Second in our Outfoscions series is a travel search product which is easy and humane to use. Yes, you don’t have to fill to and from places, date, time textboxes. All you have is one single search box and ask it the way you ask your friend. For example Jammu to Knyakumari next monday gives my favorite Himsagar Express as first option and then the rest. 90di is found by three outfoscions Kiran, Abhinit and Naqvi. They surely have an interesting search engine in crowded market. As of now their concentration is on finding the best traveling option and guiding the traveller to the respective site. Which I think is very interesting considering most of the other travel portals allow you to book the tickets on their own site.
Here is an interview of them and thanks to Abhinit for taking time out to answer my questions.

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[Thej]. How and when did you think about becoming entrepreneurs, was giving up a decent job difficult?
[Abhinit]While each one of us, would have a slightly different personal story here, but broadly we wanted to try doing something different and something of our own and so in May 2007 we took the plunge. Leaving the job certainly not easy but once we made up our mind it was not that difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

Online identity is becoming as important as your offline identity. If you are not living in stone age you will be on one of those social networks which mainly forms your identity. All those user names become part of your digital identity.

As of today, You meet most of your online business partners on Facebook¹.  You share the stuff with your friends and family. Your friends or partners search on Facebook to get your mobile number. Even Google (or any) search for you leads to your Facebook profile².  What does that mean to you and me? Facebook will own all your digital identity.With 250 million profiles online, Facebook is on its way to become online identity hub.

What happens if you are removed from their network all of a sudden? You are lost. Your friends, family and business partners are lost. A place where you were supposed to hang out fun has become your main identity. Now you are not allowed enter that place.

So what do I do?
Simple. Own a domain. Develop your domain as your identity. A domain can take various forms in various kinds of online transaction, but it will remain your center of identity. With your own domain name, YOU own your online Identity. Its worth spending $10/year.

Use social networks only for networking and meeting friends. Bring your friends from social networks to your site. I would like to be known as thejeshgn.com online than @thej on twitter. ²

1. I have taken Facebook as an example because it is the biggest social network today. It can apply to any online social network.Last few days there has been a buzz about vanity urls on Facebook. Some are happy and some arent that happy. All these buzz forced me to write this post.

2. Now you know why I am so serious about ego searches.

After reading lot about Bing, I tried it yesterday. Well for me ego search comes before anything else. This time I tried thej instead of Thejesh GN. Here is what Bing gives me.

The first result is correct but none of the subsequent results on page one are not related to me.

Then tried the same thing on Google. Well Google still rocks for me. It gives my blog as first results ( two thumbs up for that) and then the twitter account.

Then just out of curiosity I tried Yahoo.

Even though I did not like the order of search results. I liked the search results. Page one had lot relevant results that mattered to me.

Google will remain my default search engine and Yahoo will remain my alternate search engine. MS you need to try harder.

Note:
1. Bing was search engine number two for a day.
2. Thanks to VSR for pointing out this cool thing. I am not ashamed of vanity.

Reusing the code/frameworks ( either the in public domain or FOSS licensed code) is pretty common. But searching for useful code online is not very easy.The regular search engines like Google or Yahoo are not designed for code searching. Now there are few specialized code search engines which can fetch better result. Here are the top five code search engines

1. Google Code Search
2. Krugle
3. Koders
4. Oreilly Code Search
5. CodeBase
6. CodeFetch

All the above engines allow you to search on Language (like Java, C etc) and license (like GPL, MIT etc). Except for oreilly code search, rest of them search the internet. Oreilly code search contains the code from their books.Which currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code all edited and ready to use. CodeFetch allows you to search all source code examples included in all books on all languages.

But be sure about license terms and conditions before reusing the code.