Fire In Princeton Meadows And Hyperlocal Content

Finally got the time to upload this picture I took 3 weeks ago.

A fire broke out in Princeton Meadows, a strip mall in Plainsboro, last month. The fire originated in a bakery, Hot Breads, and completely burnt down 4 stores. Also gone is the popular pizzeria, Al Jons, which had been in the neighborhood for almost 17 years. Like me if you don’t read local community newspapers or websites, where do you go for hyperlocal content? Try Topix.

For those that haven’t heard of Topix, it is to hyperlocal content what Google News is to world news and Techmeme is to technology news.  Topix crawls over 50,000 sources for hyperlocal community news.  More on Topix’s about page here.

I talked to some Topix folks at the Web 2.0 conference in SF and the biggest issue they were facing was the lack of hyperlocal advertising dollars. Topix has some Google ads, but the local pizza shop owner or dentist is less likely to open a Google Adsense account anytime soon. Topix also had a free classifieds section, but then there’s Craigslist.

What Can Orkut Do For Your Love Life?

When I was India in January 2007, my friend Akshay Chikodi asked me if was on Orkut. Frankly, he said, if you’re not on Orkut you don’t exist! So I created a profile on Orkut.

Couple things I don’t get about Orkut:

• What is it trying to be – a social networking tool? dating site? First thing you create a profile, you see this message - Next steps: Are you single? Tell everyone what you are looking for to get orkut working for you!
• It looks like a developer’s prototype when compared to Facebook.

But obviously, it is definitely doing a few things right. Read Gautam’s post here, Alexa ranks Orkut second in India followed by Yahoo. Orkut on last count had over 57.4M users, 15% = 8.6M Indians on Orkut. Even though it seems a bit on the higher side, it nevertheless is a great tool for people search. People search online is catching on and I don’t think there exists a better database of Indians in India and abroad – profiles with real names, pictures, bios & interests, life/event updates and a listing of every other friend on Orkut.

Some Orkut demographics from here:

• Over 15% of Orkut profiles are Indians (Brazil on top with 55%, followed by US with 19% users).

• 70% users are between ages 18-30.

• less than 20% are either married or committed (42% no answer, 36% single)

• 65% are on Orkut for friends, 18% for dating

The last bit of info is very interesting. Given that a majority of users are between ages 18-30 and single, is Orkut big enough to challenge the hugely successful martrimonial and dating websites? Same for Facebook, can it be the end of Match.com and the likes? Why pay a premium for meeting other singles if you can “poke” or “send teasers” for no charge? Or is that too creepy for some users?

Orkut’s help section on “What can Orkut do for your love life?” here. If you’re on Orkut, I’d love to hear from you.

Thomas Friedman redefines the flat world

I attented the Personal Democracy Forum last month.  New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, in his keynote announced the addition of 3 new chapters to this popular book “World is Flat” (3rd edition) . 

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  That was Gandhi’s message to 250+ million Indians, challenging them to organize and rise up against the British rule.

Thomas Friedman reading out his new chapter announced, “If it’s not happening, it’s because you’re not doing it”.  This is the new form of Citizen Activism in the age of Internet and Technology.  Users have all the necessary tools (read blogs, forums, feeds, widgets) to organize virtual campaigns and put pressure on the big corporations and governments.

Check out the recorded version of Friedman’s keynote here.

More on the flat world and this from the perspective of employers – Back in the days, people wrote and presented their resume as a proxy of who they’re.  Today, companies can go on the internet and gather the information themselves.  The human proxy has been dropped and entities are more transparent.

Web2.0 in the enterprise

Web 2.0 is all about the transition from individual productivity (user running MS office locally) to group productivity (collective document generation & editing – forums & wikis).

Enterprise Web 2.0 benefits:

• Less email costs (increased use of blogs, wikis)
• Search benefits (document collection and archive)
• Easier updates/patches (central update as opposed to mass desktop updates)
• More transparency (this should in fact be first on the list of benefits).

When organizations don’t provide employees the necessary tools, they go out to get them thus violating company policy. A good example is employees using Yahoo mail and Gmail for storing and forwarding big company confidential documents since corporations have a 100MB mailbox limit.

P.S. Google Docs is the currently the second biggest money maker for Google after Adsense. Maybe that’ll change soon with the introduction of ads in Youtube.

Marketwatch inline widget

Testing the Marketwatch inline widget… click on the tickers to view it.
Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG), Infosys (INFY), ICICI (IBN), TI (TXN).