Latest project - Indian payments on eShop plugin for wordpress

Did anyone notice that no wordpress eCommerce plugin offers payments in INR? I use the eShop plugin for one of our eCommerce websites and it was rather painful to integrate INR Payments into the plugin. However, things may be about to change for the better!

Am trying to convince the guys at EBS to integrate their payment gateway in the eShop plugin. What with Wordpress 3.0 being launched and eShop's latest version about to become live, this might be the best time for an Indian payment gateway to be permanently integrated into the plugin. Hope it goes well, will update on this blog - stay tuned!

Websites that make money from YOUR updates

Never thought this was possible? Well, there are websites out there that make money when YOU write a blog update! Or even when you tweet to your own followers. How's that possible? Well - all they need to do is aggregate your data on their webpages and then have advertisements bring them the money. Typically, such a website will be owned by someone you want yourself to be associated with. Alternatively, they might also have some sort of an incentive for you to stay and have your content published through them. The system is definitely not illegal. In fact, it might be a great idea for you to make money from the internet - just think of something that can leverage the power of the masses. It could be something like a website that pulls data from other websites. Remember though, that one should always give credit to the source you're getting your data from. It's just plain ethics :)

Here's the first website, from Guy Kawasaki, that makes money for him when people write their blogs. Alltop is a great idea, and it solves a real problem - giving people one place where they can find all the top blogs and websites that cover a certain aspect of online publishing. What's more, it has become a rage with bloggers to have their content listed with Alltop. How Guy did it is just plain clever.

What's more, AllTop is also emerging as a one-stop for people to research on various topics that they cover (40 of the top searched topics on the internet). There's a whole section for people who're interested in blogging. You can see entries from your competition, all at one place.

And here's another website - TwitterTops, that attempts to do on twitter what Guy did with blogs and websites. The idea may be smaller, but the central theme is the same - to bring top tweeps together. In its current avatar, the websites appears to only collate TwitterTops from various geographies. Hopefully they'll be able to eventually amass tweeps based on their expertise as well. After all, just being the top twitter user in a particular country or city doesn't mean as much as being a twitter authority on a subject! The TwitterTops management needs to wake up and take notice!

Of course - you can also argue that all the top bloggers are eventually making money off of other people's hard work - TechCrunch does not itself make all the great web services they talk about. Popular Science doesn't invent all they write about. But at least these guys write about stuff! AllTop and TwitterTops promise not to write about stuff - they are only going to show the world what YOU have thought of! If only I could think of the next similar idea that could fly :)

Thanks to the social networks that make discovering such websites easy!  

PutVote redirecting to SalesForce?

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:

Indianpad

NewsCola

HumDigg

IndiaMarks

IndiaGram

Formus of \India

IndiaBytes

NaDa to Report

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.

AdAir - First Peek at Dubai

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.

Bubble 2.0

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 :)

Take on Internet Applications

GigaOM has an interesting post today on Big Internet is Web 2.0’s OS — so Who Owns the Apps? written by Alistair Croll. I have known GigaOM for some very insightful pieces of information but this post is really on top. Alistair writes about how opening up their platforms helps large web services like eBay, Google and Amazon turn into operating systems, servicing niche areas of online business.

Big Internet companies are making themselves the OS of the web 2.0 world. In addition to the fundamentals — operating a web application, storing data, handling logins — each company has a core expertise. In Google’s case, it’s page ranking and relevance; Facebook maps social relationships; Salesforce knows about customer relationships; and eBay has an auction and reputation engine.

Applications created on top of powerful existing platforms get the inherent ability to be relevant and effective, yet light weight. An application built on top of the eBay platform leverages from its reputation and auction engine while delivering functionality that eBay itself may not want to currently get into. Opening up their platform has brought Facebook where it currently is.

Creating an environment for application creation is beneficial for the web service crown jewels of today and they will only hurt themselves by creating roadblocks in the way of application development. Hopefully the Facebooks of today realize the goldmine of collective intelligence they are sitting on and try to tap into it by removing some of the hurdles. Creating conditions for development of applications serving the long tail is going to be the way of the future as per the current internet trends.