ThinkingSpace makes it to Headstart Summer 09 finals

There is some good news!
We have made it for the finals of the Headstart Conference Summer 09 to be held on June 20.

HeadStart is one of the two premium startup showcases in India (the other being Proto) – and we have been selected to present one of our products (EventShelf) – along with 15 other startups selected from all over India.

EventShelf is still in a very beta stage at the moment and we’re still building up some features and its database – but I think we should be in a very presentable and demo-able stage by June 20.

Getting feedback and seeing if the demo and presentation sticks will be interesting.

If you are in Mumbai on June 20, please feel free to drop in, check out our stall and chat with us.
The entry is free for the demo-pit area.

The event is going to be held at (updated):
Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research
L N Road
Matunga (Cr)
Mumbai, Maharashtra
India

L N Road

Matunga (Cr),

Mumbai, Maharashtra

India

and the demo-pit area will be thrown open from 12:30 PM till about 5:30 PM.

A map to the place can be found here.

More information about the finalists event can be found here.

Welcoming new members to Team ThinkingSpace!

We would like to welcome three new members to the ThinkingSpace Team.
45 grueling interviews and many, many coding challenges later, we were able to select three candidates to join our team at ThinkingSpace Technologies.

We will get these folks to introduce themselves in more depth in the coming days on this blog, but for now, I will briefly introduce them here:

[drumrolls .....]

The first person to join us (on 1st December 2008) was Nikhil Fuge.
Nikhil graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering from the JS College of Engineering (University of Pune) in 2008 and ThinkingSpace will be his first company.

The second person to make the cut was Hardik Savaliya – again from the JS College of Engineering, Pune who graduated with Nikhil and also holds a Bachelors in Computer Engineering.

And finally, we have Anushree Patil from the Cummins College of Engineering who having graduated with a bachelors in Computer Engineering joined us along with Hardik on the 15th of January, 2009.

ThinkingSpace being the first company for all these guys, we wish all of them, all the best and look forward to working with them on cool, new and exciting things.

As a matter of fact, we are already cooking up something new to be launched by the first week of March.
Watch this space for more!

Some quick updates!

We’re really sorry for not having updated this blog in quite sometime now.
But there is an explanation – which is – we were terribly caught up with tonnes of work.

We all took a much needed Diwali break and have had some time to catch up with other things.
So whats happening at ThinkingSpace of late you wonder …

UPDATE 1: We’ve been nominated for the TATA – NEN Hottest Startups Award!
Yes we have! We were at a particular time on rank 21 – but now are steadily slipping down to rank 50.
(This is out of 590 startups from India)

The ranking consists of an Experts rating (50%) and public voting (50%)
We have gotten a favourable expert’s rating and the only way we can move up is if you vote for us.

If we make it to number 30 (or lesser), we stand to gain tremendous exposure via online and offline press coverage. So we really need your help on this. Please vote for us.

Quick way (You will be charged Rs. 3): From India, send an SMS to 56767 with: “HOT <space> 327″ (without quotes)
Longer free way: Head over to this URL, sign up and vote for us online.

UPDATE 2: EventAZoo is now live!
We have been furiously working on EventAZoo and have released a live version online!
But until we have things stabilized, we’re giving out invite codes to try out the service for free to a select group of people only.

If you are interested, leave a comment on this post and I’ll send you an invite to try out our professional package – completely free for a month! (Invites open on a first come first serve basis to the first 10 comments)

Don’t know what EventAZoo is?
EventAZoo is a mind numbingly simple, no nonsense event website generator and registration taker!

Head over to EventAZoo at http://www.eventazoo.com to know more!

Presenting at the Pune Open Coffee Club

We have been graciously given the opportunity to present our startup and our products (ActiveCiti and EventAZoo) to the Pune Startup Ecosystem (The Pune Open Coffee Club) on Saturday, the 13th of this month from 5 PM to 6 PM at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research.

The “Startup Spotlight” is a new initiative started by the Pune Open Coffee Club (or POCC) in which, one startup from Pune gets an opportunity to come up and showcase their company to the local startup community. It is an excellent opportunity for new companies to get some eyeballs and share their experiences.

We here at ThinkingSpace are super excited and really looking forward to the event.
This will be the first time we’ll be publicly demoing EventAZoo and are really looking forward to the feedback and suggestions.

The theme for this time’s coffee club meet is “bootstrapping your startup” and is a 3 hour session from 4 PM to 7PM this Saturday.

If you are in Pune and are interested with whats buzzing in the startup eco system, do drop in.
More details about the event can be found here: http://events.activeciti.com/pocc/
Entry is free for everyone.

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…)

A brand new website …

We proudly present to you – the brand new ThinkingSpace Technologies website (drumroll) …

http://www.thinkingspace.in

The website is a major, major update from our previous one – which honestly speaking, needed a facelift a long while ago.

Actually, the first website went online when we launched the first version of ActiveCiti – so as to have a company website online at the time. During that time, we being extremely busy working on ActiveCiti had no time to work on the company website as such.

We have been pretty busy over the past year (our inability to update the website is a definite sign of this). But having just completed work on the I’m in TV website, we have have taken some time off to update the main ThinkingSpace website with all that we have done over the past year.

So incase you are wondering what we have been upto, our website should answer all those questions.

Another resolution that we have made here is to update the blog a lot more often than what we have been doing. So any news, updates, etc. will be put up here.

Watch this space for more …

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

Killerstartups …

Just an update …

We were reviewed by the killerstartups website.
The article (if you are interested) can be found here:

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/activeciti–Complete-Event-Management/

Wanted to thank the author – akfrankel – for giving us some coverage :)

- Saurabh