Indiainfo

IndiaInfo.com: Where is the info?

Have you heard of the dotcom bubble? It was such a beautiful dream with cash falling from the skies and everything was clean n green ($). The bubble with characteristic shine due to the sun, nicely floating around with the breeze. People talked big, build unrealistic money models and calculated enormous numbers. Suddenly there were terms thrown around like XML, HTML, JAVA, brick-n-mortar, new economy, VCs, India…..

Come again…….what was the last thing….India! Am I kidding? Well in that era, right from Virar to Churchgate and Karjat to VT (oops…CST) in Mumbai there were hoardings that had the word India associated with dotcoms – a sudden spurt of patriotism fuelled by nuclear tests and it rained – not cats and dogs, but dotcoms. There are (read were) 123India.com, eIndia.com, forIndia.com, IndiaInfo.com, Indiatimes.com, Indya.com, Indiamarket.com, Indbazaar.com, IndiaOnline.com, India…this, India…that…etc etc

So are there any survivors of this bubble burst? Surprisingly yes! Alive but hospitalized, probably because they thought of providing everything a person would want by just clicking the mouse button – so there is yet another term introduced – PORTAL.

One such portal is IndiaInfo.com, who are faring slightly better than others. It has everything virtual one would want. Pay some money and chances are you will see some real things such as shopping goods.

The site has a homepage with all the masala crammed on the 800 X 600 screensize that covers nearly all fields from science, sports, technology, news to entertainment, downloads, partner sites etc. And yes they have a search engine too and it’s powered by Inktomi. (heard that one before?) Surprising, considering that Yahoo! Just changed from Inktomi to Google’s.

Interesting enough is the fact that Indiainfo.com has no html pages with info at all.There are either partner sites (sites by themselves) or html pages with just links – plenty of them. As an example you may find several categories on the homepage such as downloads, family, tourism, education, immigration, entertainment, insurance, environment…da…da…da.

Ain’t immigration a little different from the rest usual ones? It caught my eye too. One click carried me to other links like USA, UK, Canada etc. I tried USA and there was a page with several links to official US websites that have all the legal information on immigration – I will quote usdoj.gov as an example. Of course some links carry to a list of Indian embassies and consulates (nearly all the states) and other such related information.

For all student community, I ventured into Education and the page that was loaded had other sub-categories like CA, Engineering, Management plus several links to egurucool.com, careerlauncher.com, classteacher.com, dictionary.com and official ones like directorate of technical education. My adjurations forced me to click on “Management” subcategory. I further landed into page full of links to websites of IIM, IIPM, Jamnalal Bajaj etc.

Cheez, not a word written – just links! I further thought of environment as a thoughtful category (me being from an industrial sector) and expected good stuff, an essay or two, but again there happened to be subcategories like agriculture, pollution, magazines, environment friendly associations besides links to creativebags.com, conserveinfo.org. “Agriculture” subcategory has links to agriwatch.com, krishiudyog.com, agri-history.org and the likes.

Aha! Music. “Maybe”, I thought, “there are good MP3 downloads or streaming audio, since all Indian portals seem to have one”. Poof… JUST LINKS AGAIN!!! Links to carnatic.com, hindimp3.com, bollywoodmusic.com and yup! Subcategories like Ghazals, Indipop, Top10. Sorry! I did not bother clicking on these.

Yes…yes…this must be it! Everyone has it – maybe a good collection of wallpapers, screensavers, freeware. Greed for free stuff made me click on downloads. Alas! I did not follow the words of my classteacher who used to say “Greed never pays”. Good guess…links…to visualparadox.com, desktopunlimited.com, digitalgarage.net etc.

Indiainfo has partner sites like

careerindia.com :A career portal that integrates employee-employer relation.

quizbrain.com :Lots of exercises for the brain such as quizzes, puzzles, riddles.

thatscricket.com :Need I describe this one?

evesindia.com :If there has to be a ladies special train, there has to be a dotcom too

Indiainfo caters to B2C segments through shop.indiainfo.com,, where there is a remarkable range of products at great discounts too.

Well then there has to B2B transactions too! The best one is esourceindia.com where sellers can put their goods and buyers can purchase them through negotiations, enlarging the marketbase for sellers. mydotfirm.com offers a software that allows one to create an online store through which B2B transactions can be done. Justdial.com is similar to yellow pages. My favourite and worth a visit is travel.indiainfo.com which gives general information on holiday destinations, tour discounts, special offers, hotel bookings, car rentals, holiday packages, international news. There is also useful utility like currency converter.

Did you know?

Indiainfo.com has multilingual sites too. The year 2000 was a great year for IndiaInfo when it launched the portal in Tamil and Hindi (February) and Kannada, Malayalam and telugu (April). The Hindi portal has also been awarded “Best Multilingual Portal” award from CHIP magazine.

Last Word

There is nothing very creative about this site that would make me go back. If I know what information I want, I will rather go through Google search. But when I am not too sure what I am seeking then this will prove to be a “linkers paradise”.

Psst...read the review ''Gone in 60 seconds'' my fellow member asyis...and you'll know more.

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“ The saga…of challenge is when a person takes his pride to his nose and tries to out do others “

This statement can be rightly to said all the dotcoms shooting up in the Indian market, when they launch a portal or a website or what ever funny names you call them, they forget the ethics of doing business and boast of big things like big banners, big flash advertisements, Huge funding, Big people behind the scene to take care but what happens finally is that they fall flat on the ground like a big loaf of meat.

I am doing a small research on these Indian Dotcoms and portals and would bring to our MS members a small preview of these companies with real experience (of course) encountered either by me or my friends, also I expect the members here to give me inputs and feedback on the sites which I am writing so that the consumers get a final say and the best product to deal with.

Every one must have seen the Nicolas Cage movie, GONE IN 60 Seconds and remember the chart where each and every count is kept on the stolen cars in a similar way, I am keeping a count on the number of down falls of these dotcoms. Its not that I like these companies to fall down, Its just the attitude of these companies and their employees.

Now you will have a question why employees?

Answer is simple when these dotcoms came into picture a 2 year Exp MBA was being paid heavy salary and designation like VP, CEO, COO. It was really ridiculous because when these companies closed down, these employees will definitely expect a higher salary and higher designation but they are going to come in for rude shock as none of the companies are going to pay them so high. I am not blaming these employees, I am only blaming these dotcoms

In the series the first one on my list is the famous one Indiainfo.com

Who can forget the downfall of Indiainfo.com. One of the leading portal in India scenario to hit after rediff.com. Managed by the NRI based Raj Koneru. This company was the first to have very huge hoardings in and around Mumbai with an email space of 10mb.

The inside news was that the employees used to be paid in $(!!!That’s what I call style man).

They really started well and had good variety of services like a good email service, a decent chat rooms, and a decent search engine, services in different language, etc.

The site used to load fast and was really qucik if you are using a normal Dial up connection.

Technically , I never used to find any errors or dead link which one encounters at Indiatimes regularly, like site not loading, broken links etc.

But during this run, they wanted to put legs on many things and started faltering in this scenario.

Some of the services provided by Indiainfo are :

B2C services

https://shop.indiainfo.com

Don’t even think of going there it’s a pathetic site.

B2B services

1. Justdial service ( http://www.justdial.com)

I don’t have to say more about this, most of us know what this is all about

1. esourceindia (esourceindia.com)

It’s a virtual marketplace for procurement for any kind of Business requirements

1. mydotfirm.com

It’s a very interesting concept where you can make your store online and have your products displayed on the site. With keeping your cost low you can display product, attract quotations, submit quotations etc. For starters and small timers can definitely be good bet.

1. travel.indiainfo.com

A pretty decent site. But has got competition from giants like ICICI’s traveljini.com

All these services can be accessed directly going to the site https://indiainfo.com and click one of the link.

Other Services

Inktomi powers their search engine.

http://www.thatscricket.com

http://www.evesindia.com

http://www.quizbrain.com

http://www.careerindia.com

They have singles search for all bachelors who are waiting to tie up nots or looking for dates, but there are other services better than the one provided by Indiainfo.

Customer Service:

As usual they don’t have proper customer service to back up their expensive portal.

I had sent them a email that their news section was not being updated,but its been 6 days and have not heard from them.

But no doubt after that, their news was getting updated faster than timesofindia.com. But most important is intimate the customer who has brought this thing into their mind. But no they wont do..like most other dotcoms.

Its really depressing to see, so much funds being wasted on lavish advertisements, lavish launches, lavish salaries, lavish lifestyle of the company, but couldn’t concentrate on the most important thing of any kind of services, i.e the Customer Services.

I hope with the downfall of this dotcom and many more on the lines companies will start understanding the importance of Customers and Customer Service.

I would still recommend this site for some of their value added services like justdial, evesindia.com, careerindia.com, thatscricket.com, mydotfirm.com.

I wouldn’t rate this site an average site because there are better ones to be looked on.

Ratings : 5/10

Series 1..concluded…Wait for more….

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