Dos and Don’ts of Web Design [It pays to be simple because it pays to be understood.]

Since the emergence of the Internet, the demands of web communication and web design has never been this demanding. Internet communication has come a long way since the series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his “Galactic Network” concept. He envisioned the very initial concept of the internet that comprised of interconnected set of computers through which everyone could access data and information from any site.

Today we collectively stand on the edge where there is a need to find the next social structure that will potentially guide the internet into the future. It requires vision and motivation, and not only the use of technology in web design to direct its course into the future.

The essential ‘Dos’ while building your web design- for the savviest online customers in the history

1. Strategy and Planning: We need to realize that a great web strategy does not arrive from a cognitive boardroom. However, it’s guided by your customers. Conventional design strategies reacts of the choice people are known to make online, whereas a carefully thought strategic web planning anticipates the fundamental needs and desires of your customers to make those choices.

2. Involving advanced customer research as well as getting on-board deep analytics that helps to accentuate web communication and engagement of your Brand through your web-design.

3. Use the web media convincingly to start a compelling conversation between your brand and your customers… thus using this mode to interact and attract your customer through engaging web design presence.

4. Today’s web design is all about engaging with social media and social influencers to effectively position your brand through interactive web design.

The essential ‘Don’ts ‘while building your web design

1. Remember, that innovation cannot be forced. It has to be fostered. Therefore, by being too-innovative with your web design, you may end up annoying your customers.

2. Do not steal content of design concept from other sites. As all solutions need to be grounded to the realities of the business that the website is catering to, therefore it is quintessential to be original in both content and concept.

3. Do not overcrowd your web design. As the ability to extract value and enable the construction of meaning in the abundance and complexity of data and digital information has become poor. Therefore, do not over-complicate your website design. It pays to be simple because it pays to be understood.

[Guest article contributed by Manik Kinra, cofounder of JadeMagnet.]

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iXiGo Brings Flight Search to Twitter and Facebook [And It’s Awesome]

iXiGO has launched a natural language flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter. The tool will allow Facebook and Twitter users to post a flight request on a wall or send a message to a Twitter page and
receive the cheapest flight fare and details within minutes.

For searching flights on Facebook, a user simply has to go to https://www.facebook.com/iXiGOsearch and ask a simple search query in natural language on iXiGOSearch’s wall (e.g. “Mumbai to Dubai
next week” or “Chennai to Singapore on 5th Feb”). In just a minute, iXiGO will reply to the user with a comment on his/her query with details of the cheapest flight found across multiple travel sites, a link to the  iXiGO.com’s result page as well as a direct booking link for booking the cheapest flight within seconds on the travel site where it is available.

Similarly, on Twitter, you have to simply tweet a message directed to the @iXiGOsearch (e.g. “@iXiGOsearch BOM to DEL tomorrow” or “@iXiGOsearch
Cheapest flight from Delhi to London in June”) and iXiGOsearch will tweet back a response within a minute with details of the cheapest flight and a link to view results and book the flight.

A very neat implementation of natural language processing (though they can come up with cheesy messaging around edge cases like search for Feb 30th etc), the service is built on top of iXiGo’s API. iXIGo earlier raised $18.5 M investment from SAIF Partners & MakeMyTrip (read our interview with Aloke Bajpai On iXiGo’s Funding, Founder’s Stake).

Do give the service a spin and share your feedback.

Another startup, 90di too has been doing natural language search, but do you think a social media platform works much better than standalone site?

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Enhanced services for eBay Singapore sellers exporting goods to the US

eBay and SingPost announced last week the launch of ePAC, a new shipping service for eBay Singapore sellers that offers enhanced international tracking and faster delivery times of within six to eight working days. The service applies to lightweight goods under 2kg from Singapore to United States.

ePAC is launched in collaboration with the United States Postal Service. US customers benefit too as this new service allows them to easily track and confirm delivery via their My eBay account, which gives them more peace of mind.

“Singapore sellers on eBay are highly regarded for combining good quality products at great value. This is primarily why this market has the second largest sales in Southeast Asia after Thailand,” said Oliver Hua, COO of the Greater China, Southeast Asia and Japan, eBay Marketplaces.

“We foresee ePAC playing a vital role in driving Singapore’s online exports to the United States as demonstrated by a similar shipping service launched with China Post and the U.S. Postal Service in September 2010, which is already processing more than 90,000 parcels a day.”

According to the Asian Exporters’ Index report released last year, Singapore sellers primarily sell their goods on eBay’s US, UK, Australia and Germany websites, with purchases from Brazil among the fastest growing. Singapore exporters primarily sell the following goods: Jewelry, gems and watches, clothing and accessories, business items for industrial and office use, toys, and computers.

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Mobile social network mig33 introduces Twitter-like miniblog, targets 500M users

Singapore-based mig33, a mobile social network with over 1.5M unique users a day, has launched a new Twitter-like feature called the mig33 miniblog, which lets users type 140 character texts, reported VentureBeat.

The social network, which is popular in Asia, allows users to create avatars, chat with other people, and play third party games. The miniblog will be integrated with existing features to increase their usage rate.

The feature will differentiate itself  from Twitter and Sina Weibo by offering gamification — game-like features like virtual gifts, avatars, emoticons, and actual games within the miniblog.

“We think the miniblog will be the connector, the glue for our different services that connect users,” said mig33′s CEO Steven Goh. “You can access rich media, play games, and earn badges directly within the platform. This represents an evolution of our community.”

With their miniblog, they plan to reach 500M users in the emerging markets.

Mig33 has so far raised US$34M in funding. The company was started in 2005 and now has 115 employees.

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China’s Ku6 to Become YouTube Content Partner, Targets New Audience

Chinese streaming video website Ku6 (NASDAQ:KUTV) announced this morning that it will become a YouTube content partner, and distribute its videos on a new Ku6 YouTube channel. After the announcement, Ku6 shares, which had fallen below a dollar a month ago, enjoyed a bit of a resurgence today (see chart below).

By becoming a channel operator, Ku6 can distribute its video content to a wider audience. We got in touch with a Ku6 representative this afternoon who tells us that user-generated content will be the main priority, but self-produced content will also be considered. As for which viewers the company hopes to reach, we’re told that the target audience for the channel is Chinese Americans.

To be honest, the wording of Ku6’s initial press release as well as the subsequent Reuters report made us initially think that something more substantial than a new YouTube content partnership had happened here. YouTube has over 20,000 such partners worldwide.

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Xiaomi Phone Gets an Android 4.0 Beta, Only For the Adventurous

'I can haz ice creeem sandwich?' A Xiaomi M1 user tries out the Android 4.0 MIUI beta.

The Xiaomi M1 phone currently runs Android 2.3, but the Xiaomi startup team has been promising that it’ll roll-out an update to 4.0 as soon as it has managed to theme the newest version of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) mobile OS. And now that’s a major step closer to reality with the first beta of the 4.0 ‘ice-cream sandwich’ update for Xiaomi phones being put online yesterday.

Called ‘Mioneplus,’ the beta version of the ROM is only for adventurous tinkerers who know how to ‘flash’ a new ROM onto their device. A 246MB download, it involves manually forcing your M1 phone, with the use of a PC, to install Xiaomi’s skinned Android 4.0.3. It has lots of nice, variously orange-accented or matte-black mods that replace the ice-blue and light-grey colour scheme used by Google. Here’s an earlier preview issued by Xiaomi of what the update looks like; these are the refreshed contacts and music apps respectively:

Not to be confused with the MIUI 4 ROM, which bring’s Xiaomi’s elegant theme to a number of other Android devices and languages, this new Mioneplus beta is hard-wired to work with the M1’s three-button layout, with baked-in Chinese input support and all the other localized features that’ll eventually be given to all M1 owners. The proper update, whenever it goes live, will be an easier, automatic affair for the phone owners, involving just a few clicks.

If you have a Xiaomi phone, grab the Mioneplus beta from the forums.

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Best Chinese Tech Clones of 2011

Cloning or copycatting is nothing new in China, but it’s still interesting. For Westerners, especially Americans they loathe cloning. It hurts their pride and is an insult to their creativity and hard work. For Chinese, they love it! It comes as second nature and presents grand opportunity to seize a massive market potential.

For people outside China, they wonder why Chinese love to copy things. After being here a while, most people figure out, it’s the way they were taught to learn. Follow the teacher, recite books, don’t challenge. This mentality grows and sticks with people as they mature. Moreover, I’m sure many start-ups think, “Why shouldn’t I copy?” If the business model has been proven overseas and they know how to adapt it to China, then by not copying, it almost represents a missed opportunity. When I interviewed the co-founder of Match.com, Peng Ong (now a Partner at GSR Ventures) he said “Copying is a form of innovation. The best company’s never just copy, they copy and then localize. It’s like jazz, you have a basic rhythm and structure and you move around that. Is jazz copying? I don’t think there is any original idea. Google is a copy.”

I’ve realized that the term ‘Innovation’ can be interpreted in many ways. In China, I feel it means ‘to adapt and improve’, which is still a valid interpretation. To some degree everyone learns by copying, babies do it, adults do it. But where it becomes a touchy subject, is when Chinese clones don’t just copy the business model, they copy everything except the logo!

Since Chinese are expert copiers from Nike shoes to Italian made furniture to tech start-ups, this skill ought to be commended. We have covered clones in separate posts, but we thought we should compile them and award the best tech clones of companies that were hot in 2011. The winning place is based on having a market leader position in the market perception. Of course all the original start-ups that made it big, originate from America, particularly the Silicon Valley.

Here we go, drum roll please!

1.    Groupon - First and largest group buying site in the world

Winner – Meitun, finished 2011 as number 1 group buying site by revenue

 Honorable mention – Lashou, had a good fight with Meituan

2.    AirBnb - First and largest vacation and private room rental site in the world

Winner – Airizu, the earliest clone in China

Honorable mention –Mayi, operated by one of China’s largest classified sites Ganji

3.    Tumblr - largest light blogging platform in the world

Winner – DianDian, incubated by Innovation Works and raised US$10M

Honorable mention – Lofter, spawned out of internet giant, NetEase

4.    Pinterest - the hottest social bookmarking site right now, with fast growth and salivating VC’s

Winner – Huaban, from the makers from the best Flickr clone

Honorable mention – J.RenRen, from the makers of China’s Facebook, RenRen

 

5.    Gilt - Exclusive discount luxury goods site

Winner – Xiu, to satisfy China’s insatiable demand for luxury and brand names

Honorable mention – VIPstore, last raised a new round from Intel Capital

 

6.    Flipboard - First and most popular iPad magazine app

Winner – Zaker, the earliest Flipboard clone emerged when Flipboard was blocked out of China

Honorable mention – Xianguo, from the makers of a popular RSS reader

7.    Kik - One of the most popular mobile messaging apps 

Winner – Weixin, a mobile app that is rolling Kik, Talkbox, Foursquare, Bump into one

Honorable mention – Miliao, from Lei Jun, regarded as China’s Steve Jobs

8.    TechCrunch - One of the best tech blogs about start-ups, tech trends and news

 Winner – TechNode, hey we have heroes too! Sorry Kai.

 Honorable mention – Techrice, great insight and analysis of China’s tech landscape

One noticeable trend is that the best clones are often created by very large Chinese tech companies with existing resources and money. This shows how tough the environment is for grassroots start-ups who are trying to compete against the big guys. It is also a criticism of the health of China’s start-up eco-system, that big companies can and will simply crush anyone they see as a threat. Such a dynamic explains why the M&A market is not as active as it is in America.

Now that we are already flying through 2012, what will be the next hot clones to emerge out of China?

 

 

Related posts:

1. “Cool & Cheap” Destructive Innovation
2. Feature: Jiayuan Founder Haiyan Gong: It’s Not For A NASDAQ Listing, It’s For The One.
3. How Struggling Micro-Blogging Tool Follow 5 Turned Into a Micro-Blog Aggregator

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OpenStreetMap Accuses Google of Vandalizing Open Source Maps, IP Originate from Google India

OpenStreetMap project, an open source mapping project (competitor to Google Maps) claims that user accounts attached to a range of Google internet addresses in India have been maliciously tampering with its data (via).

A few days back, Google was caught in an awkward situation when a Kenya based startup, Mocality caught Google employees scraping data from the startup site. 

From the OpenStreetMap blog: 

Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in India deleting, moving and abusing OSM data including subtle edits like reversing one-way streets.

Two OpenStreetMap accounts have been vandalizing OSM in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the same address in India reported by Mocality.

The most obvious vandalism started around last Thursday last week from these particular users however it may take us some time to do a full analysis. In fact over the last year we have had over 102 thousand hits on OSM using at least 17 accounts from this Google IP.

Do you have an example of malicious data? Yes, here:http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/10375538 (London),http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/10375581 (New York City) where a user from that IP address modified one way streets [reversed and deleted]. Here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/145893931/historywhere a user added a fake Olympic stadium.

Even in case of Mocality, some of the scraping were reported to have come from Google IP address in India.

As far as these issues (of data vandalism/theft) are concerned, its less about Google’s intention and more about company not being able to manage contractors/vendors who are often paid on accuracy of data collected. Even some of the Indian Internet companies (+ media firms) have been accused (of similar unethical dealings) by startups (though not reported in public), but its very often the contractors who are responsible for such tactics. Having said that, it’s the company ownership to ensure that such things do not happen – easier said than done, but thanks to Internet and social media – there is still a bit of democracy left.

In India, AOL has launched its MapQuest product based on OpenStreetmap, which has received funds from AOL and Microsoft.

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