Last Man Blogging!

Today’s Hyderabad edition of “The Hindu” has a nicely written and well researched article on local social networking. The author of the piece is Syeda Farida, a noted journalist whose articles always eloquently capture the pulse of India.

Syeda says (emphasis mine),

“With a ‘get local, be vocal’ mantra Anand.R.Morzaria hits the bulls eye with his www.tolmolbol.com. Drop by to check a review of the new eatery in town and add your two cents too, apart from meeting fellow out of town techies.

“As a networking website the idea is to create a local social network where one can meet interesting people in town with similar interests that can be as basic as seafood. Members can also ask questions about town that can be answered by others on the local network,” says Morzaria.”

What a way to make our day! Thank you very much, the Hindu.

Also read:
tolmolbol on “The Hindu”

Anand is a co-founder, college batchmate and a good friend of mine since childhood. He is writing a four-part post on the tolmolbol blog on how to improve the services experience. Anand is a smart guy who has the ability to explain complex things in simple terms. Whether you are a consumer of services, a business owner, an MBA student or just an interested reader, do check out the latest post from this series. It is titled “The 3P factor“.

Also read:
Part 1 : How to improve the services experience
Part 2: The power of the platform

Yesterday, I completed my second speech project at Toastmasters. The “CTM 2 project” as it is called in Toastmasters parlance requires you to “organize your speech“. Yours truly spoke on the six weapons of influence. The reason I chose this topic was because I wanted the talk to be useful to the audience. I felt there was no point in talking about something as mundane as how much I love cricket. So, I customized some of the examples for each influence principle to bring the message closer to home. As an example, for the consistency principle, I quoted how one of our members, in a prior meeting, asked those of us present to state out loud our committment levels towards attending meetings. And when I said that very action of the member would most certainly have increased the overall attendance percentages of the club, I could see him smile.

For the authority principle, I called out a doctor in the audience and asked him if he had framed and hung his medical degree for display on the wall of his clinic. I had no clue if he would reply in the affirmative or in the negative. And when he said yes, I complimented him on using his medical degree as a symbol of authority. Overall, the speech went off pretty decently and I was able to carry forward my beginners luck from the first speech. However, I need to slow down a tad bit more and introduce a little more pauses as I speak. Guess that will naturally happen when I become a more confident speaker.

I’m already thinking of topics for future speech projects. Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated

Gyaan Sutra is a wonderful blog that covers the Indian online industry. Sudhanshu Raheja, who writes Gyaan Sutra, says the tolmolbol “design looks great“.

I had the pleasure of interacting with Sudhanshu for an email interview on how tolmolbol started. If you’d like to know the story, then read the interview here.

The Hindu, considered by many to be one of the world’s leading newspapers, has this beautiful piece on tolmolbol in today’s edition.

From the article:

“You’ve visited a new coffee shop in your city that serves the most amazing chocolate brownie.

How do you let the world know about it?

With online neighbourhood sites, it’s pretty simple. Take www.tolmolbol.com.

Log on to the website, scroll down to the city of your choice, choose the category you wish to post your message, and bingo! The world knows about your review.”

More from the article:

“Members can ask questions, share tips, recommend service providers to friends and make informed shopping decisions.

Know about the best two-wheeler loans, steal deals, and more.”

To be honest, even we could not have come up with something better to say about our baby. And to hear it from “The Hindu” feels absolutely wonderful!