Storming the web!!!

Rare are the companies who contribute, get recognized and grow as a trusted brand.

SANIsoft Technologies is one of those rare identities.

Think of the word “SANI” and all coffee-fueled coders will think of the man who is well-known and respected in accelerating and contributing to PHP, Dr.Tarique Sani.

SANIsoft Technologies specializes in developing large, mission-critical e-biz applications which includes a big clientele. Knowingly or unknowingly you must have used either of these or atleast heard of these Open Source projects

* Coppermine Gallery

*  CheeseCake PhotoBlog * WAPpop   

 *   PHPZipLocator  

Yes, all these are the babies of SANIsoft Technologies.

People Behind it: 

 Dr.Tarique Sani: Needs no introduction!!! Still you are curious enough read it here

Swati Sani: She spearheads the business development and administration at SANIsoft.

Concept:

Adopting Open Source business model helps in many aspects of business but above all personal satisfaction of being part of a much better world.  

The logic behind SANIsoft seems pretty simple. Contribute, Collaborate and grow. 

We are bringing an Exclusive interview with Dr.Tarique Sani, he will be discussing about Open Source business model, guiding start-ups, and ofcourse about CopperMine Gallery!!!!  

Stay Tuned for some real action

OJAX is the new open-source federated search tool.It provides a highly dynamic AJAX based user interface to a federated search service for OAI-PMH compatible repository metadata.

OJAX is simple, non-threatening but powerful. It attempts to minimise upfront user investment and provide immediate dynamic feedback, thus encouraging experimentation and enabling enactive learning.

Benefits of OJAX

• Provide a single search interface across all the repositories in use in an institution or consortium.
• Or provide an improved search interface to a single repository
• Faster resource discovery.
• Easy to use, and support.

Features of OJAX

• Auto-completion of search terms
• Triggering of auto-searches
• Dynamically scrollable search results - no more navigating between pages
• Auto-expansion of search result details
• Rapid sorting of results
• Integrated with the Firefox 2 / IE 7 search feature
• Supports OpenSearch Discovery
• Stored searches as Atom feeds
• Includes an OAI-PMH harvester
• Easy to install in your own institution

Installation 

OJAX can be installed as a Web Application in any J2EE compliant servlet engine.

Packages Available

1. OJAX GUI, Web Services & Harvester
2. OJAX GUI, Web Services, Harvester & example repository index

People behind it

• Dr. Judith Wusteman
• Pádraig O’hIceadha

This software was developed by UCD School of Information and Library Studies, Dublin, Ireland, with collaboration from Industry.It leverages open source solutions funded by Sabre Holdings.

Disappointing Feature

The only disappointing feature of OJAX version0.7 is, auto-expansion of individual fields works in Firefox but does not work in versions of Internet Explorer before 7.0 because of limitations in earlier versions of IE.

Today most of the websites are Ajaxified.A pretty good example which i would like to showcase is, FlickrCash.

FlickrCash is a Multi-parameter Flickr search using jQuery.(jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery changes the way you write JavaScript.)FlickrCash searches for photos on Flickr in the most efficient way.You can see as many thumbniles as will fit in your browser.It loads upto 10 pages in the background,so it is very fast to browse through, to find the photos you need.When you move the mouse over any picture an “up arrow” and “close” button appears.When you click the thumbnile a preview of the image will popup,listing all the sizes that are available for the picture.

Can I save my search results? Yes,you can.Sign up and create an account for free(Activate your account) and save your search result by putting it together in a “lightbox” of photos with a secret URL.You can also share your lightbox.
Still you have doubt??Just click here.

Person behind it:  
Jesse Skinner-a freelancing web developer specializing in JavaScript, Ajax and CSS. More about him.

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and Wikia has announced that he is ready to take on search domain says a Reuters report.

He feels community powered search technology is less susceptible to spam. He said, the ranking algorithms should not be “hidden”, pointing to the counterparts which includes Google, Yahoo! and others.

At the conclusion, he also added that Wikia will be even bigger, better and popular than the flagship Wikipedia.

Read the complete story here….

Courtesy: TechTree.com http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Wikia_to_Take_on_Google_Yahoo/551-79691-643.html

Pageflakes is an Ajax-based start page.The site is organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes containing information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search,weather forecast, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos and user-created modules.You can choose to share a certain page with invited visitors or the world.Any number of pages can be added.It offers a scrollable view.Also the layout of each page is customizable.

Adding Feeds/Flakes:

You can add feeds,flakes to your page.Feeds based on Several categories are available.Pageflakes is one of a few sites that put RSS feeds, YouTube videos, web search, a to-do list and other modules in one place.You can also add your own feed.

Is the Flakes editable?

Yes, ofcourse.If you are adding Pageflakes News in your page,you are free to mention how many number of posts should appear,whether tooltip and description about the post is required or not.In the case of Flickr flake,you can view,the photos by giving the tag name or the most recent or intersting one.Single picture or 9 pictures can be viewed at a time.

May i  know the upcoming events in my city?
Yes,you can also know the upcoming events in your city by giving your Zipcode(US only).Even here you can specify the number of events to be diplayed per page.

Email configuration:

 You can also configure your email account.It supports several account types.

Search Offered:

Google search.

People behind it:

Dan Cohen, CEO -Prior to Pageflakes he was the head of My Yahoo!, Yahoo’s personalized homepage, and before that led product management for personalized products at Google, including the Google Personalized Homepage.

Christoph Janz, CPO-Back in 1997, Christoph co-founded German Internet startup DealPilot.com, one of the first comparison shopping services which got funded by Bertelsmann and has later been acquired by Shopping.com.

Omar AL Zabir, CTO-He developed projects for companies like HP, Bank of America, Citibank and other companies in the US, Australia, Germany and Bangladesh

Ole Brandenburg, CMO-He held marketing positions for several other Internet companies including Jamba, which he co-founded, Dooyoo and myBet.

Uday Walia, CIO-He was co-founder and CTO of GetSmart, JobFlash and Done.com, three VC-funded Bay Area startups. Prior to that, Uday held executive and managerial positions with at Wells Fargo Bank and Nortel. 

Storm Analysis:

In the startpage market, the independent companies seems to be innovating much faster than the grown ups.So, could Google or Microsoft be interested in acquiring a startpage, despite having their own products ?

What a beautiful thinking…..why not we have an Indian Search Engine specific to enhance the Indian user experience? You still wondering whether we have one or not?

Guruji.com is the Indian Google. 

Guruji.com helps Indian searchers look for specific Indian content on web ranging from people to cities to hotels and of course, anything and everything of India in one go.

When you visit the site for the first time, you get the feel of Google.
But this “Search Hai Hindustani”

So whats sooo kool about Guruji?

 –Offering in Indian languages. Now, Grandpa and Grandma can use Guruji. Guruji is currently offering in Hindi, Kannada and Telugu.

–Since, Guruji is in beta stage; the good thing we liked is that they care for user. They want to keep improving by taking feedbacks from the user experience.

 –Its covering a number of Indian cities which includes Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkatta, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Indore and many more.

– Its not only Search but searching almost everything an Indian user would need.

–Web 2.0 lovers destination as well

 Click to enlarge and visit the url!!!

People Behind it

Anurag Dod, CEO, Alumnus IIT-Delhi

Gaurav Mishra, COO, Alumnus IIT-Delhi

Suvir Sujan, Need we say more? Okay, co-founder of Bazee.com

Groups Behind the venture

Great ideas need more of mentoring than capital. But it would be great if one can get a combination of both.

Sequoia Capital India: Yes, these the people behind the success stories of Google, Apple, Cisco etc providing mentoring and capital.

Storm Analysis:

Search has always been a crowded market and we have seen enough changes in the way search is done. There are enough of global players like Google, Yahoo!, Ask etc.

Search has a new face in near future; currently the indexing is done using text. What about brining video or audio indexing?

But, Guruji seems good at beta stage. But needs to take constant user feedback to improve the results. Storm team liked the concept of Guruji’s Gyaan; A perfect piece, guess even Google is missing this. A good move from Guruji.

Long way to go for Guruji.

 Technorati Tags:Guruji WebStorm Web 2.0India 2.0 Start-ups Sequoia Capital