Updates on Locomi

Well yeah, thats what we have decided to call it. In this world of crazy Web2.0 names, Locomi actually means something. Lo, stands for local, co for content and mi – for me ( we didn’t get Locome – it didn’t sound half as cool anyway) – essentially its a social networking platform for giving me locally relevant content.

Other updates apart from the name? Well – we are still working on the logo and should have something soon. The backend work has started and we should be ready for a private beta by mid-September at the very latest. A big thanks to our development team at Anblik for devoting long crazy hours to this.

On another note, our team is out scouring Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Calcutta with GPS devices for hangouts that are popular with our target demographic – restaurants, clubs, gyms, theatres, salons and the like. We hope to have the most comprehensive database of such locations by September. Its costing us a bomb but is worth every penny and then some more. It gives us significant IP that we could sell later to the likes of Google.

That’s it for now. Will keep updating this blog as and when I can. Which reminds me, I need to work on the blog’s visibility. Time for some much necessary PR.

‘rb’

The standard layout

As promised, here is the new ’standard’ layout as we call it for the site. We really should give it a name now - i am tired of calling it the site. Let us know what you think!

Update: There is a newer version (which I just go to know about ) – will put that up in some time.

‘rb’

Designing (for those of us who cant afford much)

For any startup, getting your website designed is always an issue. You need it to be attractive, striking and at the same time you can’t afford much. What do you do? Well – for one there are a number of templates available online – so if your website is serving as nothing more than an information resource, then this might be a good idea. If your startup is a web based one however, then this obviously won’t do.

One way to do this is to source for freelancers – preferrably college students. These guys are good because they (usually) do it as a hobby. People who are genuinely interested in design vis-a-vis the kind who use templates, modify them and claim to be web desgners (and there is no dearth of them in India)- are obviously going to be a hell lot better. And they primarily they do it to earn some good money while focussing on their studies – which means that don’t chareg all that much.

We got our corporate website designed by a friend of mine who is studying at Manipal currently. He did a fab job for us and he’s working with us on the design of the social networking site as well.

Its looking great! Thanks a lot Sid..

‘rb’