Shuhaib ShariffThe Dark Knight… Yeah, Right!

Nec Dextrorsum Nec Sinistrorsum (Neither to the right nor to the left) :

http://www.mybangalore.com/article/0610/bangalore-schools-bishop-cotton-schools-145-years-of-excellence-.html

In the first part of this series, I’ve touched upon why the current geodomain development model is flawed and doesn’t really maximize the returns on high quality geodomains.
Before suggesting a better model, let us first understand who our target audience in a geodomain business is: I’d say it’s primarily the residents of the city.

Reason:
Take the example of Denver.com. Who do you think cares more about the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites? Who needs regular updates on stuff happening in and around the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites? Who has the ALL important: emotional connect with the city … tourists / travellers OR Denverites?
Clearly, it makes business sense to focus on local residents, because it’s easier to engage them on a long term basis … the emotional connect is difficult to achieve with anybody else.

Local residents are looking for commercial content on city portals. They’re looking to discover & explore local businesses online. Don’t believe it? Check this:

“Research shows that consumers typically spend about 80 percent of their income within 50 miles of their homes, and that about 30 percent of all Internet searches are commercial in nature. In fact, fully one quarter of all searches on the Internet are for both local and commercial content. These consumers are the crown jewel of search because they typically convert into buyers at a higher rate than any other type of online search traffic. As a result, advertisers often pay a premium to place their ads in front of consumers conducting local searches. Researchers forecast that a growing number of local businesses will begin to advertise their products and services through online search in order to reach these highly valuable consumers.”
– Source: Local.com

Next, we need to understand the needs & content consumption patterns of local residents. What do they expect from their local city portal? What will bring them back every day? How do you differentiate your offering from the BIG boys: Yahoo!, Yelp, AOL OR the city’s local newspaper website? How do you monetize?

One can categorize Local CONTENT into TWO types:

1) Content for everyday / frequent consumption
Local News, Reviews, Events, Alerts, Weather, Photos & Videos.

2) Content for Need-based consumption
Local Classifieds, Real Estate, Movie Listings, City Offers, Jobs, Yellow Pages, Online Shopping, Forums, Flight Status, etc.

It is important that content on a geodomain / city portal is highly localized. By including national or international content you will end up competing for eyeballs with Yahoo!, AOL, etc.  By all means that is a losing proposition! Stick to your niche: LOCAL

Monetization:
Geodomains need out-of-the-box thinking. Slapping together Adsense & generic banners (credit cards, insurance, web hosting, etc.) doesn’t help (unless you get millions of impressions each day) Considering that the traffic to geodomains may be significant but not gigantic, generic CPC/CPM advertising is generally a bad idea.

In the next part of this series, I will share some monetization ideas and divulge the secret of building high quality content on geodomains at very low costs.

Yesterday, the 31st of March was the last date of our Corporate Income Tax eFiling. Procrastination is a divine virtue Im blessed with … and I pushed this important task (tax filing) to the very last day.

As luck would have it, we faced some issues uploading the tax returns to the Indian income tax website. My CA was overloaded with work (too many last minute filings) and asked me to head out to the regional Income Tax Office to get this issue sorted out… time was of essence.

Now, I’ve heard of some horror stories of people and their interactions with the Indian Income Tax department. Especially when you are not accompanied by your CA … there is a tendency to harass and treat even honest tax payers suspiciously or so, I was told (As a friend says “Shak, Shak, What the **CK”)

Anyways, the job had to be done and I landed up at the IT office near Indian Express. Had sufficient documentation in hand, just in case …
Met the PRO and he asked me to meet the IT Officer in the computer section. The Officer, surprisingly was courteous and patiently heard me out. At that very instant, the Income Tax website was offline (maybe due to the load) so he did not have access to our records. He asked me not to take the trouble of coming again and gave his office number. “Please call in 2 Hrs and we’ll help you with your issue”, he said. All this, while his phone(s) were ringing incessantly.

I went back delighted that our public servants are not the villains they are made out to be… not all of them at-least.

I called a few hours later, but could not speak to the concerned officer. I was asked to provide the company details and also my mobile number, the operator at the other end said they’ll get back as soon as possible. I sort of thought … gosh its not going to solved today and I’ll have to go back tomorrow … after the due date

Guess what, I got a call an hour later from the Officer and my issue was resolved. The officer patiently waited on the phone for me to login and check if all was well. Too cool Macha!

Moral of the story: Things in India are not as bad as they are made out to be. Sure, they can be better … but its not beyond repair. So keep the faith!

DoubleSpring has been nominated for TiE50 , TiECon 2010 - MAY 14-15, Santa Clara , CA
Details at  www.tie50.net

A big “Thank You” to the TiE50 Executive Committee, for considering us.

When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are. If you don’t invest the time to do it correctly today, you will spend more time and money in repairing mistakes tomorrow.

It is widely believed that the Indian MEDIA has scant respect for copyrights. Although it is unfair to generalize, I’ve starting to believe that it is indeed true.

We’re a niche online media portal covering events & stories in Bangalore city. Time and again I’ve noticed that mainstream media uses OUR content (photos, research data, etc.) in their stories and never gives us credit (forget about taking permission!)

Let me provide a recent instance:

Bangalore Mirror issue of February 24th 2010, Page 7, which bore the story ” Tweeting to Save Carlton Towers”.

Bangalore Mirror has used 3 of MyBangalore.com Copyright images in the above mentioned story .

Images in context
1.A shocked survivor
2.A Fireman in Action
3.A victim being brought out of the building.

These images have been very prominently featured in our story which have been captured by our Staff Photographer Manish Gunjan.

The story was published on February 23rd, 2010 Titled:
Pictures: Fire in Bangalore’s Carlton Towers
http://mybangalore.com/article/0210/pictures-fire-in-carlton-towers.html

As anybody can tell, this is a case of blatant rip-off and copyright violation. Can you believe that the honorable Bangalore Mirror belongs to the Times of India Group?

It is extremely unfair to pass off somebody’s work as your own. I have no idea, how many images/stories are being used on a daily basis – they could be anyone’s, but I do know that this nefarious practice is increasing and there is nothing we can do about it.