IXiGO, authorSTREAM, and WiziQ: three innovative sites from India
An article from The Hindu talks about three web tools that have come out from India which are created for the world audience! All these tools are very interesting and useful. I had known about one of these but had no idea they came from India. One interesting thing – two are Chandigarh based! Of course there is another site Instablogs – which is entirely created and managed from Shimla, HP. Which shows that innovation does not always come from the larger cities and India’s next innovations may be coming from smaller towns – “B” or “C” grade cities as they are known!
IXiGO: This is a search engine for travel in India created by a company in Gurgaon. It was created just one year ago by a small group of IIT and management graduates. They extended it and now claim it is India’s biggest hotel search service, encompassing over 6,000 establishments, across 400 Indian towns; trawling 40 of the best hotel and hostel price comparison sites.
Among the bigger Web resources covered are the Travelguru hotel network; Inasra, a Chennai-based aggregator and HostelWorld, a specialist who concentrates on budget accommodation favoured by international ‘back packers’ and students.
It is quite like Indeed.com – the job search engine which trawls many job search sites around the US. I think this concept of trawlers of sites is a great and useful one – kind of parasitic.. but very useful for the users. 🙂
authorSTREAM: This is a site created by a person in Chandigarh, Umesh Sharma – a computer science and mass communications graduate. It is a site to help share powerpoints with voice and effects. It is very much like slideshare but it makes the combination of voice and effects with powerpoint decks easier to handle. You can share the uploaded decks on your blogs or websites.
Actually, there is another fantastic service if you want to share other documents – like Excel or Word or in pdf – its called Scribd. Some people have actually uploaded some very useful documents and even books. Most of these documents can be downloaded from the site as well.
WiziQ: This is also created in Chandigarh. Founded by Harman Singh, and has investment from the Educomp group. It is a full-fledged virtual classroom where both teachers and students can benefit from a range of tools: paint brushes to create art work; an electronic ‘white board’, audio and video sharing; PowerPoint presentations.
This is an idea that even I had had long time back and had even suggested to an industrialist… but it never went anywhere. However, I think this thing can be improved manifold!
