Its almost impossible for an idea to be unique

I am not sure how many agree this. But it happened in my case. I thought of some, may be 4 ideas till now, which went much beyond just thinking almost up to complete market research.
The first one was more of a business rather than an innovation. After some research, came to know that the market is saturated. When I thought of this idea, almost assumed like nobody is doing it till now. One more idea was also discarded because of the same reason.
The third one was not as such seen in the industry now at full scale. But it is available in some form provided by some big player.
The fourth idea was kind of seemed to be unique. But its not. I have read in the news that there are couple of companies, which are implementing similar kind of idea.
It is the case with almost all the innovations, I have seen till now presented at various conferences and by various startups. But they are in form or the other available in the world. Probably the world has become so big that you could definitely find some people, who think like you. :) Probably this is the reason why the VCs don't sign NDAs when they hear ideas from startups. Its might so happen that, the idea was already there in his mind or somebody else's mind, the VC might have already heard from. Its been clearly said by a VC in HeadStart that don't be in a fool's paradise by thinking that the idea is not ever been thought by anybody else.

Attended headstart - a 3day meet on startups - third day

This was the most useful day for me. Apart from the keynotes, there were three interactive sessions, which are conducted by VCs and others.

The first interactive session is from Srini Vudayagiri of Lightspeed ventures. I am very much impressed with the presentation. The main thing he said was not to look for VC money at the starting stages. Get the money for the starting stages from 3Fs(Friends,Family and Fools). The last F was the group of people, who blindly believes you. One more thing he said was, no VC will be signing up NDA in USA so in India. Its a very rare thing to happen.

The next session is from K Ganapathy Subramanian of Mydunia. He was previously in venture funding some time and now running the startup Mydunia. This session was very much on the practical side. He said that VCs typically take 20 to 50% stake in first round. And seed investors give half a million to to 1 million for 20 to 25%. He said that it takes typically 3 months to get the money deposited into ur account from the starting of the talks with the VCs. There were some query from audience on how to valuate the company. He clearly said there is no procedure to valuate a company. The clear example given was somebody from Skype, saying the day when Skype got sold for $X billion as a sad day. Ideally the valuation should be as high as possible. One more question from audience was, what to promise for the 3Fs in return, while taking the initial money from them. The initial answer was "nothing" :). The question was re framed to tell, what he offered when he got investment from the 3Fs. He said that assume, this is the last time you are seeing this money :).

The third session is from Deepak Srinivasan, CEO of Mobiance. The session was about Product management. I initially thought it would be like a theory class. But it turned out be very different from what I thought. That was a great session on what skills a Product manager should have? and when does a startup require a Product manager? A very good example for the craziness of a product manager is given as follows. One of the product manger at Sony, dipped the digi-cam into the water and showing the bubbles coming out of the water, said that the digi-cam can even be shrinked. The product manger should never think of the feasibility. They should have great visualization. Steve Jobs was the best product manager according to him.
A book named Crossing the castle by Geofry moore is suggested by him. The dev team should never report to a product manager. These are some of the few points said by him.

The last presentation was from CEO of mapunity. The presentation was very different from the rest of the sessions. This is the same company which is running btis, htis which provide traffic information at present in an area in Bangalore and Hyderabad respectively. This is completely community based. A novel approach to solve the social problems. All the people contribute part time. The simple theory he believes is that any social thing should be available free of cost. Many were impressed by his speech and approached him after the speech to know more about how to contribute.

After this, there were some announcements from the organizers. One of them is that there will startup Saturdays on every 3rd Saturday of a month. They even provided the group id where further info can be found. The groups name is friends-of-kickstart.

Attended headstart - a 3day meet on startups - second day

The first demo on this day was of Sonim, the toughest GSM phone maker. They were here to say there is a lot of scope to develop apps on their nxp baesd platform. That was really a tough one. In the demo, which was showcased at the parking lot, they just drove the car on to the phone. Even after getting crushed under the car tires, the phones still powered up.

The next demo was of Fastap from Digit Wireless. This product addresses the keyboard usability issues through keypads by keeping all the alphabets in two layers. This enables us users to press single key one time to have any letter.

The next demo was from Mobisy. The product is named Mobitop, which runs on top of existing platforms. This provides a FW to develop AJAX based applications on the phone very easily. Ziva sw is a partner. Tringme used this FW.

The next demo was from Sloka telecom. They provide fixed wimax solution. As part of the product they have done the complete base statio implementation in SW. This is very cost effective solution.

The next demo was from Tringme. This was the best demo in this event. Before the event I know this as a flash phone, which I thought is not that much of innovation. But after the demo, I came to a conclusion that its a very good technical solution. This seamlessly allows the users to be get called by the other party. The call can be directed to either gtalk or to ur land line no or ur mobile no., based on ur preferences. The core switching SW, which interacts with gtalk server, PSTN network is written by these guyz. The mobile version of this is developed using the Mobisy FW.

The next demo was DDgen from Vayavya. The product is auto generation of device drivers.

The next demo was from Bioenable. The develop aero tag,active rfid tag/cards.

The next demo was from Iwave. The product is iw-rainbow-g3

The next demo was from Mango technologies. The product is an UI FW for low end mobile phones. This FW provides the rich user experince on the low end phones.

Attended headstart - a 3day meet on startups - firstday

The first demo is from 90-degrees. This searches for paths of trains and airlines and gives a connected path. For example, if u want to go from place X to place Y, this gives different paths such as go from X to Z through flight and from Z to Y by train. The data based on which these paths are generated is almost real time. So there will not be much of the scenarios like, even though the search result shows there is a path (means the tickets are available) and the corresponding travel site shows there are no tickets available.

The second demo is from Proficio geo technologies. The company is having 25 employees. The product is in the geographic related. Some of the products are iciti local, iciti traffic, iciti mobi. The main use of this is you can register your home address here. Anybody can take a printout of ur address from this site and reach ur house. The data is real time with the actual city routes. The map data is provided by some third party. It seems 3000 users are getting registered per day. Data being submitted by the user goes through the moderators. It seems routeguru and yuloo(not sure of the the spelling though) are competitors for this.

The third demos is alabot. Its a 2years old company. The product is in AI. There will be bots, answering your queries entered in natural language and also performing any tasks u wanted to do online. The goal is something like, if u want to book a ticket from X place to Y place, the bot will do the booking for u. This is started as an academic project. There different bots for each of the fields such as travel,retail bot multiple domains. Because of some technical issue, the demo did not work.

The fourth demo was from sneakcast. This is an academic project in US. It involved a 4 member team.
The product is video search, which is based on the facial(object) recognition and semantic search. This checks for relevancy in the vid by analyzing the frames if the videos. The revenue generation model could be video contextual ads. For example car crash vid will have ads like insurance companies. The suggestions from panel members was that to sell/license the product to youtube like companies. Because, the content is not owned. blinks, tuvio dabbles could be competitors. The HW cost put so far was around $2 million. Because of the huge computational power needed for the decoding of video frames. This presentation is having the ppt, which is clearly visible till then all were not readable.

The panel contained two VCs
DFJ vc, which makes 1 to 10 millions of investment. They said that advertising is not much of revenue generation model in India. They also said that transaction based or subscription model like Naukri are good models for revenue generation for the web startups.
Bessmer vc, having a venture fund of about 1.3 billion. Invested about 500 million in India.

The afternoon session started with a keynote and the following are the demos, which are presented after the keynote.

The first one was from drishti (drishti-soft). This was established in 2005. This is a leader in providing cost effective crm,erp solutions in India. They provide call center/BPO softwares. Novah(not sure of spelling) could be a competitor for this.

The second one is Gradient product from Infosys. There seems to be no innovation. The panel feels it does not make sense to develop this product. A guy from infosys from the audience tried to support the product explaining the infosys business use case on that product.

The third one is Twist from Thoughtworks. This is basically in the area of testing tools. It addresses issues dealing with large test suits. This enables automatic testing for AJAX. Amazon torque could be a competitor for this.

The fourth one is from Symantec. xsft; xen software based fault tolerance. Here most of the panel members did not agree that the presented idea is not feasible. I felt this as a typical scenario of experienced people not accepting some of the things just because they did not know that they can be achieved. A guy from the audience agreed that it is feasible, and asked the presenter to look at denali vm, which could be a competitor for this.

The fifth one is Purplebytes from Pramati Technologies. This seemed more like a simple project, without any innovation. This is a dashboard with collaborated editing. The main advantage is easy to use. Sharepoint and Guru does the same.

There was Ramesh Loganathan from Pramathi Technologies in the panel. He told, they were thinking online store solution for social networking, webdesktops are the next big things in enterprise space.
The best thing that happened in the panel's Q&A session, which happened after the demos was a small discussion on Indian colleges, and our college name (IIIT, Hyderabad) was mentioned. A Lady from Accenture, who is very much impressed with the IIIT students raised the topic. The topic was started as she was aware that Pramati Technologies were offering some courses in IIIT. She frankly said that IIIT w.r.to infrastructure or no.of Phds is no where competent with the foreign colleges. As it was true, I could not do anything, if it was about the no.of entrepreneurs, I could have told the info I have. I strongly feel that IIIT should present innovations in each of these startup conferences. Then only the VCs and investors get to know about the strength of IIIT.

Indian Retail Stores suck big time

Following are some of my views on Indian retail outlets. Mainly the departmental stores like Spencers, Reliance fresh, more(formerly Trinetra). I (probably along with at least 10 more) have bad experiences at stores in two cities Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Queues at the cash counter:-
I typically see a long queue in each of the counters. Some of the times, I even grabbed all the things I needed, and wait for some time in the queue and then just put all the things back and just get out of the stores. These queues make me reluctant to go to these stores. The reasons I observed are as follows.

1. There is not enough change. As u can't hold(as per the cashier's claim) a customer bill aside without payment and feed another customer's bill, all the customers need to wait till the current customer gets paid with his change.
2. Credit/Debit cards don't work due to the payment machines and their connections not working properly. I feel its a simple problem, which can be solved to some extent, by dividing the counters into two types, one is to pay by cash only and the other is to pay by credit/debit cards only. I don't understand why outlet guys fail to implement this simple system. I think this system is implemented in railway reservation counters.
3. In some of the outlets, there will be two queues, one to get the vegetables etc weighed and the bar code for the weight is attached, and the other is to pay the bill for these weighed vegetables along with the other packed stuff. Some people forget to do this, and they just block the queue for some time. This is solved in Reliance fresh by making everything (billing,weighing) at one queue.

Quality of the goods:-

1. I typically find expired items in some of the retail outlets. I even told the store guys about these, but there is no actions took place. I don't think many of us check the expiry dates for packed items, unless it is milk bread like thing.
   
2. The vegetables/fruits are at least as old as 5 to 10 days. I really don't understand why do they name the stores as 'fresh'.

Unavailability of items:-
Almost 50% of the times I don't find what I want at these stores. Main reason I could see here is the pathetic inventory management and demand forecasting systems.

1. In almost all the retails outlets, some goods are never seen. For example Heritage fresh does not have Mealmaker(not sure of the spelling though). Surprisingly the store people also don't know what is mealmaker.
2. Typically in Spencers I don't find the basic items such as rise, salt. For other items such as diet coke etc, you can't even think of the availability at Spensers.
   
3. Some times, the items which are bought in small quantities will not be available in the small quantities. For example the masala items, which are usually bought in 100s of grams are found in half kg and one kg packs.

I feel the reasons for all these failures at a higher level could be because of the ignorance of the outlets by the actual retail chain owners such as Reliance, Spencers once the outlets are franchised. Look to see a new retail chain to come up, which would clearly address the above issues.

The problems I faced while implementing something in web

I will update this post as and when I face some problems in web technologies.
CSS:-

• The z-index property does not work unless you specify position property.

JS:-

• The script tag must be written as < script .... > < /script > even though u don't have any thing in between the opening and closing script tags. If u follow the xml standard to end the tag like < script ... / >, It wont work in IE.
  

Attended headstart - a 3day meet on startups

I attended the headstart conf at Bangalore in the last week. It was hosted at JN Tata Auditorium in IISc. I was kind of a passive observer there. I am just sharing the info and my views here.
The registration process was not good. People were required to wait in a queue for collecting badges. Lunch and tea were provided by the organizers. The auditorium was good, which has I think more than a thousand capacity. The bus frequency to this place from Majestic is good, so did not face any issues. This is all about the other than technical/actual thing.
All the three days are schedules with two keynotes each day one in the morning and one on in the afternoon. The keynotes were more like a specific technology's future and the research that is happening at the keynote speaker's organization. Most of the the keynotes dealt with databases, which I really don't like, so I ma not going to mention anything much about these keynotes.
The first two days have lots of demos from the startups as well as big companies, which are termed to be innovations (I personally did not feel some of the presented products as innovations). The demos are categorized based on the technology. In total The agenda for the demos was as follows. 12 minutes for the demo, 8mins for the Q&A from the panel(each of the technologies have a panel consisting of around 4 to 5 experts) and from the audience. At the end of all the demos, the panel members will give their views on the future of the technology, to which the demos are related. And after that they answer the queries from the audience. In the next posts, I will just detail on what happened in each of the three days.

Cool stuff for management

I will be updating this as and when I find some good links.

General stuff

1. A good collection of list of books for personal MBA. I think every entrepreneur has to read these.
   

Marketing related

1. knowthis.com -A complete site about every thing you need to know about marketing,
   market research, etc with tutorials, articles. Special sections exist
   for software industry too.

Cool news blogs on startups in India

See the list below.

• WATblog - The Refreshing Blog on Web, Advertising and Technology in India
• Aootechie
• ContentSutra.com
• pluGGd.in
• www.webyantra.net
• startups.in/India
• startupdunia
• track.in
  

Startups from IIIT, Hyderabad

Following are the startups from my B.Tech college IIIT, Hyderabad

1. Motvik :- This is started by our senior Rajan . Works in the embedded domain. Beta version of the first product wwigo is released.
   
2. Spinaxys :- This is started by two of our classmates Kopos and Rahul. They named their product as kabooru
   
3. Synovel :- This is the place, where in max no.of our seniors are contributing. The alpha version of the product seems to be out. The product is named spicebird.
   
4. Hope to see my startup here :)
5. Hope to see more here.
   

Learning Web technologies

I am new to web technologies and started learning. I could not find good resources for the web designing on the net. There is no single resource, which is complete. So thought it could be of help for anybody freshly starting off to learn web technologies. I am also listing down the softwares which fasten the web development. Here I am not discussing any of the web designers like dream weaver, front page etc. I keep on editing this post as I go on learning the web.

I think the following are the areas/components to be learned to become a perfect web expert.

1. HTML & CSS
2. DHTML and Client side scripting (java script)
   
3. Server side scripting (php)
   
4. AJAX (Actually its part of Java script, but it definitely needs a special mention)
5. RSS feeds
6. Web server configuration (Apache)
   
7. Logos and other graphic elements designer (Adobe illustrator)
   

Resources:-

1. To start with read the book, Best Practice Guide to XHTML CSS. This clearly explains, what has to go to .css (presentation) file and what has to go into .html (structure) file.
2. The second book is DOM scripting. This gives good insight of best design and usage of java script.
3. www.csszengarden.com for some cool css designs
4. w3schools.com is a very good reference for all the web standards.
5. 
   

Tools:-

1. xmlcopy editor is an open source xhtml editor. This has the coolest auto complete feature. This also has an inbuilt validator.
2. firefox has an error console, which displays the warnings and errors on a page, opened in firefox. So firefox could be very good testing and debugging tool for the web page development
3. There is a very cool php command provided in Linux, which executes the php script given as argument. This way we can debug the php scripts.
   

Remembering my last working day experiences :)

I think its 2004 Oct 20th. My last working day at SEEC. I first tried to meet my HR and exchange few words. But he was very angry on me, as I resigned just after joining 5 months and so he did not talk to me :(. After that collected my relieving letter from our CEO I think. I think this was the first time I met him. I gave a party in the evening to all my colleagues at Anupama restaurant.

And then its 16th May 2007. It was my last working day at Motorola. I did some kt even on this day too :). From morning I went to hr 4 to 5 times to collect my relieving letter. Some times hr is not there and rest of the times the letter is not ready. My PL arranged for a small farewell party, where in almost all people I know gathered to give me a farewell. After all people came in, all kept quiet and I said "all the best to u all" :). Thats how the farewell party started. Some people gave some good appreciations for my character etc. And then finally I got headphones as a gift from my lead. There is little background to the headphones. My headphones were not working two to three days before my last working day. My lead observed that and gave the head phones to me as a gift. After shaking hands with all my colleagues and managers for one last time I left the place to collect my relieving letter. This time also my relieving letter is not ready. But hr is there, so I waited till she got the letter ready and then came out of the building. Then had a chitchat for some time with the closest colleagues in the lawn in front of our building. Then we went for a party at 36 Jubilee Hills.

Here comes my Final last working day Dec 5th 2007. In the morning itself, my manager said, the relieving letter will be given and the day is my last working day. I could know that as my last working day, only a day before I think. Around 10 o'clock our director handed over my relieving letter and he said like I can even leave then it self. :) As I had plans to push off to Hyd, I brought some luggage also with me, so stayed there till 4:30PM and left for Hyd. From around 3:30PM or so started meeting everybody and told them that that day is my last working day. This time no party :)

Sad day in my life :(

To start off this post, I had to create a new blog as the blogger spam robots detected my old blog created a month back as a spam blog. See the below image. :)
Prior to this, when I tried to install Adobe Illustrator on my machine, it said it requires at least 512MB of RAM. My poor PC is only having 448MB of RAM. Actually it is 512 but on board graphics card took 64 as V-RAM. Gone are the days of below 1GB RAM. I think even 1GB is not enough these days. Vista being idle consumes 750 :). Being xp/linux user I think I can manage with 1GB.
I just get to remember the good old days.

1. Its year 2000. I am just into my first year B.Tech at IIIT. The machines we used are having 32MB of RAM 2GB of Hard disk. One GB for each of RedHat Linux and Windows98/Millennium. Of course these are IBM machines. People used to play ManxTT on those machines, I guess. There used to be some dumb terminals. I think nowadays people don't even know what dumb terminals mean. In fact there is no need for that in present exponential growing of computing speed:)
   
2. I think a year later we got a new PCs with 128 MB RAM this time. All smiles on the faces:) we could play more hi end games. This is the year I started my first PC game AOC. The games are so addictive to the people at IIIT that, the 24 hrs opened labs were closed for 4 4hrs from 2AM to 6AM. People started bunking the classes during the 24hrs open labs. And professors started giving surprises to the class, if they find low number of people.
   
3. I think in the next two years 2003 and 2004 , 256 RAM was very good.
4. And 2 years ago, when I bought my PC, 512 was a very good amount of RAM.