I am featured in a book as a co-founder of Rivals4Ever

Inside India Startup Founder\'s mind

Yeah its hard to believe but it is true! I am featured in a book called “iFounders” by Abdul Jaleel. You can get the book here. Please download it and read about exciting journeys of Indian Startup Founders including me. It has mentioned only my name as founder of Rivals4Ever. But actually all my other friends (Nachiket, Sanket, Kuntal) are equally instrumental in little success which we have got so far.

Please download the book and write a short review if you can. I am thankful to the author Mr. Abdul Jaleel who considered my startup and me worthy to be featured in his book.

Header redesigned!

At Rivals4Ever, we constantly look how to optimize the UI to make it more and more user friendly and informative. One of such efforts recently has made us redesign the header. Now the header contains more information and user can access various features of R4E right from there.

This is how the new header looks. Click on the image to have a better view. There is a menu in the header now using which you can easily navigate the whole site quickly.

Friends menu contains following options.

From My Stuff menu you will be able to access everything from one go !

So that is it for now. Please let us know how do you find this feature ? is it worth our effort or still something can be improved ?

Why R4E can be killer ?

I liked this from the killerstartup article about R4E so decided to write it here:

“As they say in the social sciences, people are better mobilized in reaction to something else- an enemy, a strong dislike- or a rivalry. Rivals4Ever plays on this concept, and is very successful at nurturing active participation in its members. Moreover, because so many of the rivalries involve brands (and extreme passion associated with those brands) there is amazing potential for advertisers.”

Nice one! isn’t it ??

This is exactly one of the reason we are doing this and its fun.

Time for a monthly newsletter to R4E users! See you later.

Thanks,
Abhishek

R4E vs Competition

As such Rivals4Ever does not have any head to head competition right now but there are few sites which are nearly trying to achieve what we are.

Those sites are:

1) blubet.com
2) productclash.com
3) ibeatyou.com
4) mymuv.com
5) versus.bix.yahoo.com

Following is the competition chart which is showing number of visitors to each site. We are no where here as blubet has more than a million users right now.  But I am sure we are surpassing the red line soon :)

The little green spike around Dec 07 is due to this article of TechCrunch about ProductClash. We have not been lucky so far in case of such spike but we did get a small one when mashable and few other blogs covered us.

Anyways we will be there shortly and will have the Techcrunch Effect :)

Keep Fighting till then,
Abhishek

R4E SPY!

We have started spying on Fan’s activities and it is open for all to see :)

It is a digg spy like feature which we have introduced in R4E and it will show what the world is doing on R4E real time. Well not actually real time right now, we are showing random activities of last week right now but I am sure when the traffic will increase it will be real time.

Spy

Spy page

Check it out and let us know what you think of this cool new feature.

This is getting serious

Cricket is getting serious in India. Few days ago only selected countries were rivals like India vs Pakistan, India vs Australia, Australia vs England.

But now Indian Cricket League (ICL) and India Premiere League (IPL) has started all new set of Rivalries in cricketing world. Rivalries are not limited to countries now but they have arrived to city level.

Somebody has rightly said “it’s not love that sells sports tickets, it is hatred”. Check out this cool article about the hatred and rivalries I am talking about.

So how can we remain behind in this case? After all R4E is created to satisfy this thirst of passion and hatred :)

Presenting all new section for IPL and ICL Rivalries for all the cricket fans of the world.

IPL/ICL Rivalries

Fans will be able to join IPL and ICL Rivalries and will be able to express their passion about the team they support. They will also be able to create Rivalries in this special segment.

Create Rivalry in IPL/ICL

So rivals, come on and show the world what are you supporting in this “Dharma Yuddh”

Keep Fighting,
Abhishek

We have new galleries!

Hello Rivals,
We have some cool stuff for you here. We have redesigned the image gallery and the video gallery and have added new features to them which makes it much more exciting and useful.

New video gallery is as below

Video Gallery

and individual video looks like this

Video

So as you can see above you can Share the video, Make it your Favorite and Flag it if it is inappropriate. Favorite videos will be saved in your profile.

Same changes has been applied to Image Gallery.

So guys and gals please go ahead and upload more of them, share more of them and select your favorites amongst them.

Keep Fighting,
Abhishek

More coverage and analytics

Hello Fans,
Just wanted to give you some more links of the blogs which were kind enough to cover R4E.

http://www.pluggd.in/2008/02/rivals4ever-create-rivalry-from-ahmedabad-based-startup
(Blog covering Indian Startups)

http://www.startupdunia.com/2008/03/03/rivals4ever-a-community-dedicated-to-rivalry/
(Blog covering Indian Startups) 

http://www.downloadblog.it/post/5816/rivals4ever-il-sito-ideale-per-le-sfide-testa-a-testa
(This is very popular Italian blog from which R4E received maximum hits)

http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/beta/rivals4ever
(Museum of Betas)

http://www.zepy.net/archives/rivals4ever-create-your-favorite-rivals.html

Thank you all the bloggers for covering us. I love blogosphere for this. They reward the good work with open heart.

Following is the spike we received in number of unique visitors because of above coverage.

Spike

We also have few loyal users now :)

Thank you all for supporting us in these early days.

Abhishek

We are facing downtime issues!

Hello All,
Our hosting provider MediaTemple (mt) is giving us hardtime right now and due to that we are R4E is going down several times today. Please bare bear with us for sometime. We can not believe that (mt), which is hosting sites like techcrunch.com and mashable.com can go down like this. May be it is just the grid server which is going down.

PS: please don’t create Rivalries which can hurt religious sentiments of people. Let’s keep R4E a clean place where healthy rivalries take place.

Thank you for your support.

Abhishek

We are Famous !!

Suddenly overnight we are famous !!  why ? because we just got covered in mashable, killestartup and number of other blogs.

Thank you very much for all the bloggers who  felt us worthy of mentioning on their blogs. You can access those articles on below link.

http://mashable.com/2008/02/27/rivals4ever

http://www.killerstartups.com/Social-Networking/Rivals4evercom—Create-Rivalry/

I will keep posting other blog links as soon as I get hold of them.

Thanks again everyone :)

Abhishek