I just launched my first Dot Com venture Janoos.com. Janoos is an online bookmark management service. Janoos is meant to be your browser’s homepage.

I had been using a static HTML page as my homepage for years. I used to add all my favorite links to that page. Somehow I have never liked the idea of bookmarks or favorites in the browser. I had created that page because whenever I opened my browser, I got a page full of my favorite links. All I had to do was click. Just a click. With a single click I could to go to my desired web destination. Quite a few people have borrowed it from me and set as their homepage. Editing that page was a tedious task because I had to manually edit that file. But it was far better than having Google or Yahoo as my homepage or no homepage at all.

Then one day I thought well why not move this page online and why not share it with others? So the idea of Janoos.com was born. We started developing without deciding a name for the service. I wanted to create a page that was lightening fast to load. That meant all the images and external files were strict no-no. There was only one image – the logo on the links page, later on I added one more image for opening the links in a new window. To make the page load faster, I resized and resampled the logo in Photoshop till I got it under 1 KB. Yes, the small logo on the links page is less than 1 KB! For editing the page that is to add/modify/delete links and categories, I decided to use Ajax because I didn’t want the entire page to reload just to add a link. So the edit links page became Javascript heavy and we also included several images on that page.

While my team members were developing the basic functionality, I started hunting for a name. There were a few conditions for the name – First and most important was that I should get a .com for that name. It is extremely difficult to get a .com for any name these days. Then I wanted the name to be short and memorable. I also wanted it to sound a little crazy ..meaningless at first like the tradition of the Internet. And then I wanted it to have some meaning after all that resembled the very idea behind the site/service. But the name should also cover up any future services offered by the site. So it was a tough challenge. I mulled over hundreds of names. I searched thorough dictionary, thesaurus, Internet and tried myriad of names. Some were too long to remember, some weren’t catchy enough, and some didn’t have a .com domain available. Then while searching through Wikipedia, I came across Janus – the Greek god of doorways and pathways. Janoos with “double O” instead of “U” immediately sounded a ring in my mind. I checked for janoos.com and it was available. I immediately booked janoos.com and all of its variants .info, .org etc. So the service was now Janoos. After I had booked the domain, Rakhee, my team member pointed out that Yahoo and Google too had two Os in their names. Well……!!!

The basic structure of Janus is similar to what I had on the static html page. It has categories and links on the user’s personalised homepage. I decided to include Google search as well so that even search can work right from the homepage. And since I was putting search, I said well why not make some money so instead of plain search, I added Google AdSense for search. Let’s see how it works out. Suggestions from my team members and some of my/their friends were implemented to add a few more features. I invited some of my friends to beta test the site and after a few tweaks here and there, we went live yesterday.

There are still many more features to be added like RSS feeds, news and weather updates, More search engines, some pre configured links, page sharing, extension for Firefox to add a link from anywhere and similar Active X control for IE. Possibilities are endless. I hope this will be a hit amongst users. I have seen some other bookmark management services but none of them provide single click shortcuts. That is our USP. The reason why I didn’t use browser’s bookmarks was because I had to click multiple times and wade through sub menus. With Janoos, there are no sub menus, no flashy graphics, just a plain page with all your links. Just click n go.

People ask me how are you going to make money from this. At this point of time I am not quite sure. If the site finds a good user base then I will think of ways to make money. I don’t want to charge users to use the service. And I also don’t want to display banner ads or even text ads like Google. Anything that slows down the loading of the page is not allowed. AdSense for search may earn a few dollars but nothing major as such. Lets wait and watch. For the time being my prime concern is to make site more user friendly and add more useful features.

Do check out www.janoos.com.

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