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

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 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!

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.

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.

Hello Surtis,

Welcome to oursurat.com blog. This blog is specially for updates on OurSurat.com and all you surti’s can post comments and suggestions about oursurat.com