Priya Shah of WATBlog called me up to do an interview on the current state of podcasting in India. I figured it may be a good idea to record the interview and also release it as a podcast.

Traditionally, this is the show where I interview CEOs of Indian IT ...

Take one URL that costs $100,000, 250 servers, a room full of PhD’s, a hot visual search technology (this is the team that built the groundbreaking Riya face detection technology) and add some keen insights from users and you get Like.com. Like is a remarkable search experience - ...

Here Riya’s CEO, Munjal Shah, demonstrates Riya’s new visual search engine: Like.com. This is an interesting new search engine unlike any you’ve ever seen before. Just type “red strappy shoes” into the interface and you’ll see this experience is much more visual than Google or Yahoo.

Silicon Valley-based Riya created quite a wave when it launched its Web 2.0 site in March 2006. Riya became an instant hit with users for its technology, which is based on facial and textual recognition. But that’s not how it started.

Web 2.0 is at a fairly nascent stage in India. There are a bunch of India centric Web 2.0 products (or applications) that currently exist but that bunch is steadily growing. So, now you have a, not too insignificant number of techies, working zealously to create India centric social networking applications, mashups, aggregators, filters, web office products etc. But have you wondered about the profile of these people, who are leading the charge of the Web 2.0 brigade in India?

From DEMO2006 in Phoenix, Arizona. “As the library of freely available information grows, purely computational methods will fall short of finding the most reliable sources that are exactly what you want. People, on the other hand, continue to act as extremely effective librarians. Aided by ...