the official blog of “Taazza.com”

We have been rapidly signing up beta users. If you have ever written about taazza or mentioned it in your blog, you should have received a beta id from us. If we missed any of you please feel free to email beta [ @ ] taazza [ dot ] com and we will have one sent your way.

If you are stopping by at this blog and want access to Taazza please leave a message and we will try and get one to you soon.

Psst … a little birdie tells me that there are exciting goodies for you Taazza newbies out there… More to come in next day or two.

Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: beta

Ouitlook ran a cover story about technology trends for 2007 on the 9th Feb, 2007. Taazza received mention in section on software trends.

“Localisation, Indianisation: A slew of start-ups are targeting the local market, rather than catch-all US markets. They serve an established niche, and 2007 will see the likes of Picsquare (delivery of printed photos anywhere in India), HungryBangalore (restaurant booking/delivery across the city), Taazza (local news aggregator) and CarPool.in start making a difference in our lives, and hopefully sustain themselves while they’re at it!”

The article is here. Read on…

Technorati Tags:
media taazza

The Ecoonomic Times ran a story about proto.in on the 2nd Feb, 2007 in the Chennai edition. Taazza

The entrepreneurs were from different fields - right from consumer hardware and Web 2.0 to Telecom and Mobile - and offered some pioneering and novel ideas. For instance, the Smart Headlamp Controller created by Smart Pundits, a firm based out of Bangalore, which intelligently adjusted itself according to oncoming traffic and external lighting. Or the website named taazza.com, an innovation in the online news space. Arjun Ram, one of the founders of the site explained to us, “Our site has features such as integrations with google maps, blogs and the wikipedia, which enables the user to enjoy an in-depth, content rich experience.” As was demonstrated to us, one of the features of the site enables the user to zoom into any local address from across the world and keep abreast of a story developing from it.

The article is here. Read on…

Technorati Tags: media, press

We were at proto.in over the weekend. It was a great attempt at bringing together the most promising entrepreneurs, ideas, VCs and tech enthusiasts under one roof. The venue was an auditorium at IIT Madras nestled amidst greenery and nature. There were over 300 in the auditorium and a dozen VCs and angel investors.

We talked about Taazza, the genesis, the vision and features. (More about us here) We received great interest from those who participated and the press. The press was particularly interested since we are about “news”. We had many one-on-one sessions to demo in detail with many who spend time offline.

Taaza’s unique offerings

• Integrates traditional news stories with social content to provide rich context.
• Applies cutting edge Semantic web technologies to news.
• Extracts entities of interest from news stories to provide context.
• Powered by algorithms that automate news delivery.

Taazza’s features

• Taazza news is auto generated for the user!
• Editions - National and Metro editions.
• View news for places, people or topics that interest you
• You can choose the time window for the news (say last 4 hours)
• Different news reading modes like Headlines, Newsriver & News maps.
• Get the news context from Photos, Videos, Blogs & Bookmarks. Integration with popular services (Flickr, Youtube, delicious, Technorati, Upcoming and Eventful)
• Mobile edition
• RSS & Microformats support

And yes, we are open for a limited / closed beta. Check out our web site for more details.

And thanks for all your interest, encouragement and support.

Technorati Tags: taazza, proto.in, news, india, beta

The organizers of proto.in have selected Taazza as one of the 30 companies in the final shortlist. We the demonstrating Taazza there for 8 minutes.

We are excited to be part of proto.in.

Look forward to seeing you all there. If you bump into us there remember to ask for a test drive. We would be more than happy to give you a demo on on one.

As more people get online(Rural+Urban) and when there is more mainstream and user generated content, there would be handful of startups like Baidu in China addressing the information glut problem.(Think local language search + aggregation and filtering tools). A tool like TaaZZa would be more relevant and thrive in such a scenario.
Web 2.0 In India

We think Dinesh Tantri hit the nail on the head! Wham! It is very easy to fall into the traditional way of thinking and continue to offer news from a national perspective. *Almost* all web media enterprises within the Indian space and world market fall into this category. Most of these sites take the approach of going top down or bottom up, by which i mean
• National media tend to concentrate on national news and interestings news stories (Top Down)
• Local media tend to focus on local news and other national news (Bottom up)
Which is precisely why neither of these approaches have succeeded! Which is why people have look at 2 news sources atleast. The oppurtunity lies in smoothening the differences or taking a radically different approach to cater news to a person’s needs.

Again, there are at-least two approaches that are being taken as far as we have seen

• One is to take a list of feeds that the user reads and analyze them to understand the list of topics that one is interested in. This assumes that the user is an avid RSS user which substationally reduces the audience that you are catering to. (Tailrank.com)
• The other is to track what the user clicks and rates and implicitly recognize the interest. Although this expands the audience base, We are not sure if this would work. Only time will tell.

At the Taazza, we will be taking a totally different approach to personalization, which is different from either of these approaches. More to come later! But nonetheless, a thought provoking post by Dinesh! Kudos!

Technorati Tags: blogs

Over the course of the last 2 months we have gotten lots of feedback from the blogosphere. Here are some interesting comments so far

TaaZZa stands out from the lot with their design.
Web 2.0 in India

Thanks! One of the founding principles of Taazza is to provide a simple yet elegant design to the end user.

Taazza looks interesting. But again, it’s interesting because I know what is googlemap, what is tag etc. And again from their screenshots, it looks like their target audience is indians amongst the 50k subscribers of techcruch, and which is not our target audience. However, it’d be interesting to see how it goes when they launch it.
BarcampMumbai - 4

Beg to differ with the whole notion of branding Taazza with web 2.0 terminology. Sure, we utilize web 2.0 technology but it is only incidental. News is about people, places and categories. Everyone understands tags and categories. So the argument doesn’t hold up!

• As more people get online(Rural+Urban) and when there is more mainstream and user generated content, there would be handful of startups like Baidu in China addressing the information glut problem.(Think local language search + aggregation and filtering tools). A tool like TaaZZa would be more relevant and thrive in such a scenario. I haven’t had a chance to look at TaaZZa yet but I am waiting to see how different it would be from TailRank kind of a service that helps me keep track of most popular India centric feeds based on my browsing habits? By the way, I enjoyed Amit Ranjan’s review of TaaZZa .
• Web 2.0 In India

There are lot of differentiators from Tailrank, we will get into the details at a later post. Keep your fingers crossed we are working diligently to release soon.

Thanks for all the link love! But keep them coming.. A few teasers coming your way soon! So stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: blogs, feedback, taazza

Technorati Teams With The Associated Press to Connect Bloggers To More Than 440 Newspapers Nationwide:

Technorati and the Associated Press this morning initiated a service to connect bloggers to more than 440 AP member newspapers nationwide.

When readers visit an AP member Web site that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the “Top Five Most Blogged About” AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati. Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver “Who’s Blogging About” that article. Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.

More people read blog than many newspapers:
“Barely four years after Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a former American soldier who grew up in El Salvador and Chicago, started Daily Kos from his home in Berkeley, Calif., the site…

1/3 of referrals to washingtonpost.com from blogs:
In a signing of the growing power of blogs to drive traffic online, WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says that one-third of the referrals washingtonpost.com gets now comes through blogs….

All these point to one phenomenon! Blogs! Not hosting them but integration with them. Another distinguishing factor of Taazza!
Lots of people have blogged about Taazza in the last few weeks, some of them very encouraging and some without merit. A detailed post with link love coming up!

Technorati Tags: Technorati, blogs

Keep reading →

Looking at the referrer log, we stumbled on something interesting.. Hits from Reboot “un”conference at Copenhagen.

reboot is a community event focused on digital change and culture

reboot is the European meetup for the practical visionaries who
are building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for
creation and organization in a world where the only entry barrier is
passion. reboot is two days in June filled with inspiration,
perspective, good conversations and interesting people.

reboot is a place for people to come together once a year and
reboot their minds with perspective, inspiration and relationships.
Starting out in 1998 with a Danish focus the event has been turning
more and more international throughout the years. In 2005 reboot turned
truly european with 400 participants from more than 22 countries.

Someone was kind enough to put forward our name to present in the conference.Thanks Mate! It appears they are taking votes for the people to present. Seems like an interesting conference to be present. Check it out here reboot