Fotoflock.com has launched today as India’s first comprehensive website exclusively for the Indian photographic community by Epson in Bangalore. Fotoflock is conceived as a platform for anyone who is interested in photography in India to gather. Be it the amateur photographer, professional photographer, enthusiast, photo studio or anyone. The portal can be described as being for 'all things photography' - anything and everything about photography for Indians who are passionate about the craft, the science, or even the business. There will be an exhaustive collection of articles, news, interviews, forums, tips & tricks, contests, event listings, photographer profiles, resources and much more. There’s something for everyone with an interest in photography. Perhaps one of the most exciting features is the interactive photo Gallery for registered users to create a personal portfolio, showcase their work and critique the work of their peers. The interactive Forum allows not only exchanges on displayed work but also sharing of experiences and expertise on a regular, open basis. The site is also designed to allow content to be generated by its users, giving it a true open-community structure. Apart from the latest advancements and news, the site will also showcase exclusive interviews with some of the luminaries of ...

On its 10th birthday (Sep.23) Google has come up with few more things other than the interesting Google TimeLine through one can see momentous events and updates in Google related History right from 1995 (when Larry meet Sergey) to 2008's Google's own Chrome Browser. Google on its birthday is offering sharing in its own way with its dedicated URL - Project10tothe100.com through which everyone has been invited to share & submit their ideas to Google and then these ideas will shortlisted to 100 ideas and then will be asked to the public (on January 27 2009), to choose 20 semi-finalists. Then an advisory board will select up to 5 final ideas. Google will give $10 million for selected idea and the last date for submitting ideas is October 20th 2008 and remember the criteria for ideas shortlisting as per google is; Reach: How many people would this idea affect? Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need? Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two? Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea? Longevity:How long will the idea's impact last?

Channel 4 have launched 4mations.tv, a new video-sharing site aimed at bringing together the best animation from around the world. 4mations is a collaboration between Channel 4, Aardman Animations, Reality Digital and Lupus Films and has a strong focus on rewarding animators who upload their work - offering cash rewards of up to £1000 for popular content, competitions, opportunities to pitch for commissions, and even the potential to get on TV. The 4mations website is based around a video-sharing platform, allowing users to upload, rate and comment on content. Additional functionality includes the "Thinks" application, that allows users to quickly and easily create their own personalized animations. Thinks has been developed by the guys behind the cult web-app - Fuzzwich. The site was designed by Oscar-winning Aardman Animations (based in Bristol UK, and the brains behind Wallace and Gromit) and built by Reality Digital (based in San Francisco USA), and is based on Reality's "Opus" video sharing platform. 4mations' visual design is based around an iconic kitten-skull character called "General Tiddles", created by designer Gavin Strange and the Aardman creative team. 4mations launches with a whole host of specially commissioned content from the UK animation community, including animated series, virals and games. ...

Zahdoo has launched as first of an interesting concept website among social networking and cognitive websites that deals with people's daily activities on internet. The portal has been launched by Hyderabad & Atlanta based IT company at Web 2.0 Expo in NewYork. With context awareness, semantic linking and a range of planning and networking features, Zahdoo delivers an engaging and productive social experience to online users. The portal is an efforts towards everything at one place portal that would bind all the online activities such as social networking conversations, information search, content tagging, online planner, personal website, reminder & alert services, sharing pictures, audio/ video with your friends and semantic search along with auto content suggestions via semantic analysis. Zahdoo enhances social awareness and cognitive abilities by linking and processing users information, activities and relationships with social circles and external context and gain access to the most relevant information and intuitively understand and process the information in users' own context. The portal is in private beta for few months is probably to enhance the portal and could even inculcate more features when go public, moreover the site is more like flash driven site rather than user and search engine friendly XHTML. I would love ...

Navigaya is a new model of portal cum search engine cum "browser based browser" flash technology based portal website/ online media center, where users can search multiple search engines faster and easier than ever before, get headline and video updates from any RSS syndicated website, create YouTube powered streaming video playlists for uninterrupted background playback, manage their favorite site links via a simple yet beautiful scrolling interface, save all customized portal settings and playlists online for use anywhere without any hassles and finally share everything with friends and strangers. Well, Navigaya.com combines all elements of search engines (Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Wikipedia etc.) along with web surfing experience such as video, audio and text with categories/ sections divided to navigate through in fun way. Apparently, it claims that it can ‘find everything sharper, deeper and faster’. Moreover, one big benefit of Navigaya is that its actually uses as a social network - you will find this option on the “login” icon where you can send your navigaya (the navigaya that you modified - including your favorite sites, playlists and all of your profile settings to your friends. Users can view and listen to their play list while simultaneously searching the web. The ...

Face
YourManga
.com is new avatar based site that allows 
users 
to 
create 
Avatars for 
themselves 
for 
free in an interactive way where users can choose different styles, put up different things to develop a virtual face to be used on varieties of use such as your IMs, social network profiles or your blog etc. Moreover, FaceYourManga.com also allows to download and print a high resolution version of Avatars you create along with feature to print the image on various surfaces turning your creation into an original furniture article for your home and can buy those printed products via Paypal. Face Your Manga is a product brought by Pixelheads and at moment is providing users to create Avatars and buy the image immediately as digital file download. It also seems that website is planning come with some sort of 'community' feature on faceyourmanga.com.

Mikogo is a free online meeting tool that enables the users to host web presentations and even control a remote computer over the Internet. The tool uses 256 bit AES encryption, allowing to share your desktop in real time and in true color quality across the world with up to 10 participants simultaneously. The tools is offshoot of its already screen sharing tool called BeamYourScreen, to instantly share your screen online to anyone. Mikogo can be employed for a range of professional, business, or academic, including online meetings, product demonstrations, online presentations, web conferencing or remote support. Naturally, Mikogo includes many features to empower the users as much as possible during use. During meeting with Mikogo users can able to: • share each others’ screens • switch presenters • access remote keyboard and mouse control • pause transmission • select only certain applications for sharing • and transfer files between PCs To get started with Mikogo just download the app, and start a meeting with 2 mouse clicks from the system tray. Receive the unique meeting ID – participants then use this to join the meeting. Noticeably, there is no installations or registrations on the participants' part. Being free web tool and no time limitations, Mikogo is easily in reach to ...

New online service Resnooze let you remind things and even remind you to visit URLs on user defined frequency which can than be send to your email. One can set multiple reminders and can customize the settings for it. Bloggers on other hand can get returning visitors (non-RSS) by embedding link (or image button) of - in their blogs or websites to get periodical reminder in their visitors mailbox. Being a user of this service, one can change the reminder's title, add a note, control frequency, the day in the week or in the month, and the exact time of the reminder. The service is pretty helpful to bloggers/ users in other sense that - when you see a website which is yet to be released or under construction or say not in public beta and you want to see and review it first for example SneakCast which is apparently got shut down before and now its in line of its relaunch, you can set a URL reminder say - weekly to get reminder of whether it is launched yet or not.

Socialmedian is a social news network that connects people with personalized news and information, by enabling users who share topical interests to collaboratively filter news for each other. Users can feed in news from any number of sources i.e. websites, blogs, bookmarklets, email or directly on the site. Also the social news network is based in Pune, India other than two of its offices in New York. Interestingly one can also submit news to SocialMedian through Twitter which is I haven't seen on any such website or news portal which have user generated content and let user submit stories/ article or URL through Twitter. People in SocialMedian can create or join networks and users with common interests can track stories aggregated from multiple sources, and submit, share and comment on stories of interest with each other. Although the concept of social news network is not new as its already been done at Digg to some extent and Mixx.com is also one such example to greater resemblance, nevertheless its simpler (and faster) user interface and pages can give some edge to user though what really matter in such type of model is larger number of user base. SocialMedian followed by alpha verion period is set ...

A new entrant in social networking space of India, quite good in usability and features to lure audience, this is one social network I would IndiaHangout.com in category - "Secondary Social networks" likewise to third World Countries in political scenario, the primaries would obviously be - Orkut, Facebook, BigAdda in Indian social networking arena. The community portal provide plenty of features like other portal of similar category do, along with features such as radio, free SMS, chat rooms similar to that of Yahoo messenger, applications such as games, videos, polls and events. The portal is convincing enough and few tweaks can bring it in line with what Hikut and Friendster doing in India. In my opinion advertisements is too early for IndiaHangout.com, one should learn from Orkut, inspite of being a google's offshoot, the social network in India started Adsense advertisements a year later before getting buzzword in crowd. The advertisements obviously distract users from being observed by users/ visitors sometime and could even annoy visitors. BPOVoice is one social network exclusively for Indian BPO aka call center employees, the portal is just opened this month for public release. The founder of portal is from BPO background himself and tried to put the ...

RoamAbout is a plugin that delivers information on the web contextually. Users would not need to leave the site they are browsing in order to search for videos, music, pictures or share the things they come across with. This Firefox & IE plugin bring all these to the user by just highlighting the text any user want without leaving the web page they are viewing. One can get related information by selecting text and clicking the RoamAbout Icon in status bar also users can post to their twitter account, the selected text of a web page and post it directly their, without even leaving the web page actually. Similarly users can browse flickr photos, Google news, info from Wikipedia, maps from MapQuest and videos from YouTube and by just selecting the text in web page you are viewing and hitting the plugin's icons bar. User can customize the the plugin bar so as to limit the no. of Icons for different Web services or websites such as stock quotes, weather or games. Moreover, the company behind RoamAround Vysr do have the open platform that provides developers with any easy way to add and integrate services and networks that users can tap into as ...

Posterous is a new service through which users can post just anything by sending email, its a kind of twitter like microblogging, but unlike microblog here one can put any content using smart auto embedding services of Posterous. The service lets post content from email and content could be audio, video, image, pdf, doc or mp3 and you would get 1GB of space for all this. One can use any email service such as GMail, Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo or any other to do blogging via email and for that you just have to send an email to post @ posterous.com unlike to other blogging services with WYSIWYG editors or so. The interesting and USP part in this is Posterous intelligently embed the files in different user interfaces like when you post a YouTube video link via email, it automatically embed the video player as such and when you post any audio files it will put a nice Posterous interface for that (see image below) and audio player when you post an mp3 file. Apart from this, when you send URLs, it will automatically create a link and when an image is send as an attachment it resize it to web friendly size, ...