iBlog: Nishit Shah

Three Web 2.0 travel portals that I am really impressed about and these sites give smart way to find absolutely relevant information in less time and help you make your travel plans.

I follow a few blogs on Indian Startup / Web 2.0 and Webyantra is one of them. I came to about IXIGO from it. The way IXIGO shows the flight available and the cheapest option is really impressive. I find searching for flights at IXIGO better than any travel website. Use it to know better. Also, their revenue model is simple, they get a referral fee whenever someone goes from iXiGO.com to their partner websites and make a booking and also make money from relevant sponsored links shown on your search result pages. I have booked 2 round trip flights using this site and my experience has been really good coz it presents in the flights and its timings in such a way that its very simple to plan your trip. BTW iXiGO is free to use.

What does iXiGO mean ? As far as they know it doesn’t mean anything even though it is pronounced ‘easy go’ in some languages. They wanted a short and joyful name that people can remember easily:)

I happened to meet Mr. Aloke Bajpai the Founder - CEO of iXiGO @ BarCampMumbai2 on startups. Missed his talk though as parallel sessions were going on in the other room.

Again, heard about this web 2.0 travel company from one of blogs. I am yet to use this service am I am sure that I will one day redbus.in finds all possible buses available between two places and shows the same and one can book the tickets online.
Its an interesting read about how this website originated. Read it here.

Nirav had earlier talked about making IRCTC better and had made a cool prototype. I believe that people behind IRCTC might have taken a lesson or two from the prototype and the comments posted and have made a slight improvement and have made the site easier to use. However, like before, I came across this website called erail.in from one of the blogs on start ups. The cool thing about this site is that it shows you just need to select the start and end point of your journey and it shows the trains available and then proceed to IRCTC to buy them.

I was surprised that I didn’t find any links about the promoters of this site. Dunno who are the guys behind this, but they have done a splendid job here !

Missed the foss.in/2006 and this time around I am gonna be there for all 5 days from 4th to 8th December ‘07. To be on a safe side, I have applied for a leave from work way in advance and booked the round trip flight tickets too !

After FOSS I am planning to go to Pune on 9th for ClubHACK India’s first International Hackers’ Convention @ International Convention Center, Pune. With impressive line of speakers , I bet its gonna be a damn interesting event and since its an invitation only event, I hope to hear a positive reply from the organizers by next month.

My return flight is on 8th late evening to Bombay. So, probably I need to get up early in the morning and catch a Volvo to Pune.

Went to Hi-End Audio-Video Consumer Electronics Expo aka AV revolution at NSE grounds Goregaon. I have been following this event religiously for the past 3-4 years as it happens every year around this time. There was a change in venue this year as it normally takes place at Hyatt Regency. Also, the number of participating companies have gone down. I remember, a couple of years back, I was not able to cover the whole event in one day. Also, it was Sunday so it was way over crowded. That’s why I made it a point to go on a weekday. However, I was disappointed to see so less booths and products on display as compared to previous events. I saw nothing exceptional except for Sony’s OLED TV , Samsung’s 70″ and Panasonic’s 84″ Plasma TV.

I bet a visit to Croma would have been more meaning full then this exhibition. I was looking for a DVD player which has HDMI as well as USB connectivity and also plays the maximum number video formats available in the market. I was disappointed to find only 3 such models. 2 of Pioneer and 1 of Samsung. The Pioneer stuff was really good but unfortunately they don’t have any distributors in Bombay. So except for grey market its very difficult to get it. I don’t know what was wrong with me that I asked an Onida booth guy about a DVD player with such specifications, he said “Such technology is not yet out in the market. We are still researching to combine two different kinds of connectivity” … lol. The speaker systems were good. I liked the concert series of Jamo comprising of two front tower speakers, two rear bookshelves, one centre speaker and a sub-woofer. And unlike previous shows, the exhibitors were not allowed to play music, so one can’t judge the quality of sound produced just by looking at the speakers and its specifications. Overall a mediocre event, covered it in just 3 hours and headed off to work for an important meeting

Click here to view few of the pics I took at the event.

Its possible to create only 3 sets in the Flickr free account, so I moved all my pics to Picasa using Migratr. However, I was not at all satisfied using Picasa though I was able to create many sets in that. Somehow I still liked the usability of Flickr so did the next best thing, upgraded to flickr pro for a year. Will have to use Migratr to move my pics back to Flickr Picasa is the only Google product with which I am not completely satisfied.

Pro account costs just $24.95..little less than 1000 bucks for a year..now dats cheap.

View my photosets at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ni5hit/

PS: Google will always remain my friend though!

click on the image to enlarge.

open_basedir is a PHP directive that limits the files that can be opened by PHP to the specified directory-tree, including the file itself. This directive is NOT affected by whether Safe Mode is turned On or Off. When we check the phpnifo.php page, there are two values for each directive, the local and the master. I came across an issue where someone wanted to change the local value. I was aware that the Master value came from the php.ini file but was not sure of the local value. On googling a bit, I came to know that the local value is taken from the vhost configuration file for each of the host.

Here it is again the second avatar of BarCampMumbai aka BarCampMumbai2 to be held on 13th Oct 07 @ IIT Bombay. As usual I am pretty excited about this one day event where you get a chance to meet whoz who of Indian Startups, Venture Capitalists, ( Not exactly but to an extent )People who are writing next generation web interfaces and geeks like me who are interested in technology. BarCampMumbai2’s site says that:

BarCampMumbai2 is IT-Technology Event/Un-Conference,!!! and nothing related with the bar,you might think!
If you are passionate about Startup,EcoSystem,Web 2.0, Mobile Technology, Service Oriented and Next Generation Web, OpenSource or Open Standard then jump in…

The sessions line up is pretty interesting too and am looking forward for Mr. Mahesh Murty’s talk.

So if you even remotely interested in technology, BarCampMumbai2 is the place to be to meet like minded people !

Be it any event at IIT Bombay.. Techfest , Moodi, etc One thing is sure that they are very well organized and you come back feeling satisfied for a well spent day.
Almost forgot to mention Directi is one of the sponsors for this event.

I have become a big fan of Majid Majidi after watching Baran and try and watch all his movies. I love international movies and don’t care if I don’t understand the language as long as there are sub-titles. FYI Baran is a 2001 Iranian film directed by Majid Majidi, based on a book by the same name. The movie is set during recent times in which there are a large number of Afghan refugees living on the outskirts of Tehran. Almost a silent movie, Baran won a number of awards both nationally and internationally for the director and writer Majid Majidi.