| |
CYBERCHATTER
RATES
OF INTEREST: who, what, why?
 In
this age of dotcom feeding frenzy, it's easy to get jostled by the rush
of sites-and conflicting claims. What are the best sites in India? Or
the world? Most self-propelled ratings will simply mislead you. An Indian
service portal I tracked recently, drawn by a press release that said
it was ranked as one of the "top sites of the world" by Alexa
Research, an American Net research and service company, is typical. It
wasn't in the top 100 or 1,000. It was in the top 1,00,000, and wedged
towards the back end.
Sites that
rate other sites are used primarily by the business to pitch for VC funding,
buy-outs, or more business. Or to boost page-views by submitting URLs
to search engines, offering advice on site positioning, keywords, and
so on. But they are also a fairly good way of figuring how your favourite
ISP, mail provider, search engine, auction hot spot or pleasure palace
stacks up. If you travel to alexaresearch.com,
you will see a mix of Indian and international sites in its Top 100 that
register page views from India, ranging from yahoo.com
at the top (for October) to
bestindiansites.com which comes in at 100 (india-today.com
came in at 83, after amazon.com).
Bestindiansites.com
offers a selection of Indian or India-specific sites in their rating.
Like many others, this site pitches ratings based on a range of parameters,
from traffic rating and listings in major search engines to more subjective
ones like load time, browser compatibility, content and site design. Often,
a bunch of site editors blessing do or die can be such a mood thing, but
a casual scan shows here they aren't really off the mark. An e-zine rating,
for instance, led to a great site that ought to be a boon for Silicon
Valley or body-shopping hopefuls, at siliconindia.com.
These ratings
and special mentions serve as a reality check. If you're a free-agent
surfer, it'll help you get a little perspective. If you're in the business,
you get perspective, plus an offer to help you learn the tricks of the
trade for better Net presence. Then again, there's always the time-tested
way of being in the right site at the right time by using a search engine,
or having your buddy say, "Hey, have you checked out this great new
site...?"
-Sudeep
Chakravarti
Q&A
Sridhar Mitta
 Sridhar
Mitta (ex-Wipro) is MD of e4e Labs, a technology "holding" company
that takes start-ups from ideas to growth. Excerpts from an interview
with K. Jayadev of COMPUTERS
TODAY:
Q. Are
VCs and incubators going in the right direction?
A.
Most
of them aren't equipped to take this kind of job. They lack money and
experience. I think 90 per cent of these firms will die within the year.
Q. Today,
everybody is talking services. Has India lost the product development
battle?
A.
It is a wrong assumption that services is a low-tech job. In fact, using
R&D expertise and the Internet as the distribution platform we will
deliver services globally.
Q. Can
India replicate Silicon Valley?
A.
That's near to impossible. Silicon Valley was a constant effort from incubation
to idea labs. Sharing of ideas is most common among entrepreneurs there.
In India, sharing of ideas is considered taboo for the growth of the organisation.
(Please
send your comments to Sudeep Chakravarti at sudeep@intoday.com)
 Hot
Off The Web |
Reality
Checks:
Average
time spent on activities by Internet Users in Metros
Time spent on Internet: 2.5 hours
Reading Books: .6 hours
Reading Papers: 1.2 hours
Watching TV: 1.8 hours
Average Monthly Spend of Internet Users
Internet: Rs 596
Newspapers: Rs 217
Television: Rs 132
Source:
International Data Corporation
|
| MAIL
MERGE: The Mivo 200 from Mailstation (mailstation.com)
is a text-only gizmo that plugs into any phone line to receive and
send mail and receive updates from Yahoo! Mivo doesn't browse the
Net but the US $99.99 (Rs 4,600) gadget can be carried anywhere for
a dial-up- currently only in the US and Canada. Mailstation says it
will network elsewhere.
|
Keywords
Did you type any of these top keywords in search engines
last week?
Mp3: 6.67
Sex: 5.74
Hotmail: 3.92
Yahoo: 2.67
Warez: 2.67
Pokeman: 2.11
N64 roms: 2.01
Chat: 1.82
Pamela Anderson: 1.51
Playboy: 1.41 |
Top
|
|
The
Indian industry has increased its decibel level of whining. Instead, it
should get the government to deliver, says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor
V. Shankar Aiyar in 