Pitchh… levelling the playing field between brands & agencies

Pitchh is an online meeting ground for brands and agencies that has just got its covers taken off. Conceptualised as a B2B platform, it can help brands (organisations) find the right creative partners- these could be advertising agencies, marketing consultants, PR firms, freelancers, designers & individuals et al. Brands can create a pitch on the website and invite applications from interested partners. Agencies can look through the pitches by popularity, locations etc, reply to them and connect directly once the initial contact has been established.

Pitchh is based on the idea that the brand-agency relationship needs to break out from the shackles of predictability. Whenever brands invite pitches, it is always from the hallowed circle- the same set of big-ticket agencies. Smaller agencies, speciality creative boutiques or even individuals that might do justice to the job on hand never get a call-in. Even the brands that are tied to blue-chip ad agencies with multi-year contracts might sometimes need highly specialised (or short term) creative inputs that the agencies are ill-equipped to handle. Pitchh brings the internet into the equation - its ubiquitous reach acting as a level playing field in this lop-sided relationship.

Pitchh is the brain-child of Rajesh Lalwani, who runs Blogworks, a Delhi based strategic social media consultancy.

The model is similar to Elance (which is for designers) but focused on the brand-agency space. The service is currently free but future monetization will be based on a mix of the freemium model, advertising & sponsorships.

The idea beyond Pitchh is very promising indeed. And while its core proposition is directed at the organised brand-agency setup, I feel its bigger potential may lie with freelancers & individual consultants, at least for a start. It is not hard to imagine a focused online community of creative service seekers & providers.

Whats cooking in Pakistan’s Internet / Web2.0 industry?

(This post is in response to a tip-off from Shahid Rana, one of the readers of Webyantra from Pakistan. He helped me compile this post as well)

Ever wondered what’s happening in the internet & Web2.0 space across the border in Pakistan? The internet base there is supposed to be app 3 million subscribers (most of which is dialup with only 100K broadband subscribers). The software exports out of Pakistan are galloping at 60% albeit on a small base ($116 million against previous years US$72 million). These numbers off course do not compare with India, yet there’s a fair bit of activity happening in the tech space there. Here’s a bunch of disparate facts/datapoints that would put things slightly in perspective, specially for an Indian audience.

Pakistans’ equivalent of TiE - The Organisation for Pakistani Entrepreneurs (OPEN) in Silicon Valley is possibly their equivalent of TiE. Launched in 2001, OPEN has chapters across major American cities. They do not seem to be having chapters in Pakistan though (please correct me if I am wrong) but are getting Pakistani startups to showcase their wares to the tech community in Silicon Valley as this report indicates.

TiE’s Pakistan Chapters - On its part, TiE has recently (June 08) launched its Islamabad chapter, making it the third city where they are present in Pakistan (Lahore & Karachi being the other two). Details here. While TiE is a global body, it has a distinct Indian origin. And this is interesting trivia- the “Indus” in TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) refers to the erstwhile Indus Valley Civilization from the Indian sub continent, which actually now falls in Pakistan.

Tech News & Blogs - One of the most widely read Pakistani techology blogs is Green & White, which covers software, telecom, marketing, advertising etc and has a sub section for Pakistan tech startups. WiredPakistan is another good blog and so are Tech Lahore & IT Tazee. TelecomPk is a very well written blog about the telecom industry in Pakistan. Add them to your RSS reader if you want to keep abreast of whats happening across the border.

Web 2.0 / Internet - One of the Pakistani startups to have made its mark in the Web 2.0 space is the Islamabad based Scrybe, the Flash/Flex based product that launched in 2006. Built originally to be an online calendar application, they seem to be evolving into an online productivity suite. Scrybe has received Series A funding from Adobe Systems in 2007.

Another company that deserves mention is Naseeb Networks, which runs a battery of websites. This includes Naseeb.com which is claimed to be the world’s largest social network for muslims, Rozee which is supposed to be the largest online recruitment website in Pakistan and RingPakistan which is into calling cards and telehony products. Naseen has recently raised Series B venture funding from two Silicon Valley venture Capital firms - ePlanet Ventures (ePlanet) and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ).

Naseeb (the social network) incidentally has a basic free version, but many of the features that are standard in social networking sites (e.g. browse profiles invisibly) are available only if you sign up as a paid premium member. Details here.

Online Job space - Check out this slide deck from BrightSpyre, one of the biggest Pakistani online job portals. The other notables ones are Rozee & Mustakbil, and Alexa seems to suggest that Rozee is a clear leader amongst the three, inspite of what the deck claims about BrightSpyre.

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If you have other things to add here, please leave it behind in the comments and I’ll update the post.

Observer… turns your mobile phone into a remote monitoring camera

MultiEyeVision, a Pune based company has launched a tool called Observer that turns mobile phones into remote monitoring cameras. The camera’s images can be viewed from any internet connected device. You need a GPRS enable smartphone for this, or you can buy a pre-configured mobile phone from them (which works just like a normal cellphone otherwise).

How does it work? You need to download and install the Observer software on your mobile phone (or use the pre configured mobile phone sold by the company). Once thats done, just start the application and point it where you want to shoot. The streamed images are viewable from your account on their website; you can also control the settings of the observer (capture frequency, picture resolution, capture timings) from the web. The images can be stored for viewing later or even get emailed to you at specific times. The tool/software can run continually for 48 to 72 hours after which it needs to be restarted. On battery, it runs for 4-8 hours.

What the Observer does not support is video streaming, due to the limitations of GPRS (which requires higher transfer speeds). It can however transmit image streams upto a rate of 3 images per minute, which is adequate for many situations. The Observer is aimed at a variety of consumer or business use cases.

The pre configured phones are based on Nokia & Sony-Ericcson models (Nokia 3500, Nokia 6300 & Sony Ericcson W810i) and cost between 8K-12 K INR. For using the software with your own phone, you’d need to pay 2.5K INR.

In fact, if there are unused mobile phones lying with you, they can be configured as well for this application. Details here.

TiE Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge 2008 - The winners are Druvaa, Equitas & iKen

The results of the TiE Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge 2008 are out and the top awards have gone to Druvaa, Equitas & iKen (there is no specific gradation in the prizes). The finals for the business plan competition were held today at New Delhi and the awards were announced at an entrepreneurship / startup gathering in the evening. Congrats to the winners. Iken has also been awarded the Microsoft award and a direct entry into the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program.

Some snaps from the event ….

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Quick note about the three winners :

- Druvaa is a 10 member startup based out of Pune and is in the data protection and backup storage space.
- iKen Solutions is a software company specializing in intelligent business systems backed by hybrid AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques. It is an IIT Bombay research spin-off.
- Equitas is a Chennai based microfinance orgainisation for extending micro credit to people who are otherwise unable to access finance from the mainstream banking channels.

The jury for the competition comprised well know entrepreneurs & startup mentors - Raman Roy of Quattro, Pramod Bhasin of Genpact, Saurabh Srivastava of TiE, Mahesh Murthy of Pinstrorm/Seedfund, Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Naukri.com & Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners.

The award ceremony was preceeded by an open house discussion on entrepreneurship challenges in India. This was led by Shireen Bhan, CNBC India’s leading business news reporter.

Firefox sets a World record and Webyantra had a role to play in it!

Firefox completed its world record for most number of downloads in a single day with 8002530 downloads . And this blog played a small part in it - equivalent to 1 part in 8002530 (0.000000124 %). Here’s the certificate….

Firefox 3 is an absolute beauty. It has been tested to be much faster than Firefox 2, IE 7, the to-be-launched IE8, Opera 9.5. So overwhelming was the response to their download day blitzkrieg that their servers melted down as this story reports.

The browser wars are a real nightmare for web designers & developers. The lack of standardisation effectively means that cross browser compatability takes away a disproportionate share of development time. For an average AJAX/Javascript enabled interface, almost 25% of development time is consumed in making it work across major browsers. Without being prejudiced, I must add that IE is by far the biggest culprit. IE7 is not a problem, but IE6 (with almost 60% world internet penetration) is a HUGE one.

Case in point - on SlideShare we have had this mysterious problem with a particular interface where some of the elements (text, images) appear & disappear randomly in IE 6. We have tried to solve this embarrassing bug for 6 months now but to no avail…. our developers had almost given up. A few days back we finally tracked down its cause to something called the IE6 Peekaboo effect. Hopefully we shall be able to nuke this with the next release…..

Instablog rolls out user generated video news and it is impressive!

Instablog, the blog & citizen journalist network has launched a daily video show called Global Report. The show is styled on the familiar television news format and features short video reports from their reporters in different parts of the world. Check out the screenshot & the video below- the final production is quite impressive. This show is available in different video formats and also for mobile devices, including the iPhone.

The video show is a powerful exposition of citizen journalism at its best. Media consumption habits for certain sections of the society are changing, courtesy the internet. I now spend lesser time reading the morning newspaper, which has been substituted by what I read online- either on online news channels or via the blogosphere. And while my own example is a slightly skewed sample to extrapolate to a larger audience, the change is incrementally perceptible for large swatches of metropolitan India.

Screenshot:

The most challenging thing in producing a video show of this kind is managing the logistics on a continued basis, apart from achieving consistency in production quality. You can do it for a short duration fairly easily but getting this running as a regular show is a demanding exercise. This is what Instablog says “….putting a daily show together of such magnitude has been an adventure in itself. We have writers sending us information putting their own lives at risk to get the truth out. We have literally put together a global news organization using tools which have to be available in even some of the world’s poorest countries….“. I can imagine that.

Instablog (for those who might be unaware) is an excellent social media news website. They have over 25,000 registered members and gets more than 3 million pageviews per month. And you can’t but feel jealous - they are based out of Shimla, the popular hill station in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. WOW! Having an office overlooking the Himalayas - I could kill for that!

Webyantra now part of OpenWeb.Asia

You can now follow Webyantra on OpenWeb.Asia. OpenWeb is an aggregated network of selected blogs focused on the Asian Web industry. The idea behind OpenWeb is to build a bridge between the Asia web and global industry, and also enhance the inter-communication of local internet markets. OpenWeb.Asia consists of blogs from the Asia-Pacific geographies, i.e China, Japan, Australia, Singapore & Vietnam.

From an Indian perspective, there is so much we can learn from our counterparts in Asia. The level of internet penetration in these societies far surpasses what we have in India, and they (unlike us) have managed to localise content and applications to a larger extent.

I look forward to a part of this extended family.

JobYantra distributed job-boards… good idea, wrong implementation

A few months back, I wrote this post lamenting the sheer futility of traditional job websites for startups, which inherently need employees of a certain kind. I had pointed towards the growing popularity of job boards on popular blogs (like TechCrunch, Gigaom, JoelSpolksy etc). JobYantra, a Mumbai based startup has launched an initial version of their service that will connect employers with hard to reach candidates using the blogosphere as a channel. However their modus operandi may need a fair bit of tweaking before it starts giving them real traction.

Jobyantra is based on the premise that good candidates already have good jobs, so there is no reason to believe that they are even looking at the career websites. However it might be possible to reach out to them via popular blogs (that they read), so why not create a service that allows bloggers to integrate a readymade job board into their blog.

How does it work? Bloggers (called publishers) can sign up on JobYantra and get a jobboard integrated in their blog’s theme. They get a custom page for displaying jobs, the design and html of which can be customized to match their blog’s existing design. Employers looking for candidates can post jobs on JobYanta and these would show up on the affiliate blog network. The employer cannot chose the type of blog to show the ads as all jobs would be related to tech/web 2.0. Currently the service is free for both employers and bloggers. Going forward they plan to charge employers and do a revenue split with the affiliate blogs. An example of their job board can be seen in the screnshot below (its integrated in the Webyantra theme)

I can foresee two problems with what Jobyantra is doing. Firstly the job board is not hosted on the blog, rather it is on the Jobyantra website (thats the way the url works), so it is almost like a psuedo navigation. This fundamentally violates the principle that you should not take away traffic and SEO benefits from the host which you are trying to piggyback. Think of adsense javascript codes, widgets, media players…. they are all embeddable in their hosts and do no wean away traffic as Jobyantra might do. The second problem is the low barriers to entry for something of this nature. I reckon that it will take a smart developer not more than a day to cook up a wordpress plugin that does exactly what Jobyantra does. Put that plugin on wordpress.org and you get free, instantaneous distribution for your plugin, and this could wipe out any first mover advantage.

I think Jobyantra should provide an embeddable javascript code for their jobboard that publishers can simply copy/paste into their blog. This will let the content reside on the blog itself and make the relationship symbiotic rather than parasitic.

I also feel that sooner or later the established job sites (Naukri, Monster, Indiatimes etc) are going to jump into this. Simplyhired already does this in the US.

Overall I feel Jobyantra has correctly identified an opportunity that is waiting to be harnessed. They need to tweak their offering to make it more publisher-friendly.

MediaNama…. the latest technology news blog to hit the airwaves

Medianama is a technology news blog that went live today. Its written by someone who needs no introduction - Nikhil Pahwa, who till a few weeks back was the face of Content Sutra (possibly the biggest of the Indian tech news blogs in terms of reach & readership) in India. Nikhil has decided to step out on his own and give this a real shot. The focus of the blog will be internet, startups, mobile & investments (as evinced by its navigation). And given the kind of contacts he has developed over the last couple of years, he should have a steady stream of newsworthy stories every day. The blog includes a calendar of tech related events; check it out here.

JLT - Cool video “Where the hell is Matt?”

Just wanted to share this really cool video titled “Where the hell is Matt?”. It chronicles the travels of Matt, a 31 year old American who got an all expense paid 6 month world trip through 39 countries on 7 continents. What did he have to do- well, JUST DANCE IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA!!!!! And dance he does with a characteristic jig that is sure to make you want to try it out yourself. If you want to read his bio, head over here. Watch every second of this 4.28 min long video (its high fidelity and so takes a fair bit of time to download, but the wait is worth the time). And yes, his world travel starts with Mumbai…. and in the midst touches Gurgaon as well…

The background score incidentally is in Bengali and is an adapation from the poem “Stream of Life” from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore and it has been sung by Palbasha Siddiqui, a 17 year old second generation Bengali of Bangladeshi origin from Minneapolis in the US (thanks Unmesh for the tip)

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

BTW, JLT is just like that- just a reason to share cool stuff from across the web.