Perspectives

This is a usual story. But something special has come out at the end of it. We are calling it Roopit.

Earlier I quit Yahoo! and then I quit Flipkart and I was sitting at home mulling over a wonderful idea in Travel space. Around that time the refrigerator at my home conked off. My mom pestered me to find a replacement (rightly so, the milk was getting spoilt). I was without a job and I decided to buy a second hand fridge instead, in an effort to save some cash. And the horrifying experiences and the frustration generated along the way has ended up in Roopit. Usual story.

Fortunately for me, apart from getting frustrated, I took notes about my behavior and thought as I went through the second hand buying experience. The icing on the cake was that I DID NOT find a fridge I liked. And something inside of me knew that of the 80 lakh people in Bangalore, there is someone out there who wants to sell the fridge I want to buy. Alas, I couldn’t find him.

Starting with a budget out 4000 Rs, I ended up buying a pink fridge (with flowers on it!!) for 14000 Rs. And everytime I saw the fridge, I heard my calling.

I read somewhere that there are close to sixty (60!!) online classifieds websites in India. Now, with Roopit around, I wish them all the best .

Google is probably going to tell you a much better answer about that.
But I could not resist putting thoughts about this on paper(blog, in
this case). Blogspot is full of illusion. It is like a “maya”. At the look of it,
it is fanciful and does all that you want it to do. But, you gotta get
out of it. It is not the real world.  As once mentioned, “nothing ever happens” TM . Sure, you can do a lot of things, but what happened to basics ? Blogging is the lifeline of web 2.0. And you dont have a notion of communities,
You can’t tag etc. But, my biggest problem with blogspot is the way
they have written their “Comments” module. It has to be better than
that.

 Like has already pointed out, we are talking about blog and not a website. Nobody really visits a blog ever.  Just as how
“Adsense” does not make sense, all those “Lotsa” things does not make sense either.

Just to say something original, I was talking to a first yearite in IIM
Bangalore about Business, startups ( I am damn interested in all of
these
things) and everything(Seems like my favorite hobby these days is to catch hold of an IIM MBA and talk to him about startups ).
He questioned Google’s ( How comical will it be to give an outgoing
link to “google” ? Will that increase my Page rank ? ) 
business  model.
Though not sure about the exact numbers, having close to 100% of revenues from Advertisement is not such a wise thing. Y! had a
similar stature six years ago and we all know what happened.

I told him “If newspaper(s) industry can survive close to 150 years
just on advertisement, I am sure Internet ( and hence G & Y ) can
too.”
Someone once told me, an issue of the “The Hindu” would cost Rs. 125 , but for the advts it carries.
Do you disagree ?  Leave a comment. I have a big theory behind this one and is probably material enough for another entry.