After being in a hiatus for just over a year, P4I gets revived. Well, sorta. Some new services appear so good you can't miss covering them. The post that follows talks about smsmeon.com - a service that has the same potential that hotmail had when Sabeer Bhatia made it. It's up to the creators to make it big!
Indian social bookmarking site PutVote.com may have lost traction with the public finally. The site is currently redirecting to this page in SalesForce.
To verify yourself, click the PutVote link above. Hover over the link before you click to make sure it points to the right page. The way I see it, PutVote would've been started by SalesForce (correct me if I am mistaken) and had to be shut down on account of either spamming or misuse by people. Here's a snapshot of what the site looked like, from Google's Cache. It isn't too hard to identify the spam links.
Last I remember, the site did not have any bookmarking juice to offer. This just goes to prove that using bad English isn't the best idea to attract the growing Indian internet audience.
Here are some of the other social bookmarking sites available in India:
Found a great piece of software that works across platforms and OSs, across computers and hand-held devices, never fails in what it does and requires less than a couple of seconds to download and install. Introducing NaDa - it does nothing for everybody!
Here's what the creators have to say about this product:
NaDa™ is a new concept. A thought, really. It is very light : 1 byte. It doesn't take long to fetch. It doesn't take long to understand. It doesn't disturb your habits nor does it makes you feel insecure. It is a reassuring piece of software that does nothing, and does it very well. That's a lot !With good reviews and recommendations from users, there really is no reason why somebody would not want to install NaDa in their systems. Here's the download link. If you like what you install, be sure to leave a comment.
Did you hear of the newest advertising idea in the world? I bragged about it here even though I don't have anything to do with it. Now AdAir just landed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's largest banner! At 20,000 square meters, I'm sure nothing else comes close.
And who is going to be the advertiser on this outdoor media? Guardian quotes Stephen Jones in that the advertiser is going to be a real estate company, in line with the current expansion in Dubai. Soon you will see ground based advertisements when you fly over Los Angeles International Airport and Chicago O'Hare.
As I wondered earlier, the ads will most likely target window seat passengers flying to these airports. This may well be one of the ways that make air travel free in the future. Would you mind a travel route covered with advertisements if your tickets were free? Or would you rather take an aisle seat and pay for it?
During an email brainstorming session with Chahal, he pointed out another way for advertising on the ground - use one (or many) of those laser lights to draw high-refresh images on the ground. That way, the ads can be moving pictures instead of being just still ones. This would definitely impact the conversion rates (which are going to be difficult to measure) and the amount of attention the ads receive. Unfortunately we did not brainstorm what happens to the ads in the day. Maybe the current day/night ads can double as a screen for night-only laser advertising.
Surely, this kind of advertising is only beginning now and we can expect more innovations in this arena soon.
This is where I got the news from.
FrankShaw has a very interesting post here on the reasons why the current internet bubble will pop. The example he points to, eBay's acquisition of Skype for $3.1 Billion in 2005, is very relevant to the argument that the current trend of buying over perceived value of a company might lead to the creation of a bubble. Armed with the right tools, one can find a lot of such examples in today's markets.
If you look at the current 'online contextual advertising' market, you can see signs of a bubble forming. Almost every service depends on advertising as a monetization method. If you remember those obstructive ads of yesterday, the contrast between then and now is very noticeable. Problem is, there might be a race for the two types of advertising models to meet midway. If you've noticed, webpages keep getting more and more cluttered with advertising and other 'link propagating' methods. And visitors keep evolving too, most people today have learnt to avoid even the most contextually relevant ads. Of course, the system works when I'm searching for airline tickets to the Bahamas, but not when I am searching for information on Labor Day. And most searches are probably related for information and may not be focused on products per se. Effectively, people get trained to ignore the advertisements altogether.
So what might the future of advertising hold? I'm tempted to say "that's for Google to decide", but I guess "Time will tell" isn't a bad cliche after all. BTW, lemme know if you find this blog too cluttered :)
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