Category Archives: Reviews

I Love My New Nokia E71

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Quick Summary: Not only do I love my new Nokia E71 smartphone, I am also writing this post on it.

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Nokia E71 smartphone

I’ll not have access to a PC for almost a fortnight, starting August 1, and I was really worried - no blogging for a fortnight! - until I tried blogging from my new Nokia E71 smartphone.

I’m writing this post on my E71 on a Vodaphone GPRS connection.

It’s not the same as writing on a laptop, of course. The Wordpress administrative interface took a couple of minutes to load, the qwerty keyboard is a little cramped, I can’t cut and copy text and doing fancy formatting is somewhat cumbersome.

However, the page download speed is only a little slower than the speed on the Tata Huawei data card attached to my laptop. My typing speed is already quite nifty after a day of playing around with the E71 and I have made almost no typos in the entire post. The qwerty keyboard, in spite of its tiny size, is easy to get used to. The screen resolution is wide enough, without being a wow! factor, and the navigation is never confusing, even if it is sometimes cumbersome. If I really want to, I can even do some really fancy formatting, with a little effort.

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Also filed in Confessions of a Closet Geek, Mobile, Mobile Blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink | Comments (6)

How Not To Run A Blogger Relations Program

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Quick Summary: Indian public relations firm Good Relations provides me the perfect case study of how not to run a blogger relations program.

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There’s a wealth of good advice available on how to run a blogger relations program — see Guy Kawasaki, Michael Arrington, Lee Odden, Emergence Media (PDF), Brian Solis (PDF), Shift Communications (PDF), Rohit Bhargava (PDF) and Vocus (PDF) to start with — so, I’m wondering why would public relations firm Good Relations send me an e-mail like this –

From: PR-Agent-Name (pr-agent-name@gri.co.in)
Date: Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:25 PM
Subject: Entrepreneur-Name unveils his second entrepreneurial venture Startup-Name.com
To: PR-Agent-Name (pr-agent-name@gri.co.in)

Greetings:

Please find below press release on Startup-Name.com, a second entrepreneurial venture of Entrepreneur-Name. It will be great if you can review the website and write your personal experience.

Should you be interested in interacting with Entrepreneur-Name, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you

Regards,

PR-Agent-Name

Account Manager
Good Relations (India) Pvt Ltd

I typically receive 2-3 pitches for startups every week, but they are usually from someone in the startup team itself, and very different from the pitch above.

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Also filed in Case Study, How-To Guides, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Permalink | Comments (5)

Check It Out: Rohit Bhargava’s New Book ‘Personality Not Included’

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Quick Summary: Check out ‘Personality Not Included’ a new book by one of my favorite marketing bloggers Rohit Bhargava.

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Personality Not Included

I just finished reading the introduction (download PDF here) of Rohit Bhargava’s new book ‘Personality Not Included’ and it totally rocks!

The basic premise of Rohit’s book is that personality is the key element defining what a brand stands for and the story it tells to its customers.

Personality is the unique, authentic, and talkable soul of your brand that people can get passionate about.

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Personality is not just about what you stand for, but how you choose to communicate it. It is also the way to reconnect your customers, partners, employees, and influencers to the soul of your brand in the new social media era.

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Personality is the macro trend. The three hottest topics in business today are how to do more with social media, using word-of-mouth marketing, and interacting more authentically with customers. Personality is the theme that incorporates all of these topics.

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Also filed in Marketing, Social Media, Trendspotting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check It Out: I Love Alootechie’s New Magazine-Style Look and Not-Only-News Focus

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Quick Summary: With its new magazine style look and not-only-news focus, Alootechie will strengthen its position as the dominant authority on the Indian digital media industry.

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Alootechie, which has established itself as the Indian online industry’s news monitor, has a new look and a new focus.

The New Alootechie Homepage

I have known about the revamp for a few weeks now through conversations with Sidharth, Ravneesh, Saket and Asfaq, so when Ravneesh told me today that the new website was up, I knew what to expect.

Apart from the staple Indian and international digital industry news, the new magazine-style homepage displays a featured news story, an interview of the month, job and event boards and several guest articles. Inside, Alootechie has extended its coverage to include mobile and gaming.

While the present website is still work-in progress (watch out for the newsletter, podcasts and vidcasts), I must congratulate the Alootechie and Webchutney teams for the really cool revamp.

My favorite part of the revamped website are the guest posts, which are basically expert opinion pieces written by industry insiders. While each topic covered in the first set of these guest posts deserves a separate post on this blog, here are my top of the mind thoughts on some of them –

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Also filed in Desi Blogging, Desi Web 2.0, Internet, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Trendspotting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink | Comments (5)