It’s not only about daring companies locally, instead you can dare an overseas company, for instance for design and development contests. So be as innovative as you can to dare companies in the areas where no one has ever dared them.

Each company when registered will have a Dare Profile with all their stats. There’s a ladder also for company’s position, and it gets updated as any two companies have a contest, and post their result.

Soon we will publish the exact rules for using the ladder and how positions are calculated. Till then please enjoy the site and start challenging other firms.

Well, same happened to me, so I got into the celebrity profiles. One profile I’d spent more time on was a very well known local model, so I knew a little about her earlier as well. Profile of her, however, seemed fake to me, and something that came in my mind at first instance was nothing other than “Identity theft”. Discussed it with friends concluded that how come a busiest celebrity can be so active on social network, but it’s mobile world so anything can happen.

Well, this celebrity story was over and out from my mind after a week, but not the Identity theft itself. I kept on finding more about Identity theft and have come up with the fact that “Identity theft is the biggest threat to Web 2.0”.

Identity theft is the biggest threat to Web 2.0 because it’s the biggest and speedily spreading internet crime. According to a research conducted by Gartner, average 28.5 people are becoming victims of identity theft each minute. In 2001, the rate of growth of identity theft was 11% to 20% and it grew upto 80% in 2002 and in 2005 it was 700%. [Source: Identity Theft Resource Center]

The research classifies the identity theft into two types, i.e. true-name identity theft and synthetic identity fraud. The first one is one in which the criminals use credentials of an actual person or business and this stands only 10% to 15% of the total cases while the other one is based on fabricated data and stands 85% to 90% of the internet fraud cases.

Identity theft affects not only individuals but also business and social groups. From Lori Drew’s Myspace case [a 49 years old woman created a false Myspace account in the name of a 16 years old boy, intending to get information from daughter’s friend “MTM” about their relationship. Later the fictitious online relationship got ugly and to end up all this "Josh" broke up with MTM and the girl committed suicide] to online phishing attacks there are hundreds of different situations whereby people suffer. Social Networks are likely to be more vulnerable to identity theft risks, as grabbing user information and creating false accounts on these networks is none too difficult.

It’s a proven fact that technology and innovations have benefited crimes along with the society for betterment and improved lifestyle. But, since there’s always a room for betterment, so is this in the case of Web 2.0. When we talk about communities, user generated content, direct access to the end user and blah blah, one question that’s of equal importance for everyone is “How to maintain your true identity?”

Moderated content and maintaining online reputation systems can resolve this very issue, but almost every social network is after more and more growth in terms of userbase, and there’re some with million of users, i.e Facebook , Orkut, Myspace etc, and it’s nearly impossible for them to keep a check on each and every activity within their online premises. Maintaining privacy and other policies at social network’s end and realizing social responsibility at users’ end does make a difference, but looking at the number of identity theft cases in each minute, the difference seems greater.

Having internet law may be a solution, but which country’s law t will be, or will one country’s law be acceptable in other? International Internet Law may be….! Well that’s a long debate and the speed with which technologies change is not the speed with which laws get updated….!

Finally I found something of my interest and thought that it might help combating the issue. it’s “Web 3.0”. It’ll hopefully be more efficient than Web 2.0, when we’ll have all OpenID and intelligent web [Semantic Web] based applications and websites. With OpenID when user will have same credentials for many websites, he’ll have better control. But the threat of identity theft remains there, when a normal user can do all this, a cyber criminal can also.

So my question is, “we’re on the way to make the web more intelligent, but how can we make the web that intelligent to identify the cyber crimes like identity theft?”

For some time I have noticed that in blogosphere, User Xperience has mostly been associated with Web 2.0 companies and hardware devices, well actually only one hardware i.e iPhone. So I decided to go out and see where I can find innovation in UX apart from the web.

On this great adventure the first experience I stumbled across was Bank Of America’s ATM on Van Ness street in San Francisco. I had this old check, which I was planning to deposit for sometime, but hesitated because my last experience with Chase’s ATM in Chicago to deposit a check was very clumsy. One had to seal the check in an envelope, which the machine will vent out and then write the amount and your account info on top of it. One also has to feed in the check amount. Usually I don’t have a pen with me so it was another embarrassing moment and interestingly most ATM machines have a slanting face which makes it even harder to use it as base to write on it.

Anyway this time around, when I was expecting the ATM to throw an empty envelope out, it just asked me to slide the check in a slot which had a blinking light. For a moment I was taken a back and didnt know what to do but the ATM kept beeping. After gaining some intelligence I decided to slide the check in and said to myself that worst come to worst I will just lose it as it wasn’t that big of an amount. It was from a friend who owed me some grocery money, luckily she wasn’t that hungry while grocery shopping.

Eager to see what will happen, the ATM showed me the scanned copy of my check with the exact amount to two decimal points. It had scanned it on the fly and by using some recognition software had understood my friends handwritten amount to the exact amount. While I was still star struck and excited with the experience, I had my receipt in my hand with a scanned printout of the actual check I just deposited.

Now I call this a true user experience. Next time I will make a video of it. So feel free to send me some checks and please feel free to be liberal with the amount

“I need just 2 pages, one where people can add a company and another page they can post for that company. There will two categories of post, In Favor and Against. And I want to show those posts side by side, something like Zebate and that’s it. No design, No formatting nothing else……………” CEO’s Words

I really wasn’t in mood of working on this “something like Zebate” thing, but it was CEO’s order so …………. that day and it was now, this ping, that ping, that ping, this ping, ping, ping, ping.

PingMyCompany was initially RateMyCompany but A great developer’s mind got PINGED and it was changed to PingMyCompany. Also after first release it was noticed that “PING” is only in our logo and no where else in the site, so it was decided to change all “comments” & “post” to “PING”, just to have PINGY touch across the site.

Well, now it’s PingMyCompany.com, and let me share some of technical aspects of the site. Here it goes:

Firstly, why CEO got this idea to develop such a platform? It was Zigron’s review on Green & White, where there been a long debate on Zigron’s hiring process. It meant, people talk about companies, and when they talk so, they would definitely love to ping for or against a company….. Isn’t it?

Now development: PMC is developed in PHP/MySQL (v5),It was started on 18th April 2008, and first release was online on 24th April 2008. It took 3-4 days exactly to put this this Live for 6 Billion people. Wow….! Well, this was the first release and contained very simple interface and features. Here’s the very first layout:

And after this first release, many revisions came and in each revision new feature pinged in it, making it simpler, user friendly, SEO friendly and lot more features. The summary of all those features is as follows.

Few of web 2.0 features it currently have are RSS feeds, DIV based interfaces, AJAX Postings, Sharing, Clouds, etc. It also has Translation Feature and Twitter integration. A bit of detailed description of these features is as follows.

I have used AJAX & DIV based interfaces so that users can have better User Xperience & quick response time. AJAX has been involved where ever it was feasable like paging, sharing, pinging, adding company etc… I have used Prototype JS toolkit (v1.6) for all ajax related work. I will soon be integrating Scriptaculos toolkit (v1.8) for better and cool AJAX affects.

I took the full advantage of MySql fulltext search features to give a better search results for users. However there has been few limitations as well in fulltext for which I am writing a custom solution to eliminate those limitations.

Through RSS you can get Latest PingMyCompany feeds. Right now we provide full text feeds. Of the multiple RSS formats that exist today (RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0), PingMyCompany supports only the 2.0 specification for now. You can get PingMyCompany feed from http://www.pingmycompany.com/rss/feed.rss

It also supports Twitter postings for all those who want to follow all updates on Twitter. You can follow it from http://twitter.com/pingmycompany

A full blown Admin panel has also been written to control everything. This is currently a small scale web application, yet with latest buzzing web features and this is not the end, we’re on the go to add more n more….

“To be very honest, I was not interested working on this application at first but now, after working on this for a month, It looks like that i fell in kind of love with PMC. It really made me learn lot of news things, and polish my existing skills. After working on this project, I really see a significant improvment in my skill set. Thanks to PMC for Pinging My Mind”.

PS: Special thanks to CEO (Haris Khan) for His this nice Idea and a bundle of thanks to Zigron Admin and everyone who were involved directly or indirectly in this project and shared there views, suggestions, appreciation, improvments from time to time to make PMC more consistant and reliable.

404 page does not only bounce your traffic, but you may also lose a potential client in many cases, so improving these pages is of utmost importance. Doing all this is just fun if you place yourself in shoe of your visitor and:

• Apologize for the inconvenience your visitors have faced
• Set a permanent redirect if your content has been moved to a new location

This is what you may normally be doing, and so all others will be, so try something different and, customize your 404 page. You may:

• Match it’s design with main site’s template
• Add an appealing message, mainly offering a search option in it
• Create an internal search engine, in case if you’ve a big site with tons of content.
• Try Custom Google Search Engine, and host the results on your own site.

These work fine, but since its all about how innovative you’re, you can come up with something more that helps engaging users as well as offering them what they were exactly looking for. Few more ideas from my side can be to:

• Put a proper structured sitemap on your 404 page.
• Ask the user to suggest if something is missing.
• Get broken links report from users by providing them a simple form on 404 page.

Retaining visitors of your website is as important as it is to gain traffic. This helps reducing your bounce rate and increasing probability of sales along with developing visitors’ trust. The methods of retaining targeted traffic may vary with the niche market, but the above mentioned case is almost same for all sorts of sites. So, be inquisitive to find what’s wrong, and be innovative to take the issue as an opportunity to do something new!

After reading some really interesting comments on a post about Zigron Inc on Green & White blog I decided that we need a site where people can share their positive and negative opinions about different firms.

So as a fun project we decided to create PingMyCompany.com. Its a simple project where users can add different companies and give comments in favor or against different companies. Its more like theFunded.com for companies.

Please feel free to give us your suggestions as comments to make this site more fun and interesting.

Update: PingMyCompany.com is having accessibility issues thanks to GoDaddy.com please access it at PingMyCompany.net

Update: Got reviewed on Green & White blog. You can read it here.

What actually brings a user to a web page is keyword, so let’s start with it. Having keywords in titles, and Meta tags will do quite good, and best if keyword is a part of URL. Simple URL is ideal from both users’ perspective as well as Search Engine. It’ll be easier for user to remember the URL and Search Engine to crawl.
Let’s say we’ve a URL structure like http://example.com/portalconsumerhomecb?portalID=138. Search Engine bots as they are quite intelligent and will crawl, but will not show the in relevant keyword’s search. On the other hand user will not be able to remember such a long URL, instead a simple one like http://example.com/mobile-games/ will work perfect. This simple URL structure will need mod_rewrite. Now Search Engine will index and rank the particular webpage for particular searches.

If you’re done with this, it’s almost 50% of the optimization, the rest is to have enough quality inbound links.

Today I had the great pleasure of attending Startup School 2008. It’s a brain child of Y Combinator which invests into young startups by students/hackers to come up with really cool ideas. Its like summer camp for startups. It was a day long event and following are few key highlights:

• First of all I loved the way everyone got connected with each other via Chat room on Chatterous.com, Twitter , live feed from Justin.tv, live pics and a wiki. It was great to get live feedback from everyone.

• Greg McAdoo from Sequoia Capital advised startups to consider their potential markets as waves. He suggested that startups should think like surfers to respect the wave and get on it when the time is right to make the most out of it. I kinda agree with the fact that without Flash from Adobe and high capacity bandwidth, YouTube would have never been a hit.

• Apparently Jeff Bezos , Amazon’s CEO was the main speaker but apparently he wasn’t well received. He kept talking about AWS and AWS. Nothing special there.

• Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and FriendFeed had a very good presentation on “Listening”. He gave some really good tips and he shared his experience that within Google their decision to launch Gmail was decided when 100 internal users were “happy with Gmail” not error free but happy. I think it’s a great way to test your product and we shall start doing the same.

• Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington was next and I was expecting some fireworks. He mentioned that he only got 15 mins which in my view was fair complaint because he deserved more as his session was way more interesting. He quoted that he wants to write stories that startups don’t want about themselves, which makes sense at times for Techcrunch. He suggested a book Purple Cow by Seith Godin. His final take away was if anyone wanted him to write a story, its better to yank him once and hard rather then pitch him continuously and become a noise. I liked the fact that he was a straight shooter and got to the point very quickly.
• There were another presentations too and you can see the recorded video at Justin.tv or read about it on Techcrunch.

Later, I got the chance to meet Mike Arrington in person and to be honest I was expecting he be hard to impress/get through. Well I was right but what I learned that he does genuinely love startups as he quoted earlier. I just introduced him about Zigron and how we are working with startup with our offshore office . This got him some what excited and he asked me to contact him later to meet up. I didnt expected that he will be interested in anything beside killer products but he did prove my assumption wrong and listened to me very carefully. Though in a second I tried to be a smart ass and gave an impression that I didnt approached him for PR to which he got back to me instantly and said “you do want f***ing business with me”… which is true Anyway lets see how it goes.

Overall it was a great experience to see what makes Silicon Valley so special.

Update: You can see 37Signal’s David Heinemeier presentation notes here and corridor discussion here.

The second discussion was “Teens Know it Better”. For this they had brought in few young teens and they were asked different questions.Following are few facts which were really interesting:

• There are about 60 million people in age group of 12 to 24 within US.
• They spend about $176 billion each year and college student spend about $236 billion.
• 59% think that they are not perfect but still they dont want to change themselves.
• Interestingly, teens dont mind watching ads on free content.
• Surprisingly teens are big on participating in campaigns which tend to make a positive social or green impact. Basically, statistically speaking teens are more socially responsible, at-least when they are online.
• 89% teens will change their brand if the other brand is more social conscious