ActiveCiti – one of the top 9 Event Management websites!

I know we have a separate page where we list in all the press and reviews we get for ActiveCiti.
But I couldn’t help myself this time.

We just found out that ActiveCiti had made it to the list of the top 9 event management websites on the internet by Events Authority sometime earlier this year.

Really made our day at ThinkingSpace.

NASSCOM’s Report on Indian Software Product Businesses

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has recently released a report NASSCOM Software Product Study: Outlook for Indian Software Product Businesses.

Key highlights of the report:

Indian software product businesses are now approaching an inflection point in their evolution. The next decade will be a period of disruptive growth for this segment, with the annual revenue aggregate of Indian software product businesses forecast to grow from USD 1.4 billion in FY2008 to USD 9.5 to 12 billion by FY2015.

Leading Indian software product firms have strengthened their product portfolio through steady investments in organic growth as well as through overseas acquisitions, and have reached credible business scale

Of the existing 371 software product start-ups since 2001, over two-thirds have been formed in the past three years – of which ~100 companies have started their operations in 2007 alone. As a result, while the top 10 companies still dominate, accounting for 84 per cent of the segment revenues, there are over 200 midsized companies and start-ups that have started generating revenues and are contributing to its growth.

They have recognized our contribution! We (at ThinkingSpace) started  in April-2007 and its been an active 1 and 1/2 years of pursuing our products (Activeciti, Eventazoo), with positive response coming from the domestic and global market. We have also broadened our scope by providing Product Engineering to our clients (ImIn-TV).  NASSCOM-Mckinsey have further identified this area as ‘product-shops’. This comes from a fact sheet related to the report, which can be accessed from their site here.

Opportunity for Indian companies in the product domain

India’s potential to cater to this demand for technology services is demonstrated by the host of global technology majors rushing to establish back-end operations in India. The trend towards offshoring product development services is likely to grow as global ISVs continue to struggle to balance their development priorities and the offshore model proves its effectiveness.

While over 60% of the top global ISVs already leverage India for maintenance services and new product development, the opportunity is further fuelled by entry of focused Indian “product-shops”.

I guess we are ‘product-shops’ then :) Anyways, I am thrilled to read this report. Finally, there has been a detailed study on the Indian software products business. NASSCOM  is taking active steps to identify this business environment in India. I hope this is first of the many steps to come in recognizing the other aspect of Indian Software Companies (other than IT Services and BPO). ThinkingSpace was started with a vision to be a successful Indian Software Product  Company, and this report just fuels our desire to become one.

On Copyrights in India…

If you have been following our blog, you will know that sometime ago, we had filed a copyright infringement case against another Indian company from Nasik for blatantly copying the entire user interface and functionality of ActiveCiti.
I agree that imitation is the best form of flattery – but blatantly downloading pages from someone else’s web property and then just doing a search-replace to put your name in — is just wrong!

Anyways, even though many people have told us that we’ve gone overboard with actually filing a criminal case against the accused company, I beg to differ. We have spent time, money and effort in developing something and we are going to defend it to the best we can.

During the entire case – which is already 8 months old, we have learnt quite a few things about Copyrights – and more importantly, “Copyrights in India”. In this post, I want to share some of this information with you…

The Berne Convention
The Berne Convention was an international agreement governing copyright issues and India is a signatory in this. What this means is that India will respect copyrights given by other signatory countries and other countries will respect the copyrights on works that India issues.

Copyrights in India
Copyright protects the artistic expression of an idea.
To put it more simply, ideas can be patented and expressions can be copyrighted.

As software cannot be (thankfully) patented in India, the best you can do is to get your work copyrighted.

Technically, all you need to do to copyright a website is put the words – “Copyright [Company Name]. [Years for which the copyright is valid]“
However, this does not work at all in the court of law – for obvious reason.

Hence, even though it is an expensive process, we went ahead and filed an application for obtaining the copyright – the legal way. To do this, we had to send all the material that we wanted to copyright (i.e. the entire website) in triplicate to the Copyright office in Delhi.

The Copyright office is located at:
The Ministry of Human Resource Development
Department of Secondary Education & Higher Education
Copyright Office

B2/W3, Curzon Road Barracks,
K.G. Marg, New Delhi – 110001
Tel: 3384387, -2549, -2458 / Extn. 31

Once they received this, they immediately issued us a receipt for the same (stating that our application is in process). The process generally takes 3 to 4 months to complete after which you will receive your copyright certificate.

Once done, you own the copyright for your work for 60 years.

Major changes made to the work warrant another copyright.
However, we are not very sure whether making subtle changes to the original work requires this.

Anyways, the process for obtaining a copyright is slightly complicated with quite a few forms to fill.
And the only copyright office being in Delhi, it makes sense obtaining the help of a lawyer or a firm which specializes in this.

A Copyright Story …

Please indulge me while I tell you an interesting story …

One fine day (27th September 2007) last year, we were going through our ActiveCiti usage stats when we noticed that there was a sharp spike in the incoming traffic.

Excitedly, we dug into the analysis of the traffic – hoping to find lots of people using ActiveCiti to plan and manage their events online. Imagine our disappointment when we realised that all the traffic was coming from a single I.P. address.

On some further investigation, we were completely shocked to learn that the statistics were getting generated from a local desktop machine and not our servers online. It struck us then that someone was busy saving ActiveCiti pages on their desktops and running them from it.

The stats would start getting generated at about 10 in the morning everyday and the last ping from the particular I.P. address would come at around 6 in the evening. Strangely, the I.P. address was static and was active on our website only on week days – Monday to Friday.

We decided to dig deeper …

After quite a bit of analysis and tracking ActiveCiti logs and usage, we found out that a firm called Web Minds India from Nasik was happily cloning the website to sell to a Malaysian guy called Peter Foo. (Please don’t ask how we found it – its a long story – but we have all the evidence … which is now with the cops …)

As it turned out, the Peter Foo guy was himself a member on ActiveCiti along with a couple of developers from the Web Minds India company. We suspect he signed up initially innocently, liked the idea of ActiveCiti and wanted it all for himself. And to get this, went and hired this firm to clone the website for him.

Just to get things clear … We wouldn’t have cared much if they just copied the concept and idea and implemented it all from scratch …

Ethics aside, this company was pretty lazy…
They decided to download all our pages and just change “ActiveCiti” to their product name called “Xogether”. The UI, CSS, Javascript — everything! Completely ripped off.
(Please see the attached screens below. We can easily have a spot the difference challenge going on here …)

We could just login to the project by typing the URL of the company and check their progress out daily. Thats how we got all the screenshots. (More evidence with the cops)
We were definitely angry (to put it mildly) with this blatant copying.

We headed off to the “Asian School of Cyber Laws” here in Pune who directed us to our current (very brilliant) cyber crime lawyer – Mr. Gaurav Jachak. Under his counsel, we filed a case with the police under 3 sections of the Indian IT Act. The case was presented in front of a judge here in Pune and he was convinced enough to direct the police to arrest the partners of the accused firm in Nasik. All this happened rather quickly…

Though the next steps dragged on for quite a bit, the cops finally made a trip down to Nasik and landed up at the company’s (Web Minds India) office.
By this time however, they had already signed off the ActiveCiti clone project and the Xogether website was live. (We filed the case in November 07. The cops went to Nasik sometime in Feb 08)

On questioning, the partners admitted to everything – including the blatant copying of the website. They were eventually arrested and were given about 5 days of police custody in Pune.
Their company (of more than 20 employees at the time of their arrest) has since, closed down.

But as with most cases, this one too is still on – and will be a while before any results can be expected. So, watch this space for more …

Why are we telling you this now you ask?
Well, a local newspaper published a detailed report of this today — and thus we decided that it was better you heard it from us rather than third party sources.

Images below:

The index pages of the sites. (click to enlarge)

The login pages. The similarity in the text is uncanny. (click to enlarge)

The best part about cloning a website. All the help comes along with it – intact and free of cost!
(click to enlarge)

ActiveCiti – just updated …

We have just finished making very important updates to ActiveCiti and you can check out the website online.
If you have logged on and are wondering what the changes are (besides the opening page looking slightly different) – don’t worry. The changes are not visible :)

Most of the changes have been made to the internal workings of ActiveCiti. The UI has been changed at very few places (though expect to see changes over the coming days)

We have hammered away and tweaked at the internal gears that make ActiveCiti tick and have shaved off tremendous amounts of fat from the system which was slowing down the website at places.
You will definitely notice quite some performance improvement at lots of places.

We’ve added two new features which will help you in promoting your event!

1. Share your public event page on social content sharing websites!
We have added a widget to all the public event pages which will allow anyone visiting the page to share the page on other social content sharing and social network websites like digg, facebook, etc.
Now you can promote your event with just one click!

2. Featured Events are now Active
The featured events bar on your calendar page will now show a randomly chosen featured event every time you open up the page. This feature was a long time coming.
Incase you are organizing a public event and would like to get the word out to the ActiveCiti community, just send us a message using our Contact Us page and we’ll see what we can do.
If your event matches our criteria for being listed as a featured event, we’ll make it one so that you can have more visitors checking your event page out!

Besides this, we have also spruced up our main page to give people pointers on what tools they can use to organize and plan different types of events. To know more, head to our main page and click any of icons at the bottom of the page.

I am sure a lot of you would be surprised at the many features we have that you didn’t know about.

We’ll be rolling out more changes and features in the coming weeks.
So stay tuned to this page …

(If you’re feeling lazy to come back and check this blog regularly, you can subscribe to it via an RSS reader or via email. The options to do so are on the bottom-right hand side of this page. Go ahead and subscribe to the blog!

We promise not to spam…)

[How-To] Invite guests who are not registered on Activeciti

We are starting a series of How-To posts of our products for you. These are some cool features which we think can help you in using the product.

On Activeciti, you can invite guests to your event who are not yet members of Activeciti. The cool thing is that there is no compulsion for your guests to register on Activeciti before they can RSVP your event. When you invite a guest who is not registered, he/she will get an email with information about the event. The email will also allow them to respond whether they will be attending the event. Your guest can thus respond with a ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Maybe’ from their email.

Now, to invite guests who are not on Activeciti, go to the Guest List page of your event. Under ‘Choose Your Invitees’ , there is a drop down which lists all the Friends Group that you have created in your Friends section. From here, to invite non-ActiveCiti guests select the ‘Non-Activeciti Users‘. You can now enter email addresses of your guests and friends and invite them by clicking ‘Send Invitations’.

You can also upload a CSV to invite guests. Once uploaded, you will be able to choose the people you want to invite from the list and invitations will be sent only to them (not the entire list).

Another cool tip – incase you want to invite non-registered people from a previous event and do not want to type all their email addresses again…

When you create a new event, go to the same Guest List page and in the drop-down, select ‘Previously Invited non-Activeciti Users‘. This will show you all the email addresses that you had added or invited to your previous events. You can select emails from there, and send the invitations. Its as simple as that !

You can post comments if you want any additional help.

The Story So Far…

Its been a long time since we have blogged. But we have been updating the Activeciti Reviews page regularly. It seems rest of us were bogged down in our work.

So where were we ? What have we been doing ? Whats kept us busy so far ?

Well, the big news in past months was that we launched a service for professional event management : Eventazoo. Its not open to public; we have kept it on entry-by-request basis. It is our second product in event-management space and first in our plan to launch a series of professional event management services. More details will be put in later posts.

Second, we are now delivering the same quality that goes into our products for our clients. We help them get their product to the launch stage, right from the conceptual stage. It gives us great pleasure to see business value being created for the client, all thanks to the efforts of our team. And in these efforts, it is our constant endeavor to improve our processes and quality of work.

One such client is Im In TV.  Im In TV is the business networking site for the TV industry. Users of this site can showcase their  talents, post and browse listings,  manage their diary, manage contacts  and recommend them, and also share their  views through a forum.

Third, event management space has evolved since the time we launched Activeciti. Our outlook towards the market has also changed with help of surveys and people who have first-hand knowledge of this domain ( Hence the launch of Eventazoo ) . This has led us to deliver more value to our users of Activeciti and our team has started work on providing minor-but-useful features for them.

Also, as usual, we have been constantly working on errors,fixes & invaluable feedback provided by our Activeciti and Eventazoo users.

We are also in the process of hiring and very soon will be updating our corporate site with more details.

Blog changes …

If you have been following our blog, you’ll notice the new theme that we moved to…
After a lot of trial and error and testing out, we figured that this current layout suits our needs the best …

Also, we created  a page in which we have linked back to all the blogs and companies which have profiled us.
I felt that instead of putting up a post everytime someone profiled us, this was much better.

One list of all the companies and blogs that profiled us – on one page — sorted by chronological order.

- Saurabh

ActiveCiti Feedback …

The reason for being in beta is getting valuable feedback from people and being able to update the site more frequently – even being able to make drastic changes overnight.
Once you go live, doing the same things is a big NO-NO.

Feedback can be anything.
From people asking – “Why can’t I do this on your website?” to people calling it lame to some people thinking the UI is cool to someone wondering whether they could use it to host their LAN parties — everything helps.
It lets us analyse our target audience and the demographic the site appeals to …

We have got decent amount of feedback from visitors contacting us – and quite a bit from bloggers who have reviewed our site.
Quite a few of these blogs have been in non-english languages … but the Google translation tool has been handy in educating us about what has been said …

Another recent review that has been posted about us is here:
http://protocoloycomunicacion.blogspot.com/2007/08/activeciti-herramiento-web-de-eventos.html

It’s in Spanish (I think) and is written by Maria Luz Alvarez.
Thanks Maria for the feedback and the exposure :)

- Saurabh

More reviews :)

We haven’t been marketing ActiveCiti as much as we would have liked (we’re still learning the ropes – this side of the business) – but we’re getting noticed at someplaces nonetheless.
I wouldn’t call it mind-boggling-server-breaking-down hits … But it is pretty decent for the amount of effort we’ve been able to put in (marketing-wise) …

We got reviewed at a couple more places.

Barry’s Best Blog has this to say:

This Internet tool makes me want to plan something. I do not care what. Just for the chance to use it. ActiveCiti is that tight.

We were also reviewed by a Chinese website -  Wangtam which describes ActiveCiti’s basic features in a short and sweet manner.

Thank you people for spreading the word out.
We guys at ActiveCiti really appreciate it :)

- Saurabh