Start IT up

Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, and here’s a glimpse of what happened when I visited orkut.com using gogle chrome:

Click on the picture to view full size (570KB)

I was waiting for our designer to show me some htmls so in the meantime I thought of ‘browsing’ Google Trends
I looked at the home page for couple of minutes thinking how can this be helpful, after looking at the listed examples first thing that caught my attention was “Tip: You can compare searches by separating with commas.” and I clicked on “music, fashion, sex“. Ok, so I saw a big graph and the searches per region. India was at number six but what was interesting to see was the orange bar. Indians are googling way more for word ’sex’ than anyone else in the world. It instantly made me think if searches on google are indication of people’s interest then I can find other interesting information for eg.
- Which country is most likely to be shopping online? Gift, shopping US, UK, Australia
- What sells more jewellery, clothes, flowers? - clothes.
- What about India? - Flowers. And guess what punjab is on the top.
- Which country might be having most Java programmers. India and Bangalore on top.
- Which is more common java, .net, php, ruby, python. Java wins by clear margin and again India and Bangalore
- Which place in India might have most struts programmers. Noida and Pune.
- Mysql more famous or postgreSQL Mysql
- Where are most people searching for jobs? India, UK
- Most Kerala people are looking for matrimonial sites.
- Some obvious ones India, Pakistan searches most on cricket and US, Canada on baseball

I couldn’t make sense to following searches.
- Why is India searching for India?
- Also ‘outsourcing’?
- What could this mean? startups

Over the weekend we went to the open yahoo! hack day at Bangalore ….and what……

Here are the ideas we thought of

1. A service which will take your favorite blogs, your linked in profile or/and your favorite articles as input and create a mash-up of articles you might be interested in from Amazon or images from flickr or events from upcoming. Will also try to make a guess as to what kind of person you are.
2. Visualizr, what we initially called as pic-story and the one we finally built.
3. Travel Helper - Give us your travel dates and cities you are visiting and we will tell you what are the events happening during that time on those places and we will also show you interesting pictures from flickr taken in those cities so that you can decide what you want to do if you have free time.
4. Tell us what you want to buy and we will give you all the relevant information. for e.g. items from different shopping sites, review sites, news, flickr etc
5. Pictorial how to? Give us step by step procedure of creating or doing anything and we will return the same how with pictures to understand better.

Creating visualizr was fun and we really like the idea as it could actually be applied in lots of things like

• Make your own cards
• Build an ad campaign
• With more comprehensive image access a new way of communication
• Evolve as a How to tool? Ask 10 questions and see how Images can answer for you
• May give a whole new way of learning difficult concepts
• Or just brighten up your day

So what are you waiting for, go check it out

Few days ago I played an interesting quiz. You should try it when you have time. I enjoyed solving it. Once done, though I was feeling happy to have solved it, I was not satisfied. Why, because I was wondering as to who really solved it, me or the search engine?

In todays connected world that has so much information available on the internet, solving a quiz is no longer a feat. Instead of trying to ponder over adwork through the quiz questions, I was clicking happily on the results the search engine had spit out. And on the more difficult ones I was trying to analyze which search results are more relevant. So much for instant gratification. Had it been 6-8 years ago, it would have taken me a few hours to finish it, or maybe even more. But at the end of it, I would have felt satisfaction and real happiness. And in the process I would have probably remembered the answers to all questions for the rest of my life. But on the bright side, I am getting better at searching and finding relevant informaion faster on search engines

With a few free days on hand and the ICC Cricket World Cup around the corner, we here at TechJini thought why not make use of the time and create something for the World Cup. Thus CheerMyTeam was born. The features were driven by two factors, 1. We are cricket fans and 2. We wanted to use some libraries/technologies. So after deciding the features, we spent about 4 days creating it. Here is what you can do on the site:

• Get a widget that you can place on your site/blog to show support for your country (See the widget in action below at the end of this post)
• Vote for and cheer your favourite team
• Vote for and cheer your favourite players
• View latest World Cup public photos from flickr and videos from youtube
• Take part in discussions
• View live score (thanks to vcricket)

Thats all we had time for although we wanted to do much much more. After all you cannot do much on a diet of beers and pizzas

The widget (for India) is below. You can get the widget for your country.

If you have any feedback/suggestions/brickbats about the site, please leave a comment.