Harman Speaks

01. screenr.com – record movies of your desktop and send them straight
to YouTube.
02. bounceapp.com – for capturing full length screenshots of web pages.
03. goo.gl – shorten long URLs and convert URLs into QR codes.
04. untiny.me – find the original URLs that’s hiding behind a short URLs.
05. localti.me – know more than just the local time of a city
06. copypastecharacter.com – copy special characters that aren’t on
your keyboard.
07. topsy.com – a better search engine for twitter.
08. fb.me/AppStore – search iOS app without launching iTunes.
09. iconfinder.com – the best place to find icons of all sizes.
10. office.com – download templates, clipart and images for your
Office documents.
11. woorank.com – everything you wanted to know about a website.
12. virustotal.com – scan any suspicious file or email attachment for viruses.
13. wolframalpha.com – gets answers directly without searching – see
more wolfram tips.
14. printwhatyoulike.com – print web pages without the clutter.
15. joliprint.com – reformats news articles and blog content as a newspaper.
16. isnsfw.com – when you wish to share a NSFW page but with a warning.
17. e.ggtimer.com – a simple online timer for your daily needs.
18. coralcdn.org – if a site is down due to heavy traffic, try
accessing it through coral CDN.
19. random.org – pick random numbers, flip coins, and more.
20. mywot.com – check the trust level of any website – example.
21. viewer.zoho.com – Preview PDFs and Presentations directly in the browser.
22. tubemogul.com – simultaneously upload videos to YouTube and other
video sites.
23. truveo.com – the best place for searching web videos.
24. scr.im – share you email address online without worrying about spam.
25. spypig.com – now get read receipts for your email.
26. sizeasy.com – visualize and compare the size of any product.
27. whatfontis.com – quickly determine the font name from an image.
28. fontsquirrel.com – a good collection of fonts – free for personal
and commercial use.
29. regex.info – find data hidden in your photographs – see more EXIF tools.
30. tineye.com – this is like an online version of Google Googles.
31. iwantmyname.com – helps you search domains across all TLDs.
32. tabbloid.com – your favorite blogs delivered as PDFs.
33. join.me – share you screen with anyone over the web.
34. onlineocr.net – recognize text from scanned PDFs and images – see
other OCR tools.
35. flightstats.com – Track flight status at airports worldwide.
36. wetransfer.com – for sharing really big files online.
37. pastebin.com – a temporary online clipboard for your text and code snippets.
38. polishmywriting.com – check your writing for spelling or grammatical errors.
39. awesomehighlighter.com – easily highlight the important parts of a web page.
40. typewith.me – work on the same document with multiple people.
41. whichdateworks.com – planning an event? find a date that works for all.
42. everytimezone.com – a less confusing view of the world time zones.
43. warrick.cs.odu.edu – you’ll need this when your bookmarked web
pages are deleted.
44. gtmetrix.com – the perfect tool for measuring your site performance online.
45. imo.im – chat with your buddies on Skype, Facebook, Google Talk,
etc. from one place.
46. translate.google.com – translate web pages, PDFs and Office documents.
47. youtube.com/leanback – enjoy a never ending stream of YouTube
videos in full-screen.
48. similarsites.com – discover new sites that are similar to what you
like already.
49. wordle.net – quick summarize long pieces of text with tag clouds.
50. bubbl.us – create mind-maps, brainstorm ideas in the browser.
51. kuler.adobe.com – get color ideas, also extract colors from photographs.
52. followupthen.com – setup quick reminders via email itself.
53. lmgtfy.com – when your friends are too lazy to use Google on their own.
54. tempalias.com – generate temporary email aliases, better than
disposable email.
55. pdfescape.com – lets you can quickly edit PDFs in the browser itself.
56. faxzero.com – send an online fax for free – see more fax services.
57. feedmyinbox.com – get RSS feeds as an email newsletter.
58. isendr.com – transfer files without uploading to a server.
59. tinychat.com – setup a private chat room in micro-seconds.
60. privnote.com – create text notes that will self-destruct after being read.
61. flightaware.com – live flight tracking service for airports worldwide.
62. boxoh.com – track the status of any shipment on Google Maps – alternative.
63. chipin.com – when you need to raise funds online for an event or a cause.
64. downforeveryoneorjustme.com – find if your favorite website is
offline or not?
65. example.com – this website can be used as an example in documentation.
66. whoishostingthis.com – find the web host of any website.
67. google.com/history – found something on Google but can’t remember it now?
68. errorlevelanalysis.com – find whether a photo is real or a photoshopped one.
69. google.com/dictionary – get word meanings, pronunciations and
usage examples.
70. urbandictionary.com – find definitions of slangs and informal words.
71. seatguru.com – consult this site before choosing a seat for your
next flight.
72. sxc.hu – download stock images absolutely free.
73. zoom.it – view very high-resolution images in your browser without
scrolling.
74. wobzip.org – unzip your compressed files online.
75. vocaroo.com – record your voice with a click.
76. scribblemaps.com – create custom Google Maps easily.
77. buzzfeed.com – never miss another Internet meme or viral video.
78. alertful.com – quickly setup email reminders for important events.
79. encrypted.google.com – prevent your ISP and boss from reading your
search queries.
80. formspring.me – you can ask or answer personal questions here.
81. snopes.com – find if that email offer you received is real or just
another scam.
82. typingweb.com – master touch-typing with these practice sessions.
83. mailvu.com – send video emails to anyone using your web cam.
84. ge.tt – quickly send a file to someone, they can even preview it
before downloading.
85. timerime.com – create timelines with audio, video and images.
86. stupeflix.com – make a movie out of your images, audio and video clips.
87. aviary.com/myna – an online audio editor that lets record, and
remix audio clips online.
88. noteflight.com – print music sheets, write your own music online (review).
89. disposablewebpage.com – create a temporary web page that self-destruct.
90. namemytune.com – when you need to find the name of a song.
91. homestyler.com – design from scratch or re-model your home in 3d.
92. snapask.com – use email on your phone to find sports scores, read
Wikipedia, etc.
93. teuxdeux.com – a beautiful to-do app that looks like your paper dairy.
94. livestream.com – broadcast events live over the web, including
your desktop screen.
95. bing.com/images – automatically find perfectly-sized wallpapers for mobiles.
96. historio.us – preserve complete web pages with all the formatting.
97. dabbleboard.com – your virtual whiteboard.
98. whisperbot.com – send an email without using your own account.
99. sumopaint.com – an excellent layer-based online image editor.
100. lovelycharts.com – create flowcharts, network diagrams, sitemaps, etc.
101. nutshellmail.com – Get your Facebook and Twitter streams in your inbox.

I found this blog post from Gautam Ghosh's blog
(http://www.gautamblogs.com) very interesting, so thought it
worthwhile to share here:

When I was blogging this post - the model popped into my head - but
only in the past few days was when I started thinking how businesses
can use social media that it formed into something like a model.
The Content-Community Matrix to using social media
I like to call it my "Content - Community" model.

* Content is text, photos, videos as well as reactions to that
content. The reactions can be in the form of comments, votes (up or
down) or ratings.
* Community is a shared identity between a group of people who may
or may not know each other. And conversations can be of various types
as I showed in this model earlier

Clay Shirky in his book "Here comes everybody" says that every webpage
has a latent community - as the people who share the interest in that
content.
What is needed is to tap that community and to bring them together.
The model is a simple 2x2 matrix with the horizontal axis denoting
community and the vertical axis denoting content.
A business (or non-profit) or government can use these four approaches
as a starting point and have different kind of social conversations.

1. Low Content and Low Community - Obviously these are not very
social. Typically static webpages which offer no commenting or
curation facilities would fall in this category.
2. High Content and Low Community - Big example - wikipedia.org.
Other examples would be website like Quora.com, a discussion board
like Pagalguy.com, an ideation platform like Dell's Ideastorm.com in
which people either ask questions or submit ideas and then vote them
up or down is heavy on content and focused on solving issues.
Community takes a backseat in these platforms. What is the key to
success is defining clearly what issues will be addressed. Social
commerce platforms and services like Flickr.com and Slideshare.net
would also be examples of this category.
3. High Community and Low Content - The assumption in these
communities is that the shared interests and self-identity of the
community will need trigger more and more content in the future. If an
organization is investing in such a social site then they need to seed
it with some initial content and guide the community and help then
create more content. Most ning networks like my
humanresourcespeople.com start out like this.
4. High Community and High Content - These are full featured
community platforms with content creation platforms. I would typically
classify "social" intranets with extranets - with activity streams,
wikis, rich profiles in this category. These would also be the
category where category 3 could develop into after a period of time.

Some thoughts to keep in mind: these categories are not watertight.
Over a period of time, for example, category 2 would develop a core
community of people who interact and converse with each other.
category 3 would slowly develop into category 4 too.
You might ask where does a facebook.com or Twitter.com or
Foursquare.com fit here? Note that they are social networks, not
online communities - and the difference is crucial. As Lithium's
Michael Wu (see his 4 posts about it) states we have a social graph
and we are members of various communities - for example I am
simultaneously a member of communities like my alumni groups, HR
professionals, KM enthusiast, Social Media explorer, Comic Book lover,
foodie and Enterprise 2.0. These are where I build strong or weak
ties.

Source: (http://www.gautamblogs.com/2010/09/content-community-social-media-model.html?...)

1. http://www.bittorrent.com/
2. http://sxc.hu/
3. http://www.deviantart.com/
4. http://www.dafont.com/
5. http://www.1001freefonts.com/
6. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
7. http://www.istockphoto.com/
8. http://vectorstuff.blogspot.com/

On 24th september, 2010, I attended one of the most awaited social
media conferences in India DMC, Mumbai. My objective of attending this
conference was to take some learnings & inputs from the different
sessions by various esteemed personalities practicing social media in
their companies.
Some of the speakers were as follows:
1. Ashok Lalla (Euro RSCG)
2. Mahesh Narayanan (Google India)
3. Muralikrishnan B. (eBay India)
4. Lalit Bhagia (Star TV)
5. Harish Gandhi (Canaan Partners)
6. Vishal Singhal (Cell Strat)
7. Sridhar Ranganathan (InMobi)
8. Ali Hussein (MTV India)
9. Maya Hari (Conde Naste India)
10. Sandeep Suvarna (LinkedIn India)
11. Prerana Nayak (Rediff India)
12. Rajeev Dhal (J9 Ventures)
13. Mohit Gundecha (Mig33)
14. Mahesh Murthy (Pinstorm)
15. Gul Panag (Bollywood Actor)

Here are my learnings from the conference:
1. Do experiments: Maruti Suzuki started http://www.marutinri.com/
just for the sake of experiment and now they are selling approximately
400 cars (gifted by NRIs to their families back in India) a month. Now
this experiment is a profit center for them.

2. In the digital world, don't teach young children to learn by rot
but teach them how to learn. Focus on peer learning & one's passion.

3. Aircel is one company highly focussed on data use in mobile
telephony. Out of 15 million subscribers, 10 million of it's users are
using it's data services like web, GPRS, Apps etc. as compared to 12
million out of 140 million subscribers in case of Airtel!

4. Earned media is more important than paid media in case of Digital
because that is where your content goes viral. And one can earn media
through trust & credibility. Owned media is equally important because
it is your voice, your base over which other media is developed. And
most importantly you control it.

5. Social media will remain peripheral in terms of budgetary spends in
India (Currently only around 3% of total marketing budget in India or
Rs. 7 billion approximately) if it's not able to generate money or ROI
for the company. But at the same time generating money has not to be
the only objective of Social Media. Apart from the monetary meaning of
ROI, ROI in case of social media also means to be R-Relevant,
O-Original & I-Inventive. In fact according to one of the speakers,
monetary driven ROI in case of social media is a curse! as social
media is stripped naked being completely measurable.

6. One's objective has to be clear that why you want to use social
media: It can be to create awareness or action, a part of integrated
marketing and also one needs to be clear that for what & for whom you
are doing social media marketing.

7. Don't market 'at' but 'for' the customers. Concepts like 'Opt-in
Marketing' are the steps in that direction.

8. MTV India case study was discussed where it was told that listen to
what users are saying on social media about you or your industry, then
assess that conversation to know their likes-dislikes etc. then
participate in the conversation and engage them, measure the response
or action, then improve your products/offering accordingly and repeat
this cycle. Another practice discussed by them was to create the
content relevant to particular context (like youth, partying, campus
etc. in case of MTV which is a youth brand) which helps in connecting
users to each other & generates conversations within them and thus
helps in building a community around the brand.

9. Conde Naste India also discussed their case study regarding their
social media efforts. Being the owners of luxury brands like Vogue
India, they believe in organic growth of their facebook & twitter
profiles (without using any advertisements) and try to help their
users in one to one way so that they can be their brand ambassadors.
They collaborate with some niche & relevant bloggers who write on
fashion & who are influential in their segment to write for vogue and
in that way they are creating a eco-system around vogue in India.

10. Gul Panag spoke regarding using social media to generate funds &
organize volunteers for her social activism work related to poor
people in villages around chandigarh.

Apart from the learning I got through the various speakers, all the
participants got an excerpt of 'India Digital Media Research
Report-2010' by CellStrat. Overall the event was really cool & I got a
chance to interact & network with various people interested in doing
something related to Social Media in their companies.

Yesterday, I attended the IndiBloggers meet at Hotel Sea Princess, Juhu organised by IndiBlogger Community. It was a great fun to interact face to face with some of the interesting bloggers like @Miilee (the saree girl :-) ), @Chipro (from Vietnam!), @shrikant, Firoze Shakir (Very enthusiatic photographer!), @mahafreed {the Parsi Scribe, I think :-) }, @srinistuff (cool social media guy!), @sachinuppal (co-founder of Games24 and @beeayeanoowhy (a very funny Guy!), although it will be tough to mention everyone in the list. I met many people whom I knew online but not offline. Also made a number of friends whom I never knew! :-)

Adding to the spice was the entry of beauty with brain~Bollywood Actor: @gulpanag who did a nice job moderating a discussion on Bloggers as a change catalyst in society. The discussion was really inspiring for me at least and I started having dreams of bettering the world around me! The event was very well organized and all of us got exciting freebies & won number of prizes. Above all the networking with new & exciting people participating in the event was an essential factor in the success of this meet. The event was a superb success! I am looking forward to attend all such meets in the future too!

Some of the blog posts regarding this event by other participants are as follows:                                                                                   

(1) Manav Dhiman (The  Youngest blogger there, 16 years old)                       

(2) Idea Smithy (Interesting  Moniker! Isn't it?)                                                      

(3) Binoy (Very funny Guy!) 

(4) Payal Shah Karwa  (Communication & PR lady)

(5) Ojas Mehta                                                                                                      

(6) Jaydip Parikh                              

(7) Firoze Shakir (Very energetic Man) 

(8) Neha Thakkar

(9) Shrikant (Intellectual dude from Pune)

(10) Maithili (Aka Miilee!)

If I have missed anyone please comment me the link of the concerned blog. 

(download)

Click here to download:

The_IndiBlogger_Meet_One_of_th.zip (1.48 MB)

After watching the trailer of "The Social Network", I feel within myself a strong desire to see this movie. The story revolves around the creation & expansion of Facebook founded by Mark Zuckerberg, as we know today, although there is another angle to the story of this social networking giant that Zuckerberg stole the idea from his friends. The movie will also show how Facebook changed the way people around the world Socialize. This trailer ends aptly with the tag line that "You don't get to 500 million friends, without making a few enemies." It also shows that if you have a great Idea & will to execute it, the big & unexpected fortune awaits you. I'm really looking forward to this movie. Are you?

Lot of companies in this digital age are trying to harness the power of Social Media.  While some compaies have done wonders like Starbucks which has recently crossed 10 Million fans on Facebook, at the same time some companies have faced a disastrous backlash from the users. In this post I'm going to discuss the backlash faced by one such company due to wrong promises made by them.

One of the e-commerce companies based in India, Indiaplaza recently started its Facebook fan page & advertised heavily on Facebook that first 5000 fans will get Gift Coupons of Rs. 500 (10 US $) each & promised that those lucky fans can purchase various items within that range free of cost. But when the fans got the coupons & entered the specifically launched microsite for Facebook fans, they were left hugely disappointed because apart from one odd book there was no other item they could purchase with that coupon. All the items were quite expensive and fans were supposed to shell out significant amount of money to purchase those items. Also there was a disparity between the lower prices quoted by the company initially & higher actual prices for the same items, due to which most of the fans got pissed off!

Result was huge backlash from the users on Facebook wall. They expressed their anger & disgust openly and threatened to bring it down & even started posting links of competitor sites asking the fellow fans to leave Indiaplaza and avail better offers on other sites. They vowed never to purchase anything again from Indiaplaza. The administrators of Indiaplaza got scared & even deleted one complete thread to save their face but the damage was already done! Latter they tried to reduce the damage by extending the offer on some more items but to no avail!

Let us learn from this example not to repeat such mistakes. Kindly share your thoughts on this & any such examples which you have come across.

Today in the Internet Industry, online Social Gaming is a fast growing segment which is highly profitable for the developers & quite engaging for the users. Zynga is a clear market leader in this space and far outweighs its competitors. Its game Farmville is the single largest digital game with 62 million users at the time of writing this post. It's current  valuation as per some estimates is anywhere between 1.5 to 3 billion dollars, which is quite amazing. Facebook has emerged as the single largest platform for such social games & as per facebook statistics  more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries are currently active on it's platform trying to tap more than 400 million active users.

What do you feel regarding the future of Social Games & it's impact on the internet ecosystem? Your comments are eagerly awaited.