“ The saga…of challenge is when a person takes his pride to his nose and tries to out do others “
This statement can be rightly to said all the dotcoms shooting up in the Indian market, when they launch a portal or a website or what ever funny names you call them, they forget the ethics of doing business and boast of big things like big banners, big flash advertisements, Huge funding, Big people behind the scene to take care but what happens finally is that they fall flat on the ground like a big loaf of meat.
I am doing a small research on these Indian Dotcoms and portals and would bring to our MS members a small preview of these companies with real experience (of course) encountered either by me or my friends, also I expect the members here to give me inputs and feedback on the sites which I am writing so that the consumers get a final say and the best product to deal with.
Every one must have seen the Nicolas Cage movie, GONE IN 60 Seconds and remember the chart where each and every count is kept on the stolen cars in a similar way, I am keeping a count on the number of down falls of these dotcoms. Its not that I like these companies to fall down, Its just the attitude of these companies and their employees.
Now you will have a question why employees?
Answer is simple when these dotcoms came into picture a 2 year Exp MBA was being paid heavy salary and designation like VP, CEO, COO. It was really ridiculous because when these companies closed down, these employees will definitely expect a higher salary and higher designation but they are going to come in for rude shock as none of the companies are going to pay them so high. I am not blaming these employees, I am only blaming these dotcoms
In the series the first one on my list is the famous one Indiainfo.com
Who can forget the downfall of Indiainfo.com. One of the leading portal in India scenario to hit after rediff.com. Managed by the NRI based Raj Koneru. This company was the first to have very huge hoardings in and around Mumbai with an email space of 10mb.
The inside news was that the employees used to be paid in $(!!!That’s what I call style man).
They really started well and had good variety of services like a good email service, a decent chat rooms, and a decent search engine, services in different language, etc.
The site used to load fast and was really qucik if you are using a normal Dial up connection.
Technically , I never used to find any errors or dead link which one encounters at Indiatimes regularly, like site not loading, broken links etc.
But during this run, they wanted to put legs on many things and started faltering in this scenario.
Some of the services provided by Indiainfo are :
B2C services
https://shop.indiainfo.com
Don’t even think of going there it’s a pathetic site.
B2B services
- Justdial service ( https://justdial.com)
I don’t have to say more about this, most of us know what this is all about
- esourceindia (esourceindia.com)
It’s a virtual marketplace for procurement for any kind of Business requirements
- mydotfirm.com
It’s a very interesting concept where you can make your store online and have your products displayed on the site. With keeping your cost low you can display product, attract quotations, submit quotations etc. For starters and small timers can definitely be good bet.
- travel.indiainfo.com
A pretty decent site. But has got competition from giants like ICICI’s traveljini.com
All these services can be accessed directly going to the site https://indiainfo.com and click one of the link.
Other Services
Inktomi powers their search engine.
https://thatscricket.com
https://evesindia.com
https://quizbrain.com
https://careerindia.com
They have singles search for all bachelors who are waiting to tie up nots or looking for dates, but there are other services better than the one provided by Indiainfo.
Customer Service:
As usual they don’t have proper customer service to back up their expensive portal.
I had sent them a email that their news section was not being updated, but its been 6 days and have not heard from them.
But no doubt after that, their news was getting updated faster than timesofindia.com. But most important is intimate the customer who has brought this thing into their mind. But no they wont do..like most other dotcoms.
Its really depressing to see, so much funds being wasted on lavish advertisements, lavish launches, lavish salaries, lavish lifestyle of the company, but couldn’t concentrate on the most important thing of any kind of services, i.e the Customer Services.
I hope with the downfall of this dotcom and many more on the lines companies will start understanding the importance of Customers and Customer Service.
I would still recommend this site for some of their value added services like justdial, evesindia.com, careerindia.com, thatscricket.com, mydotfirm.com.
I wouldn’t rate this site an average site because there are better ones to be looked on.
Ratings : 5/10
Series 1..concluded…Wait for more….