The organizers of proto.in have selected Taazza as one of the 30 companies in the final shortlist. We the demonstrating Taazza there for 8 minutes.

We are excited to be part of proto.in.

Look forward to seeing you all there. If you bump into us there remember to ask for a test drive. We would be more than happy to give you a demo on on one.

For those who are new to the term Barcamp, here is the definition

BarCamp is an unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. The BarCampChennai focusses on Web 2.0, Social Media and Next Generation Internet.

The two days at Barcamp Chennai were a revelation of the enthusiasm of the community here at Madras(it still remains madras for me). Kiruba & Co did a phenominal job of managing the show. As typical for any “un”conference, the twists and turns of the events made it all the more interesting But alls well that end well! The show was great success. Even a few reporters decided to show up and mingle with the geeks! If anything else “blogging” has gone mainstream in India! “Live Blogging”  was world class!  Video blogs, photo blogs, limited podcasts & live updates  Way to go folks!

The audience was diverse, from final year students to entrepreneurs! People flying in from Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay to a remote demo session from California.

As for the sessions, there were as colorful as a rainbow .. ranging from Mobile Computing to User experience design. A lot of people attended Day 1 and the numbers dwindled on Day 2, but the response was still fabulous. The wiki has lots of information on the same, so I will spare you folks the boring details.

Some constuctive feedback below to be take with a pinch of salt

• A demo session – While there was lots of presenting, it would be nice to have had an hour or so for an information session where people could walk around and try out products/demos. Would have been a good way to connect and let the rubber hit the road.
• Bandwidth – The bandwith at the event was fairly limited and was troubling at times. But with a university infrastructure the organizers did the best they could. Hopefully next time around some company would pitch it and this would be a non issue!
• Questions – As the number of sessions were fairly high, the presenters to had to stick to time! While the enthusiasm of the crowd was great and interaction was great, it puts a strain in the content that each presenter can address. This is a double edged sword, too much restriction would make a conference defeating the purpose of the “un” conference! It guess it probably a responsibility of a the speaker to channel the question or postpone to the end of the session (Note to self! )

Towards the end of Day 1, we headed out to a beach south of Chennai! A wonderful way to connect and catch up with folks! A fabulous location and a perfect stop!

As for us at Taazza, this event was an awesome beginning! A great way to get the balling rolling. The presentation was very well recieved! Taazza’s review contest generated some fabulous reviews. Here are some of the questions that we were asked

“When were you launching” – Asked my most including The Hindu reporters
“Do you compete with MyToday”
“Whats your mobile stratergy”
“What is your business model”

Some of the feedback that we recieved were around color scheming, data accuracy and mobility. All well taken, please watch this space for some updates on this front. Meanwhile please keep those comments coming at feedback[at]taazza.com!

Some day we will be camping on the beach around a fire with our wifi laptops attending Web 3.0 sessions!

Oh yeah and by popular request Barcamp Bangalore, here we come! See ya folks there!

P.S: Apologies for the delay in the recap, barcampbangalore will be up on time!

A thought provoking article about online news papers by Andy Rutledge. He nails it here

Newspapers are in business to make money. Period. Sure, they’re in business to keep the world informed, but only as long as they’re profitable. Period. Paragraph.

If your business is concerned with providing text content to readers and attracting eyes to your advertisers’ ads, it makes sense to do it well – in whatever medium you’re operating. With very few exceptions, top-tier newspaper publishers are failing to present quality on the web. In fact, their newspapers are among the least readable publications available on the Web

Here are some of the problems that he points out

1. The number one problem with online newspapers is the presence of garish and stylistically inconsistent ads on the main page. Readers don’t visit these sites to be dazzled by frenetic colors and dizzying arrays of ads. Rather, they come to read news and be informed.
2. n almost ever case the layout and design of online newspapers sucks. Very few online newspapers employ intelligent use of grid, color and content hierarchy. Most have a flat aspect with no visual clues as to how the page and its information is supposed to be consumed.
3. With most online newspapers, the site navigation is horribly confusing and inconsistent. Furthermore, the link text on the page is often disguised, easily confused with non-link text, and provides little or no visual feedback when used.
4. Online newspapers often have questionable typography and paragraph configuration. Some (like The Wall Street Journal) have quite a horrible mishmash of font styles, coupled with poor font selection. Proper typography is more important in the low-resolution online environment than it is in the high-resolution environment of print.

Precisely, what we are talking about! Look out dinosours! Your free ride is coming to an end pretty soon!

So what is wrong with the existing sites you ask?

Are ya seriously asking this question. Well, lets entertain it nonetheless. Most of these sites have been having a free ride for a while, case in point Samachar

India made easy it claims! One can close a zillion popups and go on a easter egg hunt before one discovers news items. Same is true for other sites like Times Of India, Rediff, etc. They are all good content providers but extremely bad content enablers.

Innovation is non existent! They do a bad job adopting technologies, case in point RSS. Its taken more than a few years for these sites to adopt it. Its time for a fresh breeze!

Fair enough, what about the google’s and microsoft’s of the world, for instance google.news?

Good point. If you are comfortable just subscribing to RSS feeds from google news you should stick to them. Indians like us are opinionated, love to critic and enjoying voice their opinion.

So how are ya different?

We at Taazza believe that we can push the boundries of innovation with new technologies like tagging, mapping, memetracking and digg. There is significant gap between technology enablers and content providers within this space and we are working on exploiting the same to enable you the user.

Sounds like fun, When will I bet able to get my hands on this stuff?

We are working extremely hard to get the technology out to you. At the moment we are targeting Spring 2006.

Is there any way I get can previews of whats to come?

Please subscribe to this blog and sign up for updates. We hope to send out invites to a select few and solicit feedback.

We are very excited to launch soon! Stay tuned. Meanwhile please feel free to leave your comments!

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