Sify iWay, candidate for WebOS ?

Sify has over 3000 VoiP enabled cyber cafes called “Sify Iway” in most the major cities (149 cities) and towns of India. These are franchise run cyber cafes where SIFY provides the network and billing software to run the cyber cafes. The billing is centralized and each cyber café makes money based on the number of hours of internet usage. Users have a single sign-on ID which is created once during initial the registration process.

Just like prepaid mobile, IWAY provides you prepaid broadband access with a roaming user ID which you can use in any Sify IWay cyber cafe's through out India. About 60% of Indian users access their broadband internet in cyber cafés and SIFY has most of this market share. Lot of Indians have their first broad band experience in one of these cyber cafes which are very popular with the school and college kids.

The SIFY Iway cyber cafes have computers which are stripped down Microsoft Windows with absolutely minimal storage options. Once the user logs out of the computer all the files created during the session are deleted, so the only option is saving the files as an attachment in an email message. Besides local storage doesn’t make sense, since it’s a shared PC and users might end up using a different PC during the next visit to the cyber café.

These computers have the mandatory Microsoft Office which is used mainly for editing or updating resumes. These machines are strictly meant for browsing, but lack of choice in terms of operating system limits them to using Microsoft Windows.
Companies like Google, Yahoo which are putting together the components for a WebOS, should take a closer look at iWays, since webOS has better chance of getting accepted in this model. If Google were to launch a Gdrive, online storage of bookmarks, Word Processor, Spread Sheet etc which could be delivered over the web, IWAY can be perfect match for this technology.

If a network computer every made sense for mass captive audience, then this is the best fit.
Since this is a prepaid service and the cash credit exists in the user account, this can be tied up with some sort of payment system to enable transactions like Railway ticket booking (which is huge in India) and Airlines reservations etc. Ecommerce is a relatively un-tapped field in India with great potential for growth because of lack of proper payment options.

Sify Iways also have VoiP enabled telephone booths which are used for providing extremely cheap (6 cents per minute to US) international phone calls. These are cheaper than the rates of any state owned or private telephone service.These cyber cafes provide a major growth area for Broad Band in India. Since the cost of ownership is divided, people can access broadband at the rate of 40cents per hour without ever needing to invest in a PC.
Besides Sify is a major ISP in the Indian market, which again gives the possibility of distributing toolbars/instant messengers to the ISP users.

PS: This blogpost was sitting in draft mode for the past few months and for some reason never got published. Since the time of writing this article, some four months back, Google launched Google Browser Sync and Google spreadsheet.

Google, please fix google news.

Google news is my home page for viewing breaking news and getting a daily dose of topics that get most attention. There was a news item today with the headlines "California Port Shut Down Over Possible Terrorist Threat", with Oprah's picture next to it. Oprah and terrorist threat ?
That sounded bizarre and clicked on the link to visit the website. Well the "Google Spider" was bringing back "Banner ad" which featured Oprah's image on it, instead of images in context to the news items.
Here is another news item "Rice to visit Pakistan, Russia". Google news figures Rice is a white, tennis playing Russian.

Google's lack of focus, exposes the weakness of search products like Google Image search, Google news and Google Blogsearch. One would think that these are low hanging fruits which Google's engineers could have nailed in 20% of their time.
Weakness in these areas is allowing competing products like Riya ( Image search), Technorati ( Blogsearch and meme tracker), memeorandum to sneak in. This market was Google's for the taking from the beginning and they are making themselves vulnerable on these fronts. Talking of techmeme, it gets a lot of my attention to find the buzz in blogo-sphere , more than Google News. With the resources that went into building Google News, one would imagine a meme tracker would have come out of Mountain View long back.

Google Browser Sync

In March, I had posted about a company called Glaxtar which provides a firefox extension to provide a personalized web experience by replicating browser settings, bookmarks etc across every browser user logs onto. Seems like Google's been working on this and they have come up with "Google Browser Sync".

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions

The web browser in its current form is not built for RIA ( Rich internet applications), but firefox with its extensions provides a great way to circumvent some of these issues.

Riya looks at becoming image search engine

Riya, the photo recognition website is entering into the "image search" market. Hitwise had released figures of traffic at various Google properties and image search ranked at #2 with 9% of the total usage. Google's image search lacks any kind of image recognition and looks more like a image "names" search engine.
Images or Photos are the single biggest source of user generated content and the least exploited in terms of "contextual advertisements". Riya with its ability to recognize patterns and text in images can develop the ability to provide contextual ads. Michael Arrington at techcrunch has more and he is calling it a "major strategy shift". I am betting this would have been the strategy from the beginning, just kept under wraps to keep GYM out.

When it’s ready, users will be able to search on an image (the easiest way will be via a browser plugin to search right from the page containing the images). See a rug on ebay that has a pattern you like? See other rugs from across the web containing similar patterns. Riya will make money if the result you click on is from another ecommerce company - Riya pockets the referral fee.

I would think Riya is missing a big opportunity in not doing what Google did with text. Provide incentive for users to host images and provide contextual ads for those images based on a combination of "image recognition", "tagging" and "text surrounding the images". Riya should do a "Adsense for images" on the lines of "Adsense for text".
Related Posts : Image ranking algorithm

Tags: Image Ranking Algorithm, Image Search, Search, Adsense for images

Ebay : Click to Call

This is what shareholders of ebay get after spending 2.6$ billion and nine months of wait.ebay adds a "click to call" link on some product categories. What took them so long ?

OM Moves on

Was waiting till I heard from the man himself. Om has written a emotional post about leaving Business 2.0 and moving on. Gigaom has been a part of my daily reads and really enjoyed engaging with OM and his readers on various topic. I remember, OM once had a survey carried out regarding his readership. Out of the people who responded 18% were CEO's,CTO's, founders etc. That tells something about the quality of gigaom and influence. Wish Om all the very best.

MSN Virtual Earth India : High definition map of Bangalore

MSN VirtualEarth India has launched high definition map of Bangalore City. This is one of the first few efforts in providing a mapping solution for India. Virtual India is a research project by Microsoft Research India, in collaboration with the Government of India's Department of Science and Technology, powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth™ technology.
More from the MSN VirtualEarth India blog

We have street-level maps only of Bangalore (you can zoom down to Bangalore and view the street map of Bangalore in multiple languages). We have rendered these maps and translated street and place names ourselves. Bear in mind that there can be errors in both the underlying data and in the rendering and transliteration process. Do report any gross errors in our online forum and we’ll try to fix them. At this time, we have not enabled the full functionality of community pushpins. While you can search for a set of pre-loaded public pushpins (like “park”), we do not yet allow users to *add* public pushpins in this public version of Virtual India. We will enable adding of public pushpins in about a week – after we have had the chance to gauge the load on our servers and to respond to initial feedback on our site.

Looks like the folks at MSN Research have put in this data manually, so some of the information on the map can be incorrect. Its sickening to know , the local authorities don't even have a proper map to help the Indian public. I recall my days in India where our Motorcycling Club used to depend on Lonely Planet maps rather than anything else available in the market for planning our routes.