In its latest venture, Microsoft has launched a comic strip – Heroes Happen {Here} – featuring who else but super hero techies. The strip is co sponsored by Microsoft and Seagate.

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(Pic – The man himself)

Sabeer Bhatia has been trying hard to beat his one trick pony reputation. After trying his luck with Arzoo and Live Documents, the man who sold Hotmail to Microsoft has now launched an online tool for facilitating teleconferencing at no extra cost to the user.

Looking at the website, one thing that struck me as odd was the image used on the home page.

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(Pic – Proto.in session in Chennai, India)

Few days back I came across this particular group (in India) – Proto.in (www.proto.in) – which provides a platform for interaction between innovators and investors. Google takes them serious enough to be one of their major sponsors. What the group does is play a sort of match-maker between a small company and a prospective investor. Say if you are a startup which is short on monies but has a demonstrable ‘prototype’ capable of hitting pay dirt, then Proto.in is exactly what the doctor ordered.

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A new social networking site – Bigadda (www.bigadda.com) – has been getting rave reviews in the Indian media. Claims like 15 members signing up every minute to the site hoping to attract 10 million users by 2010 are doing the round.

Intrigued, I decided to check it out and see for myself what the buzz what all about. So here goes.

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A heavy duty criticism presented by a writer in Business Week recently.

Over to Gene Marks.

I’ve used a lot of things that don’t work as advertised. Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s bad luck. Or maybe it’s just bad stuff.

I’ve never had any success with vitamins; I still get sick just as often. Teeth-whitening products have failed me. So has the Atkins diet. Rogaine shampoo? I just grew a little peach fuzz. Using my frequent-flier miles has always been a huge frustration, except for that one time I flew to Fargo, N.D., on a Saturday night in February. Baked potato chips? They taste like wood.

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(Pic: 3/5 of Boing Boing. Courtesy – Laughing Squid)

Blogs which created the biggest splash in the webdom. These are the rock and roll guys of the blog world.

Don’t like any of these blogs or if one you really like got left out, let us know in the comments section.

# 1. Boing Boing

Boing Boing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It’s the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com, and won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony.

* By Mark Frauenfelder
* http://www.boingboing.net
* 3,165 members have made this a Favorite

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Pic: bigadda.com

Global networking sites like Orkut are benefiting from India’s huge number of young people, but many local ventures want to claim the clicks

– Nandini Lakshman, BusinessWeek

For the past year, global networking sites have been growing in popularity among young Indians. According to JuxtConsult, a New Delhi-based online research and advisory company, 44% of Indian online traffic uses the Internet just for social networking. Google’s (GOOG) Orkut is the most popular social networking site in India, with a 64% market share. Facebook is also winning many Indian fans, especially students.

But in the last six months, a plethora of local sites has emerged to compete with the Americans. Today, there are more than a dozen India-based and focused social networking sites with colorful Hindi names that are synonyms for community (bigadda.com) and friends (yaari.com). “I guess it’s a cool thing to do,” says Praveen Gandhi, managing partner of Seed Fund India, an early stage Mumbai venture capital fund. He claims in the last year he’s had fund requests from over 50 entrepreneurs wanting to set up social networking sites locally.

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