Thought Clouds

I am going to be at SearchCamp.in this weekend. If you would like to attend please register here by adding your name. You can provide additional information about yourself or your company here.
[ I am sorry for posting so late. However in case you drop in, it would be good to meet you. ]

A two day search marketing event at chennai-  a terrific time and a superb domain for me given I spent majority of time at uGenie on SEM. I have been highly passionate about that space.

I would possibly cover the event live. Last time I attended Proto.in, I did a blog post on Proto.in post the event giving a gist and my opinions.

Regarding SearchCamp, (excerpt from SearchCamp.in) it is a two day event aimed to bring together the best minds from the Search Engine Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. This event is the first of its kind in India and will feature workshops, debates and keynotes on the present state and evolution of Search Engine Marketing.

To add to it, many of the sponsors are leading Search Marketing firms. There are also lot of independent SEO specialists who are actively taking part. I see a great level of participation from the Indian Search Marketing startups or with a dominant footprint here - pinstorm, position2 etc. efrontier the leading Search Marketing firm is also a sponsor and there are lot of talks from folks from these companies. There are also the big spenders in Search Marketing space who would be able to give a perspective in terms of how this is defining business and how they might want this space to be or their expectations.

However, in all I fear that this is too much of SEO and less of PPC. Of course, Paid Marketing interests me more given my interests in analytics and stats.

We at Ugenie, decided to take Search Marketing in-house. I was more focused on Paid Marketing - PPC - and very less on SEO, which targets organic traffic. We automated a lot of keyword generation, coming up with campaign structures, keyword pricing and bidding. It is a massive system. Building something generic is pretty hard. Even custom implementation itself might not be feasible for a lot of companies to build and maintain in-house especially hard for startups as the resources are constrained and day to day bidding management would demand a lot of time and focus.  However, for companies focused on Search Marketing or big spenders this would mean a great level of control and hence higher level of tuning on ROI and targeting. Even for smaller companies this would mean that they can position themselves to target the long tail to bring their costs down and yet not compromise on traffic or sales.

I will have a lot to write about the current market, trade-offs, tips and tricks in SEM post the event. Keep a watch.

Its been a long time.. so what's up..

That explains the long silence on the blog.

Anyway past is always more clear, I can at least jot that down. And future no one has any clue anyway. So here is a quick update on life.

Work - significant milestones. iRead is now a mainstream business, the biggest book sharing application on Facebook, soon to hit half a million users. Harry Potter Magic Spells application which gave me and mekin a mention in top developers for more than a week is now at 1.3 Million users. And as far as other facebook applications we have launched over the last 3 months I have lost track! Overall we now have a user base of 2M users. All this due to a sweet accident over a weekend! I wonder if it is good or bad :D Thats about the action at work.

I got an iPod Classic woahooo! :) (as the long hunt for a genie lamp failed). A pleasant surprise! This was actually to mark the uGenius award I was given in January '07 for the marketing efforts to hit the board targets. The ipod is pretty cool, a little bulky to carry around. I felt the sound quality is not that great but I was amazed by the image quality. I and my cousin Vijay were condemning as to what a waste it was to have the 2 inch video screen but now i find myself shuffling through the photos and few video songs.

We had a day outing to mark uGenie's first b'day. [Pictures] A bit late but perfect timing given we had good milestones.

Weekends - fun, confused. There is so much to do on weekends like reading, catching up with friends, cribbing ;), playing badminton, spending those lazy afternoons with old friends. And as always there have been long sessions trying to figure out LIFE! 

Home - Finally went home for the festival after 2 months.. (yes 2 months is long given my hometown is 120 kms away from here). Went home again for a little longer when I took vacation. By the way this time around I got dial up working from my home town. Yippee! The township is as quiet, nice and pleasant as always. Our green farm lands always beckon. Apart from that things are a little weird with mom. She was the one who kept stretching me all through my childhood and now she wants to just let it out to flap :P

Outings - lots. An impromptu outing with my sister to Tippu's summer palace. Many in Bangalore are not aware of this magnificent monument right in the center of city next to Minto hospital, KR Market, Bangalore. A good write-up on this historical monument can be found here.

Also did a 2 day trek to Edakkal Caves, Meenmutty falls and Chembra Peak - all in and around Wayanad, Kerala with mountainroarers (A very vibrant and friendly group with a passion for adventure. Just loved the company) . This needs a complete blog post, which I hope I would do soon - for now you can see some pictures.
A visit to my friend at Gurgaon. It was quite hot in Delhi even at this time of the year when we look for sweaters and blankets here in Bangalore. I had loads of fun with the folks working at his company, spending late nights watching movies, drinking tea on the terrace, more driving to coffee shops at 12 in the night, quite a bit of fun. Over the weekend we went to see Qutub Minar, watched a play at India Habitat Center (this one is covered in Rang De Basanthi), shopped a bit and tasted a variety of food from the food stalls of each state at Dilli Haat and roamed around a bit.

Anything else - hmm err.. later...
My Blob

I can't be more happy. My adrenaline levels are running high. I and mekin are listed among the top 5 facebook developers :).

Since the leader board is bound to change quickly (We were #2 and #3 yesterday and moved down by 2 positions today) here is a snapshot.



Not just that..
Our new application Harry Potter Magic Spells was ranked the most viral application one day after we launched. We grew from 1000 users to 9000 users in a 12 hour time period during US day time. We are now at #2. Snapshot below.


iRead has been doing great too. We crossed a milestone. Read my earlier post on iRead here. There is something more that I am more excited about which is on its way and I hope all goes well :)

This is a tremendous booster for both of us.

This whole facebook exercise as mekin said in his post has been a tremendous amount of learning and a great sense of accomplishment. We could probably do better and we would constantly strive for that. Some day i would like to take time out and put up a brief article on the learnings.

I was at Chennai from thursday night till sunday night. After a long time, I found myself amidst art at dakshina-chitra, I also met my teacher of oil painting for 3 weeks - Dharma, who now works at amazon chennai, courtesy vinaygmurthy I also got ample time to buy some glass articles and paints at chennai city center (while killing time), and with the freedom that prasannasv showered on me I could happily scatter all my colors at his house and paint!

So this was my holiday at chennai, part 1 - celebrating colors

Wonder what it is ? Don't you think the ultimate person responsible for an error on a website is the CTO ;)



PS: thankfully it not that perfect a coincidence it is Cto and not CTO.