Go4I

“Simplify life follow the Sun”

It’s a really nice little slogan, which does create an impact on the surfers mind. As it is said time and again simplicity is walk of life. Its not only Internet but thing in life simplicity creates lot of impact.

In this rat race of bringing one above the other and gearing for a greater competition ahead, Internet portals through out the world has been heavily spending on each and everything may be it is on their Infrastructure, or the Internal Customers (the employees) or the external customers. When you talk of virtual world nothing is tangible and nothing can be seen, I never understood these companies spending heavily on the state of the art infrastructure, luxurious lifestyle of their employees. But where is the money pumping and at one stage it has to be blocked because no one knows from where is the revenue coming in.

You can see the amount of labour layoffs in US is nothing but a fact, which is already started in India as well. Indiainfo.com is the biggest example of this. There is one portal, which is spending right, left, up and down on advertisements. The amount of ad expenditure is pretty heavy and I still don’t know what is their revenue model. By know you must have understood whom am I talking about it is Go4i.com.

Go4i.com

I knew this company since it was launched and the day they gave a big page advertisement on the ever advertisement crazy, Times of India. Hindustan Times wanted to get online in the lines of TOI and they caught hold of HDFC and Stanrose Chase Capital to fund them. So imagine the amount of revenue being pumped in. They have a lavish office based on Delhi’s hep areas Safdargunj and have more than 200 employees working on various departments of content, design and customer service. They have one of the best of the guys employed right from the CEO to CMO. I have interacted and they are one of the most professional people around in a DOTCOM.

They have various subsidiaries

http://www.go4careers.com, I am not sure how many have been recruited through go4careers.com. After the launch of Monster.com’s India section, no one would want to go to various Indian Jobs websites apart from jobstreet.com or jobsdb.com.

Mission

Go4i started with a mission to provide all the services without getting into too much of content and make it as simple as possible. Whether it is email or search. They believe that too much information is clutter and believe that information should be precise and perfect. I never understood what to they mean by that. Do they mean only limited information should be present so that new users can get used to? But if you are on Internet you need to give complete information or you loose your way.

CONTENT

Everything is fine, good infrastructure, nice behaviour of employees, impressive slogan but the bottom line, what about content.

Desgin

The design of this website is really sweet. The initial color combination has been limited to blue and yellow. Managed by Planetasia.com , the website doesn’t fail as far as design is concerned whether it is the use of Fonts or the colours. Loading time of the website is pretty okay but at times it has been very slow.

News

The news is powered by Hindustan times so you can t expect it to be bad but the problem is that they are sometimes updated pretty late. I heard that they are using the latest technology, then why this problems. But you have better websites for news so you don’t need to really waste your time. “Simplify Life, be away from these news section”

Email

From the word go, their email sucks big time. It’s absolutely damn slow and they are many technical problems with their email. It takes hours to upload an item and ages to download the attachment. “Simplify Life but please stay away from this email”

Chat

If you click chat, you need to wait for some 5mins for the screen to come. The technology used for this chat is pretty okay, but I doubt whether people go to go4ichat because I have not seen more than 20people on go4i.com.

“Simplify life there are better chat rooms than go4i”

Cricket

This is managed by the subsidiary go4cricket.com which is an average website. The content is far inferior to other websites like cricinfo.com total-cricket.com. Here you have official homepages of Rahul Dravid, Sanath Jayasuriya, Moin Khan and Shahid Afridi. You can send emails and chat to them. Tell me frankly does anyone have time to do that. Will Rahul Dravid actually reply to your emails? Its a big question mark, when some one say chat with the celebrity, are they really the one because Indiatimes has got a tendancy of projecting as the Celeb’s favourite website.

Shopping

As far as shopping is concerned again they fail miserably, the categories are very limited and have tied up the websites like Tsnshop.com.

Customer Service

They have a good customer service cell, but it has been limited to Delhi, so they failed nationally. People in Delhi will be really happy but as far as Nationally they have been loosing impacts. Some of the contest winners from Mumbai and B'lore have complained of Lack of co-ordination from Go4i employees.

Apart from these, go4i provide all the services which other portal provide but in limited stock. As I said they don’t believe in too much content. But they have really failed miserably in every department accept for the design and the look and feel.

But in today’s Internet world were CONTENT IS KING; you can’t stay away from the main essence of Internet.

Overall:

Go4i really started well with heavy advertisements even on Television on a big scale and was known in the Asia-pacific region but somewhere down the line because of lack of proper revenue model and lack of content they failed miserably. You can really say such waste of some impressive setup, profesional employees.

“Simplify Life and Don’t follow this Sun”

• 
  • Flag This Review
  • Irrelevant
  • Fake
  • Junk
• Thank You! We appreciate your effort.