Surti Blog

Hello all Surtis,

Happy New Year to all of you and OurSurat.com wishes you a very well new year ahead.

With this new year, We are planning to add a new Education section due to heavy public demand. Currently in first phase we are targeting SSC and HSC or in other words Standard 10 and 12 Question Papers only. As, it is not just doing website development for adding this part, We will also need Question Paper Sets and as many as we could have. So here is where we need help from all of you OurSurat.com members or any people living in Surat. So I request you on behalf of OurSurat.com Team to help us in any way mentioned below:

1. If you have close contact at any school in Surat, help us to get last 5+ years papers from any school of Surat.
2. If you know some publications who publishes any paper sets (Surat schools / Board) which we can use.
3. If you are from education field, you can guide us the best way to present all question papers at single place.
4. If you are students from Surat, How we can make this section more useable for you.
5. Or any other way, which you can help us for this section.

To help us for this section, You can use any one of the following mediums:

1. Call us on our Help Line Number 955 8888 559 and Ask that you want to Talk about Education Section.
2. Email us on our special email address education@oursurat.com
3. You can also post your contact details and suitable time as comment to this post and We will give  you a callback.

Surat already took first step towards IT Revolution, By helping us – You can be part of our effort to giving society back.

On behalf of OurSurat.com Team,
Ashvin Savani

OurSurat.com booked Stall at IT Expo 2010 like we had last year. Last year we got around 2200 forms filled up by Surati people. With that consideration, this time we participated in IT Expo 2010.

This time was superb and we received great response from everywhere! Here are some interesting things we experienced so far:

1. More than 6200 people visited us in last 3 days and will participate for FREE 100 National SMS campaign.
2. People is interested more on Web and IT than last year.
3. HIND TV from Surat, covered OurSurat.com in their daily news.
4. Some another News Channel from Mumbai, covered our Interview too.
5. Too less IT people / Web Professionals we found visiting IT Expo or OurSurat.com stall.

If you still not visited, Visit us at Stall # 323 in Web & Software Dom and Get 100 National SMS for FREE.

Update: By mistake I wrote “More than 6200 people visited in 3 years” which should be 3 days

OurSurat.com – The next generation Surat portal is getting ready for next beta release. We are focusing on many things but here are the major things for this release:

• Usability of the portal
• YouTube Videos (Jokes, Funny Videos etc.,)
• Chat Rooms
• Invite System to invite friends
• Referrer System to gain benefit for invites and being active on OurSurat.com
• Point system (I will write separate post on that)
• Revised version of How-to’s (Most common procedures for common man)

Keep visiting OurSurat.com

Ashvin Savani – Leader, OurSurat.com & OurSurat.com Team

Hello Suratis,

Kem chale che navratri? I hope all of you are enjoying it in pure surti style! and be safe from Swine Flu!

There is huge public demand to invite friends to OurSurat.com through their existing friends or contacts. So we are planning to do it in two ways. First is email and second is via mobile. We will also planning to add some more value to inviting friends by giving some points, Free T-Shirts, Free Gifts and Free SMS like offers.

About emails, We currently planning to support inviting contacts from following emails:

1. Gmail
2. Yahoo!
3. Hotmail
4. MSN
5. Microsoft Live!
6. in.com
7. RediffMail
8. IndiaTimes
9. Sify

You will also able to invite your friends (by sending them emails through orkut automatically) from Orkut. I did not see that many surti’s are using Twitter otherwise we could support that too!

Second option is SMS. You will able to invite your friends by SMS. It will be like creating your AddressBook and You can use the same AddressBook to send FREE SMS later when we will introduce that feature.

We are really working hard, towards getting as many features as we can add to OurSurat.com and making it more useful to All Surti’s! And as always, We welcome all of your suggestion from bottom of our heart. Keep supporting us to fuel more energy to make OurSurat.com better and better.

Ashvin Savani,

Leading OurSurat.com

So I am back here again!

We got some requests from users, specially girls. Cell number is required to join and use friends. And who are not your friends, can see that number. It is not good for your privacy. You can make them private in Friend’s settings, but it was not there by default.

As OurSurat.com’s social responsibility, we took this very seriously and we have now this feature built in. Means your personal details will be private by default. If you want, you can share those details with your friends and even if you don’t want to share with your friends, you can keep them invisible from them. Not only that, We also applied this privacy settings for already registered members.

Always here to have better society in Surat with power of IT!

Ashvin

Hello all OurSurat.com users and well wishers!

I am creating this blog post, so everyone can give us feedback about OurSurat.com and its features. What we can do to make it better? If I want to say that in simple words, What is Public Demand?

Please continue sending us suggestions as comments to this post.

Ashvin Savani

Hello OurSurat.com Friends,

I would like to share details on Ads module in OurSurat.com. Ads is Free Classified Advertisement and it will be really useful to Business People of Surat who are approaching Surat based market. It is similar to “ટચુકડી જાહેરખબર” in local news paper. Apart from all Business People, It will be also helpful to individuals like me and you, to give personal advertisements on OurSurat.com for FREE.

What are the similarities:

News Paper and Oursurt.com both are approaching Surat people and so as an advertiser, you can get potential exposer for your advertisement.

What are the differences then?

Ads in News Paper -You need to pay some amount of Money for ટચુકડી જાહેરખબર and it will be there for single day only. Next day, people will not see your ટચુકડી જાહેરખબર on the same News Paper. if you want, you need to pay again so that your ટચુકડી જાહેરખબર is there for next day and so on.

Ads in OurSurat.com – You need to be registered user of OurSurat.com that is absolutely FREE. Then you can write your Advertisement from the OurSurat.com at anytime as per your comfort. We like to say Ads rather than Classified Advertisement in our Terminology.

• Your ads will be there in OurSurat.com home page – randomly basis as per Random rotation.
• People can access your ads from OurSurat.com – Ads Module.
• People can search your Ads from the  Ads Module – Classified categories / Sub Categories.
• People can search your Ads from the Area/Location from Ads module.
• People can search your Ads from the search module of OurSurat.com, by the words – so make sure to add suitable words in your Ads description.
• You have potential that your Ads can be searched by Google and other search engines because all the contents on OurSurat.com are indexed by the search engines like google.com and so all your content on Oursurat.com can be searchable on Google or other search engines.
• You need not to worry for auto expiry of your Ads because it will be activated for atleast 3 months and later on you can reactivate your Ads, Three months is there instead of lifetime to make sure that genuine Ads should be there.
• You can put as many as you want on Oursurat.com totally FREE of Cost.
• We are doing all the promotions of OurSurat.com continuously so indirectly all the Ads in OurSurat.com will be automatically reach to more and more potential Surati People and ultimately benefit to all the Classified advertiser without any cost.

Categories / Sub Categories

We have created some category / Sub Category to have better management of the Ads – Still it is not perfect and seeking your feedback to complete it.

• Buy – Mobiles, Electronic Items, Household Items, Bikes and Cars, Furniture, Real Estate, other
• Sell – Mobiles, Electronic Items, Household Items, Bikes and Cars, Furniture, Real Estate, Other
• Automobile – Vehicles, Bikes, Automobile, Cars, Other
• Health – Health, Gyms and Aerobics, Sports, Health and Fitness, Doctors and Hospitals, Ayurveda, Medical Stores,    Other
• Education – Spoken English, Foreign Languages, Student Visa, Foreign Study, Competitive Exams, Other
• Life Style – Yoga, Hobbies, Dance and Aerobics, Religious, Apparels, Jewelery, Fashion, Animals and Pets, Beauty, Games
• Real Estate – Row Houses, Bungalow, Flat, Hostels, PG, Rentals, Office Space, land, Party Plots
• Consumer Durables – TV/LCD TV /Plasma, Photo camera, Movie Camera, Computers, Refrigerator, Vacuum Cleaners. Other
• Business and Services – Astrology, Art and Antiques, Travel, Consulting Services, Business Coaching, Personality Development, Doctors, Legal Services, Garments, Diamond, Textile, Toys, Musical Instruments, Shares & Equity, Baby Items, Mobiles, Repairing, Food, Services, Internet & Web Services, Hotels, Books & Journals, Books, Magazines, News Papers, Event Management, Catering, Insurance, Loan, Small Business, Banking, Jobs, videography, photography, Restaurants, House & Decoration

Still these are not final categories, scopes are there for modification categories and sub categories, So please send us your feedback on this to ease fast access of Ads from right category/Sub category

Please feel free to comment on this post and give your reviews on the Ads module.

We are about to finish the final testing on Ads and very soon we are launching Ads on OurSurat.com as beta release and all the registered members can access it as beta tester. So if you have not registered there Please click here to register on OurUSurat.com.

We will soon have detailed post on how Ads module in OurSurat.com works.

Hello Surtis,

I am back again with some good news

OurSurat.com team is working hard to release beta as soon as possible and now we are very near to the release. We are doing final testing of the release. So be prepared to participate for beta very soon. Here is the rough outline what the beta edition will have:

1. Home page (English)
2. Aggregated News (Gujarati)
3. Friends (English)
4. Free Classifieds (English)

So stay tuned!

Hello Surti’s!

I am back again with another feature for Friends section of OurSurat.com

We are doing final testing of friends before we go under beta currently. So at that time, I thought – How it would be pain for users to enter their profile data again with OurSurat.com? And of course we are here to reduce the pain! So that more and more surti’s can be part of OurSurat.com. So in Friends, we will provide a feature where you can import your Orkut profile directly as your OurSurat.com profile. Me and the team was so happy about this feature and we were sure that people will like it.

But, My security team told that, people will hasitate to use it because, We need to ask his username and password of orkut. And Yes, its very valid threat. But we are here for trust, privacy and for free service so there is no point of stealing your valuable usernames and passwords of orkut. So we decided to get some twist in the Idea. We will not ask you for your username and password. Here is exactly, How it will work:

1. User will login to OurSurat.com portal.
2. Visit Friends Section.
3. Go to your profile and Edit it.
4. Inside Edit section, User will find an option to Import Social Profile.
5. It will ask to enter page source as input.
6. Page Source, will be the HTML code of your Orkut profile. Here is how you can get it.
7. Open Browser / New Tab and login to your Orkut account, and goto your profile.
8. Right click anywhere in the page and click on View Source Code.
9. Simply Copy all text from there and Paste it inside OurSurat.com Site.
10. Click on Import Button to import all your profile data into OurSurat.com
11. You can change some fields which, you want to change or remove.
12. That’s the feature! And we will also provide support for other Social Services too later.

Enjoy OurSurat.com!

This is a new feature, came across me today. Let me tell you what exactly it is.

Nodal Officers are part of Public Grievance System approved by most of government and semi government bodies. Due to government rules, it is also applicable to corporate houses who are into public services. Nodal Officers are such officers who are liable to solve consumer complaints which are not properly addressed or solved by customer care of their respective companies. Here is one simple example how it works:

Say I have some complaint about Vodafone or Airtel services in Surat, What I will do normally?

1. Call Customer Care of Vodafone or AirTel.
2. After many tries, If they will not solve my problem / complaint, I will contact local officers.
3. So, I will visit local offices.
4. Even if they are not able to fix my issue, then I am not hopeless. (Thanks to government of India)
5. I can contact these Nodal Officers and put my case to them and they have to fix my issue.
6. Even if they are not able to do that, I can also go upwards (Public Grievance Officers) and to consumer court etc.,

So this is complete chain, How it works. And I have feature idea to implement a Directory for all such corporate houses. Users will able to search the directory by company name or services type. I hope people will like it and it will be useful for them.