iBlog: Nishit Shah

Its been more than 2 years since I have been shopping regularly online, it was around 2-4 times a month earlier and now its almost 5-7 times. I do most of my regular transactions online, like paying monthly mobile/ electricity bills at Visa Bill Pay, incase I am going out of station, I buy airline tickets at IXIGO,  or train tickets at IRCTC, concert tickets for Iron Maiden show at TicketPro, Tata Sky recharge vouchers, etc and recently purchased Indian Premier League tickets for the match between Mumbai Indians and Deccan Chargers at Kyazoonga using the credit card. I don’t mind spending the extra 25-40 bucks they charge for courier. It is more convenient and saves a lot of time. And when it comes to paying credit card bills, its simple to transfer money through netbanking. Damn, I relay too much on the net and feel really handicapped in case its not accessible even for a couple of days.

I read a lot of books and boast of decent enough collection that can be called as a small library. At the last count I have around 187 odd books including the technical reference material. For the past year and half or so, I have bought almost all of my books at Indiaplaza. If I come across any good book I just add it to my wish list at Indiaplaza and once the wish list is big enough or if I have finished reading all the books from my library, I add them to my cart and order them. Not only there is 22% off on most of the books, the books get delivered in just a couple of days at my place. Also, the collection of books that they have is much better than the one at my neighborhood book store. I am very much impressed with their customer service though there have been only a couple of instances where I need to bother them, else, everything has been smooth so far. I bet its one of the best shopping portals in India.

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 !

Meebo is a AJAX based site on which anyone can login to their MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, etc accounts without installing any client software on your system. Usually in schools/colleges/offices, the MSN, Yahoo! clients are either not installed or their respective ports blocked by the firewall to prevent guys from spending their time in useless chat. What to do in such a scenario? Meebo comes to the rescue in this case. Just put in the complete username and password and you are logged in for instant chatting! However, its again blocked by firewalls at these places. So what to do in such a case ? Check out this link

Came across Buxfer in Rajat’s Blog and have been using it since then to track my personal expenses and it has done its job pretty well. Buxfer is short for ‘BUcks transFER’ created by 3 former IITians doing their PhD at Carnegie Mellon. And as they say necessity is the mother of all inventions, they needed some way to track their expenses while eating out with a bunch of guys. As scraps of papers and their memories were not enough to keep track of it, they came up with a small script and then they shared it on the web and the rest as they say is A New Dot Com on the Web