Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

We really need a good looking and efficient news aggregator in India.

Internet services in India have always been a few years behind the world. Even at a time when the internet has been pushing boundaries, we are still used to surfing the internet as second class citizens. How many real world class innovative applications on the internet can you recall, which have been born and bred in India, for Indians?

Yet every time we refer to our country as non-US, we emphasize our presence in the ever growing internet community. Every time a new individual or organization takes it upon themselves to create something of value to us in the Indian subcontinent, it is appreciated, not as much as it should be, but yes it is.

So I introduce you to one of our latest news aggregators called Indian NewsBox, a new aggregator designed for India which gives you access to the most read news sites and blogs in India, all under one website.

The idea is novel, though a little over-used already. There are a number of services which are already existing and do get a decent amount of traffic. IndiaNewsBox is still in it’s beta, so this post is more about the changes which could help make it better.

The content is organized into Headlines (India and International), Business, Sports (Cricket and Other), Tehnology, ShowBiz, Regional ( Hindi and Kannada ), Market and Indian Blogs. The selection of blogs is interesting, ContentSutra, Webyantra and The Kamla Bhatt Show. Full marks for the collection of web sites.

Each of the tabs shows the last five posts of the respective websites. Though I don’t think you can really do justice to the news websites by just five posts when they put in over 200 entries over the whole day.

Two much required changes would be to allow the user to decide which blogs one wants to read and how many previous posts are visible. There is this real problem about how to let the users choose which blogs to decide, because unless you allow for registration and remember which blogs each user had chosen, it would be extremely difficult to find an algorithm which suits everybody. A creative solution to the whole problem is required. Maybe this is really where one could innovate.

The site design is clean, yet a little lacking. The websites does not really use CSS to much good, instead uses tables to create each of the pages. The end result is that some of the ads seem to be left-oriented, which is destroying the symmetry a bit.

There is a link to a blog, which has all but one entry, posted two months back. There is nothing wrong with it, but if you are linking to your blog, it would be great to have a few posts more occasionally.

On the whole, it is a good service, but it would require some fixes to make it really great. If you have any feedback or ideas, please leave a comment here to drop a mail to feedback[at]indianewsbox.com.

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