Olaworks Knows Your Face, Maybe Better Than You Do

I’ve been fascinated with augmented reality technology (AR) for a while now, because I think it will become the standard of mobile. It feels a bit like wearing 3D glasses through your mobile, allowing you to see things you can’t see normally. As Allen Lu, of Senscape puts it, “[AR] becomes an extension of yourself.”

I last wrote about Mobile Bus, a Korean company developing mobile marker based AR games. But while in Seoul, I also took the opportunity to drop by another Korean based AR company, Olaworks.

Established in 2006 by Jung-hee Ryu, the progressive technology company attracted US$4m investment from Intel Capital and SKYLAKE Incuvest. The company has 60+ patents and has two main technologies. One is ScanSearch, a Computer vision and sensor based mobile search. The second is Olaface, a facial recognition engine to detect, track and identify people in real time in photos and videos. The company now has around 60 employees.

Here’s a quick overview of what Olaworks technology can do:

Face detection/face tracking – automatically detects and tracks one’s face from the images or videos. It’s what you commonly see in digital cameras nowadays.

Smile detector – can detect not only when you are smiling but how much you are smiling! Some cameras have used this technology to automatically trigger the shutter when you are smiling the best.

Blink detector – can detect the level of how much you blink in each eye. Like the smile detector, a camera shutter can also be triggered based on how much you blink. The technology can be applied in Driving Safely Management System to alert you when you’re driving when drowsy.

Face feature detection – can detect and extract many different facial features such as the nose, mouth, and jaw.

Face recognition – similar to how Facebook is able to know who is in the photos, Olaface can also identify and tag names to faces.    Next time you awkwardly forget someone’s name, just use your phone to find out!

Face similarity search - analyzes face photos searches a large scale database for the most similar person. I remember doing something similar on a Facebook app a while ago, but wasn’t convinced by the results because it returned a picture of a Korean female pop star.

Age/Gender Classification – amazingly the technology can detect what gender and age you are based on your facial structure, such as how far apart your eyes are. I really want to know how accurate this feature is! No more having to ask embarrassing questions of how old someone is, or more awkwardly wondering if someone is male or female.

Head tracking – this detects and tracks the 3-dimensional direction of the face! This is super cool for using your mobile to detect someone you just met and add them to your social network. Olaworks has also released a fun mobile app that allows you to hold your mobile phone up to a face and augment a pirate face on top.

Object tracking – can track or detect a moving object and auto-focus on it. One obvious application for this is when taking moving shots with your digital camera. One cool future application is to be able to instantly detect something like a moving car and being able to find out the brand, make and how much it is.

Image matching – is able to recognize objects automatically by matching them to a database. This is useful for matching a logo on the street or a book on a shelf. I see this as a huge market for mobile commerce, where consumers can point to products around them with their mobile and then automatically get directed to an online shop to find the best price. This technology will also give rise to the next wave of daily deals start-ups, whereby a customer on the street who is hungry and wants a place to eat, can simply flash his phone in front of the restaurants in front of him, see a coupon augmented on his phone and choose one best on the best deal.

ScanSearch currently supports the Korean version of iPhone and Android as well as the US and European version of Windows 7. It will also be installed in Optimus 7, the first LG Windows smart phone from 11^th October.

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I believe the possibilities are endless with augmented reality and will only be constrained by your imagination. There are arguments both for and against AR. People that doubt it say, it is cool but gimmicky. Those who support it (like me) believe it will be the next evolution of mobile, providing somewhat of a blue ocean of opportunity.  None the less, Olaworks is working on awesome technology.

 

 

Related posts:

1. CityIN Launches Automatic Face Detection For Photo Tagging
2. Korean AR Company, Mobile Bus to Release 3 Kingdoms Game
3. Fat Face Social Media Marketing

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MyCube’s Black Ocean strategy

MyCube, a Singapore-based company that is developing the “world’s first Social Exchange”, has announced on August 8 that Black Ocean, the firm’s key investor, has obtained majority ownership after another round of funding (amount undisclosed).

This means changes to key management. Johan Stael von Holstein, MyCube’s co-founder, has stepped down as CEO but remains on the Board of Directors and as the company’s PR Ambassador. MyCube General Counsel Robert Tobias will become interim CEO while a replacement is sought.

Currently, MyCube is in private beta. It purports to allow users to own, control, and monetize their digital data. They are also four weeks into their Digital Life Academy internship program, where they pay 30 interns from around the world S$2,000 each to discuss Internet business ideas and work on projects (more on MyCube here).

According to Crunchbase, Black Ocean is a “vertically integrated internet, media and technology holding company that creates, builds and invests into disruptive businesses based on new generation technologies.” With offices in Singapore, Moscow, Luxembourg, London, and New York, the company previously invested US$ 5 million in MyCube in May 2011.

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Echelon 2011 alumni FashionSpace secures seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments

Echelon 2011 happened almost two months ago and we have just received news that one of our exhibitors, FashionSpace, recently secured a seed funding round from newly established Singapore-based angel investment group Crystal Horse Investments.

e27 caught up with FashionSpace’s co-founder and Space Captain, Danielle Siauw, to find out more about their product, the funding received and other plans.

Tell as a little bit about FasionSpace

FashionSpace is an online publishing platform that lets users discover and curate the latest trends, products and brands from the best retailers and indie designers around the world. It is also a place where fashion brands and fashionistas create their own social fashion magazine.

There are three types of users – fashion merchants, publishers and members. Fashion merchants are able to showcase their products and to create their own lookbook. Publishers are the bloggers or any traditional magazines who are interested to curate and create content for their own blogs or websites. Members are anyone who are interested in fashion, browsing and shopping.

Fashionspace is a combination of many things:

- a site filled with user-generated magazines, meaning any one is able to create their own magazines and create pages with their own content or using our merchants’ products.

- it is a social media, like Facebook, but dedicated to fashion. We have all the social elements like social bookmarking and social sharing tools like widgets. Widgets are actually user-generated banners using content from our site. We are also integrated with facebook via facebook connect. We want our users’ content to be as viral as possible in the most creative way.

- It is a search engine for fashion. We aggregate fashion-related products so that our users can search for the items they want from multiple sources all at once. We have a cost-per-click advertising program where merchants’ with the highest marketing dollars with us will be ranked highest on the search engine be showcased on our homepage.

- It is an affiliate marketing platform where users get a share of our advertising revenue through our search engine marketing platform by publicising our merchants’ products in their own magazines or on their blogs/Facebook/websites using our widgets. A cost-per-click will be incurred if the users’ readers click on to the widgets and redirects to the merchants’ ecommerce site. See it as an advertising matchmaker between fashion merchant and the users.

How is it different from other fashion sharing services out there?

Fashionspace.com allows users to play both fashion editor and reader by creating their own digital ‘social magazine’ —  where they have the ability to incorporate videos, images, content and e-commerce links into embeddable widgets that exist both onsite and across multiple platforms. We want our content to go beyond just Fashionspace.com, we want all the magazines and products to be highly interactive and shareable on other social networks and websites.

What sets Fashionspace.com apart from other online publishing tools is the built-in Affiliate Program where users also have the opportunity to earn cash and rewards based on the curation of products from partnering merchants and popularity of their magazines.

How is user response for the beta?

We have over 30 merchants onboard. In terms of users, we have more than 500 members onboard since launch. We have not done any marketing launch now as we have just collated feedback on what’s working and what’s not. We are in the 2nd phase now where we are enhancing the site based on the feedback.

Tell us about your funding round with Crystal Horse Investments.

We got S$250,000 funding from Crystal Horse Investments (CHI). All I can say us that I have a very fair agreement with CHI in which I am given majority ordinary shares.

How is the fund being used to further develop FashionSpace?

We have spent quite a bit on the development of the site, sales and content creation at this point. We will be allocating more funds to marketing once our site is enhanced.

Future plans for FashionSpace?

We are talking to a few potential partners for technology and marketing to further improve our offering. One of which is launching our eccommerce platform and also using innovative third party solution to further improve the usability of our site. We will be exploring mobile apps as well.

We are also looking to partner with traditional fashion magazines. There are also plans to increase our pool of merchants to include regional and international brands.

Where are you planning to monetize from?

We hope our affiliate marketing programme can start to drive more revenue for us. We are also planning to sell campaigns to fashion houses using our site.

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Chinese Browser Market, Still a Mess, Says CEO of Mozilla China

“Compared with a year ago,  how do you think of the Chinese browser market right now?” I asked Dr. GONG Li, the CEO of Mozilla China yesterday at his office, “Still a mess, even more complicated than before”, Gong answered.

the Market players

Maxthon used to be the No.1 local browser in China, but now it has been replaced by 360 Browser. Sogou Browser (SOHU’s product) is getting popular as well. “Firefox’s doing OK in China, takes 5%-10% market share according different web stats source”, Gong said, “either you have a powerful distribution channel or you have a truly good technology, you have the chance to win the market.”

Thanks to 360 Anti-virus software which is hugely popular in China because it’s free, 360 Browser describes itself as the most safe web browser and becomes the No.1; Sogou Chinese input software is probably the most downloaded input software for Chinese, and it has Sogou Browser bundled which makes it popular too, and Sogou Browser also describes it as the Fastest one. Both Sogou and 360 are based on IE core. And for Firefox, obviously, it’s truly built on some cutting-edge technology. “Why Maxthon and some other local browsers’ market share is shrinking, because the distribution channel and technology they don’t have either of them.” Gong said.

Almost all the big guys have released their browsers, including Baidu as the late comer. “At least at this stage, they are competing with each other on their distribution channels, not really the product itself.” Gong commented.

Firefox in China

Firefox is well compatible with standard like HTML5 but with that it can not please the local market. One of the biggest issues for Firefox here is the online banking. All the online banking systems only support IE-core based browsers. “We have been working with banks such as Construction Bank of China for quite a long time, but till now, we are still waiting for the final launch. ” Gong said, “the bank is open and wants to work with us, but as the majority of local users are using IE which is the bank’s dev team has to focus on. So even we have worked out the solution, when it comes a bug at the testing stage, it takes long time to get it fixed.” If the online banking issue can be solved, it sounds like a great breakthrough for Firefox in China.

Furthermore, Firefox is working closely with popular sites like Taobao, to make sure the best user experience can be guaranteed. And started from this year, Firefox also spent more effort to drive local communities and organizes events in different cities, like Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Haerbin etc.

Firefox in Mobile

The mobile market is super hot. “If Firefox can’t not do anything now on the mobile space in China, the opportunity might be gone soon.” I said to Gong, and he agreed. “But there is not much we can do with our local team”, Gong said, “We actually have talked to a few phone manufacturers in China since a year ago, but there is one critical issue they wanted us to solve but we can’t, the support of Flash. We need wait for our international team to sort it out.”

 

Related posts:

1. Firefox China Calling Developers, Getting More Energy to Inspire Chinese Web
2. Mozilla China – A Spacious Office, A Fresh New Start
3. Baidu Released its Browser, a Disappointing Browser but a Promising Prototype of Cloud OS

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Beijing Maker Space, a Place for Hackers to Build Dream Machines

Geeks that hack machines together, for the love of building are the forgotten tech heroes. A while ago I met Justin Wang, a Renmin University grad who has since joined forces with Beijing Maker Space. The space is a co-working lab in Beijing, for tech enthusiasts to build their dream machines.

Beijing Maker Space is made

The lab was established in January this year by a mysterious hacker called Flamingo. The mission is to encourage social innovation and develop the open-source hardware ecosystem by building a physical and online community where people can learn, share and work on projects using interactive design.  Like open-source software, open source hardware means people from around the world have already tried to build something and can share how they did it, so an engineer is not starting from nothing. The beauty of knowledge-sharing means people can build on and improve what somebody else has done. Justin believes that “this [sharing] will speed up innovation.”

Passion to help the hacker community

I had a chance to more recently catch up with Justin to find out more. Justin is adventurous and artistic, having back-packed through thirty countries and loves photography and making small movies. Currently he is trying to build the hacker community through Beijing Maker Space, a relatively new concept in Beijing. “It’s a place for engineers and artists to come together to make cool things.” He genuinely wants to create a world without borders were passionate engineers can learn, share, build and make money.

From students to people with full-time jobs

Based in Xuanwumen, Beijing, the lab currently houses a mixture of people. Some use it full time and others are people with normal day jobs that use the space to release their creative and engineering energy. Some come from Google and Yahoo or even Bank of China. The space also gives “students with a sharp idea, a way to realize it.” Says Justin. Since it is just starting out, the space can only fit 8-10 people.

Making Money

Beijing Maker Space plans to generate money from revenue sharing the sale of toolkits and assembled products with the creators. The space is currently free for people to use. Justin says “normally for hardware, you go from idea to research to demo development to product development to product testing then commercialization, the point where you get cash inflow. But for open source hardware, we can sell the electronic boards along the way, meaning cash comes in a lot earlier in the research and development stage.” According to Justin, the parts are not expensive because they are only building a demo out of cheap material, like plastic. Once they build a reasonable prototype, they can raise investment to develop it properly.

3D printers, scanners, multi-touch tables and a computer with no screen

One of the interesting projects that they have worked on is a 3D printer that can amazingly make 3D objects. The original version came from an open source lab in America called MakerBot. Justin says “we found a local vendor to supply all the electronic parts, made a few changes and made it.” It works by feeding the software a 3D model, like a blender; then the machine will print a real physical replica of the blender. Of course the blender won’t function, but the shape will be the same. Justin also mentioned, if you need a hook to put on your wall, you can just print it. They are even trying to print a plastic human! They are also working on a 3D scanner to scan 3D objects then connect it to the 3D printer.

Another cool project is a multi-touch table that uses light sensors that react to hand gestures. A camera underneath the table recognizes the difference between fingers and no-fingers then relays the coordinates to the CPU to function like a mouse. It’s a bit like a big iPad. Justin says it’s actually not that expensive to make because all you need is glass, white paper and a projector.

Justin himself has formerly worked on a marker based augmented reality project. Basically when you hold a phone up to a paper with a black mark on it, the phone will display a text message like “Baby, I love you!” See the video to see what I mean.

Now he is working on a concept computer without a screen, but instead a micro projector. The projector will project a multi-touch screen onto a special carbon paper that can be the size of a table or a wall. When you’re done, you can even roll it up and take it home. Justin is currently working on making the paper screen work.

Beijing Maker Space is also co-operating with a hacker space in Shanghai and Guangzhou and aims to sell products from all spaces.

You can visit the hacker space at 北京西城区宣武门外大街25号富豪写字楼213室（庄胜崇光百货SOGO对面）

 

Related posts:

1. NTalks Beijing Event, Come To Access Chinese Microblogging Space
2. Brands can build their own designer social network with Behance
3. Mobile phone chip maker Spreadtrum has 25% of China's 2G market

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211job.com：Online Recruitment Initiative Targeting High-level Executives

Whom do you think is more difficult to get a decent job, fresh graduates or executives from big companies? Ask your friends about this, nine out of ten might respond saying the former.

 

That’s not the case for Wang Lan, the founder and CEO of 211job.com, an online recruitment initiative targeting top-level executives. According to Wang, on some level, it’s even harder for people who hold an important post in conglomerate to do a fancy jump.

 

How come?

 

First off, putting your resume online is like putting your career at risk. On regular online recruitment offerings including Zhaopin.com, ChinaHR.com and 51Job.com, users can set their online resume status to be “Open”, “Only for myself” or “Entrusting”. “Open” means anyone can view you resume and get to know you’re looking for a new opportunity, which might be a little awkward for you if you’re not aware enough to block your Human Resource colleagues.

 

“Only for myself” means no one except yourself can view it, while “Entrusting” means that only staff at those recruitment solutions can see your resume and set up you with new offers. But the problem is, they’re nowhere near professional head-hunting companies in terms of either connections or aptitude. It would take a little bit longer for them to help you with a great bound. Besides, the confidentiality of you resume is still a question.

 

Secondly, high-level positions are always limited, there’s no way for you to get at whether your next employer is a fit or not. Random jumping is an unaffordable risk for high-level employees.

211Job.com is trying to save all those hassles for them. Except for its promise of never sharing resume with any third-parties, 211Job has also been providing down-to-earth member services as well, sending latest and confidentially positions to them so they don’t have to look up for such information. Also they can talk to seasoned consultant with relevant experience in certain areas, for example, Wang Lan, founder of 211Job, has been in IT industry for over 10 years. Some of the other consultants used to work in energy, medical, chemistry or FMCG industry.

 

As such an initiative which attach much more importance to its offline part rather than online part, its hard to tell an intriguing tale for investors who mainly engaging in internet business. Wang tell me that :”At the current stage the company is running smoothly, the best we can get from getting invested is that we can expand more aggressively to take over more markets.”

 

Companies which leveraged 211Job to locate their employees include HP, Microsoft Research Asia, SIEMENS China, Fujitsu and so on.

 

Related posts:

1. Baidu to Strengthen Online Recruitment Service with Independent Brand and Domain Name Next Month
2. NewChinaCareer – A Serious English Recruitment Platform For You To Find A Job In China
3. Resume 2.0

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Google’s Patenting Trends – Founders Aren’t The Top Inventors At Google!

Trend analysis is often considered to be the core of business intelligence. Various classes of trends are determined and analyzed to address the objectives of a business intelligence studies. One such class of trends that is considered to be crucial while studying technology companies is patenting trends.

Patenting trends of a company is derived by crunching patent information corresponding to a company. Various macro and micro level trends can be derived by crunching patent information. Such trend analysis has been found useful in determining the market entry strategies, product strategies, R&D efforts, key innovators of a company and collaborations, among other competitive intelligence information.

This study attempts to determine macro level patenting trends of Google. The report provides the following macro level trends as part of this study:

• Year wise patent filing trend
• Country wise patent filing trend
• Year wise patent filing trend in top 10 countries
• Top 20 IPC classes
• Year wise patent filing trend for top 20 IPC classes
• Top 20 successful inventors

Year wise patent filing trend

This trend indicates that there was a substantial increase in patent application filings in the year 2003, when compared with number of patent applications filed in 2002. The subsequent year, 2004, also witnessed a substantial increase in the number of patent applications being filed. Thereafter, the number of patent applications being filed has remained fairly consistent.
The graph tends to indicate that the number of patent applications being filed in 2009 and 2010 has decreased. However, it shall be noted that it generally takes 18 months from the filing data (priority date to be precise) for the applications to get published. Hence, some of the patent applications filed in 2009 and 2010 might be awaiting publication. Therefore, the number of patent applications filed in 2009 and 2010 might be substantially greater than what is indicated in the graph.

Country wise patent filing trend

As one might anticipate, US, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and EPO (European Patent Office) are the top three jurisdictions in terms of number of patent applications being filed. However, interestingly, 5 countries, China, Korea, India, Brazil and Japan, which are primarily Non-English speaking countries, find a spot in the top 10 patenting destinations of Google. Additionally, 3 developing countries, China, India and Brazil have found a spot in the top 10 patenting destinations of Google.

Year wise patent filing trend in top 10 countries

From this trend, it appears that, since the year 2003, Google has started to diversify their patent portfolio by filing patent applications in multiple jurisdictions. Among such jurisdictions, Brazil appears to have witnessed a decrease in the number of patent applications being filed, while most other jurisdictions have witnessed an increase in the number of patent applications being filed.
Top 20 IPC classes:

Year wise patent filing trend for top 20 IPC classes

From this graph, as one might guess, it appears that significant portion of the patent portfolio attempts to protect techniques related to information retrieval (which can be interpreted as search – IPC code G06F 17/30). Further, a significant portion of the portfolio attempts to protect techniques related to e-commerce (IPC code – G06Q30/00).
Please note that one patent/application per patent family (A patent family is a set of patents/patent applications filed in various countries to protect a single invention – same set of inventors) is considered for the above two graphs.

Top 20 successful inventors at Google

Interesting point to be noted in this graph is the absence of Google’s founders’ names among the top 20 inventors for Google, considering the fact that any inventor with 6 granted patents (patent families) would have found a spot in this graph.

To summarize:
In addition to the above macro level trends, various other macro and micro level trends can be derived to serve various analytical objectives. I hope entrepreneurs in India use patent date intelligently in their decision making process.

What’s your take?

» More Legal Resources

[About the author: Kartik Puttaiah is the Co-founder of patent services company, InvnTree IP Services Pvt. Ltd., based in Bangalore.]

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Bangalore Based Postoz Launches SAAS Based Business Process Management Service

Email is not dead (read: Why Still Do an Email Startup?) and while there is a huge opportunity to build business using email as a communication platform, the reality is that email based workflow management tools haven’t proven to be very useful (especially from monitoring/tracking perspective).

Bangalore based Postoz has launched a SAAS based service that offers web based workflow management. Postoz is a web-based business process system that enables enterprises to create (using drag & drop web form components) and deploy business processes (like helpdesk, procurement etc) in few minutes.

As of now, Postoz is integrated with Google Apps and offers no integration with existing enterprise systems. Given that CIOs are known to go for bloated software, Postoz does offer a lean product and pricing is done as a function of number of business processes in the system, storage and number of users per business process.

The bigger question for the team is whether to sell a platform or packaged products (which is what TCS’ iON is doing).

Here is a quick QnA with Postoz team

QN: Please share team background.

The core team consist of selvan (http://softonaut.blogspot.com/) & ananth (http://ananthakumaran.in/). Before we joined hands to create Postoz, we worked as consultant in business process automation space for large NY based bank, worked with Chicago based technology consulting & product development firm and also worked with technology services startups based in India.

QN: Moving away from email based workflow will bring in behavioral change (and hence, friction). How do you plan to educate your customers?

Email based workflows are painful when the team size is not small and business process requires

• Transparency among team members (who is working on what & how long).
• Traceability of work item across various departments.
• Quantitative data to analyze existing process structure for improvements.

We are hoping that value propositions & benefits offered by our product will encourage customers to embrace it. Feedback from customers so far is encouraging.

QN: Target segment? How do you plan to market to US (assuming that’s in your radar).

Postoz is focused on automating “human centric” business processes such as Help desk, Procurement, Employee on boarding. Our target customers are managers & business owners of SMEs with limited/zero tech knowledge ( No coding, No IDE, No IT infrastructure ), who runs their business on SaaS.

We will market our product outside India by listing at SaaS marketplace such as Google Apps and via social media marketing (Google Adwords/Twitter/Linkedin groups/Blogs).

QN: Future plans?

Our future plans include Internalization, Payment gateway integration within business processes and integration with other enterprise apps based-on customer demands.

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SearchEnabler – Your One Stop Shop For All SEO Tools

Discoverability of any web product is very crucial to its success and what better way to get discovered than through a simple Search. There are already 100s of free and paid tools that help you optimize your web presence and improve your Search engine ranking. Bangalore based Quicko Labs is one startup that believes there is lot of money to be made in this game.

Quicko’s SearchEnabler is an all-in-one Search Engine Optimization platform. The tool offers on-page analysis, keyword/competitor analysis, Google Analytics integration, creating and tracking SEO campaigns, detecting bad links etc. 

SearchEnabler is looking to launch a pro version at $15 a month. The team claims to help you save few hours everyday from your traditional SEO work at this affordable cost. Along with startups and SMEs, the major target audience for this product is agencies, who need to handle multiple campaigns for multiple clients, where ease of managing campaign can bring in speed and savings. The startup is pitching itself as an affordable enterprise level tool.

Quick Steps before you start using SearchEnabler
1. SearchEnabler is divided into 3 major steps ‘Plan, Optimize & Track’.
2. Plan phase requires inputs of your website profile, competitors and keywords.
3. Crawls are scheduled on daily basis, request to wait for few hours after completing plan phase to get complete data.
4. Optimize step would provide necessary information for identifying site and page level issues and recommendations
5. Track can be used to check progress and update plan/optimization strategies.

Q. How is this tool better than the tools that Google provides. Is it like Google’s Analytics + Webmaster + Website Optimizer all built as features of one product?

1. Yes to some extent we tried to bring in minimum required set of features similar to existing products mentioned by you for setting, optimizing and tracking website optimization campaigns. We did try to enhance/ create loop among the features for e.g. Keyword research data is not only pulled from adwords but also from GA with bounce rate and other KPI.
2. Link data with different dimensions like domains, anchors, follow/no-follow for link analysis and trend. This data is not available is any free tool across various dimensions.
3. On-Page analysis for all important tags impacting ranking like URL, Title, H1.
4. Competitor comparison data for websites, on-page, link, domain/geo.
5. Site level issues like duplicate data in titles, meta desc, content, broken links, malware, performance, w3c errors, index, depth and so on (very few are available in webmaster)
6. Rank tracking
7. Weekly reports & we are introducing alerts for key issues shortly

Most of the above activity still can be done without help of any tool, its been done by 1000s of freelancers and service companies across India.  To get good SEO results regular optimization and tracking of most data points is required, using multiple tools, pulling data from several sources is pretty time consuming and moreover difficult to analyze across varied data sources. Where as some of the data like On-page, competitive analysis, multi-dimensional link analysis, rank tracking are hardly available in any free tool.

There are quite many competitors for SearchEnabler and most are already popular. In such a market, it would be more about packaging the product and increasing its own discoverability in terms of the niche features that sets it apart.

What do you think of SearchEnabler? Would you move to a paid tool for saving few hours everyday?

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News Roundup: Facebook:YBrant Partnership, 13 Million MNP Requests

Facebook selects Ybrant as ad marketing partner

Facebook has roped in Ybrant Digital, the Hyderabad-based digital marketing solutions company, as its Marketing Application Programming Interface (API) Partners.

Ybrant is among about 20 companies Facebook selected globally as it launched new Marketing Programme recently [source].

MNP: 13 Million Changed Numbers

Nearly 13 million subscribers have changed their service provider using the Mobile Number Portability facility since November 2010.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, maximum number of porting requests have come from Gujarat (12.98 lakh) followed by Maharashtra (10.32 lakh) till June 30. About 10.5 million subscribers had used MNP as on May 31.[source]

ZTE partners with BSNL to spruce up broadband connectivity in India

Under the partnership, ZTE will deploy ultra high-speed ADSL2 + and next generation VDSL2+ broadband devices across BSNL networks in 15 circles. [source]

Monitoring of Social Networking Websites

Indian government wants to monitor social networking websites (Twitter/Facebook). The Telecom Service Providers provide facilities for lawful interception and monitoring of communication flowing through their network including communications from social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, as per the terms and conditions of their licence agreements. There are certain communications, which are encrypted by the Solution Service Providers of these services. The Telecom Service Providers are not supposed to know the content of any communication and, therefore, do not know whether a service is encrypted or not. This is known by the Security Agencies only when the stream of encrypted content is delivered to them through the facility of lawful interception and monitoring provided by Telecom Service Providers.[source]

Maxx Mobile to foray into tablet space

We are in the process of developing some tabs. It will take a long time. It is not that easy (to produce a tablet). We have to do a lot of work on that. The features will be the USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Right now we cannot comment anything on it [source]

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