MediaNama…. the latest technology news blog to hit the airwaves

Medianama is a technology news blog that went live today. Its written by someone who needs no introduction - Nikhil Pahwa, who till a few weeks back was the face of Content Sutra (possibly the biggest of the Indian tech news blogs in terms of reach & readership) in India. Nikhil has decided to step out on his own and give this a real shot. The focus of the blog will be internet, startups, mobile & investments (as evinced by its navigation). And given the kind of contacts he has developed over the last couple of years, he should have a steady stream of newsworthy stories every day. The blog includes a calendar of tech related events; check it out here.

JobYantra distributed job-boards… good idea, wrong implementation

A few months back, I wrote this post lamenting the sheer futility of traditional job websites for startups, which inherently need employees of a certain kind. I had pointed towards the growing popularity of job boards on popular blogs (like TechCrunch, Gigaom, JoelSpolksy etc). JobYantra, a Mumbai based startup has launched an initial version of their service that will connect employers with hard to reach candidates using the blogosphere as a channel. However their modus operandi may need a fair bit of tweaking before it starts giving them real traction.

Jobyantra is based on the premise that good candidates already have good jobs, so there is no reason to believe that they are even looking at the career websites. However it might be possible to reach out to them via popular blogs (that they read), so why not create a service that allows bloggers to integrate a readymade job board into their blog.

How does it work? Bloggers (called publishers) can sign up on JobYantra and get a jobboard integrated in their blog’s theme. They get a custom page for displaying jobs, the design and html of which can be customized to match their blog’s existing design. Employers looking for candidates can post jobs on JobYanta and these would show up on the affiliate blog network. The employer cannot chose the type of blog to show the ads as all jobs would be related to tech/web 2.0. Currently the service is free for both employers and bloggers. Going forward they plan to charge employers and do a revenue split with the affiliate blogs. An example of their job board can be seen in the screnshot below (its integrated in the Webyantra theme)

I can foresee two problems with what Jobyantra is doing. Firstly the job board is not hosted on the blog, rather it is on the Jobyantra website (thats the way the url works), so it is almost like a psuedo navigation. This fundamentally violates the principle that you should not take away traffic and SEO benefits from the host which you are trying to piggyback. Think of adsense javascript codes, widgets, media players…. they are all embeddable in their hosts and do no wean away traffic as Jobyantra might do. The second problem is the low barriers to entry for something of this nature. I reckon that it will take a smart developer not more than a day to cook up a wordpress plugin that does exactly what Jobyantra does. Put that plugin on wordpress.org and you get free, instantaneous distribution for your plugin, and this could wipe out any first mover advantage.

I think Jobyantra should provide an embeddable javascript code for their jobboard that publishers can simply copy/paste into their blog. This will let the content reside on the blog itself and make the relationship symbiotic rather than parasitic.

I also feel that sooner or later the established job sites (Naukri, Monster, Indiatimes etc) are going to jump into this. Simplyhired already does this in the US.

Overall I feel Jobyantra has correctly identified an opportunity that is waiting to be harnessed. They need to tweak their offering to make it more publisher-friendly.

Webyantra now part of OpenWeb.Asia

You can now follow Webyantra on OpenWeb.Asia. OpenWeb is an aggregated network of selected blogs focused on the Asian Web industry. The idea behind OpenWeb is to build a bridge between the Asia web and global industry, and also enhance the inter-communication of local internet markets. OpenWeb.Asia consists of blogs from the Asia-Pacific geographies, i.e China, Japan, Australia, Singapore & Vietnam.

From an Indian perspective, there is so much we can learn from our counterparts in Asia. The level of internet penetration in these societies far surpasses what we have in India, and they (unlike us) have managed to localise content and applications to a larger extent.

I look forward to a part of this extended family.

Sharp’s Solar powered LCD TV also consumes the lowest electricity

In an effort to contribute to the Mother Nature, Sharp unveiled a prototype of a 26-inch LCD TV which consumes only 1/4 of electricity when compared to its CRT counterparts or 1/3 from other LCDs. Also for all those people living with irregular electricity supplies, this TV can be hooked to a solar panel so that they don’t miss out their daily dose of a soap opera. The product is still in testing stages and when it becomes commercially available, it will extend the idiot box benefits to 1.6 billion people living without electricity and lower power bills for us.

[Impress via Engadget]

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Pioneer’s Optical Disc can store 400GB of data

Pioneer Electronics has announced that they have developed something phenomenal. It’s the world’s first 16-layer optical disc which can store up to 400GB of data. That’s 25GB in each layer which is equivalent to a single layer Blu-Ray Disc (BD). It is still unclear but it seems that the new discs will be compatible with existing BD Players because of the same specification of the lens.

Pioneer will be demonstrating this piece of technology at International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2008 to be held in Hawaii from July 13.

Press Release