IIM-A grad launches subzi mandi on laptop

Surat: Your daily aloo, baigan and bhindi will soon be just a click away. No more finding your way through the filth at your neighbourhood subzi bazaar and haggling for prices with rude vegetable vendors. An IIM-Ahmedabad graduate has brought the mandi right on your laptop.
City-based Akrosh Sharma, who passed out of the elite B-school in 2004, is all set to launch an online vegetable store after running a vegetable retail business for the last couple of years.
The website will create an online mandi where one can “see” the fresh vegetables, check prices and place orders. “Apart from purchasing daily vegetables, one can gift fruits using the web service. We are launching the concept of gift-packing fruits and vegetables as a ‘healthy gift’ option,” says Sharma. Sharma feels it will be a hit, especially among working couples in the Hazira industrial zone who seldom get time to shop for fresh vegetables everyday.
  “Once the order is placed, customers will get the vegetables at the time specified by them,” adds Sharma, who grew up in Vadodara and joined IIM-A after getting an engineering degree from MS University. His stint at IIMA landed him a lucrative job with a top MNC and was based in Surat. But Sharma, apprehensive of getting into a comfort zone, left his job to tread a different path and go on his own. He launched his vegetable and fruit business in 2007 in a 10 by 10 feet shop. 
“I competed with the mandi and not the big stores. I created a subzi bazaar-like atmosphere in terms of product display that had well-behaved staff members dealing with customers, high sense of hygiene and no haggling,” said Sharma. Currently, his “mini mandi” concept has crossed Rs 1 crore in annual turnover.

“New concepts like these will lead to improvement of the market where the customer will have better options. An institute like IIMA can encourage entrepreneurship in a big way. We wish it is not only IIM grads but even other entrepreneurs should come forward with innovative concepts like this,” says Vardan Kabra, who was Sharma’s classmate at IIM-A and had opted out of the placement process to launch his own school in Surat.

Source: The Time Of India

End of Geocities

Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year. 

We learned that Yahoo would be closing the door on GeoCities back in April, so users have had plenty of time to migrate to other services. Earlier this year, for example, MSN partnered with WetPaint to allow people to create "fansites". After Yahoo's announcement, Wetpaint took the opportunity to announce a "bailout plan for foreclosed GeoCities properties," which it called the "GeoCities Asset Recovery Plan (GARP)."As it shuts down GeoCities, Yahoo itself is now plugging its own $4.99-a-month Web hosting service.

Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do? Yahoo's way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

"Then there's the fact that Google, not Yahoo, appears to be responsible for the lion's share of GeoCities referrals, sending about 31.45 percent of the site's traffic its way," noted Doug Caverly upon Yahoo's original announcement. "Yahoo's only behind of 16.89 percent of all GeoCities visits. So by closing GeoCities, for which it paid $3.6 billion in 1999, Yahoo seems to be turning its back on a large amount of traffic. Moreover, it's turning down free traffic from its biggest competitor."

"Carol Bartz may be trying to get Yahoo's costs under control, but it looks like sticking a 'for sale' sign on GeoCities would be at least one preferable option compared to a closure," he added.

But alas, it looks like the sign reads "closed" rather than "for sale." So say goodbye, and in the words of Richard Marxx, "hold on to the memory."

It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users? After all, it was the GeoCities users that built their sites, promoted them and put up with sometimes annoying ads. A simple forwarding of their GeoCities url to their new home would be appreciated! 

MySpace isn't exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it. What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished? Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting use out of them. They're obviously getting page views.

Here's what Yahoo is telling GeoCities users to do if they want to keep their sites:

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you'd like to keep your web site, you'll need to move your site files to another web hosting provider.

We recommend moving to our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.

Perhaps it's not worth it to users to go throgh the hassle of migration, but it has been nice to have their GeoCities site at least remain in tact. Well, tough luck. I hope you've gotten what you wanted away from it before Yahoo obliterates it. There are some sites out there that have not yet been shut down, but it appears that is only a matter of time.

source: webpronews.com by Chris Crum

Only In Japan: Burger King Offers A Windows 7 Whopper

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2787537724230594021
If you listen close enough you can probably hear the arteries of hundreds of Japanese people clogging as Burger King has unveiled the Windows 7 Whopper.

What is a Windows 7 Whopper you ask?
Well, it’s just like the ordinary Whopper… only with 7 patties of meat and stands over 5 inches tall. As far as the price goes, the Windows 7 Whopper will set you back ¥777, which translates to about $8.55, which isn’t that bad when you think about the quantity meat you’re getting.

Only the first 30 customers per day can take advantage of the special ¥777 pricing, each patron after that will have to pay ¥1,450, which is about $17.10. For those interested, the promotion runs from 10/22 - 10/28.

Source: Webpronews.com by By Jeremy Muncy