Anand Parthasarathy 'Hooeey' handles personal browsing data across multiple machines
HARNESSING HISTORY: Rajeev Purnaiya's (inset) brainchild "Hooeey" has users in 80 countries. BANGALORE: 'History is bunk' said Henry Ford. The man who enabled millions of Americans to hit their nation's highways, might have been less dismissive if he had lived today — in an era when the immediate past history of one's excursions on the information superhighway becomes a small but potent tool to gain that personal and professional edge. Just think: most of us rarely care to log the web sites we visit. And when we use public terminals, the more hyper-cautious tend to delete the entries under the 'history' button when we quit our work, on the sound principle that it is nobody's business. But how often do we say: "What was that nice motoring site I stumbled on last week?" or "I wish I had noted the address of that free tax software!" Now help is at hand. A Bangalore Web start-up has created a useful tool that allows its registered users (it's free!) to log the history of their Web browsing — across multiple machines. Called Hooeey for no other reason than its cheery sound ( www.hooeey.com) the tool lets the user switch the 'save history' on or off, at will. It allows one to gather one's 'web hop' history in one central service that one can view at any time — and even ask for some basic statistical analysis to be done. "Which was my most used site?" "How much time did I spend on looking at mutual funds last month?" Granted major search engines like Google, provide similar analytics — but they are limited to one's use of Google tools — and they are not one's private findings. Hooey is the brainchild of Bangalore-based Rajeev Purnaiya, a graduate from the University of Alabama and an MS in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University. He had earlier founded CyberBazaar, India's first web conference company before it was sold to WebEx and eventually became a part of Cisco. "We tend to spend a lot of time on the Internet. Yet so much of our activity is wasted," Mr. Purnaiya told The Hindu on Saturday. "I thought Hooeey would be one way to harness information about one's own browsing past to enhance the future browsing experience." In the few weeks since the service became available, it has acquired users in 80 countries. The application allows users to create a "Web Tour" slide show which they can share with friends on a contact list — useful if you want to link and share your uploads on multiple social networking on photo sharing sites. http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/24/stories/2008022460031300.htm To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
