ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

The third startup which I decided to cover from Proto.in 2008 is AtonePlace, a real estate service primarily targeted at NRIs (non-resident Indians).

AtOnePlace’s business model impressed me because what they are doing is not done by other real estate portals. They are providing the details of the various properties in India and all the details can be accessed by anyone at anytime for free, but the interesting question comes that how are they making money ?

Well, they act as a broker (like normal real estate broker) and take care of all the paper work, running around and provide personalized services to the clients who are sitting far away from the country.

The idea struck Gunjan Garg’s (founder of atoneplace) mind when he decided that he’ll invest in the property in the booming real estate market. However, couldn’t decide properly because in limited leaves, he couldn’t find the right property to invest in. Gunjan says “atoneplace is all about providing information about property & service to the client till their satisfaction“.

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Antya is another startup which was showcased at Proto.in 2008 and is a human powered search engine. Well, recently we had covered Wikia & Faroo and both of them also depend on the users for providing search results.

Antya has been funded by Vivek Pahwa who managed to sell the copy of FaceBook called DesiMartini to HT media (well, I have to give 10/10 to Vivek for his marketing skills or 0/10 to HT media people in market research else this deal wouldn’t have been possible). Anyway, Antya is a little complex search engine and the concept is still not very clear to me. It’s a combination of search engine, discovery engine (like Stumbleupon) & a regularly updated directory.

Antya works a little different from search engines as it doesn’t show the results like any other search engine (who mostly show results like Google does) but it focuses on the brand of the websites. It’ll show you the related images and brand building images (logos, posters etc.) of the search results and they do it because that’s what there mission is : “To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user”

But does it really solve the problem ? Well, I can’t say much about it because I’ll definitely get in touch with the founders to know more about Antya and how it’ll benefit anyone (I hope after reading this review, they’ll even talk to me) but meanwhile a small search still shows me that I’ll still prefer Google over Antya and here’s the example :

I tried searching for Pizza Hut Chennai on Antya and it gave me the website of Pizza Hut. However the same search on Google gave me lot of results which were of more interest to me and here are the reasons which still keep me with Google (even if we leave Google, Guruji (another local search in India) gave me better results:

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Well, as I said that I’ll be going to Proto.in 2008 and will be live blogging from there (Thanks to the Wi-Fi, which never worked! I wasn’t able to live blog). However, as I promised that I’ll be covering most of the startups (I thought of covering all the startups, however many of them couldn’t impress me much) over here. So here I go with the first startup which showcased at Proto.In 2008 I.e. The ViewsPaper.

Unfortunately, just like many other countries India is also affected with Corruption and various other social problems and most of the people just ‘crib‘ about them and still do nothing to change any of that.

The ViewsPaper is a portal enriched with new media, concentrating on the Indian youth (specific youth) which wants to change the way India works. The ViewsPaper is trying to bring in the power of youth, who thinks that things can be changed if the right steps are taken.

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It seems that Feedburner is having some glitch (once again!) and is showing just about too much readers for everyone!

Here’s the chicklet of TechCrunch and Labnol and I do hope that someday I’ll touch that readership (the one shown in TechCrunch’s chicklet) :

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Well, I always say that it’s good to be fan but being blind is not correct. I see that most of the people just take the words of few people and don’t look at the real picture.

I saw an excellent article by Ed Bott where he pointed out a similar example where one of such follower said that when you search on Google for the search term ‘Vista IE7 Hang’ then you get around 362,000 search results (currently it shows 184,000 results) so there has to be something wrong with Vista or IE7 !

Well, to give some brain to such a follower Ed did some more searches and found these results (please note these are some old results so it will vary if you do the current search) :

Vista Firefox hang / Vista Firefox hangs – 828,000 – 842,000 results

Safari hang / Safari hangs – 1,640,000 – 1,730,000 results

Ubuntu hang / Ubuntu hangs – 1,020,000 – 1,040,000 results

Tivo hang / Tivo hangs – 1,150,000 results

Well, just to add my own search into this I thought lets see what we get when we search for ‘Vista Rocks‘ and this is what I get :

Vista Rocks : 2,870,000 results

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