Zimoz is a website that allows you to create Web2.0 style postcards and publish them as a blog, or send them by email. The idea is based on the concept that ‘everyone likes to get a postcard‘. Hence you can tell your story or discuss issues in a format, that is the electronic equivalent of postcards. You can add images, videos, clipart et al to it and thereby add another dimension to that storytelling. Check out these postcard samples– they certainly do justice to the concept.

The site has been created by these guys (based in Mumbai & California), and they are currently bootstrapping. They wanted to create something unique and innovative and were looking at the various genres of user generated content (audio, video), emails and blogs, to conjure up some kind of a mashup. They decided on this idea, because it seemed a simple but interesting way of letting people tell their story. The fact that postcards are likely to conjure up pleasant memories of bygone years also seemed to help. Zimoz is something of a hybrid between a blog and email. People can reply to your blog (or your email) by their own postcard. You can decide if the blog is public or to be shared with friends/family only. This is what a blog looks like. The site also has some basic social networking features. Their future revenue model is likely to be based on contextual internet advertising and what the team calls, ‘long-tail classifieds‘ (letting user build ‘rich and expressive’ boutique and services catalog using the website).

Overall Zimoz seems like a cool, cute idea. And that idea has been executed quite well (the site’s visual design is very appealing).

I have been tipped off about the launch of mashup sites by Yahoo India for Delhi & Bangalore. Titled ‘Our City’, these two sites have just gone live and while their current state is not hugely exciting, their future potential certainly is. The sites aggregate city specific content from other online services from Yahoo. Given the wide array of popular Yahoo services like flickr, delicious, upcoming, yahooanswers and less popular ones like yahoopodcasts, yahoovideos, yahoo360 etc, suddenly, you are presented with the prospect that if things go right, this site could evolve into the default destination for city portals in India.

I find it very surprising that inspite of having 3-4 major national level players (Rediff, Indiatimes, Sify) and at least half a dozen smaller ones, the Indian internet space is still bereft of popular city portals. True, each of the above mentioned portals have city specific pages, but they are far from impressive. I see this as a huge need gap, that should have been exploited long ago. In fact, if I had to setup a web based business in India for myself (and assuming for a moment that resources were not a constraint), city portals would be amongst my top three choices. Yahoo has correctly identified this as a gaping void, that is just too inviting to be ignored. In fact, Yahoo, with its strong media lineage and having ownership of hugely popular user generated content sites like flickr, delicious etc, is very well positioned to fill this gap. One might argue that many of these popular services are not necessarily India centric, but the fact is that they do have a lot of Indian content, which can be surfaced easily using tags.

The mashup site is essentially an aggregation of content from these disparate yahoo services; there are separate sections for city related photos (from flickr), videos (from yahoovideos), events (from upcoming), bookmarks (from delicious) news, weather, blogs (from livejournal & technorati), podcasts, basic city information (from wikipedia) et al. The current design & layout is a distant cry from the slickness one would expect from Yahoo, but I would expect them to tighten up soon.

One fundamental question arises here– is it possible to create a live, throbbing city portal by using just user generated content? I would think not. But using a judicious mix of user generated content and traditional reporting oriented media, it is possible to create an online repository or destination, that captures the ethos of a city quite effectively. Think of a website which has different types of city related content i.e. audio, video, images, blogs, events, tags, news etc, all converging together. I think that’s what ‘Our City’ is trying to achieve.