Techie-Gyan

E Commerce Business Plan – Baby Products

Aditya — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:37:37 +0000

The eCommerce Business plan for premium baby products. I presented to Sequoia at Sunstone Business School. We were awarded as second best Business plan among all the business plans/presentations.

Babycart

View more presentations from Aditya Chaturvedi

Spring Framework 3.0 – Core

Aditya — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:19:40 +0000

Spring Framework – Core

View more presentations from Dmitry Noskov

Google Starter Guide on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

shaguna — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 07:49:36 +0000

How does one improve traffic on a website? Well there are various ways e.g. online marketing/advertising, through search engines, social networking etc.
The higher the page in search results, the better probability it has of being clicked and hence more visitors would reach the website through a search engine.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process of improving the visibility of a website to search engines through natural and organic/unpaid methods. SEO is usually about making small modifications here and there in your website. When viewed individually, these are small changes, but in totality they can have a major impact on the site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

Here’s an interesting article to get you started – Google’s Search Engine Optimization – Starter Guide.

Before going ahead, do remember that SEO would help your website gain better positioning in search results, but main focus of a website should be it’s content & users, not just search engines.

Railway Reservation through Mobile

shaguna — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:21:42 +0000

This article is a step ahead on my earlier article on Online Railway Reservation Websites For India.
The world is moving fast and everyone is on the go all the time. In order to get train tickets, standing in queues is history, online reservation requires one to sit on a computer, which is a comfortable option, but not really possible all the time. Well, technology is keeping pace with the people’s lifestyles and there are many mobile applications available that can be used to book ticket with a phone, anywhere, anytime! All you need is:
1. A JAVA enabled mobile phone
2. GPRS, WiFi, 3G or any other medium to connect the phone to Internet
3. The Railway Reservation Application

How simple is that!

In this post I will discuss about the three mobile applications the are available on IRCTC, the railways’ official website . IRCTC has partnered with three applications and links to all of them are available on IRCTC website in the “Mobile Zone” section at the bottom of the page. Click on any one of the following links to know more about that application:

1. ngpay
2. atom
3. PayMate

In order to book tickets using these applications, all you need to do is SMS your mobile number to a number provided by the providers or enter your mobile number on their website. They will send you an SMS with the link to the application. You will then need to download, install and configure the application on your mobile phone by providing a username, password and some other information.

All these are basically M-commerce applications that provide various other facilities like Flight Booking, Hotel Booking, Movie Ticket Booking, Bus Ticket Booking, Bill Payments etc. For booking train tickets, you need to browse to IRCTC and start your search. It’s fairly simple. The payment can be made by Credit Cards, Net Banking, Debit Cards, Cash Cards etc.

On successful booking, an e-Ticket will be sent to you by the application on the email address provided at the time of transaction. This ticket can be cancelled through ngpay itself.

A maximum of six berths/seats can be booked at a time, for a specified journey between any two stations served by the train, subject to distance restrictions in force. An individual user can book a maximum of ten tickets (PNR) in a calendar month. Booking can be done against General (GN), Ladies (LD) and Tatkal (CK) quota berths/seats.

ngpay:

SMS ngpay to 56767 OR enter your mobile number on this page to get a link to the installation application on your mobile phone.

ngpay on IRCTC and ngpay Official Website.

Click on the below snapshot to know about the steps to book tickets using ngpay:

atom:

SMS atom to 54959 OR enter your mobile number on this page to get a link to the installation application on your mobile phone.

atom on IRCTC and atom’s Official Website.

Click on the below snapshot to know how to install and use atom:

PayMate:

Enter your mobile number on this page to get a link to the installation application on your mobile phone.

PayMate on IRCTC and PayMate’s Official Website.

Click on the below snapshot to know about the steps to install and book tickets using paymate:

Hope this article helps in planning your journey more comfortably!

Online Railway Reservation Websites for India

shaguna — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:29:40 +0000

Most people like to travel, but no one wants to spend time and energy standing in log queues. When i was young, planning a trip was a big task and we went out only once a year. Why? coz my father did not have the time and inclination to plan the travel. Until a decade back, people used to stand in long queues wasting precious office hours just to get a rail reservation. Now that I’ve grown up, I and many others like me, travel often within India, usually every alternate month! The number of frequent travelers in India is going up, main reason for this is improving infrastructure in India and traveling is becoming easier, be it by any medium – road, train or air.
Indian Railways has done it’s share by starting online booking of rail tickets, helping people like me, who would rather not travel than stand in endless queues, just to get a ticket. The official Indian Railways’ website IRCTC was started in 2002, with a lot of loopholes, restricted online timings etc, but it still made a lot of business and since then, is one of the most useful portals to Indians all over the country. Till sometime back, it was the only player in the market but then government allowed third party websites to provide this facility as well. These websites have partnered with IRCTC. This means when you go for Online Reservation using any of these websites, your reservation details will also be sent to the Official IRCTC Database. All these websites completely rely on Official IRCTC Database. If the official database is experiencing errors or downtime, then none of these portals can carry out Online reservation until the Official Railway Reservation Database is back again.
IRCTC charges a service fee for each ticket. All the other websites also charge their own service fee (in addition to IRCTC Service Fee) for carrying out railway reservations through them. This additional charge ranges between INR 10 INR to 50, depending on Type of Train, Class of Travel, General/Tatkal Quota etc and differs for each portal.
All the Online Reservation websites offer both General and Tatkal bookings, choice of berth etc while making the reservations. They also offer ticket cancellation of e-tickets bought from them.

In order to get an an Online Railway Reservation (e-ticket), all one needs is the following:

Internet enabled computer
Identity proof (needs to be declared while booking and shown while travelling)
Mode of payment (Credit card, debit card, net payment through account etc)
Printer to print the e-ticket
Age/Senior citizen proof (incase you took a ticket in Senior Citizen quota)

People who do not have access to internet can also make use of these websites by getting their tickets booked through local Internet Cafes, Agents etc that use online booking to reserve tickets for these passengers.

Here’s a list of some of the websites that offer online rail reservations. I’ve also tried to highlight some of the distinguishing features of each website.

Click on a logo for more information on that website

makemytrip

By far this website offers the best user experience. It is simple to use and provides you multiple options on the basic search page. You can get a fair enough idea of the availability status on the result page itself and don’t have to click on each train and view it’s status separately. However, there’s a catch here, the default search results that are displayed to the user are not the latest status’, but cached data i.e. data captured sometime back. To get the latest status, you will have to fetch the updated status for your particular choice. I would still say, that this is good approach, as in most cases, travellers prefer to check various trains and then pick up the ones’ that suit them. Here, you get an idea of status (time, availability, rates) of all the trains and can simply refresh status for the one’s that suit you.

Some of the distinguishing features of makemytrip as compared to it’s competitors:
- choice between oneway and return trip
- While searching if you select “flexible dates”, the search results will be displayed for 4 days.
- While searching if you select “flexible class”, the search results will be displayed for different classes, e.g. Sleeper, AC 3 Tier, AC 2 Tier etc
- After getting the search results, you can refine the data by selecting your preferred time of departure/arrival
-You can also save passenger details and avoid having to fill in these details every time you book rail tickets.

Make My Trip - Click on the picture to view a snapshot of the result page

IRCTC

This is the first online reservation portal that made life easy for internet buffs, followed by the aam janta. It started in the year 2002. The website is owned and managed by the Indian Government. The website is little slow as compared to some of it’s competitors. Once you make a search and select the train and Class of travel, it displays availability of future dates as well. It also provides rail tour packages and a whole lot of information on Indian Railways.

IRCTC Result page - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

cleartrip

Although not very impressive to look at. The website is crip and clean and much faster than most of it’s competitors. Does give you an option to change dates and travel class on the search result page. But the like most other sites, you need to fetch the status of each train individually.
One interesting feature of this website is that you can email the search result.

Cleartrip - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

yatra

They also provide you the option to alter Travel Date (Previous/Next) and Travel Class. Overall not a very impressive website as it is very slow. But does provide the service and is another option.

Yatra - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

ezeego

Although you need to get individual status of each train, ezeego offers couple of interesting features that non of the other sites does:
- View route
- Email Result for a specific train
The website has a lot of bugs, I tried to book a tickets 3 times, but failed! It is also relatively slow.