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.

હુ ઘણો ખુશ છ્વ કે આજે મે એક નવુ ડોમેઇન રજીસ્ટ્રર ક્યુઁ. aapnusurat.com.

I am planning to have two domains for the portal. OurSurat.com and AapnuSurat.com. If user will come through oursurat.com he will be redirected to the portal with default language of English and if he comes through aapnusurat.com, he will be redirected to the portal with default language of Gujarati.

I really thank you Viral for your feedback and suggestion about Jantri Values.

As we all know there is much happening about Jantri Values and Land / Property Agreement taxation in last few months.  And we really think that this will be valuable feature for OurSurat.com and it will help many people in many ways. So I give +10 to this feature and we will mostly try to add it in our first beta if possible, otherwise it will be surely part of second beta.

Viral, If you have any online or offline resources about Jantri Values, Or if anybody else have such information – Which can help us in anyway, Please send it to oursurat-at-avinashi-dot-com.

Once again, Thanks for the wonderful suggestion, Viral.

Viral is a System Administrator in SVNIT, Surat. Just so others know about his techincal knowledge.

I got some reviews from friends and business friends about one of the feature of oursurat.com which is free email address for all the users of oursurat.com at following 4 domains:

1. surti.in
2. surati.in
3. surtimail.com
4. surtimail.net

Providing email space for all users its also very big task itself. It needs many servers and a huge amount of bandwidth to handle it. Also spamming is big issue. So finally, managing mail will take up to 40% of all the energy and investment we are applying for oursurat.com. Even after doing all of these, Will it be really useful for users? Here are some strong points, I got from the reviewers:

1. Existing email address is the key. It’s like phone numbers. User won’t change it easily.
2. Changing email address is a big headache for users themselves. For example, many hotmail users are still using the service even its not providing much space etc.,
3. Hence, its not much benefitial to users and of course it eats much energey and investment from the oursurat.com team.

All these strong points, do really makes sense. So we are thinking of delaying or postponeing email feature to next beta, and use the energy in to something else. So we are working on this and we will give you update on this soon!

As all of you know, Guides or say Mini Guides are the most attractive part of OurSurat.com. Today we were checking all the suggestions we received from IT Expo visitors and Our Team’s own suggestions. We made a total list of 150 suggestions from various categories. Some of them were repeated many times as sugestions from different visitors and team members. So we are making priorities from that list.

I will also post a list of our priority list of guides over here on this blog and you can also suggest any other guides comes into your mind. Also about categorization of all these mini guides, We finally decided to assign multiple tags to every guide, So that we can achieve best usability. Our plan is that all OurSurat.com users should reach to desired guide with minimum number of mouse clicks required to open it.

Waiting for your suggestions friends.

This is real start of the blog. Actually, I am not getting much time for myself to be free and type something over here

Surti’s are basically mast and bindaas people who believes in peace of mind. So they normally select doing service and stay away from tensions. While Surti’s also allowed and welcomed other people from Rajasthan and Saurashtra (All the Marvaris and the Kathiyawadis) who run businesses in surat, either in diamnods or in textile.

All these businessmen asked a same question at time of their visit of Stall # 102, at IT Expo 2009 in Surat. The question was very simple: If OurSurat.com is providing everything is FREE and there is no hidden strings, What is business model for Avinashi? How Avinashi will make money out of it or run it?

It was well expected question from all businessmen of Surat. Here is the honest answer. Avinashi is the company behind OurSurat.com. Running a portal is not a easy job. Many portals were created about Surat and no-one even remember them as a past. There are several reasons why they failed but I will answer that as seperate post. But anyone can understand that running a portal will require good amount of money for buying server, manpower to maintain it, salaries for these team members and last but not the least – Continuous updates and ideas to retain the users.

So finally everything goes back to money. Without money it’s not possible to run the portal. Here is the deal Avinashi is working on. Avinashi is a software export company in Surat. Most of you may even not hear about that in last 5 years. Yes, Avinashi is 5 year old company having head office in Surat and leading player in Rich Internet Application development market.  We do business worldwide but all the brains (Team members) are Surti’s only! And it is very hard to build a great team. Even sometimes candidates are good and convinced to join the company and try to work on something different than traditional company’s do. But parent’s are not aware about the brand Avinashi. So even though we are offering 25000 salary in Surat, and other brands like Reliance etc., are offering lower salaries, Parents will still force their Son / Daughter to join branded company. Why? because, Avinashi is not well known brand in Surat.

Okay, So now next question comes – How OurSurat.com will solve your brand problem?

Making brand is not a joke or a short term process. It takes reasonable time and very high costs. So it might take 2-20 lacs of rupees per annum based on how big brand you would like to build. So Avinashi thought a way, where it can make a brand and at a same time It can give something back to the society! Yeah, myself – I am son of farmer, Arrived from Saurashtra. Surat gave us everything we need and now its my time to give something back to it. But of course, I am not multi billionar person. What I have is skills and technology knowledge that I serve to my clients in USA, UK, Europe and other corners of globe. So I want to help Surat by my knowledge. Just knowledge is not important but you will also need money. So my company Avinashi will invest the marketing / branding budget in OurSurat.com and If the portal will help people, Brand will be there automatically.

So as very short answer, Avinashi will invest its branding money into OurSurat.com and it will serve Surti’s for all their needs. By providing most of services FREE, It will serve purpose of Giving back to society as well as Branding by providing them best services.