re-orientation etc., they decided to christen the sessions NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0.

Check out this page for details about previous sessions.

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Win 10K: Grab photos of Mark Zuckerberg in India and guess what he’s upto…

Tags: facebook, India

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Australia based Indian technology gossip site, TechGoss is offering 5K for the first, exclusive photos of Mark Zuckerberg in India. And another Rs. 5000 for a detailed story on his stay in India. The sender’s anonymity is guaranteed. The Facebook founder is apparently visiting India at present and not much is known about his plans, or the reason for his coming here. As the Techgoss article points out, Facebook has to probably deal with a completely different Goliath in India - Orkut, whicj has a very limited reach in the US. Top 10 countries for Facebook are USA, UK, Canada, Turkey, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Columbia and South Africa.

In all probabilities, this has to do with the impending launch of Facebook India, close on the heels of the launch of YouTube India. Can’t think of any acquisition moves here - the homegrown Indian SNS sites are unlikely to be having any M&A appeal to Facebook.

So all you Indian Facebook junkies- this is a chance to earn a few quick bucks! And yes, no photoshopping allowed! Otherwise Techgoss is likely to get inundated with tons of photos of the Facebook wizkid standing next to the Taj Mahal, India Gate, Gateway of India….

Here’s something I did for fun….

DJ… you owe me 5K for my photoshoping skills…

Update: My photoshopping skills are not bad after all. Valleywag, the gossip website seems to have linked to the spoof …

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Confession: It’s official now! SlideShare loses its (financial) virginity

Tags: funding, slideshare, venrock

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Just wanted to confess on this blog that my startup, SlideShare has now officially lost its bootstrapping (aka financial virginity) status. And we have entered into a serious relationship with one of those big venture firms in Silicon Valley. This was not an impulsive decision; the marriage was preceded by a courtship that lasted a couple of months- horoscopes were matched (Indian style), the (technology) pundits were consulted and each party tried to woo the other with candle-lit dinners, chocolates, long midnight serenades etc. Here’s hoping this relationship blossoms into a life-long partnership for the benefit of the extended family (the slideshare community).

And if you are bored of reading drab press releases announcing funding news (like I am), check out the slide deck below. This is a makeover that our design team gave to the official press release. It is based on a very popular presentation style on slideshare that has almost achieved cult status now!

| View | Upload your own

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ReviewGist - Intelligent comparison shopping

Tags: comparison, reviews, shoppping

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ReviewGist is a startup based out of Gurgaon, India. ReviewGist is a review and price comparison website, allowing you to view reviews and best prices of the product, from a lot of review and shopping websites in India. ReviewGist is one of the few Indian startups to get a mention on TechCrunch.

The first thing one would notice is the extremely neat, intuitive and professional layout of the website. Many more review comparison sites seem to exist today, the popular ones being compareindia.com and wize.com. Many dedicated online shopping sites also perform price comparisons. However, where ReviewGist stands out is that it claims to do semantic processing of all the different reviews it crawls for a particular product and performs the rather difficult task of converting highly subjective reviews and opinions/comments into purely objective points, categorized as “positive” or “negative”.

Ex. If a review mentions “the phone has a good flash”, it would automatically detect that the reviewer is talking POSITIVE about the “flash feature” and would group the review appropriately, which is pretty innovative. You can however make out that some level of plain keyword matching and human intervention has also gone in behind the scenes.

ReviewGist does not provide any reviews of their own. The entire website is driven by aggregating data from external websites. The layout and look and feel of the website might give you a false impression that the website performs a comprehensive review of all products in that segment. This however may not always be true. Moreover, the number of categories are also restricted to certain pre-defined but usually popular ones.

The debate over such summarized and concise reviews over a detailed analysis of the product from trusted websites like CNET is totally justified. When making a big purchase, one might be tempted to read a comprehensive writeup about the product rather than tidbits about the product from various resources. However, it can be argued that one review site may not cover all aspects of the product in equal detail and may or may not be biased towards a particular product.

The basis of comparison provided by ReviewGist may not always be satisfactory enough to decide which of the two products is better. Say, you cannot compare digital camera’s solely by how good their flash, battery life, megapixels etc. they have. Some finer points regarding the camera and subtle advantages and disadvantages of the product may be completely ignored by a comparison website simply because they do not provide a basis of comparison. Despite all the comparisons, I am still tempted to click on the reviewers links and read the detailed article as well.

Online shopping has not really picked up that much in India so far so I am not sure how useful it is to provide price comparisons from various online vendors. Most people would use it to get a good idea of the best deal they can get when they negotiate a deal offline.

Overall, a good consumer product discovery & research site. Gist of all expert opinions at one place, making shopping decisions simple, fast, accurate and authoritative.

Review written by Gaurav Gupta

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Ready to download Barcamp signages & pictograms…

Tags: barcamp

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Here’s a simple but really useful resource that would help all Barcamp organisers. I found this slide deck on slideshare; it consists of a clutch of signages that would come in handy while organising a Barcamp (e.g. signages for cafetaria, toilets, no-smoking et al). They are creative commons and ready to download, print, copy, use and extend. This has been shared by Kosmar, a German web-designer.

| View | Upload your own

You can download the deck here.

This is something really adorable about the BarCamps. People volunteer to do all kinds of things, purely out of their own interest. Hardly anything needs to be paid for.

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