Web2.0 "websites" from India

One of my readers (Rajeev) pointed me out to two interesting websites catering to India. The first one ins www.ilaaka.com which is similar to www.zvents.com, catering to events, deals, offers etc for Indian cities. Interesting effort, but lacks user momentum and adoption. Will check back in a few months time to see usage.

The second is a classified search/local search engine called onyomo. Onyomo has a nice AJAX based map for some of the major Indian cities. Searching for cinemas in Bangalore worked nicely with the list of movies playing along with small map of the location. Mapping has a long way to go since there is no "driving direction" option and the individual images take lot of time to load. Onyomo should consider consider using local.live.com API for this ? It will save them on development effort and bandwith. Mapping and driving directions in India is a big challenge not just for start ups like onyomo but even for biggies like Google or MSFT. Searching for other things like cyber cafes didn't yield any results. These companies are competing directly with the likes of Google/Yahoo and MSN which have set the bar very high for such services. I am still searching for a USP for these website besides the Indian/local flavour.

Salary comparions from Indeed

Liked the just released "salary comparison" feature from indeed. For example the difference in salary between a j2ee developer and a .net developer is roughly 7k. Seems reasonably accurate. I have found indeed to be better than simplyhired.com, another competing job search engine.

Flash based updates to Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance, one the most popular offering from Yahoo is experimenting with flash based charts and portfolio. This is an answer to Google Finance, which also uses flash instead of AJAX in its finance offering. The first impression pretty good and would look forward to a full featured upgrade You can try the new flash based Yahoo Finance here.

On hacking of citibank's onscreen keyboard

BoingBoing has a post about how citibank's on-screen keyboard is defeated by Trojans.

A new trojan that records screen-movies has been discovered in the wild; the malware specifically captures your mouse as you laboriously enter your password into banking sites that use on-screen keyboards to defeat keyloggers

Its time the pin heads running the banks start providing two factor authentications. With the spread of cell phones its time the Banks use a two factor scheme where the tokens can be obtained via an SMS on the cell phone or use Cellular Authentication Token. Simple user name / password schemes are archaic and have lived beyond their purpose.

Oracle profits up 29%

Oracle announced first quarter results and profits are up by 29%.

Net income for the fiscal first quarter rose 29 percent to $670 million, or 13 cents per share, from $519 million, or 10 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue rose nearly 30 percent to $3.59 billion from $2.77 billion.

New software license sales rose nearly 28 percent to $804 million from $629 million last year. This a good indication of where the company is headed in the futured. It indicates that Oracle is able to hold on to the customers from the acquisitions. Quoting Kim Caughey

"It is one thing to just hold onto the customer," she said. "It is another thing to get them to buy the next version as well. It looks like they are doing that."

This is not entirely accurate since project fusion is still a few years away. But this is a good indicator of customer preference and that Oracle is able to hold on to customers. The applications business will be in a critical phase mid 2008 when the integrated product(Fusion) would be released. The challenge then would be convince the customers of the advantage of moving to SOA based architecture and justify the cost of the upgrade. Oracle stocks are up 13% in after hours trading.