Well, most of you who follow me on Twitter or are on my GTalk friend list have perhaps already seen this. But those who haven’t here is the unveiling of  Startup Crush.

It is a Digg-styled clone catering to the niche of news, reviews and information about technology startups. I don’t yet know whether this is going to be focused on Indian startups alone or will want to continue to cover global startup news. An interesting section added there is that of Startup Jobs, which I hope many startup job consultants will make use of to get to the right audience.

And personally, this is an experiment on how user generated content and a social community can be rallied along for a particular subject.

Love to know your comments/reactions on Startup Crush.

Satisfly.com taps into the various social networks such as facebook, myspace and twitter to figure out the behavior of a person who has recently travelled by air.

By profiling such information and sharing it with the airlines, it aims to provide you, the passenger, with the ability to decide on the kind of person you would prefer as your seat mate. Satisfly stems from the problem that not everyone has good seat mates. And in long journeys, it becomes all the more important that the person sitting next to you does not get on your nerves. Step in Satisfly. They figure out a person’s on-flight behavior and needs and then categorize the person (along with the help of the airline, I suspect). Based on this profiling and categorization, they are then able to suggest a co-passenger to you with whom you might have a higher degree of comfort.

As of now Hawaiian airlines has tied up with Satisfly to improve their customer service and to ensure that no passenger is grumpy at the end of a long flight.

What next? Choose your preferred air hostesses/stewards perhaps? The world sure is evolving.
Link obtained via Economist.com

I have been on a mini-sabbatical of sorts from blogging. Amongst various reasons, the primary one is that of switching jobs. My new job is in an area which I am not too familiar with (the mobile space) and hence a lot of learning is required to be done.

Having said that, I believe that blogging worldwide is now moving towards micro-blogging, slowly but surely. People want to update their thoughts instantly and in as few sentences as possible. So, if you don’t have a blog yet, don’t fret,  you could just go straight ahead and become a micro-blogger.

If you do have a blog, then it makes all the more sense to supplement your online presence with something that is quicker and has a larger impact. A micro-blog is a logical next step.

“How do I start?”, you ask. Simple, I say. Just head over to the all new Wikyl.com (www.wikyl.com) and get your own microblog for free. Mine is accessible at http://wikyl.com/dhimant

And don’t forget to leave your feedback and thoughts on the new UI of Wikyl Somethings that still don’t work properly include the Groups application. However, the Twitter integration works just fine, so even if you have a Twitter account, just link it up to your Wikyl account and update only on one place, but get twice the impact!

Have a great day, ladies and gentlemen. It’s been drizzling in Bangalore the past few days, something that you could perhaps micro-blog about? (The last sentence was a bit of a stretch eh?)

Masala Chai is a visual arts blog that features South Asian art and design. I found some of the designs shown really wonderful and you must check them out.

I recently came across RangDe.org which takes the concept of microfinance to the online world.

Facing threats from the new age economy, which should be read as the ever increasing internet penetration (and more importantly Wikipedia), Britannica recently announced that it will open up its premium content to publishers and bloggers.

I signed up for this offer of theirs and they considered this blog worthy enough to be given a premium account for free. What’s more? Well, for you, dear reader, there is a lot more. If I link to a particular Britannica article on this blog, you get to read the entire content for free (and which otherwise would have required some significant $ out of your pocket).

I think this is a good initiative by Britannica and it would definitely serve to increase traffic to their site. Wikipedia has done a great job of disrupting the encyclopedia market, but it does have its own percentage of biased and disputed information. However, Britannica.com is quite difficult to navigate through in spite of their ultra cool looking UI. I couldn’t find quantum physics for example on their list of topics sorted alphabetically. Having said that, I found the information on Britannica very comprehensive and indeed excellently written!

I leave you, ladies and gentlemen, with an opportunity to peek inside one of the world’s coveted encyclopedias – the Encyclopedia Britannica. As a sample page, I have chosen the life of Mahatma Gandhi:
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Britannica

In case you want to compare, here is the link to Wikipedia’s content on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

You like reading once in a while. Books and all that. But heck, no time from all the work and the occasional socializing event. How do you catch up with some reading? How do you finish a novel in these times?

The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is DailyLit.com (Link obtained via Mrs. DhiOnlyOne, who was kind enough to gift me a book from DailyLit – more on gifting follows).

DailyLit allows users to browse through the hundreds of books that they have listed (including 700+ free books). Once you have located the book, you can then subscribe to it on your RSS feed reader. DailyLit will then send you one page of the book on your feed reader everyday. All you need to do is spare 5 minutes to read a page, and before you know it you would have finished reading a moderate sized novel!

Cool eh? There is more. While browsing, in case you would like to gift a book to a friend (or your spouse, as in the case of Mrs. DhiOnlyOne), they have a simple “gift this” button. Your beneficiary receives a link on his/her e-mail and all they need to do is include that link as a subscription in their feed reader. Here onwards, the person starts receiving one page per day of that book.

What if I want to read more pages, you may ask? Trivial stuff, I say. They have a link after every page which allows you to instantly get the next page, instead of waiting for the scheduled feed.

PS: Find a feed reader too geeky? They also send you book pages on your e-mail.

Here’s to more book reading minus the time-related excuses. Cheers!

Two of my friends, who are both brilliant in their work, have started a new website called Antya.com.

Antya has been started by my former colleagues Bharani (who is also a fellow ISB alumnus) and Sunny, an ex-Googler.

Antya provides a refreshing space in the saturated search engine market. While you can definitely search for all things you want, Antya offers you to discover new websites which are out there in some corner of the internet.

Their mission is simple: To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user.
Essentially, they are targeting to bring to the user all the niche websites that currently form the long-tail of the web.

Here’s wishing Bharani and Sunny all the very best with this new venture.

A great service for those who want to check their mails on-the-go but do not have a high-end phone or do not subscribe to GPRS: SMSmyEMail.com

Some of the features:
# No downloads and no internet/GPRS connections required.
# No signup Fees.
# Get 50 Free alerts on adding an email account.
# 5 Free alerts added to your account per week for first ten thousand users.
# Get 20 Free alerts for each referal. *Referred member should add an email account to SMSmyEMail.
# Works on your existing cell phone.
# Choose who you get email from on your cell phone – no spam!
# Works on all Indian Mobile network carriers.

This is really interesting. Primarily because it caters to a huge market of people who do not have GPRS (or do not intend to subscribe to it because of the cost factor).
Additionally, an SMS based service is very easy to use and quite convenient.

If you are a person with a passion for colours, ColourLovers is the site for you. A social networking site based on the them of Colours, this is a very well-designed site.

As they claim in their About Us section:

COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

The site has a very good layout with a pleasant feel and gives you a whole lot of options to play around with. If you are into designing or are looking for vibrant ideas, this is the website to visit.