From the category archives:

Traffic

India needs Tata Prius and not Tata Nano

by Sriram Vadlamani on September 30, 2008

Toyota Prius uses the energy produced from braking and tries to replenish it for running the car. It also uses the kinetic energy produced from the spinning of wheels on a downhill to replenish some of the energy required to run the car. This would reduce the amount of energy (fossil fuel) needed to run the car. This car is best suited for city conditions. This was designed for US market.

Now, imagine the car in India.

I would say the car would never use the petrol in the tank. Any guesses why? In Indian cities you don’t do anything else other than hitting on the brake pedal. That is a lot of energy to run a car. So Isn’t Prius the better-suited car for India than Nano?

India needs a Prius or a Prius++, not Nano !

Nano would be an environmental disaster. It would clog the roads, the atmosphere and ultimately the lungs of little ones. Funny thing is Tata is doing the Indian society a great service by commoditizing the car market. Though they are running into loses already because of the Singur issue and the new plant to be set-up.

{ 14 comments }

Trak.in June Statistics and other updates

by Arun Prabhudesai

WOW…What a month June has been ! The traffic went even beyond my expectation. Google seems to love trak.in. It ranks my blog very well on number of high traffic keywords.

A lot has happened in the month of June apart from registering high traffic growth. The feed subscriptions also went up, only marginally. I have moved to a new house personally. My startup hover.in also moved to new bigger office. We secured funding for hover.in as well in May.

Apart from this, hover.in is in the last phase of alpha. It will come out in Beta on August 1st. I am extremely excited about the way hover.in is turning out. I am sure Web publishers and bloggers will feast on our offering.

Moving on to Trak.in June Statistics, here is the snapshot of Google Analytics and Feedburner.

3 comments July 3, 2008 Continue Reading →

Trak.in February Round-up

by Arun Prabhudesai

Its that time of the month again – doing a quick round-up on previous month.

February saw least number of posts published in a month since the start of this blog. Not an achievement that I would have liked.

February traffic growth

The traffic however remained constant with a marginal growth compared to January. This month saw close to 119,500 page views compared to 117,500 garnered last month.

February subscriber growth

From subscriptions perspective, February was a good month – It added close to 180 subscribers. On Feb 1st, Feedburner subscriber widget showed 1285 subscribers and as of today Trak.in has 1466 subscribers. A decent growth given that very few posts were published this month.

4 comments March 2, 2008 Continue Reading →

Yahoo’s new Ad solution targets user behaviour, hopes to increase click through rates!

by Arun Prabhudesai

Now, I feel this is a serious threat to user’s privacy. Even though the Yahoo! officials have assured that they follow strict privacy policy, a normal user will be quite uncomfortable knowing that everything he/ she does is tracked and stored !
I am okay with search words stored anonymously, but here Yahoo! not only tracks activities, but stores it as a user profile.
Even Google stores searches done, however, user has the facility to stop storing these results. Also, I am not sure if google keeps the track of which user has searched for what !
Even with all this, I fail to understand how Yahoo! will know what banner ads user has clicked (unless they are Yahoo’s own ads ) and which microsites they have visited.

3 comments January 21, 2008 Continue Reading →

November Roundup: Statistics and more…

by Arun Prabhudesai

As expected November was not a great month in terms of statistics and subscribers. The total pageviews came down from 110K to nearly 94K. The posts were relatively infrequent and I was also not able to give much time due to my move to India.
November also saw complete overhaul of Trak.in blog, including new theme and Wordpress version upgrade (Blogging Software on which Trak.in runs). During this transition the blog was down infrequently. All this affected November statistics negatively.

0 comments December 11, 2007 Continue Reading →

October Roundup: Stats and more

by Arun Prabhudesai

October marked 6 months completion of Trak.in blog. From 3800 pageviews / 20 subscribers in May 07 to nearly 110,000 pageviews / 900 subscribers in October 07, it has been a fascinating journey.

6 comments November 6, 2007 Continue Reading →

Mapping India: Making the impossible, possible

by Arun Prabhudesai

I am not sure if it is entirely possible, given the unorganized and inconsistent naming standards of the Indian roads. Infact, forget the naming standards, most of the roads don’t even have names. There are always multiple combinations possible to go from anywhere to anywhere with similar distances.

6 comments October 30, 2007 Continue Reading →

See this if you drive in India!

by Arun Prabhudesai

Indian traffic and roads are legendary. Internet is littered with videos of undisciplined and dangerous driving habits of Indians. Commuting in India is one of the biggest shocks face foreign travelers face when they arrive in India.

0 comments October 24, 2007 Continue Reading →

Internet Search: Can you do without it?

by Arun Prabhudesai

Information retrieval via Internet search is now an indispensable tool for billions of people worldwide. Most of us will feel paralyzed even at the thought of not having it.

4 comments October 10, 2007 Continue Reading →

Sunday fun: It can happen only in India

by Arun Prabhudesai

Indian roads are legendary and Traffic on it, even bigger. It is a shock for any foreign national traveling. They are always amazed at how does Indian traffic system work.

But it sure works ! Best way to describe the traffic would be “Organized Chaos”

Now, this video goes one step further. Have a look at these daredevils (aka foolish people) doing stunts on a busy delhi highway overflowing with traffic.

4 comments September 22, 2007 Continue Reading →

India crowned World’s No. 1 Travel Destination!

by Arun Prabhudesai

The leading UK Authority, Condé Nast Traveler UK, has announced that India tops the list of preferred travel destination in the world.
This feat has been achieved for the first time in history of Indian Tourism. Surely, it is great moment and pride for all of us Indians and we should rejoice it whole heartedly.

2 comments September 7, 2007 Continue Reading →

Bangalore: Best city to do business in the wired world…Really?

by Arun Prabhudesai

CNN’s Business 2.0 has mentioned Bangalore as the best city to do business in the wired world.
To be honest, I am quite surprised at this news. However, if an authority like Business 2.0 says it; one really needs to consider it and take it seriously.

3 comments September 6, 2007 Continue Reading →

August Wrap-up: Traffic, Subscribers and popular posts

by Arun Prabhudesai

Trak.in received 55000 pageviews in month of August, an improvement of around 180% over month of July. The subscriber base too doubled. As of writing this post, Trak.in shows a subscriber base of 367 as compared to nearly 175 by July end. So other than the traffic on the blog, these subscribers read the posts regularly through RSS Reader or Email Application.

2 comments September 2, 2007 Continue Reading →

Trak.in Blog featured in Times of India, Delhi Edition

by Arun Prabhudesai

This weekend was quite good for Trak.in, it got featured in Times of India. If you are one of the readers in Delhi, India, you must have already seen the special report on Blogging in India appeared in Times of India Delhi Edition.
Trak.in was mentioned along with two other blogs (One is the usual, Amit Agarwal).
I am not sure if there is an online version of this report that Times has come out with. Here is the partial snapshot of the report that appeared in the newspaper. (Click on the image to see what is written about trak.in)

6 comments August 12, 2007 Continue Reading →

Indian Search Engines : Who is winning the race ?

by Arun Prabhudesai

India centric localized search engines market is saturating fast, real fast. In last year alone there must have been more than 10-15 Indian local search engines launched. Some smaller and some bigger. Some with huge funding and some with none. This space is so crowded right now that it is difficult to know who is really winning. However, I’ll attempt to put forth a brief overview of current scenario.

Before moving forward we should give some thought to following questions.

* Is India having a market size to accommodate all of them ?
* Are they different and unique enough from each other to command attention and traffic?
* What are the sources of monetization for these search engines?
* Is their search quality relevant enough to get the user move from their existing favorite search engines?

23 comments August 7, 2007 Continue Reading →

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