Dharmesh on startup conflicts…

Startups, is an immensely high involvement activity…just like marriage…

In a marriage, a natural bond present between heterosexual beings keeps couples together…in up’s and down’s. In a startup, it’s the passion and ambition of creating something worthwhile and different that keeps diverse people together…

Dharmesh Shah has written an excellent article about the typical issues almost every co-founder would face because of being in such a high involvement activity, with everyone betting a very important part of their lives on some mission…of course you might create your best friends there, but there is obviously the other side to the coin…

He doesn’t give you any guidelines though…may be a sequel will follow…

Even the comments are definitely worth reading…

Chak De !!!

Awesome movie…

After a long time, I was totally engrossed in the movie…totally involved…emotionally…

Hats off to this new director…Shimit Amin…his and his entire team’s efforts show up in the movie…and hockey looks like real hockey…of course they’ve selected the crew accordingly…good there are no glossy-glitzy heroins…so viewer really focuses on the theme…

It pinpoints exactly the problems that’ve crippled Indian sports for so many years…and creates a soft corner for all the oppressed groups…for female players who get oppressed and ignored by their relatives…for backword states like Jharkhand whose players can’t speak either Hindi or English properly, and don’t even have proper clothes to wear…for Hockey as a game in general, which in spite of being our national game, has always lived in the shadow of Cricket…and for minority religions like Muslims, who have always been tagged as pro-pakistan without looking at individual attitudes…

All of these interwened fantastically…

No rubbish item songs…no unnecessary skin display…and most importantly…in spite of having Shahrukh in a very dominating role…no melo drama…I mean, of course, the movie has loads of drama…but they don’t go overboard…

A must watch…!!!

Adieu to my wisdom tooth and Harry Potter…

I am only half as dumb as I was yesterday now…after losing one of the 2 wisdom teeth…(I was already half mad as the other two have never shown up…:)
Wasn’t as painful as I had imgined though…in fact…there was no pain at all…thanks to Dr. Karmarkar…

Took my chance to delve into the seventh HP book…and cried after a lot many years while reading a book… dont really remember when I had been so engrossed for nearly 2 full days in a book…the ending chapters are absolutely wonderful…

Thank you J. K. Rowlling…

Don’t know how die hard Harry Potter fans would live now…without the excitement of ‘what happens next’…when a casual reader like me got so engrossed…may be as Sherlock Holmes was resuccrected on popular demand…Harry will reveal more of his life…but looks very unlikely looking at the clearcut epilogue…with all our young friends living a healthy happy family life…

Indian Tech Starups…a roundup…

First blog on my new home…

A roundup of Indian tech startups…a gist of what I have been reading for past few weeks…

Startup	What they do
Mobile
Burrp, JustDial, Mkhoj, Onyomo, MGinger, Myzus, Moveo, ValueFirst	Local search. Burrp is more lifestyle services oriented. All are getting into mobile/SMS based services. JustDial is more into call centre interface and certainly have a head-start. mKhoj is primaily into localized deals and discount offerings. Onyomo is primarily local search. mGinger is trying to apply chain marketing to SMS media. They pay a few bucks for every SMS Ad read by a user. Not sure how willing an advertiser would be, when he knows his ads might be getting read just for the sake of a few bucks. Also, this will be popular only in young not-earning-but-want-to-spend crowd (say age 16-20). Moveo is into mobile VAS applications.
Ticket booking & Movie rental
Bookeazy, Movietell, BookMyShow	Ticket booking online. Bookmyshow is recent entrant from the house of Media giant TV18. Others will have a very tough time competing with them.
Seventymm, Madhouse	DVD rental online (Indian Netflix). Madhouse has been acquired by Seventymm. They also have very good funding. With a clear-cut revenue model, they look set for a big success.
Travel
MakeMyTrip, Yatra, TravelGuru ,Ezeego and so on…	Travel services online. Biggest revenue category, dog fight going on. All are very similar to each other.
Travenues (iXigo), Zoomtra, Inasra	Travel search engines. They parse all the above sites and give users structured output. I believe they work on lead generation revenues. Inasra is focusing on Hotel bookings.
Financial services
Apnaloan, InsuranceMall	Apnaloan connects borrowers with banks. The site looks very crappy to me. InsuranceMall is an insurance selling site. They are part of some insurance brokerage firm called Bonsai. I dont know why, but they dont sell life insurance online. IRDA restrictions?
Real Estate Search
99acres, Jaidad, IndiaProperty	Real Estate B2C classifieds. Is there some scope for a vertical search engine here?
E-Shopping
SpotEazy, ShoppingTadka, OffersForShoppers	Shopping deals search engines. Most of these are present only in a city or two right now…but all of them intend to expand nationwide very soon…ShoppingTadka yet to launch.
Global players
SlideShare	Share PowerPoint presentations. They now have the one & only, Guy Kawasaki, on board. Look very much set for success.
Zoho (AdvantNet)	Web office suite. Their products are superb, and are certainly ahead of their Google counterparts.
Social Networking
MingleBox, Yaari, Sixer.TV, BigAdda, SERaja	Social networking. MingleBox has early mover advantage. BigAdda is a late entrant from Reliance. SERaja is events-based networking.
Photo sharing & printing
Picsquare, iTasweer	Photo sharing and printing. There are several other players here. Very crowded. iTasweer has struck a deal with Microsoft for having their service integrated with Vista.
Komli, Tyroo, Ozone	Ad networks. Yahoo picked up stake in Tyroo. Komli is working on a product in this space.
Uncategorized
Myntra	User created designs (T-shirts, Mugs, Caps etc.). Goos that these guys have a clean & simple revenue model, especially because advertising model has not yet generated a lot of money in India. I didnt get the name though…is it a twist to ‘Mantra’?
Maps & GPS
RouteGuru	Road directions, the good old way, using landmarks. Very ‘Indian’ way of solving the problem.
MapMyIndia	Similar to Google Maps. I guess they act as content providers to a lot of other sites.
Classifieds
Sulekha	Sulekha has an early mover advantage here.

Marc says, you don’t need to plan too much…

In the 7th article of this series…Marc is trying to assure the aspiring entrepreneur, that he does not need to, rather he possibly cannot, figure out exact details of the business plan or revenue model, all upfront…I was slightly disappointed at the post though…as it focuses too much time on the story (How Edison accidently invented the phonograph)…but too little on actual concrete analysis…unlike his previous more elaborate posts.

Scrum Pros and Cons

When I was at Doubleclick Inc, we were part of Scrum rollout. We had Ken Schwabber himself coming in as a consultant guiding us on the rollout and the problems we were facing.I think Scrum was really helpful…here is how I would summarize its strengths and weaknesses…

Pros:

1. Scrum encourages teamwork and transparency. It helps breaking down hierarchies. It helps even a fresh developer to understand what an engineering manager and a product manager is doing (even though he might be clueless initially on what people are talking about ).

2. Scrum focuses on user features. This is its strength as well as weakness sometimes (see below).

3. Scrum is adaptive, and gives a good visibility to the management on development effciencies of all teams using normalized benchmarks (though this normalization would be difficult to achieve in practice).

Cons:

1. Scrum focuses totally on user features. It might be very tempting for the team to get quick-and-dirty rather than slow-but-clean approach. Simple speaking, non functional requirements like clean scalable archiectue, clean consistent programming practices, consistent documentation, security of the system, memory footprint can easily get ignored, beacause they have no direct impact on user experience. It would be really cumbersome to clean up the system later on, when your userbase grows quickly, and hackers start playing with your system.

2. Theoretically, Scrum asks every team member to forget his specialization (Developer, QA, BA etc.) and work as a team member. But, I could not comprehend at all, how a BA would understand about architecture and scalability when he does not know the difference between Java and JSP?

3. It is primarily useful for product based companies. It does not focus on creating empirical feedback data that’ll be useful across all projects (needed in services based companies). It does not focus on handovers (which is needed regularly in Indian high-attrition scenario ) and documentations needed for handovers. Power of simplicity is ok, but just removing some concerns from one’s perspective (as against CMMI, which is a very heavy process pyramid in comparison) does not make them unreal.

Of course, I know very little about management or processes, but this was what my perspective, as a developer…but didn’t dare to argue with Ken Schwabber then…