Decorate Your Google Search Home Page.

Google is always upto something new. But this time it enters the already trodden path of Microsoft's Bing. Like Bing it would give you an option of personalizing your search background. Bing had this feature right since its launch.

How does one configure it? Its very simple, go to the Google search home page, you can see a link "Change background image" on the bottom left of the page. Click on the link and you get a popup where you can upload your favorite image from your PC, from your picasa album or from google's public album.
Upload the image and you are done. Your favorite search engine page is now customized and personalized for you.

If you really like the old black & white classy background, click on link "Remove background image" and revert your changes.

What is Google trying to prove with this feature? Is Google trying to say that it's main competitor is Bing? I have almost forgotten Bing, but thanks to Google, I am reminded of Bing again. Is Google forcing us to use Bing?

Please write your ideas and views as comments to this post.

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Mnemonic Dictionary (www.mnemonicdictionary.com)

Short of words for GRE, GMAT or even CAT? You feel you are wasting your time and energy remembering all the difficult words? We present to you a solution -The Mnemonic Dictionary (www.mnemonicdictionary.com), which is going to help you in memorizing all these scary words.

Mnemonic Dictionary(MD) helps people retain and recall new words. MD provides memory aids (called mnemonics) for each word. Mnemonics is a connect to-be-remembered meaning of words with a systematic and organized set of images or words that are already firmly established in long-term memory and can therefore serve as reminder cues.

In an exclusive interview to the GeekOnNet team, Amit Aggarwal founder of MnemonicDictionary.com speaks about his company, its goals and future plans.

Founder: Amit Aggarwal
Founder's Background: B.Tech. Chemical Engineering, IIT-Bombay.
http://in.linkedin.com/in/amitaggarval

The Geeks: What inspired you to start MnemonicDictionary?
Amit: The idea for mnemonic dictionary came when I was still in college and was preparing for GRE. This exam primarily lays a lot of emphasis on vocabulary and I would struggle for hours to memorize new words. This technique worked wonders for me and I wanted to reach out to all those students and professionals with similar concerns and to save them from the usual grind. Mnemonic Dictionary was launched after spending several hours on building quality content for the website.

The Geeks: How long have your website been functional? Can you please explain your "Business and Revenue Model"?
Amit: Beta version of Mnemonic Dictionary was launched in May 2007. We are exploring other revenue models but currently our website is making money only from online ad inventory.

The Geeks: Your website contains a lot of information. What technology do you use to maintain such huge database of words?
Amit: Mnemonic Dictionary uses SQL format of Princeton University data bank, Wordnet which consists of not less than 150,000 words.’ Mnemonics’ on the website are mainly contributed by the active members and users.

The Geeks: Name some of your competitors in the market. How do you differentiate your website from them?
Amit: Answers.com and Dictionary.com offer similar services but none of them provide mnemonics aid. Mnemonic Dictionary is the only place which provides memory aids along with meaning and usage for each word.

The Geeks: What was the biggest hurdle you faced and how did you overcome it?
Amit: Biggest hurdle was getting traffic on our website as we started with a very low budget of approx 80,000 INR and did not have any money to invest on the professional marketing of the website. We capitalized majorly on Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. Currently, we are getting more than 1000 visitors daily only from search engines.

The Geeks: What are your future plans of expansion?
Amit: We are planning to publish our mnemonics data (for words in Barron) in the form of a book, so that users with constraints like poor net connectivity or inaccessibility to internet are not deprived of this wonderful technique of building vocabulary.

The Geeks: How do you publicize your website? Any big publicity campaigns coming up? What is your USP?
Amit: Word- of- mouth publicity has gone a long way in making us popular. Many GRE/GMAT/LSAT/CAT aspirants keep recommending the website to their peers’ .Also, our sound knowledge of SEO and SEM has helped us. The USP of our website is its powerful use of “mnemonics” to help in easy retention of words.

The Geeks: What background skill, knowledge and experiences help you in your business?
Amit: Experience and passion for web development and online marketing via SEO and SEM has made this journey rewarding for me.

The Geeks: My readers look at you entrepreneurs with a lot of respect and inspiration. We would like you to just give us some insight on your "mantra of success"?
Amit: I would like to quote famous lines of Shiv Khera
“Winners don’t do different things, they do things differently”
You just think how you can solve everyday problems differently and the rest would automatically fall in place.

We are very fortunate to have so many budding entrepreneurs in our country. We as GeekOnNet team is here to encourage their hard-work and talent. Our aim is to bring in more visibility and awareness for such startups. We hope all our avid followers help and support us in our novel initiative.

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EveningFlavors : for, your every evening is special

Looking to go out for a romantic dinner or a date with a special someone? Family in town, and you want to take them to a popular restaurant? EveningFlavors.com has just what you’re looking for. Team GeekOnNet comes again with one of the hottest startups of Bangalore (Bengaluru).

EveningFlavors.com is an online media & Services Company started by a team consisting of IIT and Industry professionals who has substantial knowledge in their respective fields and executed the idea in a cost efficient manner. Their aim is to make every evening of yours special. They started executing this idea from August, 2008 onwards EveningFlavors.com is the India's leading restaurant reservation, review and search site. EveningFlavors provides you with amazing offers and great events taking place in Bangalore.

You can now plan a party or book a table at your choice of place, rate and cuisine with a click on the mouse or a call to 080 - 40894999.

In an exclusive interview to the GeekOnNet team Akash Shrivastava, co-founder of EveningFlavors.com speaks about his company, its targets and future plans.

Venture Name: EveningFlavors.com
Founder(s): Akash Shrivastava, Ravi Shrias, Vinod C, Abhishek Kumar

The Geeks: What inspired you to start eveningflavors.com?
Akash: 90% of business ideas come from the problems we face in our daily life. We(team eveningflavors) being foodies always use to face issue to explore different restaurants and lounges on weekends and finally we had to be adventurous enough to risk our evening to explore new restaurant or rely on friends to get information about the new restaurants. We never found a dedicated service or web portal which would be reliable one stop solution for all dining and partying needs. Looking at the scope we quit our jobs in Aug. 2008 and started working on our baby idea which turned out to be huge content rich dedicated portal to F&B industry, table reservation and party assistance service called as EveningFlavors.com.

The Geeks: How long have your website been functional? Can you please explain your "Business and revenue Model"?
Akash: It’s been one and half year we are in business. We are lead based model where we work with our partnering restaurants to generate leads.
We already have around 300 active tie-up and another 200 indirect tie-up with restaurants in Bangalore. Average of around 10000 diners in Bangalore dine through us. Now with the sort of niche audience we have, new avenues of revenue have already started emerging in form of subscription and advertising.

The Geeks: Your website contains a lot of information, how do you basically keep yourself updated with all those new restaurants opening up every day? What is the secret of such a strong network?
Akash: We have put in strong initial effort to maintain the content on our website. Since, internet is still not in reach with the common people we had tough time in convincing restaurant owners for our portal. Slowly we picked up our pace and now are able to maintain the updated content by dedicating a team especially for the content management. Apart from this we are having user generated content too. Once we have got a brand value even the restaurants and beverages companies are putting their info in our website.

The Geeks: Name some of your competitors in the market. How do you differentiate your website from them?
Akash: Since, the market is crowded there are actually few big players like JustDial, and Asklaila, Burrp who falls into the basket of our competitors. But we are far different in term of our uniqueness for the content,offering and services which we impart.

The Geeks: What was the biggest hurdle you faced & how did you overcome it?
Akash: With so many TV channels, magazines and internet websites various marketing medium are saturated to its brink and initial stages of our business we used to have a pretty difficult time to get an appointment from restaurant owners leave aside explaining them the concept of Evening flavors. Whenever we tried to meet a restaurant owner we found tens of people already in the queue for meeting with them for promotions and marketing and they usually use to stereotype us as just one more good for nothing website!!!
Having put in lot of thought and efforts we have now established ourselves as strong brand in Bangalore market.

The Geeks: What are your future plans of expansion? How do you want your customers to look at eveningflavors.com 3 years down the line?
Akash: Our futuristic plan includes expansion to 15 top cities of India.And we work with the vision that 3 years down the line if your planning your dining and partying the next thing which should come in your mind is Evening Flavors.

The Geeks: How do you publicize your website? Any big publicity campaigns coming up?
Akash: We are having strong hold in the market segment for our publicity. Right from the online publicity we are hitting the offline market for our publicity. We are having marketing partnership with pubs, lounges, restaurant, newspapers and magazines for our offline publicity. Having tied up with CallEasy, CommonFloor and mofirst we are looking at even the bigger picture of our market hold.
Above all of this we are into SEO, SEM and viral marketing using social networking websites like facebook, twitter. Today EveningFlvors's facebook fanclub is having more than 4500 people.
Please wait and watch for the big publicity campaign coming up, they are there and will be implemented very soon.

The Geeks: What background skills, knowledge and experiences help you in your business?
Akash: Me, Ravi and Abhishek having few years of experience in corporate was something which led us frame the idea of EveningFlavors though with vinod having 17 yrs of experience in various fields was a asset and we got a good support from our family and friend which helped us dealing with issues very professionally.

The Geeks: My readers look at you entrepreneurs with a lot of respect and inspiration. We would like you to just give us some insight on your "mantra of success"?
Akash: Ha ha ha :)(Laughs) We have not tasted the big success yet though successful in achieving smaller landmarks. Would like to say it’s long tough journey, believe in your dreams, keep your eyes and ears open and keep learning from your mistakes .

If you think that I am missing something if you wanted to know about the venture mail me/comment your questions. My email id is ranjeet@geekonnet.com. I will try to include those questions in the forth coming interviews.

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AdSense : Now serving multiple ad networks

I received this e-mail (mentioned below) from Google AdSense Team last week, announcing new feature of AdSense. Now AdSense will be serving third party ad networks along with it's own Adwords.


Hi,

We have launched a new capability in AdSense allowing Google-certified ad networks compete directly within AdSense, which means that advertisers from these third-party networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers to show on the Google Content Network.

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you'll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks or all networks except AdWords. Please note that we'll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won't see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To ensure the quality of the ads that appear on AdSense publisher websites, Google will certify all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. Some participating ad networks use targeting methods similar to Google's interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won't be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we'll allow networks that comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. Publishers can opt out of user interest targeting from these ad networks, and Google has changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this.

We are currently only accepting ads from Google-certified ad networks in North America and Europe, but we will make this feature available to ad networks in additional parts of the world in the future.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

This feature didn't impress me at all but has raised some questions in my mind.
Why AdSense is going to serve third party network?
Is Google AdSense running out of advertisements and advertisers?
Does Google want to prove that It's ad network is the best by providing a common platform for every other network?

I think this new feature will be a killer for many ad networks. As stated in this e-mail, Google still approves the Ad networks for quality, privacy, speed etc. So, there is a chance that some high profitable ad networks may not clear Google Test. Well, I hope that from this new feature, publishers will have access to higher paying ad networks which will increase their ad revenues.

Your views and comments are welcome.

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FireFox 3.6

You often see a pop up window in order to upgrade your older version of firefox. More than 1 million users have downloaded and installed firefox 3.6 since its launch in mid January.

I have observed that since last week or two this pop up is appearing rather frequently. Does this mean that Mozilla is aggressively forcing us to upgrade our firefox?

This popup window appears after 60 seconds of keyboard activities and comes with 3 options "Ask Later", "No Thanks" and "Get the New Version". If you opt for "Ask Later" the popup window will come after 24 hours. If you chose - "No Thanks" and decide later to upgrade firefox, you will just need to run "Check for Updates" from help menu.

Performance: According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.6 is some three times faster than Firefox 3.0, and about 20% faster than 3.5. The most noticeable new feature in the new Mozilla browser is Personas, which allows users to personalize the look of Firefox. Other new features are, a "plug-in updater" that will detect out-of-date plug-ins, "form complete", and open video and audio via HTML 5 for full-screen display and poster frames.

Firefox 3.6 is not a major release so please do not expect any revolutionary changes in web browser technology.

Should we dump IE (Internet Explorer)? Tell me your answer as comment to this post.

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Social Wars!!

"When everyone is playing social games with friends, then why play akele?" This is the main tagline of an Indian social networking website for its recently launched social games. Being a Internet freak I feel that these games are just a newer version of the old stand-alone games. With better internet speeds and lots of social networking, the games have spread their wings from just being played on standalone PCs to now being played directly in the cloud. We can name this family of games as Game 2.0.

Game 2.0 is simply an integration of simple games made on some server side scripts, action scripts like JS or ajax, Flash and implemented on Web 2.0 (aka social networking).

For the newbies, let me tell you that social games are web based games which you can play with friends, mostly on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc. In this post I will give a brief about the biggest players in development of social games, and compare them in terms of market share, funding, revenue and business model.

We are already familiar with the popularity of the first generation social networking startups like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut etc. Now a new generation of application developers have taken center stage, who are based mostly on these gen1 social networking sites, and are making big money. The top 3 in my list are:

1. Company: Zynga (www.zynga.com)
   Funding: $219M
   Major Apps: Farmville- 61M Players, Mafia Wars- 25.8M , Yoville- 19.8M, Texas Hold Em’ Poker- 18.3M
   Revenue: Estimated $200M
   Zynga is a srong candidate for 2010 IPO.
2. Company: Playfish (www.playfish.com)
   Acquired: by Electronic Arts (EA Sports) for $400M
   Major Apps: Pet Society- 20.5M, Restaurant City-17.3M, Country Story- 8M
   Revenue: Estimated $135M
3. Company: Playdom (www.playdom.com)
   Funding: $47M
   Major Apps: Mobsters -14M, Bumper Stickers-11.7M, Own Your Friends-10.1M, Sorority Life-7.1M, Mobsters 2-3.5M, Poker Palace- 1.5M
   Revenue: Estimated $60M
   

Let me just remind you that these companies are startups and have existed for not more than three years. So, how are they making this much of BIG money? All of them have two revenue models, and these two models are like the necessary practices for companies in this domain.

• The first model is very simple and straight forward. It begins when you start playing any of these games. Initially everything is free in the game. But as you move ahead in the game you will need a lot of virtual stuff - like seeds for your farm or guns for your gang - which you would have to buy from an online store using a credit card, PayPal etc. The idea is very simple here - get addicted to the free version, then start spending real money for virtual stuff. Playdom has gone a step ahead and even opened offline stores for virtual goods.
  
• The second model is the traditional online revenue model using ad clicks, lead generation and toolbar installation, but in an entirely new fashion. If you do not have a credit card or a PayPal account, then you sign up on some other website to get virtual money, which you can use to buy some virtual stuff. The cache here is that when you sign up for that website you are actually generating leads for them. When you signed up on the other website, the gaming company gets real money for the lead generation. You can call this SGL (Social Game Lead), and this lead to companies is a guaranteed lead, as the user needs the virtual stuff, which means he is willing to pay if you can sell him the virtual stuff, i.e. if you can do some SGM (Social Game Marketing).
  
• Toolbar installation revenue model is more interesting. When you install a toolbar, it will make Ask.com (say) the default search engine on your browser. Ask.com makes money from search ads and pays money to gaming company or the toolbar developer for every installation of the toolbar. Ask.com pays about $1-$2 for every installation. Just imagine how the money is flowing back to the game developer. Ask --> Toolbar developer -->Zynga --> Facebook (for ads) --> Zynga. This is an endless circle. Hats off to this revenue model.

In the beginning of this post I had quoted a tagline - ...why play akele (i.e. why play alone)? This tagline is being used by an upcoming Indian social gaming website - Ibibo.com. The tagline suggests how new players are trying to capture the potentially large Indian market. The reason I wrote 'potentially' large market was that though the Indian market is very large, but the revenue models might not work out here that easily. You will find less than 5% of the Indian gamers buying online stuff. So, your game might be a very big hit here, but you might not be making any money out of it.

If you were not able to make money out of this market, then this potentially big market could turn out into a potential risky market. Another reason why I say so is that these game developers are not paying any attention to localization, rather Indian-ization, of the games. The big developers have simply imported their international versions to India, and the local developers are merely copying the international games. They have not even cared to give Indian names. For instance, Ibibo has a game called Teen Patti, which is a card game. They have explained the rules using names like Aces and Jacks, which most of the Indian audience would not understand. Had they cared to mentioned that Ace means 'Ekka' and Jack means 'Gulaam' the public out here would have simply loved it.

Zynga and Playdom have opened up their Indian development centers in Bangalore, and they are planning to develop games purely for the Indian audience. I hope they keep their promise, and also hope that the Indian developers like Ibibo give some genuine thought rather than simply copying ideas. The competition is going to become more fierce as biggies like EA are soon going to join the race.

We still have a few unanswered questions to ponder over - will the potentially big Indian market grow into a real market for the developers, and what new things can be integrated with social networks to make more money out of this seemingly big market?

Your views and comments are welcome.

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