OlaCabs : Book a Car/Cab online!

We have already seen, how internet has revolutionized Train/Flight ticket booking. This technology can also be used to change our ground transportation system. GeekOnNet is featuring another hot startup from Mumbai "OlaCabs", started by 2 IIT-Bombay Alumnus.

OlaCabs offers car rental services for local use as well as outstation use. You can book cab/car online or over the phone.

Why do you want to book cab/car online? GeekOnNet is mentioning some benefits of online car/cab booking.

1. You pay the right price for your journey
2. The security of door to door service
3. Guaranteed journey
4. Ease of use
5. 24 hour service
6. Airport and other journeys
7. Excellent for business use

In an exclusive interview to the GeekOnNet team, Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of OlaCabs and a very good friend of mine speaks about his company, its targets and future plans.

Venture Name: Olacabs.com
Founder(s): Bhavish Aggarwal, Ankit Bhati

The Geeks: What inspired you to start olacabs? What are the services offered by OlaCabs? What is the specific problem that OlaCab is solving?

Olacabs: I had once rented a car for a weekend trip with friends to Bandipur from Bangalore. The driver turned out to be a cheat. He stopped the car in Mysore en route to Bandipur and asked to be paid more than what had been decided earlier. He was so rigid and ill mannered that we had to leave him there and continue our journey by bus. This led to the business idea of using technology to offer a better and more predictable experience to consumers and improve efficieny for the car owners/drivers.

We offer car rental services for local use as well as outstation use. You can book online or over the phone and be assured of a reliable, safe and quality experience.

The Geeks: What’s your Business & revenue model.

Olacabs: We work on a pay-for-performance model. We just charge a commission in whatever sales that we bring to car owners. Also, to get access to the technology platform, we charge them a small fee. Other than that, there are no other costs that operators have to bear.

The Geeks: How difficult/easy for you to convince cab owners about your services? What obstacles have you overcome?

Olacabs: We have tied up with many car operators in Mumbai. They are very receptive to our concept as we work on a pay-for-performance model. The harder part is sourcing car owners. Since it is a fragmented industry, getting to the owners is a time consuming process.

The Geeks: There are few big players in this market. So, how can you differentiate OlaCabs from them?

Olacabs: most cab booking portals are plain vanilla websites with price listings. Our strategy is to focus on the backend with car operators because that would ensure a certain level of quality and predictability with respect to the consumer experience. We intend to bring all car operators and all taxis on to a single technology platform to enable real time inventory distribution, nationally.

The Geeks: What prospects are you visualizing for your company 5 years down the line? Are you going to implement something new (e.g. Mobile phone booking, smart phone’s app for cab booking etc.) to your business?

Olacabs: The entire ground transportation industry in India is run in a very opaque, inefficient and ad-hoc manner. There is no service guarantee or price transparency for the consumer and operators are also troubled with no structured channel through which customers can be sourced. We believe that technology will help make this industry efficient and drastically improve the consumer experience in years to come. We are definitely considering developing mobile bookings and smart phone apps in the near future!

The Geeks: After working in the world’s leading S/W firm for more than 2 years, what led you to quit your job and start your own venture? What are the rewards of owing own business over a nine to five job?

Olacabs: I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur since my college days. After spending 2 years in my job at Microsoft, I started feeling bored and restless. So I got together with Ankit and we decided to start a company. I left my job and moved to Mumbai to start Olacabs.
Working on a startup means you are the guy responsible for everything. The buck stops with you. The thrill and challenge of designing a company bottom up is beyond comparison and something you just cannot get in a job!

The Geeks: Any suggestions for future entrepreneurs?

Olacabs: The biggest joy and the biggest challenge in entrepreneurship is finding a real and challenging problem to solve. Most of us first generation entrepreneurs have a tough time finding the right problem. But once that is figured out, the joy of solving real issues for real users and seeing people benefit from your innovation is beyond comparison! So just be persistent!

Olacabs provides the simplest way to book a Cab/Car. You enter your city and your need. Olacabs searches the available inventory of its partners and provide you with a list of results and prices of different available cars from different operators. You can see rating of that operator, what other customers said of them, and then book it on Olacabs.com. Or you can call Olacabs at (022) 322-65-652 and they'll help you through the process!

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UniApply: One-Stop Solution for all Education needs

Choosing your career is an important step because your future is at stake. It is generally observed that a large section of students are unaware of what they want to achieve in life or how they can achieve their goal. This amounts to a situation like boarding a train without knowing one's destination. Undoubtedly it may result in waste of precious time as well as money.

Team GeekOnNet comes again with one of the hottest startups "UniApply" (www.uniapply.in) of Bangalore (Bengaluru).
Three IIT Bombay alumni started UniApply (www.uniapply.in), an educational portal in July 2010 with a vision to eliminate information based discrimination among students. UniApply is a one-stop solution for all your education needs in terms of choosing the right institutes and most importantly applying to them. This trio furthers the goal of a successful transition of more students from high school to college and also help them in career advancements.
In an exclusive interview to the GeekOnNet team, Ranjan Banerjee, co-founder of UniApply (www.uniapply.in) speaks about his company, its targets and future plans.

Venture Name: UniApply (www.uniapply.in) Founder(s): Ranjan Banerjee, Kamlesh Laddad, Akshay Ukey.

The Geeks: How did you get the idea to start UniApply?

UniApply: Each and every one of us in our student life has surely been through the "All pain, No gain" application process and it was this realization that led to the need for automation in this sector. Today, almost all the students apply to multiple academic institutions before taking admissions in any vertical. However, there is a lack of connection resulting in a huge gap between various institutes and student/parent community. Hence, we aim to bridge the gap through our products and services by bringing all the stakeholders in education - students, parents, institutes, etc into a common platform.
UniApply aims to serve as a technological link between the educational institutions and students. While eliminating the prevailing information arbitrage, we aim to smoothen and strengthen automated education processes backed by a strong and updated technological base. UniApply team also develops innovative technology to enable students to successfully manage their educational and career plans. Its data-driven solution helps to bridge the transitions between high school, college, and career, by making certain that students take the necessary steps at the right time to reach their goals. Last but not the least; the collaboration platform will enable effective communication among the stakeholders in the educational ecosystem viz. institutes, faculty, students, alumni etc. Our basic objective is to help students to take informed decision about their academic and professional career and to help and guide them in preparation for competitive examinations. We also look forward to provide all sorts of information about admissions, different colleges, various career avenues, and entrance exams to students enabling them to make the right choice in selecting a career and institute option.
Our highly motivated team with its indelible technological background is determined to create a benchmark in the whole education process.

The Geeks: Give some details about the Team background and work experience.

UniApply: I (Ranjan) have completed my graduation / B.Tech from IIT Bombay. Post IIT, I worked at Zinnov Management Consulting, a business strategy consulting firm where I got an opportunity to work with Fortune 500 companies in projects related to market entry / expansion, go-to-market strategies, offshoring advisory etc. I have always been passionate about entrepreneurship and have been part of the core team at The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay. There when I met my other two co-founders, Kamlesh Laddad and Akshay Ukey.
Kamlesh and Akshay, both have completed their post graduation in Computer Science from IIT Bombay. Kamlesh was Senior Consultant at webMethods (now Software AG) in technical consulting division. He traveled round the globe during his tenure at Software AG and worked very closely with Business analysts and Functional analysts of MNCs and has a great understanding of industry processes.
Akshay was software engineer at America Online (AOL) and worked on key AOL properties like AOL Portal, AOL Autos, AOL Real Estate, etc. He has contributed to several open source projects and features of the Apache SOLR and has a publication in IEEE journal.

The Geeks: What is your market and how has been the response?
UniApply: With our aim to be the ultimate technology connect between the Educational Institutions and the students/parents community, we plan to associate with the institutes and have a parallel increase in our reach in the student community through online as well as offline campaigns. Our concept is being widely accepted. However we all know every new venture does have initial ignition issues yet undoubtedly there is arms open welcome to the concept.

The Geeks: Who are your competitors? How do you differentiate your products/services from that of others?
UniApply: All the portals providing education/career related information are our competitors. However, the domain of UniApply is yet unexplored, as very few startups are offering services related to admission application process. There is certainly a huge demand from the institutes’ side for automation of the pre-admission process and helping them enhance their reach in the student community. We are different from other education portals as we provide a platform for applications and admissions into an institute the student wants to join rather than just information on the institute. We aim to revolutionize the admission application process enabled by Information Technology and to remove information based discrimination among students. Our services are aimed not only at the application stage but also at the admission stage of an educational institute. Our focus is to automate and combine the areas of admission processes and thereby provide a single window for the students to apply to various institutions.

The Geeks: What are the rewards of running a business over a nine-to-five job? What are the challenges you have faced?
UniApply: There is always a joy of creating something new. Every day brings a new challenge, together with an opportunity to learn, create and innovate. Moreover, driving a business in itself is pretty exciting as you can mould the pre-existing concepts into an advanced level ideas and figure out the best possible ways to enhance your business and most importantly we are into a business that aims at making a student’s life simpler which is a huge impetus for us to keep going. However, since we are in start-up phase, we face challenges like recruiting the right person, funding etc.

The Geeks: What are the UniApply growth plans?
UniApply: Education industry is witnessing a fast paced growth so this sector has a promising growth going forward. There is significant increase in the number of institutes and students every year. Moreover, with the entire world getting tech-savvy and internet friendly, UniApply and all other education portals would achieve greater heights. Especially with regards to UniApply we intend to transform the application procedure and we are sure we would. We are looking for expanding horizontally and aim to broaden our reach both in terms of institutes as well as number of students. Apart from this, we are also looking forward at launching few more products/services targeted at helping students in their exam preparation.

It was a very interactive and informative talk with the team of UniApply. If you have any queries or suggestions please write to me (ranjeet@geekonnet.com) or info@uniapply.in

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QPrize: $750,000 Seed Fnding Competition

Qualcomm ventures has launched "QPrize" a business plan competition to support international entrepreneurship. This is the second edition of "QPrize" ie. QPrize-2010. QPrize is an initiative by qualcomm ventures to identify, strengthen and promote your business ideas (based on wireless technology only) while in the concept stage.

QPrize competition is open to entrepreneurs in India, North America, Europe, Israel, south korea and China and will provide $750,000 in total seed funding to help entrepreneurs transform their business plan in reality.

India regional winner will get a prize money money of 100,000$ and will also get chance to compete with other regional winners.

Timelines :

• December 14th,2010 - Deadline for submitting completed business plans
• January 15th, 2011 - Event to pick India region winner
• March 1st and 2nd, 2011 - Grand Finals in California

The India regional winner for QPrize - 2009 was "Capillary Technologies", an IIT Kharagpur incubated company from Bangalore, Capillary technologies provides mobile based loyalty programs for retailers. Their first product, "In Touch", is an SMS based loyalty program with analytics for retailers, with analytics on the web, as well as campaign management and messaging tools. They also provide SMS based event management for Events, College Festivals and Conferences, with registration, games, quizzes, schedule and event information.

Qualcomm Ventures (QCV) was formed and began funding in 2000, with a $500-million fund commitment to make strategic investments in early-stage high-technology ventures. Since then, QCV has funded numerous companies in the wireless sector, and set up several exclusive regional funds to spur development in key strategic markets, including a $60-million fund in Korea, a $30-million fund in Japan, a $100-million fund in China and euro 100-million fund in Europe.

In India, Qualcomm Ventures has invested in 5 companies –
Kirusa - Product: voice SMS,

MapmyIndia - navigation & mapping
Apalya - Products : TV on mobile
Capillary - Products: customer loyalty and relationship management over mobile
Tessolve - A high-end semiconductor service company

Here is your biggest chance to take you venture to the next stage and increase your visibity among the largest entrepreneurial community. The biggest thing is, this competition is for seed funding so there is no question of any negotiation with any VCs. Grab this opportunity and convert your "on paper ideas" into a reality.

Team GeekOnNet will be providing you all latest buzz of QPrize. For more information visit http://www.qprize.com/

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Epic Browser 1.2 : India’s first-ever Web-Browser

We had received an e-mail announcing the release of Epic Browser 1.2. For those who doesn't know about Epic browser, Epic browser is India's first-ever web browser developed by a Bangalore based Internet company "Hidden Reflex". Epic has already cleared more than 500,000 downloads in 178 countries.

• Epic has support for more than 12 Indian languages
  
• It includes more than 1500 apps such as gmail, twitter, facebook, orkut, travel, job, yahoo messenger, gtalk, cricket and games
• This is the first browser which has antivirus and antispyware integrated with it
  
• It has more than 1500 wallpapers and themes
• you can directly access My Computer
  

In newer version of epic, Hidden reflex mainly focused on Epic's speed and Security. These are the two things users always look for in web browser.

Epic 1.2 is faster, leaner and more powerful.

Here are the primary changes done in Epic 1.2.

Faster Load Times: Nearly 20% faster start-up times and faster rendering.

One-Click Super-AntiVirus Scan for file Downloads: When you download a file in Epic, you'll have an option to scan the file first via VirusTotal, our partner. They'll check if the link is considered malicious and scan the linked-to file with 40 different anti-virus engines including Symantic/Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky, K7, AVG, Avira, Panda and 33 other a-v products! They have removed antivirus scanner which was causing instability.

Facebook, twitter with Popup Alerts: Complete facebook, twitter sidebar.

Hide-able sidebar: You can hide the sidebar for more browsing space.

Easy Access to Auto-Saved Text Fields: If your computer crashes while you were typing a long e-mail, Epic saves your text and nothing is lost!

I have been using it from last 3 months and let me tell you this is awesome. Speed is still a concern but I am sure it will improve in every version. Epic is "all in one" browser.

You can download Epic from it's official site http://www.epicbrowser.com/index.html. I have only one request to my readers, use it, give feedback and promote this Indian browser.

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Internet Explorer 9 : First look

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) is upcoming new browser by Microsoft. Microsoft has released its Beta version 3 days back on 28^th October. Internet Explorer 9 is Hardware-accelerated HTML5. Internet Explorer 9 moves rendering of text and graphics from the processor, to the graphics card. That means, your website’s contents/images will be clearer and video will play smoother on Internet explorer – 9. When I first came to know about IE9, I had few questions in my mind.

1. is it fast enough?
2. is it compatible with different versions of windows?
3. What are the new security features in this new browser?
4. is it good/cool enough to win back former IE users who have migrated to Firefox, chrome and other browser?

Geek’s review:

The first thing which disappointed me a lot, was the system requirements. IE9 is not supported in windows XP & is only for windows 7 and Vista (32 and 64 bits). Thus answering to my 2nd question of compatibility. Sadly Microsoft has ignored its best OS the Windows XP. How hard is it for Microsoft to make a version compatible to windows XP? I still do not understand why Microsoft is wasting money and time on Vista & why Microsoft wants to kill windows XP?

Any way you can download its beta version from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide, the size of the installer is around 19 MB and installation is very slow, frustrating and forces you to restart your system after installation. But in the end I was able to install it on my laptop.

First look of IE9:

Ya, it's impressive. It is clean, simple and very minimalist. The address bar box works both as address bar and the search box. Browser options like home, file, history, bookmarks and tools are shifted to top right of the browser and represented by 3 icons only.

Pin website: IE9 has this very impressive feature to pin your favorite website in task bar as apps. You will just need to drag the favicon from the IE9 box down to your taskbar so that whenever you want to open this website just click on the icon in taskbar.

But how much is the use of this functionality is still to be seen? I really do not want to fill my task bar with different websites. Or my task bar space will not be enough for it. As a developer I would like to develop an app or add-ons which will show me the option to choose the website from pined websites when I do a right click on my task bar. Actually this will be very useful for the user if we integrate this option with “pin the website” feature. Regarding to website apps pining functionality I would say it’s new, refreshing but not much useful.

HTML-5 Test (How well does your website support HTML-5?) : Microsoft says that IE9 supports HTML-5 and CSS-3. But when I did html-5 test on http://www.html5test.com/ IE9 scored only 96/300 when firefox 3.6 scored around 130 and chrome scores 231 out of 300. IE9 is lacking behind in HTML-5 support by a huge margin in comparison to chrome and firefox. But ya, there is definitely an improvement from IE8 to IE9. IE 8 scores only 26 in HTML-5 test.

Speed/Security/other features: I can clearly see IE9 is faster than firefox 3.6 but slower than chrome. IE9 has no default ad blocker integrated with it. IE9 uses SmartScreen filter that warns you if the website that you are visiting contains threats.

Finally, Microsoft has realized where search box should be open when we press Ctrl-f. In IE9 it gets opened in the top of the browser just below URL bar, not like IE 8 which opens search bar in the middle of page.

Well, IE9 is cool, cleaner, simpler, fast and secure. Now all 3 browser giants are at equal level. Browser war is on now. This is a very good move by Microsoft to get back it's browser market share. It will be very interesting to watch how browser users will reply to IE9. For me, all three are equals now. I have more option now. But still my priority will be chrome-> Firefox -> IE9.

Write your IE9 experience or your questions about IE9 as comment to this post. Remember IE9 is still in Beta version. Use it on your own risk.

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GOOGLE INSTANT : Search Before You Type

8th September, The day when Google officially announced and added another milestone to make search easier, faster and efficient. Google Instant gives result as you type. you will get your search result faster than your typing speed.

I have been using it since the last 2 days and I have only one sentence to describe this i.e. “It’s mind blowing.” Here is some more insight to Google Instant and my first impression of it.

Features of Google Instant:

There are mainly 3 features of Google Instant:

• Instant search result: you get your search results before you can type. As soon as you start typing, Google Instant automatically shows results for a popular search that begins with those letters . You get your results before you finish typing your query and hitting enter.

• Predicted result: Google instant predicts what you are going to type next and gives predicted search query in search textbox in gray text. This predicted search query remains until you type next character.

• Scroll to search: Using up and down arrow keys you can scroll to suggestions and you get a updated search result page as you move on the suggestions. No need to click on “google search” button, no need to hit "enter" anymore.

Google says that Google Instant saves 2-5 seconds per search query and I can clearly see that it is saving our search time.

Also, Google has integrated safe search in Google Instant. If you want to search any uncensored adult things, Google Instant doesn’t suggest anything. You will need to hit enter in order to get search result.

Is it really effective? Generally, when we search anything, we have search query or phrases in our mind and we search or type accordingly. Here in Google Instant for every character, the search result page is being loaded or refreshed. The screen is flickering with results while typing query. I think this is very distracting to user.
Also I can not see any improvement in the quality of search results. It is fast and instant but search results are same as what we get in normal google search.

I think Google Instant is targeted at mobile phone users who are going to be the major revenue sources for google in the upcoming years. Predictive search result is similar to predictive text options which are used in smart phones and designed specifically to expedite the speed of typing on tiny keyboards.

Overall, I really like the instant results and seeing how the results change with just the addition of one letter. It will be interesting to see how the public take to it and adapt themselves to new search techniques.

Please let us know your views and experiences of Google Instant.

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