Skip to main content

IT solutions industry and clone sites--option for creativity?

As noted, our team developed software solution platform that powers many Groupon and Fiverr like sites.

Initially, the development wasn't much interesting as now; there was less freedom to add our own idea--as customers would be asking exact or similar features of popular site. Taking GroupDeal, when we added merchant interface, many customers didn't want it as it wasn't a feature available in Groupon and LivingSocial; but Groupon has come up with similar feature as Groupon 2.0! We've even added friends mod as I have a gut feeling that Groupon will definitely take that direction. From the very beginning, we predicted that Groupon is good idea out of Woot, but the interface isn't good--something like Digg would be ideal for Groupon; but, we couldn't do anything here. Also, the initial FUD was that our software didn't scale on load--even when we shown it's scalable than Groupon; and that got settled down once MySuperDealToday could sell 1,440 deals in a day

And, when we added PayPal adaptive payment and PayPal preauth option (also, we referred it as "PayPal connect"; I'm quite surprised why PayPal isn't even trying to popularize it?) to FPPlatform, it wasn't much interesting to customers.

There are lot of ideas and possibilities for folks at PayPal, Google, delicious, Yahoo!, Groupon, Fiverr and any other internet companies; but it all looks like they don't have enough freedom like many of us in IT solutions industry.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BehaviorS.js - An alternative to Behaviour.js, event:Selectors and Low Pro libs for unobtrusive JavaScript programming

BehaviorS.js yet another unobtrusive JavaScript library similar to Behaviour.js and event:Selectors but in implementation uses hash based lookup without extending elements; so presumably it should be faster than the rest. The original script and idea was by JLof ; I extended it for DOMContentLoaded support, optimized a bit to avoid scanning of more depths, and added new rules support. I wanted to document the plug a long time and just got time to do it. For the time being BehaviorS.js is available here Update (2006-09-11) : Coralized the link to BehaviorS.js so as to save the load on free brinkster.com webpage Update (2006-09-27) : If the coralized link to BehaviorS.js doesn't work, use http://www21.brinkster.com/guideme/BehaviorS/ Update (2025-06-07) : Now available in https://github.com/rrjanbiah/behaviorsjs

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...

Tamil Castes and Consolidation - Hacker Style Cheat Sheet

Tamil caste system and its hierarchies are complex and difficult to understand--due to different addressing systems. Similarly, the caste consolidation or grouping of similar or different castes under some title is extremely confusing. In many cases, the caste consolidation doesn't make any sense, but due to ulterior motives of politicians for their vote bank politics, these systems exist. So, to explain the system, I created a formula like cheat sheet: Vellalar = Pillai + Mudaliar + [Gounder] Pillai > Mudaliar ~ Gounder Thevar = Maravar + Kallar + [Agamudayar + [Senathipathi]] Senathipathi >>> Agamudiyar > Maravar ~ Kallar Agamudayar ~ Gounder Vanniyar = Padayachi + Gounder + [Naicker + [Reddy]] Naicker >>> Reddy > Padayachi ~ Gounder * Gounder is BC, Padayachi is MBC