Coldest goodbye email – DimDim. Congrats nevertheless.

Must be the coldest goodbye mail ever. Almost ‘talk-to-my-hand’ esque rebuttal. Bad open source contribution in spite of using the FOSS mantra for the few initial months – helped massively in the coverage against WebEx. I hope this FOSS misuse will stop.

Nevertheless, this is great news for the Indian product ecosystem. I hope the early employees too had some good exit in addition to the founders. Still remember their first appearance at Barcamp Hyderabad 1 in IIIT-H pitching their first ideas.

Congrats to all at DimDim.

LiveBlogging from BCH5 – 3

Hardcore way to do your startup – Nanda – www.atuitu.com.

About AtuItu: Social Network for telugu folks. Built on Ruby on Rails.

• Describe your product/startup in one single line
• Breakup your work into very small parts – modules – task for the days – not codes
• Every problem is a challenge – every achieved challenge gives a sense of achievement
• Do mistakes. Don’t worry about them.
• Be in the market and keep changing it based on the feedback.
• Focus on getting your product out. Let the users give you the response and feedback.
• Only dependent on yourself.
• Distractions – money to sustain, depressions. Be very guarded from any distraction.
• All about persistence.

Relevance of Rails to startups – Sumanth Krishna A

• One person – one idea – product.
• And basically the top ten of Rails – the usual drumming that is given for rails – DRY, convention over configuration, ActionModel, CRUD, partials, helpers, etc…
• Agile Development
• Huge debate on Rails vs PHP vs Ruby vs Django
  • It quickly moved onto saying PHP is a language and Rails is a framework, blah blah. But then finally it boiled down to whoever already knew the language/framework and whoever was comfortable with the other.

get a headstart!

Introducing HeadStart, a technology, innovation and product showcase for startups as well as biggies who have something to show off that meets the above conditions. Led by a passion bunch of folks who are behind the wildly successful BarcampBangalore as well the MoMos, Headstart promises to be a very promising affair.

What can you expect from HeadStart.in?

1. Technology Buyers aka Customers
2. Workshops
3. Panel discussions

As an entrepreneur, my sole concentration would be on (1) and would be hoping to build:

1. Something tangible that will contribute to my immediate need of kharcha pani – customers & investors. It wont do any harm to get some customers – your valuations will definitely get a boost just on account of that. Of course a first hand opportunity to get a feedback on your product is not a bad thing too.
2. Long term and strategically – to build a varied and interesting network – of co-entrepreneurs, technology sellers and buyers and of course investors.

Headstart is concentrating on, where the companies get their next meal from – the customers, which is a great focus to have. Of course, VCs too will be there to grant a closed door meeting if your idea has much dough. With stalls for startups, it will be an interesting event, quite different in scale.

And of course with no charge [free as in free beer] for companies for demoing it will be an interesting watch to see the sort of startups wanting to demo there. Just because of this low barrier of entry, I guess the initial shortlisting of companies is going to be a nightmare – Proto had taken care of this by having a moderate fee for demoing startups and which would only get serious companies to come forward to demo.

The post follow-up [PRwise, etc] with the showcasing companies if done as well as promised is definitely going to make a notable difference to the life of the startups.

Its an ambitious plan definitely but considering the amount of sweat being put in, hopefully we will have a very well organized event. Its quite nice to see the amount of effort being put in to provide a pedestal for promising startups in India.

The question is: do we have enough interesting technology product startups?

Also of interest is to see how it fares compared to Proto.in in terms of % startups getting funded, prospects improved drastically. Definitely something to watch out for.

Messiness vs Order.

Need to point you guys to a really good post by Umair. Its about the edge and why LinkedIn needs to be more messy than it is currently. I have been in LinkedIn for the past few months and its been a really tough thing to get anyting going; Im just a squatter there, hoping someone would come and we could have a good coversation going. On the other hand, Orkut which I started using after having abandoned way back in 03-04, is now my social network. There is so much activity going on; if I were to smoke my time away; Orkut would be the place to be. I digress, so back to the topic. Some gems:

Forget about economies and cost-cutting and trimming the fat – because that stuff’s a commodity. It’s not a basis for any kind of advantage.

… in the post-network economy, (re)learning how to create value is going to be, in large part, about getting messy. This is perhaps Google’s deepest – and most jealously guarded – secret.

This actually brings to the certain conclusion I have come about recently: It is fairly impossible to predict what the future will be like. The business models, value creation are all going to be radically different and mostly will be something we cannot even imagine now. And certainly they will be very disruptive.

Way for IITs and IIITs?

First as an alumnus of IIIT, its quite heartening to see IIITs being considered alongside IITs in Prof. Sadagopan’s post.  For one this attitude towards IIIT is in itself a milestone for a such a young institute like IIIT which aspires to be a research institute.

I digress, vanity prevailed. What is the direction then that IITs and IIITs need to take? As PG says, IITs and IIITs are the best surroundings to build a ecosystem of startups in India. Already IITs are making their mark in the arena. I personally know of atleast 5 startups (all in the early stage) from IIIT and thats quite a cool thing for such a young institute. I hope too that the money too starts flowing in; the circle shall be complete.

While I still know its not that the ecosystem is displaying signs of bubble behavior, I sometimes get worried when off the head you hear someone wanting to talk to you (only after an NDA that is!) about a brilliant dotcom idea…

Testing Guruji.com with Biryani

After hearing that local search for guruji.com is up, I went ahead and searched for the best way to define Hyderabad local search – dum ka biryani.

Dum ka biryani gives me 0 results. Points for not giving me even one place with a dum ka biryani offering. -1/10

Duma ka biryani hyderabad gives me 0 results. Points for not giving me even one place with a dum ka offering when I even specified the place. -3/10
Biryani gives me results from places like chennai and coimbatore where any self respecting biryani afficionado will never have a biryani. Points for offering me the search results but not with the correctness. 4/10

Biryani Hyderabad returns me results from highly remote biryani centres which I see are basically biryani take home points and are never a match to the best & better biryani places which are not on the list Bahaar, Bawarchi, Paradise (which btw sux big time now!). When the big three are missing from the search list the list needs to be revamped. Points awarded for giving me a new take home biryani center near my house but not the ones that have been there since ages and are serve much better food. 2/10

My opinion is that there is still a lot left to be done in the local search site. The feedback option is very good. I however would have preferred if the site was still said to be in ‘Beta’. The list results I got are highly chaotic are no way in connected to the real world preferences or needs of a Hyderabadi biryani afficionado.

Yet Another Social Networking Site? Go! Yaar?

Was not very surprised to see this article in the CIOL newsletter that a new social network site called Go!Yaar is up which is aimed at the Indian community. I have been looking at Rent-A-Coder to see if there are projects worth working on and I observed that almost every 10th website project is a facebook or a myspace clone.

As I see it, until now the Indian online social community has been pretty much polarised – either you are on Orkut or you arent. And the Indian subcontinent contributes to one of the biggest ethnic and geographical social networks online in Orkut barring otherwise the Brazilians(?). Its almost 4 years that Orkut came online and its now that the Indian social networking sites are waking up to the smell of fresh coffee. No wonder Rajan says India is on average 3 years behind the valley.

Now back to Go! Yaar. Two of the biggest points is about the strategy itself. Its interesting to find what they write about building Go!Yaar on the existing social networks – universities, colleges and corporates; which is to say puzzling. Other than the premier institures in India, say the IITs, IIITs, BITS, etc no other college or university boasts of a email address! So its puzzling which email addresses they are going to leverage. Early adopters cannot exist in isolation in a social network.

Also, though India is slowly picking up on the ecommerce front, it is nowhere near the position where we can monetize the tremendous value in the online ad marketing or sales as did MySpace.

As I see it, Go!Yaar has its tasks very well cut out:

1. Getting people to first migrate to their site from Orkut. i.e build the intial critical mass of early adopters
2. Once they reach the critical mass, the other friends would not wait long to join the Go!Yaar site. But how? I dont have a college email id?!!!
3. Change its name. Too ABCDish/NRIsh name. The target audience because of the name is very very niche, looks like it targets the urban hip hop crowd.
4. Find ways to monetize the social network. Google Ads or any of the Ad Affiliate programs might not be of much help. We are fools to click the ad once, but twice? Remeber, we as yet dont buy my new camera by seeing the ad.
5. Think of better ways to get people faster onto their site: Migration must be very easy. Make that migration automatic for me will ya? That is precisely why we see mass migrations to WordPress.
6. Try to win where others lost out badly. sms.co.in, fropper (have stopped seeing the fropper ads on TV long since, what happened?), friendster, hi5… You are the entrepreneur, you find out.
7. Tries to be too good at too many things. Make each one as seamlessly and perfect apeice as possible.
8. Get the early adopters (premier educational institutions, corporates) to adopt it with gusto and stay on the site. Find methods to get these early adopters hooked to the site.

The plusses however are it aims to be a very tightly integrated set of online services, blogs, video, email video, photo album, IM. But this one looks like it can be poised to strike big if it can stay afloat without taking that financial hit and also not to speak of the steady migration of the early adopters into the site. Promise of mobile integration is interesting but unless until the features are compelling enough to solve one main pain point of offline social networking aspect, there is no way I will waste my 1 rupee on sms.

It will be interesting to see how this one fares. I have tried to go to Fropper but its too much of a fad to be of really much value to me. As of now, inspite of its crappy server, its Orkut that I am on, all my friends are there only

Business Idea: HitClub [Rank=Genius]

Close on looking at the Stroke Foundation of UK, and frankly that Im now officially jobless and penniless entrepreneur on the look out for business ideas, I had this braintide about implementing a new business idea : HitClub.

Every business that has a very strong correlation to the real life wins. Its as simple as that. So heres the idea.

HitClub consists of two active participants. One the hitters and the others hit-me. Hitters are the frustrated candidates who want to vent out their frustrations of bad bosses, ultra lazy government bureaucrats, idiotic teachers. Now these guys want a way out to vent their frustrations by hitting someone. In real life this can give you a good deal of a coverage for dealing in domestic violence or manslaughter. However we will make it easy for the Hitters.

We have other set of people called the Hit-Mes who are the guys Hitters can use as targets of their frustration. Basically, Hit-Mes charge very prohibitive costs for taking in the punches, kicks et al while the Hitters pay money for helping getting their frustrations out. The business idea is in connecting Hit-Mes to your Hitters and start charing a percentage for each session and lo and behold you have a business in hand!

Anyone who really sees a potential in this idea can contact me asap. Lets work something out )

CoFounder of BillMonk Speaks

I had earlier written a post about FaceBook launching its own version of social money managing portal(site?) which looked like a killer of BillMonk. Social money is an interesting concept and seeing BillMonk being featured by Michael Arrington kept me intrigued about the idea and also about the undeniable ingenuity the people had used to solve the social money problem.

The co-founder of BillMonk left a comment on that post and I strongly think their comment itself deserves a post of its own. The comment is produced under verbatim:

As the co-founder of BillMonk, I can honestly say that I was delighted when Facebook made its APIs available. We in fact recent added Facebook integration:
http://billmonk.wordpress.com/2006/09/05/facebook-integration-and-profiles/

I don’t see FaceBank (now MoochSpot) as a BillMonk killer, or even a bad thing. Now that we’re integrated with Facebook, their network is just as much an asset to us as to MoochSpot.

But more generally, it’s inevitable that good ideas attract imitators. For us, having competitors validates the social money space, and educates users to choose tools that help with borrowing with friends. Winning becomes a question of focus and knowing what the user wants.

Thanks for your detailed comment guys, I hope to see more of you and also hopefully will become a dedicated user of the service. Cheers.

FaceBank – Killer of BillMonk ?

BillMonk a social money site which helps you to track the expenses sharing with your friends was profiled on TechCrunch and Arrington was quite much taken by the Idea. You might want to have a look at the links in the bottomt to know what im talking about. And now Facebook has Launched its FaceBank, which seems to be a killer of BillMonk.

The big bullies are turning out to be quite the killers. MySpace nuking singlestat.us and now FaceBank all poised up to nuke out billmonk. Even though MySpace nuked SingleStat.us because it was adding load onto the MySpace servers; FaceBank is very clearly a direct competitor [killer ?] of BillMonk.

Monetization or Feature Bloat

I have always been thinking of how FaceBook would be monetizing its tremendous social network. Now with FaceBank we seem to be already moving in that direction. This actually seems to be a very logical move to me, considering that your social money is tied up with your friends are your pals are all actually inside the FaceBook! This is one simple addition to FaceBook but seems like the move is going to have some really bad repurcussions on other startups in this area.

But whats getting me to think is : Is this direction of a Facebank a clear indication that FaceBook is running out of ideas. By making its API open, it has definitely chosen to tap into the minds of brilliant geeks around the world to build them interesting apps for Free. And with FaceBank coming in, I seriously doubt if really this act is an act of desperation? Clearly this could be one of those shooting-the-gum-on-the-wall-and-see-if-it-works ideas, an act which Google has mastered recently. Putting in everything to just hope that atleast one of them works!

Consolidation as a method of tying up consumers ?

Consolidating the apps is a very common undercurrent here and this looks very similar to the Google myth about atleast one team of 10 engineers working on one very interesting idea in the world. And Im already wondering that if any of the other products or applications with requirements for a network to be present can already use the existing networks: More succintly put will FaceBook be that monster that is going to put its network to use by just churning out new cooler applications thought out by entrepereneurs and just use its network to nuke them out.

I wont however pay my obituaries to BillMonk as yet. It looks like an excellent service and not sure how many people are comfortable mixing up fun with serious money! I mean I never know when FaceBook will suddenly turn out to be my Life Manager?! And moreso who hasnt heard that Bulk slows you down; FaceBooks heading in that direction perhaps?

Links:

• Bill Monk profiled on TechCrunch
• BillMonk on TechCrunch again