All about Proto.in

As we get closer to the Bangalore edition of Proto and the excitement builds up for India’s premier startup event,  here’s an awesome conceptualization about Proto.in by the folks from Pictualize.

Date : Jan 23-24, 2009

Venue: Nimhans Convention Center

Btw, if you haven’t already registered, now’s a good time to do so, go ahead and register now.

Featured on the Product Management View

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I will now be guest blogging for the Product Management View – a blog focussed on product management and strategy , run by world class product managers from various backgrounds and vast experience in this field.I am pleased to be associated with them and look forward to some great discussions over there. Thanks to Stewart Rogers from PM view for making this happen.

My first post for the Product management view is about maximizing product value through effective feature prioritization. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic and having some great conversations.

The PM view also tracks major webinars on product management, you can sign up for a webinar remider service and here’s the handle to the RSS feed.

Where your apple taxes go

One for the apple fanboys! Love this one.

Understanding spatial search

So what is spatial search ?

In today’s context, where the Internet is the starting point for finding any information you need about anything in the world, and of course most of us use Google. The problem with traditional search is that it does not support or have information about the geographical dimension.

Why is spatial search important ?

This becomes extremely important when searching for something like “Guest houses in Bangalore”. Although the geographical location, in this case ‘Bangalore’ can be used as a part of search query term, the search engine does not interpret it as a geographical location.

So results for the search query – “Guest houses in Bangalore” will turn up documents with “Guest houses” and “Bangalore” and might not show up results with guest houses koramangala or indiranagar which are localities in Bangalore and also hence very apt results. This is because, the search engine does not have a relationship between these terms.

The other issue with traditional search in entities like homes is that the geographical information of these locations are not known, and hence they cannot be visualized on a map – which would be the most intuitive way to visualize these results.

While planning and architecting my100floors, we understood the need for Spatial search and helping users visualize home searches on maps. Moreover we felt that that searching for properties on maps was the intuitive way to find properties. In fact, we are the first to provide a map based search in India, cracking the problem of non-availability of geo-coded data.

The next post will talk about our implementation of Spatial search in, challenges we faced and a walk through of the user experience.

my100floors.com is currently in closed beta, leave your email address on the site and drop me a line here or on twitter and I will make sure that you get the invite.

FailCamp – learning from other entrepreneurs about failure

FailCamp’s idea is simple – get a bunch of inspired people together and enable them to learn from each other and from other entrepreneurs who have battled (or give in to) failure in their startups.

This is a wonderful initiative and I am keenly looking forward to this event in Chennai.

Here are the event details

Date and Time – November 16,2008
Venue – Tenth Planet, Chennai. (Looking at pics, venue seems to be super cool! and an interesting company – they do outsourced projects on open source technologies)
Registration - FailCamp Wiki

If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment here or over on my twitter stream.

Of twitter, microblogging et all

Twitter, of course has been one of the main reasons why I don’t get time to write on this blog. Most of the times, 140 characters seems to be more than enough to convey what I want to say. Moreover, I always end up having very interesting conversations there and the there’s always instant feedback from a set of very engaged audience.

I have now been using Twitter seriously for sometime now, so thought so sharing some stats. Thanks to  Twitter Stats and TweetStats which helped me to churn out these graphs.

Tweets per hour

Tweets per day

Twitter Timeline

Top @replies

So if you are already on twitter, follow me.

China Internet and Web 2.0 trends

The slide deck below has some really great information on Internet and Web 2.0 trends in China, a market that most of us are not really clued into. Thanks to Trendspotting for putting together this data packed slideshow.

Here what I find most interesting and insightful from the information

• China has the largest internet user base in the world to the tune of 253m users. They also have the largest mobile subscriber base of 574m.
• China has a very health internet user sex ratio comprising of 47% women
• IM, Online music and Online Video/movies are the top three online channels for Chinese youth
• Out of the top 5 sites in China based on traffic, Yahoo China (No.5) is the only international player out them, others are all local players.
• Chinese participation in Social media sites is higher than the global daily average.
• Bulletin Board Sites (BBS) are extremely popular
• The Total online ad spend per internet user in China is only at $8, however the ad market has heated up and is growing at 50% with increased ad spends due to the Olympics
• Internet censorship and moral policing are very common in China, in fact 85% of Chinese approve government internet censorship.

So what’s your take on the Chinese internet market ? Do you have more insights ? What do you think are future trends in China ?

Microblogging from DCamp 2.0 Bangalore

Folks, I am covering the DCamp 2.0 event happening at ADITI in Bangalore over on Twitter and Friendfeed. To learn more about the event, check here.

No more live blogging 140 characters works much much better.

Follow me over on

Twitter – www.twitter.com/vinodhn

Friendfeed – www.friendfeed.com/vinodhn

and let’s get a discussion going.

DCamp Bangalore 2.0

Design Camp 2.0 bangalore is all set to happen on the 26th July, 2008. This time it is being hosted at ADITI along with the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). To participate in the event you can register on the wiki from here.

Date : 26th July, 2008. 10 AM onwards.

Location : Aditi Technologies
224/16, Ramana Maharishi Road, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore – 80

DCamp is an unconference focused broadly on design and user experience community. It is open to everyone interested in the topic: designers, usability practitioners, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and other audiences.

We already have close to 50 registrations with very interesting speaker slots. If you wish to speak at the event, sign up for a speaker slot on the wiki.

If you have any interesting ideas for the event or wish to have discussions / BOF sessions around specific topics, leave me a comment or call me on 98866 38995.

See you there!

Recap of the last year – Techcruising

It’s now almost an year since I started blogging seriously – blogging about work, about trends in technology, product management, user experience and usability.

It’s one year down and this is my 50th post on this blog. Not bad after all, an verage of four posts a month, a post a week!

The other I was just going through my blog stats and wanted to check out the most popular posts etc.

Here’s an excerpt

Top 5 posts and pages of all time along with the number of views

MOSS based internet portals	766
Living in a web 2.0 world !	316
Apple form factor evolution	247
Microsoft announces eScrum Tool	132
Microsoft Cloud OS	126
About Me	119

Here’s the traffic snapshot over the last year. I think that this is fairly consistent, but would like to hear from experienced bloggers about this trend line.

Any finally search engine terms which brought me in traffic, here are the top terms along with the number of clicks

Web 2.0	211
Product Evolution	107
Apple	75
MOSS Strategy	64
Microsoft	54
MOSS for internet	25

Thanks for all your support, keep the comments and feedback flowing!