TechNayak(mirror)

This I had to write about. Found this through Techcrunch and was ROTFL after reading and seeing it. Its not new that there are 2.0 startups by the dozen every week and people are trying to do something new. Well if you would like to create your own 2.0 firm here is what you do ( I mean sarcastically ofcourse )

  “Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator”

Using the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™ as part of your Business Plan.

1. Devise bullshit-compliant products and services with the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™
2. Go to Brownpau’s Buzzphrase Generator for some excellent catchphrases with which to litter your site and marketing materials.
3. Name your new Web 2.0 site with Andrew Woolridge’s Web 2.0 Company Name Generator. Update: Or use this one, which is even better!
4. Go get yourself a snazzy logo with the Web 2.0 Logo Generator.
5. Sell your company to Yahoo!
6. Repeat over and over

Here are some of the things I got as solutions which is actually hilarious:

enable citizen-media tagclouds   and   tag undefined mashups , hilarious i must say. This was my company name Zimeeno.  My company does this : rss-based photos via email invite *only*.  Give it a try, if nothing you will feel like an entrepreneur 2.0

I just finished seeing Yahoo Ourcity, a local mashup site that localizes to your current city and shows a mashup of information collected from the various Yahoo brands. Quite recently I have begun to notice a trend in sites that localize content based on the access point . For example if I were to log into Orkut from Bangalore, I would see a lot of Bangalore friends, but if I were to log in from say the US of A , i would see more friends from the US than from India, its more relevance to the data.

Yahoo OurCity also does the same, by showing you a localized version of the site. The portal features current news,weather information, photos tagged geographically to Bangalore in Flickr , upcoming events in Bangalore and other info like movie listings, events, blogs etc. This is where Yahoo stands out from the other web giants. Yahoo has a tradition of building great audiences around a product, they did with their mail, answers and My Yahoo which are forerunners in their own right. Our city is definetely a great concept, add to this the usablility of Yahoo products, great backend services like Flickr, News, maps , videos , del.icio.us and other systems, and you have a great portal which will pull in people like bugs to pest-o-flash. Social networking features is not given that much of an importance, considering thats the most requested/required feature. nevertheless this concept of the Local Daily portal will work. Below are some screenshots.

Last year was the year of social networks, mashups and video or pod startups. This year was predicted to be the year of widgets and more. But I see another kind of concept growing in popularity - Online betting, predictions, gambling etc.

It figures perfectly, people need to spend more time on the internet and mail, social netowrks and blogs just dont do it for some of them. Games would be a fun way to look at things, but thats no fun if there are no real winners or money involved. So ? almost everybody likes sports, my entire office is biting dust when India is playing cricket. Combine sports perdiction with fake(or real) money , add a dash of social networking to it, offer up to the minute stats on the game itself and you have a perfect idea for a site that will make millions. Sports fans will go gaga over such a concpet, add to this the unsurmountable ” I said so” ego to the equation and you will have gangs of friends pooling in to write about games and their early predictions. Whats better is they will come back later to review their victory and prove their worth. Add incentives like currency, more authority etc and people wil be flocking like there is no tomorrow.

Lot of betting based sites like gottabet, pickspal and pickspop have already turned up and cashing on people power. There is also Xuqa that allows people to play and earn more peanuts which is akin to this. I see this concept really growing wings the next year or so? what do you think?

Adobe will be relinquishing control over the Portable Document Format or PDF as we know it to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Proprietary formats are not accepted by lot of government based organisations as they see it as a threat to their data. There are a lot of proprietary formats available like the PDF, Microsoft text etc, but since their adoption criteria is challenged because of their closed scheme of thing, companies are thinking otherwise. Good move by Adobe, although they stand to lose control over what they created, but they tend to gain in sales of Acrobat if the format is accepted to store critical data.

Ok so I finally got an iPod and i cant get enough of it. After the initial adiction, I can figure that people who own the ipod, which is plenty , dont really look beyond their itunes library. In lieu of that, avvenu has come out with a product that lets you listen to your itunes library on your mobile phone. The requirement is that you listen through a browser from any windows/mac smart phone and that your itunes is powered up and online . The music streams from yoru itunes directly to yoru mobile. They also allow you to store upto 250 songs on their servers, these can even be shaerd with some of your friends via email. Avvenue plays only unrestricted MP3, AAC and WMA files, no iTunes DRM’d songs will work.

Demo 2007 is underway and one of the eye catching announcements was from symantec about their new identity management suite.  Symantec plans to release a new product that helps people decide, on the fly, whether a service demanding credentials like name, email, phone, credit cards etc are trustworthy or not.

The Identity Initiative taps into Symantec’s worldwide labs and response centers, which monitor spam attacks and collect information and make assessment on sites around the clock. when you open a site, which asks for persoanl information, symantec Identity window pops up and provides you up to the minute stats ont eh site, its credentials and advice whether you can really give up your information. Such and initiative would really help the cause of many end users. Sites that are mailicious, that have had prior complaints and spamming sites etc will be flagged red to warn the users. Its finally the users choice to submit information, but norton will warn you.

You can also generate alias addresses if you are scared that the site will spam you. You can also report sites to norton against such things I guess. Symantec plans to use ID systems like Yahoo ID or openId to implement such a system. I like the idea, and definetely a service offerign of this order froma company like symantec is seriously worth watching.