06 March 2012

Quora - Last place I want to see spam

Spam is inevitable evil mails,comments in blogs,un wanted pop ups all unsolicited sh*t is growing in numbers and Wikipedia is a notable victim, trying hard to keep its sanity. Now Unfortuntately Quora gets it too ...

Until recently Quora is closed, Knowledge gate which gave entry only to the authorised,tech savy experts who genuinely wanted to contribute.

Now for the past couple of visits It changed, I repeatedly encountered link building activities mostly on ecommerce queries Here and Here Its painful because I was helpless! There is no way I can report content spam, I can report the name of the person is wrong etc., down vote but its not going to solve the problem.

Why Downvoting is not spam protection ? Because you can collaboratively upvote to promote your posts making them stick. and downvoting only means the content is less worthy than it is. In the case of spam it is not the story.

I have 0 tolerence for spam in Quora because that is the most valuable resource for people really interested in collaborative learning and many really contribute because of that reason.

With increase in such activities, I am sure there will be contribution but not as passionately as it is supposed to be.

If you love Quora and if you think it need to be addressed please do something about it.

 

26 February 2012

Clean Hosting on Hostgator.

I moved from Godaddy, which gave worst imaginable service as a server with no credibility and accountability from the staff and the servers to Hostgator India.

Its been nearly a month and unlike with Godaddy,Its been really worth every micro penny I spent on these guys. They Deserve appreciation for commitment and ability to provide commited and  apt solutions. Being godaddy subscriber its really a quantum leap in service for me.

Hostgator in their unlimited plans provides space as /home/primarydomain/ while your webroot will be /home/primarydomain/public_html all your sites ideally sit in that webroot making it extremely difficult for you to organise backup or migrate to different servers.

They may not be completely messy but you will struggle to identify dependencies if the directory names does not have extensions such as .com/.co/.in/.org etc and if the migration or backup is for primary you will have hard time escaping the unnecessary subfolders created for the addon domains (not subdomains alone).

I asked if there is a way to do this better ? there is no documentation or help in this regard and they did try their best to explain how it can still be organised but I am against the idea of putting folders in a less secure way (Have to handle permissions for each of them seperately etc)

After they tried their best I decided to get my hands dirty before its too late and since I have not started migrating to hostgator yet.

I simply created a folder other giving access to all in /home/primarydomain and started hosting all the domains now my primary web root /home/primarydomain/public_html is  intact, serving only my primary domain while /home/primarydomain/other/addondomain1,addondomain2 s handling their own space respectively.

Seems like they liked the idea and hope they will make other's experience less painful in the future.

When you provide good service, entire ecosystem will help you to do your job better, Its not closed innovation anymore.

I recommend using hostgator for anyone wanting best performing service at affordable price, NO Kidding They really impressed me. I strongly encourage startups to consider This.

BTW Thanks Hostgator guys You rock!

This is what I thought I can do for them and you, You can click on the link below and get the benefits.

22 February 2012

Why Flipkart Acquired LetsBuy?

I think flipkart and letsbuy are two possible acquisitions for amazon.com in India, Flipkart was more closer with market reach,nearness to the amazon in India than letsbuy but with high valuation and series of funding from the VCs, though is far from realising profit yet did not get through the acquisition.

Obvious alternative for Amazon Acquisition would have been LetsBuy, with its simple alternative with some what less market penetration, but with open source backed cms, and little funding from the VCs beyond family funds.

For e-commerce of the scale of either letsbuy or flipkart to survive against new entrant(Junglee/Amazon) need more synergy and collaboration than before and letsbuy adds that to flipkart. This makes Junglee stick to its initial price comparision model, unarmed by the competition because of the lack of operational experience in the new demography.

I don't doubt Amazon's ability to start afresh but that would not be as easy as it would have been if they could acquire a company already doing that.

Now Why Flipkart acquired letsbuy, is not just a simple answer to say acquire new vertical/bring some thing to board etc., though they are part of the package. This move is more towards disarming the competition.

And I am surprised by the agility of this entire process once they realised new (ar)rival.

 

19 February 2012

Why Flipkart Acquired LetsBuy?

Hi,

This page is under construction, Please be patient and come back to us while the Brain is busy building the content.

You can visit http://vasundhar.posterous.com in the mean time.

:)

16 February 2012

A Journey thus began -My Journey with Redbus as a user

I love startups, through out my career if there is some one who made me understand the creation of brand,process and building an organisation leaving what is called "Well Paid, Secure Job" and the Ups,Downs and extreme excitement of building something I attribute it to Karthik K of Ogive.

I think its destined for me to be an entreprenuer, though I did not know in the beginning of my journey that I will, atleast so soon. Its so challenging,exciting for the reasons far from business, Its value creation, continues learning and getting a chance to work with wonderful people.

So when I saw Redbus Fastcompany 50 Innovative Comanies list I was thrilled, but not surprised as my experience started with Redbus precisely on 22 Feb 2007. I interacted with them on chat support for my failed transaction, then they immediately got back to me with ticket with which I travelled, but had a bad first experience So I sent the following mail to those guys

Redbus-office

worst service
1 message

Vasundhar <bvasundhar@gmail.com>

Thu, Mar 1, 2007 at 17:48

Hi

I booked a ticket from Chennai to Bangalore on last sunday ie 24 Feb 2007 for 10:45 PM bus of sharma travels,
the ticket number mentioned in my ticket was 23 and the same ticket was given to 3 more people.
finally your phones were all dead and the server was down when I tried to reach you by mail from there.

Finally we managed to board the bus only because the travel agent took responsibility.

Let us know if you want us to act on it or will you be acting your self ? to make it better ?
--
Best,
Vasundhar
--
If Physics is my God, Linux is my Girlfriend.
I go to the temple of biology to understand God with my girlfriend. ;) [Some call it Bioinformatics

Then after nearly six months, I had to book and travel with redbus, This time since I had to go straight from office which was located off Indiranagar road, pretty close to the redbus office, I asked if I can collect the ticket from their office and if they can arrange it there, They told me to com over and I what I found is a duplex house with bunch of cables lying here and there and few young chaps of my age working on the first floor, if I remember right his name was shiva, who helped out that day by calling the agents to confirm the tickets and wrote the number etc., on the paper. (I think they had some issue with the database or something to process the payment or something similar)

First things I noticed after going there were bunch of computers, with ubuntu , numbers of many travel agents marked in all the colours and few guys taking care of the backend,reservations and so on...

But they were extremely friendly and customer focused. Needless to say the travel had no hiccups this time as they seems to have workedout on the complaints me and other folks complained about on 1 March 2007. Then I wrote the following mail.

Tremendous Improvement
1 message

Vasundhar <bvasundhar@gmail.com>

Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 16:56
Hi Team,

I am very happy with the kind of service you are providing, with commitment.

I gave a bad feed back about your service on March 1 2007, and Best Feed back now
which really is great deal of effort on your part in gaining customer satisfaction and trust,

All the best for your future,

Vasundhar.

Since then it became kind of habit for me to go there and book tickets either online or go visit those exciting guys (They were not that famous back then though they did great job)

I wanted to feel the excitement and they never turned me down to visit and share few plesantaries.

When I see the news about them knowing the startup ups and downs of redbus as a customer, I thought of sharing what I feel is a great Team Effort in building one of the most innovative and successful brands. Taking an opportunity to Thank and Congratulate the entire team and founders vision in successfully executing it.

Congratulations Redbus. and Thank You.