Web Innovation Conference 2009

Yesterday I attended the Web Innovation Conference 2009 (Gurgaon) organized by TFCI. One of the major attraction of the event was the diverse and monolithic agenda, covering almost all the buzz words of the World Wide Web. With terabytes of information to be shared, speakers tried their best to convey the message within a short stipulated time period.

Projects as “The maiden Web Innovation event to connect the architects and builders of the web with the brightest minds, hottest concepts, and nextgen killer tools and applications”, I guess it did fairly well to achieve its objective.

Still have doubts, check out the agenda below

Theme Address:
Mohit Hira , President eLearning (Retail) – NIIT

Digital Advertising Concepts & Best Practices
Parminder Singh, Business Head - Google India

True Cloud: Build your IT Infrastructure on the Cloud
Jayabalan S, CTO - Netmagic Solutions

WEB 2.0 - Fundamentals for creating online products, services & business models
Jayabalan S, CTO - Netmagic Solutions
Sanjay Aggarwal, GM Operations - Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation

Investment Themes On The Internet
Alok Mittal, Managing Director - Canaan Partners
Ritesh Banglani, Vice President - IDG Ventures India

Emerging landscape of Web 2.0. and Sneak Peek into Web 3.0
Sanjay Trehan, COO - NDTV Convergence

Top 10 Best Practices of Successful Digital Advertising
Anil Tirunagiri - Google india

Save Capex - Reduce Opex - the Cloud Computing way
Nitin Mishra - Head, Product Management - Netmagic Solutions

SEO: Marketing or Technology?
Pradeep Chopra, Co-Founder & CMO - Omlogic

Enterprise RIA
Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Sr. Computer Scientist & Evangelist - Adobe India

E-Commerce in Web 2.0 Era
Sanjay Aggarwal, GM Operations - Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation

Consumer 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Changing Moods, Metrics, & Monetization
Harish Bahl, CEO - Studio Smile

Web 2.0 means Business
Nikhil Sarup, Sr. Vice President - Digital Marketing - Solutions Digitas

How brands can influence consumer behavior in a 2.0 World
Sandeep Bansal, Director - BD - eBusiness Interactive

Successful Social Media Strategies for Corporates
Kiruba Shankar, CEO - Business Blogging

Establishing Trust Online
Rakesh Antala, Co-Founder & CEO, Crederity Inc.

User Driven Product Strategy
Satyajeet Singh, Product Manager, Naukri.com

Since I reached a little late (thanks to peak hour traffic) I was not able to attend the Mohit's presentation. But some of the important takeaways that I could note down from the discussions were:

• Sometimes "the media becomes the message”
• To reduce online fraud, track some fraudsters and take stringent action against them to set an example
• Cloud computing can be very useful for startups
• Promising areas in the Internet are : Ecommerce, Education, Financial Services, Entertainment
• Strength of an Internet company is determined by its "Product Strategy” and “Cost of acquiring & retaining traffic”
• Pure advertising based model may not work in India for some more time
• Local language market will grow slow
• Semantic web will be mainstream by 2012
• Social Media can be a boon and bane for Companies, so it’s important to have a presence in Social Media.
• To improve traffic, first identify the major source of traffic
• Online marking should be handled by Marketing team not technology
• 60% of people research online but buy offline
• 1% of the user contribute in building content, 9% get involved in community service and remaining 90% just download it.
• Interaction of a B2B site should be like we do in person. Since we do not start forced selling in the first meeting, same should be done on site.
• Most of the major internet companies (including social networking giants) are evaluating ways for authenticating credentials of users.
• My presentation can be accessed from slide share

Overall, good experience :)

User Driven Product Strategy

User Driven Product Strategy

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IndiBlogger Meet

Another weekend, another unconference. This time it was a Blogger Meet organized by IndiBlogger. The event was hosted and sponsored by Microsoft (Gurgaon).


I have noticed that all the conferences these days begin with a hash code, and this one had: # indincr. Also a funny thing about this blogger meet was that there were more Tweeters than Bloggers here.

We started the conference with a little intro from IndiBlogger team and attendees, and I realized that most of the entrepreneurs were byproduct of a bad boss. No wonder why I am still working for someone else (boss I hope you are reading this :)

But the main reason, for me being there was a presentation by Microsoft “Internet Explorer 8: First Look”. Though it wasn’t a first look for me because I have been using IE 8 for more than a year now . But I wanted to see how a person from Microsoft tackles so many Firefox fans sitting there (some were even wearing Firefox T-Shirts).

The presentation was given by Abishek Kant and I must admit he did an excellent work in handling questions like “What is the USP of IE 8”, “What is original in IE8” etc. And he was candid enough to express that the main objective of his presentation was to spread awareness about IE8 and not to compare it with any other browser.

Some of the points that he covered during his presentation:

Accelerators:
These are a form of selection-based search which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse.

Web Slices:
These are snippets of the entire page that a user can subscribe to. Web Slices will be kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals.

Smart Screen Filter:
It is mainly an extension of Internet Explorer 7's phishing filter. If a user visits a site which has been labeled as an impostor or harmful, then Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported harmful and shouldn't be visited.

Automatic crash recovery
A crash recovery mechanism has been incorporated; if the browser crashes, web pages being viewed may be recovered, at the user's discretion, when the browser is restarted.

Performance and stability
IE8 improves rendering of content authored to various web standards. It has complete support for the W3C CSS 2.1.

Version Targeting
Since it has stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. As a result, as in every IE version before it, some percentage of web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions would break in IE8. To avoid this situation, Microsoft proposed Version Targeting whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the X-UA-Compatible declaration either as a meta element or in the HTTP headers. A browser with a newer version than what the page has been coded for would emulate the behavior of the older version so that the assumptions the page made about the browser's behavior holds true.

Nothing from the points mentioned above will make me switch to IE from Firefox but if you are using IE7 then IE8 makes more sense for you.

We also had Priyanka (better known as Twilight Fairy) giving a very interactive presentation on social media and copyrights. The theme was that every blogger has to be protective of their content and they are responsible for the comments posted on their blog. Some important points mentioned were “If it is on web, it doesn’t mean it’s free to use”, “Linking to illegal content is also illegal” etc.

Over all meet was good (any meet is good if it ends with Pizza ). But unlike Mozcamp Delhi, there were no free IE t-shirts here, another reason to like Firefox :)

Yahoo monitoring Twitter by "SideLine"

“Watch, search and monitor the twitter public timeline in real time” is the baseline of Yahoo’s new app for searching and monitoring Twitter. Based on Adobe AIR this desktop application is built using the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) and allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.


Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license and the first beta is available for download here.

Some of the prominent features (as per Yahoo) include:

• Advanced search query builder
• Custom search groups
• Automatic refreshing of defined search queries
• Monitor trending topics
• 20% more awesomeness

Being a Kung Fu Panda fan, I like the last one the most. Also because the other top four are very basic functionalities any search app should have.