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CabCorner – share the ride, share the fare

May 7th

Posted by Varun Bihani in Blogs

2 comments

Share the ride, split the fare and save the environment – with this motto, CabCorner will become the most interactive online cab sharing platform where you can afford travelling in a cab for the cost that you pay for a public transportation. The website is set to launch on May 31, 2010 followed by an iPhone application which will make it available on the move as well.

This will be yet another proud moment for our expert web development team at Galaxy Weblinks who has worked round the clock in last 10 weeks to pull this through. CabCorner will surely be one of the best custom web application that we have built in last 10 years. We are so very thankful to the founders of this great startup, Jonathan McKinney and Jesse Sommer, to give us an opportunity to partner up with them in this venture.

CabCorner aims to cut travel cost for cab riders by helping them find other riders who are also heading to the same direction. At the same time Cabcorner will also help the cab industry grow as much more passengers will join and travel more distances. A simple 3 step process will allow riders to find their companion. You start with entering your departure and destination address and CabCorner will show you all the other rides that are departing from it’s vicinity. Not only that, it also shows you the exact fare that each rider ride has to pay. If you don’t find any other ride, you can post your own and wait till someone else finds you. You will also be able to share your ride on Twitter and Facebook so that your local friends can also join your ride . Integration with Google maps makes the applicaiton more interactive because now user can see the best route that their cab will take.

While our programmers did an excellent job in converting this idea into reality on Internet, our iPhone application developers left no stone unturned in doing a terrific job with the mobile version of this platform for iPhone users who will be able to download it from the Apple store for no fees.

We will be pleased to hear your comments & feedback about this cab sharing platform so don’t hesitate to leave a message or send us an email.

PS - We were just interviewed for listing on DiscoveringStartups, and we need  VOTES for our website.  If we win the monthly contest, we’ll receive a cash award that will go a long way towards expanding our business.All you have to do is click the vote button in the upper right hand corner of the page — No signing up, no info will be requested! Visit- http://bit.ly/daO7tU and and click on the VOTE button at the top right. Thanks so much for your help folks! Happy sharing…

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A number of social media software tools have emerged after the Web2.0 revolution

Social Media: Spreading Wings on the Web!

Jul 4th

Posted by Arjun Sarode in Blogs

No comments

We are already familiar with traditional communication media such as newspapers, films & television, and of course the good old radio set. But with the advent of Internet, a completely new communication media has arrived on the web demographic. You guessed it! We are talking about Social Media.

Not very long ago, computers were being used only for defense and secret military purposes. Eventually their use expanded for the benefit of the educational society and finally with the development of the Internet and Information Technology, they reached our living rooms. We started chatting and sending emails to each other. The next thing we knew, we were sharing music, photographs and files – all online! At the end of this tunnel, what you and me got is a powerful and potential medium of communication with the society; more commonly known as Social Media.

Web2.0 essentially has a lot to do with the way users interact (read: communicate) with the internet. People write their views and opinions in blogs (origin: weblogs) like this one, share and download digital audio & video files using podcast, and make friends online on virtual social networks. Social Networking has become the latest buzzword of Web2.0 with more people joining popular social networks. Once they join, they can create their profiles and upload and share their content through the web. A few popular online social networks are facebook, myspace and Linkedin.

A number of social media software tools have emerged after the Web2.0 revolution

A number of social media software tools have emerged after the Web2.0 revolution

While facebook and myspace are looked upon as casual social engagement platforms, Linkedin is considered more of a professional network that lets you enhance your professional/business circle, find jobs and get recommended by colleagues.

But just how useful is social media to the online community? You can of course find and share information and media with others. But at the same time you can also make connections and initiate conversation with like minded people irrespective of their location. One major achievement of social media is the fact that it has made distributed team work possible. So now, even when my manager lives across the globe and sleeps when I’m awake, we can still work in perfect tandem ;)

But perhaps the greatest arena where social media strikes glittering gold is that of internet marketing. Skilled internet marketers exploit the potential of social media to promote their products and businesses extensively. Right from blogs to forums, to microblogs to social networks and social bookmarking sites, online marketing battleground is just increasing in area as we speak! We will probably need a completely separate post to go into the depth of this issue; so lets just keep this one aside for now.

Lastly, here are are a few social media platforms that you should know about:

  1. Blogs: A Blog is an online journal or diary, usually updated from a few times a day to a few times a week. Popular platforms: Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Typepad.
  2. Micro-blogging: blog entries limited to just 140 characters; great for Mobile interaction, quick interaction, and branding. Popular sites: Twitter, Jaiku.
  3. Social Networks: socially interact and network with friends and colleagues. A lot of personal/professional crossover in these spaces. Popular sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.
  4. Article distribution: Distribute useful, educational content and establish yourself as an authority to potential clients. Popular sites: Ezinearticles, Squidoo.
  5. Photos, Video, Podcasting: Distribute your content in a visual, more interactive format. Popular sites: Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube.
  6. Social News: Users submit content/news stories which are voted on by the online community. Popular sites: Digg, Reddit.
  7. Social Bookmarking: Users catalog and share sites they like. Popular sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious.
  8. Social Shopping: Users share and review products. Popular sites: Stylehive, Kaboodle.
  9. Forums/Q&A: online chat rooms for just about any topic you can imagine. A great place to establish yourself as an authority and answer questions. Popular site: Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers.


So here we are. If you are new to the concept of social media, I’m pretty confident that this article would have been a good refresher course for you. Do send us your valuable feedback about what you thought of this post.

As always, if you liked this or other posts published on blogoxy – do subscribe to our feed now!

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Courtesy: joyoftech.com. Click to expand

How to use Gmail to make your work easy!

Jun 23rd

Posted by Arjun Sarode in Blogs

No comments

Like many mid-sized web development firms, we encourage our employees to use Gmail for their official mail accounts. A major reason for this is because Gmail is probably most ahead in giving amazing innovations and freedom to its users in the form of its numerous features. Truly, Gmail is a classic example of a Web2.0 email service.
But even with all these features, I presume most many Gmail users do not use even the most visible of its features – the ones that are right in front of their eyes! So, last week I decided to write a mail to my associates, informing them about a few of these Gmail Gems. Not surprisingly, I started getting replies from my coworkers, curiously inquiring more about these features.
It was then that we decided that we will publish this article on our blog – so that this valuable information is passed on to our subscribers. Here’s the original article:
Gmail is the free email service offered by Google

Gmail is the free email service offered by Google

A lot has already been written about the advantages of Gmail – so I’m not going towards that road. My purpose of writing this rather long mail is to make you aware (in case you already aren’t) of a few features of Gmail that we can use for making our work easier and convenient.
  1. Reply and reply to the appropriate mail.You must have noticed that Gmail has introduced the “conversation” form of email through which, the entire chain of emails, chats and replies on any particular topic (identified by the subject of the email) can be viewed at the same place. I have observed that many a times when I or anyone else delegate any work to some of you, you reply to it by composing a new message rather that replying to the original one that we had sent. This makes it very difficult to search at a later date and we usually find ourselves lost and often assume that the work has not been done since you hadn’t replied. So, one thing that I would like all of you to start following is to inculcate this habit of replying to the proper mails and think twice before composing a new message. You should also use the option of “reply by chat” so that the relevant chats are saved for review later.
  2. Use Tasks

    Gmail has introduced a series of applications developed by developers across the world via Google Labs. You can check them out under the Settings -> Labs section of your Gmail. One such application that I find very important is the “Tasks” application. It allows you to create various task lists and organize the work that you have to do into various priorities. Let me explain how I am using Tasks to check my work:

    Every time I read my new mails, I wonder what I have to do with it. I will either delete it (or spam, archive it) or do what my manager or a client has asked me to do. So, I have created 3 lists:

    a) Tasks that I have to do today.
    b) Tasks that I have to do in a short term (2-5 days)
    c) Tasks that I have to delegate (assign) to someone.

    So, based on what the email has, I select the appropriate list first, then I click on the “more actions” button on the top and then select “Add to tasks“. This way, that email is added to me task list with a convenient option of going to that particular message on a click. Now, I can easily add these tasks in my today’s plan in the reporting system and when I add today’s work before I go, I have a ready reference of what I had done all day. As I finish a task, I check (cross) it in the task list and before I leave for the day, I clear all the completed tasks to have a clean, fresh task list for the next day.

    FYI, you can also add tasks manually in this list. The “delegated” list helps me follow up with all the work that I have assigned to any of you.

  3. Star important messages

    Every once in a while, you come across a message that has some important information that you have to refer to quite a lot. For e.g. if you ask the server admin to create your svn (subversion or any other version control system) login, he will send it to you in an email. Now, say 10 days later you want to log in again, but you don’t find the mail that the server admin had sent because its lost in the thousands of other mails in your inbox. Searching it becomes very time consuming and hectic for all of us. For such messages, the best option is to “Star” them. You can star any message by clicking on the white star that appears in its left. Once you star it, it becomes yellow or changes color.

    Now, whenever you want to review that important info, just click on the link which reads “Starred” in the vertical menu of Gmail (below inbox) – and you will have that message for a ready reference. Also, remember to keep this list restricted to at most 10-15 messages. Do a clean up of this list every 3 months and remove the older starred messages that you don’t have to refer to anymore.

  4. Use shortcuts

    Using keyboard shortcuts will save a lot of time. An experienced web surfer will always prefer his keyboard over the mouse. More info here.

  5. Avoid Drafts

    Gmail has a feature of auto drafting of message. Having too many drafted messages means you have kept a lot of people waiting. So ensure that you have no drafts. Either send them or discard them.

  6. Make proper use of Filters, Labels, Archive and Spam

    I’m sure most of you are using filters and labels. For those who don’t know – Archiving a message removes it from your inbox but does not send it to trash. So, it will appear in your search results under the heading “All Mail”. When you mark a message as spam, Gmail will blacklist that email address for you and any further messages from that email will directly go into the spam folder. So make sure you use these two features responsibly.

    You may want to follow the Official Gmail Blog for new features that Gmail keeps introducing every once in a while.

    Apologies for this rather long article. We will appreciate any feedback that you may have and will be happy to offer any assistance as desired. Before I sign off for today, here’s a funny cartoon which perfectly demonstrates how ‘hip’ Gmail has become nowadays. Check it out.

Courtesy: joyoftech.com. Click to expand

Courtesy: joyoftech.com. Click to expand

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