Most friends of mine end up tagging me to these photos. I do like to download some of these photos so in case it is taken down, I can still have a copy with me.

I found this nice online tool which allows users to automatically backup photos they are tagged in to a designated folder on Dropbox.

I am using Ifttt, a neat website that allows users to create triggers to carry out actions. In this case whenever someone tags me in a photo, it will set off a trigger. The result will be that the photo will be downloaded into a folder on my Dropbox account.

Creating a Trigger with ifttt

• First register with ifttt and look up the various recipes.
• It has many that allows backing up FB photos to Dropbox. My personal choice was this recipe.
• Now connect your Facebook account and approve the website to access it.
• Then do the same with your Dropbox account.

Now next time someone tag’s your photo on Facebook, it will automatically trigger a download to your Dropbox. Considering Dropbox is a sync service, I am basically saving all my tagged photos in the cloud available to me anywhere on any computer without necessarily logging into Facebook.

Try out ifttt and its numerous options to create triggers between various online webapps. Do drop in your comments.

Link: Ifttt | FB Photos Backup

-- This Post Automatically Backup your Facebook Photos to Dropbox is Published on Devils Workshop .

When an online tool like Wunderlist suggests, that it is a one stop solution to organize your life in a better way, I tend to take it with a pinch of salt. But I got me curious enough to try it out check how useful it would be.

Wunderkit is a online tool that allows users to organize their life and also get their friends from Twitter and Facebook involved. It is currently by invitation only and it certainly seems to be neat and interesting online tool.

Wunderkit Features

• The webapp allows users to register with their Twitter or Facebook account. One can also add friends via email to a specific work-space.
• Creating a work-space allows users to create notes and tasks separately.
• I could also check and make some of my work-spaces as public if I chose to do so. That means I can invite people to view it thanks to a URL.

Why Wunderkit holds promise?

Most things I could do with Wunderkit, I could with Evernote. So why would users want to try Wunderkit. The reason lies in being social. The focus of Wunderkit is on allowing friends from Facebook or Twitter to create projects. Thanks to Twitter integration, Wunderkit can also be used by people who are anonymous.

I would not recommend a complete move to Wunderkit at the moment as it still is a beta product. Also unlike Evernote, it does not have a desktop app but I guess that will happen very soon.

Video Walkthrough of Wunderkit

Try out Wunderkit and drop in your comments. Also special thanks to R@xit for the tip.

Link: Wunderkit

-- This Post Task Management With Facebook and Twitter Contacts – Wunderkit is Published on Devils Workshop .

According to this report by Medianama, Flipkart is acquiring LetsBuy.com for $15 to $20 million. This will make Flipkart the undisputed leader of online retailing in India.

This announcement gains another perspective in the backdrop of Amazon making plans to move into the online retailing business. It has already launched Junglee.com, a price comparison website.

Will it drive up prices on Flipkart?

LetsBuy has the reputation of being aggressive about pricing while Flipkart concentrates on delivery. Usually with no competition in sight, Flipkart might be tempted to drive up prices. But it can hardly afford to do that as Amazon’s entry into the market might be around the corner.

Here is a graph from Google Trends comparing interest from India in Amazon, Flipkart and LetsBuy.

The graph clearly shows that even if Amazon is not yet in India, there is immense interest about it which almost matched Flipkart at times in the last 12 months. So Flipkart will have its work cut out to keep improving its portfoilio and infrastructure.

Flipkart’s Ace

Flipkart has done something that most online retailers did not do before them. This was to take a leap of faith with the ‘Cash on Delivery’ payment model. Most Indian users are not comfortable putting out personal data like bank details and credit card details online to buy things. Flipkart also leverages ‘Cash on Delivery’ model in its advertisements. Any new entrant in India, even if it is Amazon, will have to get into the Indian online buyers psyche before hoping for success.

What are your views on the state of online retailing in India? Do drop in your comments.

No related posts.

-- This Post Flipkart to Acquire LetsBuy.com is Published on Devils Workshop .

According to Marketing Land, Yahoo has laid off it apparently 12% of Flickr staff. This includes much of the customer service team.

What exactly is killing Flickr?

Picasa from Google was hardly used by people to upload photos, especially when compared to Flickr. Flickr kept growing and has more than 5 billion images on it. But social media websites like Facebook were a challenge as people probably found it a lot more convenient for sharing personal photos. Picasa has seen a spurt in growth only after it has become integrated with Google+.

In general, the lack of innovation on Flickr over the past two or three years has made its usage quite stagnated.

Will it join the Yahoo casualty list?

I am not sure about this as yet, but it is obvious that there are big problems ahead for Flickr. Yahoo did sell off Delicious, which ended up being a good idea. Yahoo itself as a company has an uncertain future while it has gone from being a $100 billion dollar company to $22 billion over the past few years.

Hopefully Yahoo offloads Flickr to a better company and not close it down like it did with Geocities. What are your views on Flickr’s fate? Do drop in your comments.

-- This Post Is this the Beginning of the End for Flickr ? is Published on Devils Workshop .

I thought of searching for some good alternative and ended up finding Adobe Photoshop Express Editor. The online tool is pretty good and might not have all the features from Picnik, but it has a few good options.

Photoshop Express Editor Features

• You have to create an account to access the free online editing tools with Photoshop Express.
• I could upload images online and organize them into albums or folders. Users can choose to have some images public or private.
• Each image can be edited separately. This pulls up an online image editor like we see in the image above.
• I could sharpen the image, make changes to its contrast and other usual effects like adding text, dialogue bubbles etc.
• Once you register, you can get upto 2GB free storage space for your images.

Photoshop should target Picnik users

A lot of users of Picnik, are not happy that their images stored with Picnik, will now have to be moved or downloaded locally. I think Adobe should target more users from Picnik by offering an automated tool to transfer images. Unfortunately, Adobe usually is not a very proactive about its products unless they are paid ones.

You can also try out other free online tools which allow users to remove backgrounds easily from images and also another one that allows users to quickly resize images online.

Try out Photoshop Express Editor and drop in your comments.

Link: Photoshop Express Editor

-- This Post Free Alternative to Online Image Editing Tool Picnik by Adobe Photoshop is Published on Devils Workshop .

One criticism of SOPA is that it is actually unfair to internet companies and gives media companies extra-ordinary power. This nice poster from Nasc, a website that specializes in pixel art, shows how the internet would become exclusive to media companies while other’s like Wikipedia, Google and would be treated as suspicious.

The picture above might be funny, but it does show what exactly is the problem. Most media companies, including some of the press have always believed that they have some sort of exclusivity with distribution of content. The internet has levelled the uneven world a lot.

Possibly such laws are trying to hang on to the old way of doing things, which was full of controls and exclusive access. In an open web today, exclusivity has hardly any place.

Do you think SOPA is about censorship or about hanging on to older ideas on distribution of media content? What are your views? Do drop in your comments.

Related: How does SOPA work? [Infographic]

-- This Post [Funny Poster] The Internet Powered by SOPA/PIPA! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Usually TweetDeck and HootSuite are good enough to schedule tweets but with these clients I have to select the timings individually.

Hence I really prefer using Bufferapp.

Set up Timings with Buffer

• Create an account with Buffer and connect your Twitter account to Buffer.
• Now say you want to post all your tweets in the evening from 6 pm to 8 pm simply select those timings on Buffer.

• I could also specific different patterns for different times of the day. For instance as I am less likely to check Twitter on Sundays, I made sure no tweets are scheduled for that day.
• We can also add a Facebook account and have a Chrome extension to schedule posts quickly while browsing through articles.

You can read this article that help you set-up using Buffer while using Google Reader.

A quick reminder while using Buffer is that make sure you select the right time-zone so that tweets are scheduled properly. Buffer does not take your Twitter account’s timings into account.

I have found this a very useful tool to space out what I share on Twitter. I would recommend against scheduling links and tweets on trending topics which ideally should be tweeted out as soon as possible.

What are your views on scheduling Tweets and which tools do you use? Do drop in your comments.

Link: Buffer

-- This Post Automatically Schedule Tweets at Pre-Assigned Times is Published on Devils Workshop .

If you visit Wikipedia tomorrow, there is a good chance that this screen will greet users.

Blackout Protest against SOPA…

A couple of weeks ago, Reddit announced it was going to protest SOPA by blocking its own content for a single day on 18th January 2011. The idea is to show users what the internet could be like if SOPA and PIPA went through to become a law.

Today, Wikipedia has decided to follow Reddit and will blackout their website to show protest against the bill. There are many websites which will be going black to protest but the Wikipedia is the most popular one today. Here is a list of all the websites that have confirmed a blackout.

Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia, announced the participation of Wikipedia in English to have a blackout in a tweet.

Online activism has got a lot of people involved in protesting SOPA. GoDaddy was one of the rare tech companies to support SOPA initially. It led to user backlash with thousands of website owners moving to another service. The episode turned out to be a complete PR disaster for GoDaddy.

The argument is age old: Should a website be held responsible for user-generated content? For example should blogger.com or WordPress.com which host millions of blogs be responsible for someone publishing content to which they do not have copyright over? We have seen the lack of understanding of such processes.

Look up this infographic to understand how SOPA will work!

We will have to wait and watch throughout the day to see if more prominent websites like Facebook, Google and others could join Wikipedia in a blackout tomorrow.

Do drop in your comments.

Link: Wikipedia Press Release

-- This Post Wikipedia to Protest Against SOPA With a Blackout Tomorrow! is Published on Devils Workshop .

He was a not the typical 20 something, who are usually the ones who end up creating web start-up companies. He graduated from IIM – Bangalore and gave up a well-paying job along with financial security to create his own web start-up.

I decided to catch up with Sitakanta Ray the founder of MySmartPrice and interview him on his experience of creating an internet start-up company in India.

Q. Could you tell us about your enterprise MySmartPrice.com and what it does?

With MySmartPrice, we want to answer two important questions that every shopper has in mind. They are ‘What to buy?’ and ‘Where to buy it?’. Currently MySmartPrice allows people to quickly compare price of a product across stores. At this point of time we cover mobiles, books, cameras, games and laptops. Over the next few months we will cover all major product categories. Our goal is to become the easiest way to get the best price, for anything sold online.

Apart from this we are also working on answering the what to buy question as well. You can find our first attempt at solving this problem at mysmartprice.com/mobile/finder. We plan to roll out some major improvements to this part of the product in the new future.

Q. MySmartPrice seems to be India centric at the moment and even though India has a very bright future when it comes to online retailing, it also has an unpredictable future. How difficult was it to draw up a business plan?

I think once things become more predictable in an industry, start-ups will find it more difficult to succeed. The fact is big companies have more resource (both talent and money) than start-ups and a lot more experience about operating in stable, predictable times. The hope is to get in the game, understand it and get a big enough lead before they direct their best resources to the game.
Let me confess that I do worry about our own ability to put together the right team, move at the right speed and execute well. But I am much more comfortable about future of e-commerce in India. There are two simple observations that give me the confidence

Our cities are getting congested, rents are going up and we are having more money and less time. All of these will make online commerce more attractive.

If you look at our Tier-II and Tier-III cities, then you will find that supply is not keeping pace with demand. There has been a lot of increase in affordability. TV shows have taken the aspirations higher but supply is lagging behind. People are turning to online shopping to solve that issue.

Having said that now we work on a 12 month plan. There are so many variables, many of which we have no clue about. The idea is to keep extending that time period as we get more clarity both about the industry and our own abilities.

Q. What is your team like? Who came up with the idea of MySmartPrice?

MySmartPrice was started by me and my friend Sulakshan. We have discussed hundreds of ideas in the past 10 years but price comparison was never one of them!! We sort of stumbled onto the idea of MySmartPrice.
I was coming back to coding after 5 years and needed a good challenge. Came across isbn.net.in of Swaroopch and found the problem interesting. So when I finally showed the idea to Sulakshan, he got excited about the possibility for e-commerce in general. That is how we moved from a self assigned project to a proper startup.

Q. How is MySmartPrice going to monetize? Will it serve up ads or sponsored reviews? Or are you looking at a different model which is not generic and relevant only to MySmartPrice?

Monetization is one of the areas where we are most clueless . For now we are surviving on AdSense money. The plan is to improve upon affiliate income part. Apart from that we have some ideas but we will need a higher scale to get them to work. It will be interesting to see how they will stack up when the hit the real world.
The trick will be to get the product execution right. If we can truly become the easiest way to find the best price, then monetization will not be a challenge.

Q. We often hear of young kids in their 20s creating a start-up after college well before having personal responsibilities like marriage and kids; in your case it (might?) be different. What were your challenges?

I wish someone had told me that starting your own company when you are young is really a better idea. We had been thinking of starting a company ever since we graduated from college. Every time we used to delay the decision by saying that it will be less risky once we cross this certain milestones. After 10 years we realized that entrepreneurship is never going to be a safe option so we better take the plunge now.
So finally when we decided to take the plunge, I had a 7 month old daughter and my wife had just left her job as well. So everyone in both the families completely freaked when I first mentioned about leaving my job. Fortunately my wife stood by me during that period. In a way that I have been a boring conservative guy all my life worked in my favour . Everyone assumed that I must have some Plan-B in my mind even though I had none.

Q. You were in IIM – Bangalore and worked in finance domain for years. I heard you went back to coding after a good 5 years. Why would someone do that? What is love for coding or just that MySmartPrice needed a coding team more than a management team?

Once a geek, always a geek . In a way I realized how much I enjoy coding only once I stopped coding. On a more serious note, the final decision was  a combination of both my passion and the need of the product. We wanted to build the easiest option to find the best price. Making a product that is absolutely easy and intuitive to use is something that gets Sulakshan excited, whereas I get my kick out of working with millions of records of data and deriving sense out of them. That is how we ended up with this division.

In India, starting new companies is difficult especially for people coming from an academical and services background. There is always family pressure to not start a business as it is termed ‘risky’. What were your challenges and advice to others creating start-ups.

I can talk about geeks and technology companies alone because I have no clue about any other business. (How much clue I have about technology businesses will be known in a couple of years only) If any geek out there is holding back because of worries about “what if my startup fails” then I will ask him to stop worrying right away. The probability a good geek will go jobless because of a failed startup is definitely less than Shahrukh going without a film offer because of some failed movie.

Having said that I can say that creating the product is definitely not the toughest part because we already know a good deal about it. Getting people to notice your product and hiring the talent required by the product are the toughest parts. It may be a good idea to learn about these things also, preferably at someone else’s company. By the way we are hiring.

-- This Post Interview – Sitakanta Ray on starting MySmartPrice is Published on Devils Workshop .

Here is a infographic by visiblegains showing how Email is alive and kicking along with growing every year. Which is true for me too, as on an overall basis, I use email a lot more than ever.

There were 107 trillion emails sent in the past year, that is 3.3 million emails per second. Even if email is well and alive, on the downside a massive 45% of all email is spam.

What are your views on the future of Email? Do drop in your comments.

Related: How to setup Google Apps on your Domain

-- This Post Is Email Dead or Will it Survive? [Infographic] is Published on Devils Workshop .