DeskAway is a cloud collaboration software to track & manage a project between team members, locally or anywere globally. Though there are many collaboration service similar to that of Basecamp & Zoho Projects but it targets small teams & business so pricing is also less.

Included in the extensive list of DeskAway services are project listings, project history, time sheets, a docs wiki, task lists, recurring tasks, discussion forum, calendar, blog, status updates and templates. DeskAway even offers a free account that lets users manage 3 projects with 5 users; the most expensive package is only $99 a month.. It is easy to use interface with some powerful back end functions.You can read details on how it works here.

It’s quite some time I am using Google Adwords for my own sites & client sites. Goofing up with billing is a common issue with Google but I have got into a habit of ignoring it.

But from yesterday what I am experiencing is quite a horror story with Google Adwords. My client’s ads have not been running on Google Adwords for more than a day now. This is because the Adwords system says that we have not made our payment. But the actual story is: In India, the Reserve Bank of India had introduced a rule that all credit card transactions made online need a PIN. We got that done, and Google sent us a form which was supposed to take care of all this from their end. We signed the form and sent it to Google Hyderabad, India. I checked out with some friends & they are also experiencing same kind of issues with Google.

On August 7, we got a message from Google that our Adwords payment could not be processed, and that our ads will be stopped if we do not make the payment quickly. We contacted our account representative regarding this, and he told us that it is a technical error and to be ignored. Yesterday, we got a message that our ads are not running. Adwords being a pretty sizable mode of traffic for us, we immediately mailed our account representative. But we got no reply from him for almost 6 hours. We decided to call up Google’s India offices so that we could have our ads running as soon as possible.

Google has 4 offices in India – Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. We called up each of them, only to be told that everyone had gone home (at 11 in the night, which is not so late if you are working in a company which intends to change the world). I then realized I was talking to the security guards at the offices who obviously had no idea of what their bosses had done wrong. They gave me an email address and asked me to direct my problems there. And an auto-responder got back to me: This email address is no longer in use. And it gave me no other way to get in touch with an executive.

So I decided to call up Google’s US offices. After 2 minutes of pressing numbers to get through to a support executive and then waiting for another 2 minutes for someone to pick up, I was finally asked to leave my message in the voice mailbox. Obviously, I was in no mood to leave a message and then wait for someone to call me back. So I mailed my account representative again. Five hours into the working hours of the next day (which happens to be today) and I got no reply from them. I again called up their India offices, this time during working hours only to be told that the only support that they offer is through email. So 24 hours have gone since our ads stopped running and there is no information that I have got from Google.

Things I got to know from the entire episode:

1. How can a company like Google not offer phone support for something that generates over 95% of all its revenues?

2. Google manages search for the entire world, but they can’t manage their internal communications itself.

3. Google knows that the world cannot do without it, or will take a very long time to get ungoogled. So…

I think Google takes customers for granted becoz  it has a monopoly in online advertising & turning out to be a bigger evil than Microsoft.

I had long got the news of the Kolkata Bloggers Meet via 2 of my ex-collegues Saptarshi & Arnab at 123greetings.com & wanted to attend it to meet with old friends at the meet. But incidently we at FusionCharts also decided to give a product demo for  FusionCharts Google Gadgets for blogs at the meet.  Thanks to Sanket & Saptarshi(he blogs at handfullofrain..opps  hatfullofrain we came up with a great presentation at the last moment. It was really nice to to see such a great turnup at the venue.  There were some gr8 presentations from Abhishek Rungta, Aji Issac Mathew (worked few months with him), Saptarshi (old collegue), Arun Agrawal, Vikas Kedia.

Also it was nice to see some new bloggers in the meet. Did I forgot to tell about the t-shirts and an ELearning CD (from Indus Net Academy) as a gift?

Thanks to ppl like Kamanashish & all others for organising such a event in kolkata.

There is going to be a Blogger’s Meet in Kolkata on 8th of August, 2009. Well Its great to have something like this in Kolkata. Well apart from hearing from speakers like Abhishek Rungta & Aji Issac[worked with him for few days], I am looking forward to meet some of my friends Arnab, Saptarshi who used to work in 123greetings long back.

It has been quite few months with FusionCharts & every day I am finding some or other new company using our charts for some projects. Well as it has a free unlimited version & you can use it for internal reporting, so always it is not possible to know exacly how many of projects it has been used for. But this week I was really exited to find out USASpending.gov is is using FusionCharts for it’s Federal IT dashboard. The news was blogged by Tim O’Reilly at his blog . We have also got a nice snap of Barack Obama at our official blog using FusionCharts!

I have joined this FusionCharts team recently, but if you think data codes, flash programming is a very serious affair here, you gotta change your views. He is one of the most dedicated over here we have got kidding? not really ..he is quite SERIOUS with his work !

He has some really thoughts on this and shared his views with one of my co-worker Shamasis go  on and read it. I am quite supporting his views on this and making a resolution to apply it from next day, atleast for the rainy season!

WordPress is by far the the most popular blog platform. But being the  the most popular one so nowways lot of hackers are targeting WP blogs & you need to upgradeand fix it quite often. so I was looking for easy & secure blog platform which can be hosted on own server for business & blogging needs.

These are some alternatives to wordpress which are easy to install,more stable & are also SEO friendly.

# MovableType : One of the most popular blog platforms since date. It has been bigger than WordPress a few years ago but as it is not Open Source & you need to pay so it lost market share. But now MovableType has open sourced and it is easy to install. It certainly is more secure and has less upgrades to be performed.

# Drupal : Drupal is more than a blog platform but you can set a blog with it with ease & it is quite SEO friendly.

# B2Evolution : This blog platform has been around for ages but never got really popular. It may be name or the lack of character, B2Evolution even attempts to mimic WordPress looks by using the Kubrick theme, but this might be as well an advantage. anyways, just the fact that it’s around as well as “alive and kicking” for a such long time makes it a viable alternative.

# Textpattern : Back when I started blogging it was an easy decision, WordPress o Textpattern. It was a choice like PC vs Mac, the more design oriented bloggers have chosen Textpattern. The community seems a little dormant by now but Textpattern is still a good choice it seems to me. Also there seem to be quite a lot of plugins for SEO.

# Mephisto : It is a comparably unknown blog platform but if you look at the code, screenshots and and WordPress-like URLs it looks very promising. But due to lack of funding and only two developers working on it Mephisto is still stuck at Version 0.8

# Typo : In version 5.1 Typo introduced many of the features we’re accustomed to from WordPress or MovableType. Like Mephisto the URL structure follows WordPress defaults and the markup looks great.

But still inspite ot having all this other options people tend to blog on wordpress for its great list of plugins or themes. But if you want a more secure blog with lesser hacking attacks these options can be tried .

When you are running international campaigns on Googlle you need to know how the ads are appearing  in another country. For this we need to manually change the country code in the browser adding the GL location code of the country. But there’s a nice plugin called the Google Global Firefox extension.for FireFox that allows you to see how Google results pages (SERP) look in other countries. Check this out as it is really a nice plugin & you can also configure the countries as per

Any doubts about Michael Jackson’s megastardom should have ended after news of the singer’s death tripped up Google and crashed AOL Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, TMZ and, of course, Twitter. A survey of the epic traffic:

#Leading news websites saw traffic surge to 4.2 million visitors per minute from around 2.75 million visitors per minute, according to Akamai.
#CNN’s traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
#Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama’s election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
#Facebook status updates tripled.
#AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
# TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson’s death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
#The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
#For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren’t working on Google News.
#Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson’s page.

source

If you are running a startup & looking for VC funding, you need to pitch your product at startup events & to investorspitching.. It’s very important that your presentaion has a good inpact on your lice audience. Here’s a great howto pitch” presentation by Dave McClureat at the first PresentationCamp organised at the SlideShare office in San Francisco.