The inception of Wirkle

Turned DAD this week

2008-06-20T14:22:00.007+05:30

It makes me very happy to let you all know that I turned DAD last Monday. My baby boy was born on Jun 16 and was 3.6Kg at birth. See my son sleep in this picture on the left.

Also attached is a little video of him ... I must have watched this video over a 100 times in the past 2-3 days. Whenever, I am not with him and I find any time at all, I tend to put on videos of my son or slideshows of his pics .... it feels great to be a father !!!

My little baby is saying "Hi !!" to the readers of this blog.

Who are your customers?

2008-04-06T18:49:00.001+05:30

The key thing for any business is its customers. Now, customers come in various shapes and sizes ... also depends on the kind of business you are in.

At Wirkle, we are in the mobile technology business, both products and services. A significant percentage of our customers tend to be startups working on cutting edge mobile products and we at Wirkle add value by providing our technology expertise. Now the good part about that is that we are usually at the fore-front of technology working on next generation mobile products.

The down-side, however, is that startups are usually cash constrained and it is quite possible that work might come in spurts when business suddenly picks up and might stop when business is low. In some not-so-good circumstances a startup might even be forced to stop work altogether.

Now that does not mean one should not work with startups. I believe the key is to have a balanced customer base including both - the more established bigger companies as well as the younger companies ... the former keep your business moving by maintaining steady revenue while the latter keep you at the fore-front of technology.

Long time, no see ... Again !!!

2008-03-16T23:04:00.002+05:30

Well, well, well ... looking back at my blog, I see that my last post was on Nov 4, 2007. One thing I can tell you, maintaining a blog and running a business at the same time is not easy ... do-able, but not easy.

A lot has happened over the past couple of months - Wirkle has moved a bigger office ... very colorful (it took quite some effort to select the right layout of the office, the color combination ... see pictures below). As a company, it continues to grow ... over 30 people now, hiring is one of our biggest focus at this time.

Scaling to the next level is the next challenge ahead of the company, forming the right processes that ensure satisfied clients and employees is what we're trying to figure out right now.

The journey this far has been very eventful, a lot of hard work and a lot of learning. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to post about my experiences ... hoping that the readers of this blog will be able to gain something out of it.

Running the Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon

2007-11-04T11:50:00.000+05:30

You guessed it right, this post is going to have little to do with Wirkle ... this is about the Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon which I ran on 28 Oct 2007, and to sum up the experience ... it felt GREAATTT to cross that finish line after running 21 kms for over 2 hours !!! Yup, thats me on the left ... very close to the finish line (my wife Preeti taking the picture).

If you have been reading my blog, I had made a post earlier when I had completed 10kms of running. If you don't recall ... just click here. Now if you look at that post carefully, it was on 22 Dec 2006. You might think it took me quite a few months practicing, but the reality is it wasn't until Sep 2007 that I ran 10kms again ... all the months in between were pretty low in terms of my running practice.

To avoid sounding too cryptic let me just walk you through the story. It goes back to when I was in the US. I have a bunch of friends who completed their first marathon ... their stories were my first inspiration. I didn't do much about running in the US except for running on a treadmill for about 2 miles every now and then.

After I returned from the US to India at the end of Aug 2006, I heard about the Hutch Delhi Half Marathon that happens in October. Unfortunately, by the time I got to know about it, it was too late for me to practice anything and besides there was too much settling down I had do here in India. Nonetheless, I told myself that I will run the next time around.

So after the Hutch Delhi half marathon in October 2006, I made my modest beginnings and started practicing. I managed to reach 10kms by December (remember my last post on 22 Dec, 2006). Starting January the weather became so cold in Delhi that I didn't do any practicing. After Feb-Mar when the weather got better, I did start practice ... but that was casual running mostly around 5-6kms.

Many months passed like this and now it was almost the middle of Sep in 2007 when I realized that the Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon (28 Oct 2007) is only 7 weeks away. I started to look out on the web if there was anything I could do now to train myself to 21kms. MarathonRookie was a website that I found very useful. Based on the plan in there, I prepared the following plan for myself -

Week Beginning	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
10 Sep	Rest	Rest	Rest	4.8km	Rest	Rest	6.4km
17 Sep	Rest	Rest	Rest	4.8km	Rest	Rest	9.6km
24 Sep	Rest	Rest	Rest	5.6km	Rest	Rest	12km
1 Oct	Rest	Rest	Rest	7.2km	Rest	Rest	14.4km
8 Oct	Rest	Rest	Rest	8km	Rest	Rest	16.8km
15 Oct	Rest	Rest	Rest	9.6km	Rest	Rest	20km
22 Oct	Rest	Rest	Rest	Rest	Rest	Rest	D-Day, 21km

I would run every Sunday to increase my running distance, and I would run once during the middle of the week where the distance would be half of the distance of the Sunday run and would act like a warm up. The other days of the week would be for recovery. Other than this I started to consume more carbs and proteins, my wife mostly taking care of my diet. I also made sure to drink lots of water especially before and after the running sessions to prevent dehydration.

The good part was that I was able to stick to the above plan ... although it was hard to wake up at 530am in the morning twice a week to run that distance. I would run in Delhi's Dwarka Sports Complex on their track which was 0.8kms long, I'd usually complete a certain number of laps of the track, which is why my plan is in multiples of 0.8kms.

As per the plan, a week before the Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon I had completed 20km in 2:05hrs. The last week I said no to running, just allowing by body to recover. As per the timings of my practice runs, on an average it took me 5 min to run 0.8km. I could run a little faster in the beginning but then I got quite slow towards the end. At this pace, I figured it was possible to complete the half-marathon around 2:11 hrs.

On 28 Oct, i.e., the D-Day, Preeti and I woke up early and reached the venue. There were about 7000 people running in the 21kms half marathon ... the energy was tremendous. Vodafone had also arranged for a timing chip which was to be strapped around the ankle and would be used to track one's time. Other than that, on every km there were people to give you bottled water to prevent dehydration and there were photographers (arranged by www.marathon-photos.com) all along that were clicking pictures. Besides that, the traffic was blocked on the route of the marathon, however, there were people almost on both sides of the route just seeing whats going on and cheering ... great energy !!!

When the marathon started at 7:45am, it seemed as if there were sea of people in front of me and well as behind me ... over a couple of kms the crowd gradually wore away. The route started from nehru park, going over the safdarjung airport to India Gate and finally to the Le-Meridien hotel in Connaught Place and all the way back.

I was going pretty steady in the beginning, keeping track of time as I completed every km ... i was doing just fine, speeding ahead of a bunch of people (as you can see in the photo on the left taken by Marathon-Photos). I was having fun and I was enjoying the scenic route. Once I reached Le-Meridien, I told myself that I'm done with half of the distance, I sure can complete the remaining half.

One bad part was that the day was a little sunny, also I usually run in the early morning when it isn't as hot. As such, I was sweating more than I usually did. The other bad part was that, we had go over a bunch of overpasses/flyovers ... that also got me a little more tired than usual. At the last flyover after completing about 16km I was pretty tired, finding it hard to run over it ... at the time most of the people on the flyover were just walking.

By the 18th km I was really tired, my legs were going numb ... my pace had slowed down quite a bit. The picture on the right describes my state more accurately (again courtesy Marathon-Photos.com). The last 3 km were the toughest ... I wanted to take a break but I was worried that if I did, I might not be able to get back to running again ... so I kept running.

Finally, I thought I could see the finish line ... that was such a relief. I picked up pace and tried to make it fast to that point as you can see in the picture on the left. I was caught by surprise to see Preeti there at the finish line clicking my picture. I completed the run in 2:16:40hrs. The finish time was 2:17:45 since I had started a little later than the others.

A short while after I completed my run the prize distribution ceremony started with Rahul Dravid (India's ex- Cricket Captain) and Sheila Dixit (Chief Minister of Delhi) on the stage. I was barely able to stand after the run ... but I did manage to catch a glimpse of them.

Looking back, I had lost 5 min as compared to my original estimate of 2:11hrs. That was mostly due to the sunny weather and the flyovers. Nonetheless, I ranked around 700 out of the total of 7000 people that ran and overall it was a great experience and a great sense of accomplishment.

A success story

2007-08-29T00:28:00.000+05:30

This story goes before Wirkle had even come into existence ... the Wirkle concept was presented in the i2i business plan competition where it was selected amongst the top 8 of the many-many plans that were presented. Unfortunately, we were unable to go beyond that because at the time it was merely an idea and had not reached anywhere in terms of execution.

The other day, Lomesh pointed me at their website where Wirkle is being talked about as an i2i success story. You know .... its funny thinking about those days and seeing all that has been accomplished since then ... it feels good. By the way, here is the link from the i2I website.

FYI - i2I (ideas to implementation) is one of the biggest business plan competition in India, it is organized by the Entrepreneurship Cell of IIM Calcutta.

The Startup FAQ - Post 2

2007-08-15T01:13:00.000+05:30

This is in continuation to my previous post "Startup FAQ - Post 1" on this blog which I had posted on Dec 26, 2006 ... approximately 8 months back. Now, I'm not sure if you folks are even keeping track of this anymore, nonetheless, I'll try to be more regular now hoping to provide some value to the entrepreneurs out there.

I think we should focus on investment first, right? Once we get investment, the revenue piece will get sorted out automatically.
Having done this ourselves, I can give you some food for thought. Lets think about it for a moment ... a business ultimately has to earn revenue, Im sure you wouldn't argue against that. Think of investment as a buffer that will help you get to the point when you have revenue and you are self sustaining. So first you need to think about revenue, then comes investment or any other route that will help you get there.

I have figured out the revenue model, now lets move on to investors?
Waaaait a minute ... we know our revenue model so I presume we know our customers. The next step is not to go to investors, but to go to customers and ask if the service that you'll provide is of any value to them or not. If it isn't, then you need to go back and do more homework. If it is, then you need to ask them if they'll pay for it, and if yes ... then how much?

I have customers and they are willing to pay, so Im all set?
Well, do keep in mind that there is a little difference between willing to pay and actually paying. So you need to make sure they really mean what they are saying. One way would be to ask them if they'd be willing to pay a small token amount that would help build such a service ... and if they're willing to do that, you're all set

Hmmm ... i see, is there anything else that I also need to do?
One more thing ... a successful business has to solve 2 problems -
1. Solve a need that exists,
2. Enough customers should have that need.
So problem 1 was solved by finding customers and making sure they are ready to pay. Now that we have done that exercise, the next step is to make sure that there are enough such customers in the world. This is important because you need to make sure that the need you are solving affects enough customers to give you that scale that will allow you to grow your business going forward ... makes sense?

... shall have more in my next post, until then Happy Entrepreneuring.

3 long months ... OH BOY!

2007-07-16T18:53:00.000+05:30

I just opened my blog today and I was shocked to see that my last post was THREE MONTHS BACK ... OHHH MANNN. Lets see what all happened in the past 3 months ...

1. Lomesh (Wirkle's COO) got married, Sunil's (Wirkle's CTO) father went through a surgery ... so both of them were out for a bit. That was a really tough time for me when I had to practically take care of everything.

2. We continued to grow, we have filled up our current office ... and after a lot of looking out we were finally able to close on a new office for Wirkle. We'll be moving there next month. Trust me if you can, finding an office in Gurgaon is not an easy task.

3. One of the bigger projects (sorry, I won't disclose the name here) at Wirkle went through a phase I delivery. This was a very tight milestone for us, a good chunk of the Wirkle team was working on that.

Things are looking better now, I'm hoping I'll have more time the coming days and I'll be able to blog more frequently.

A growing company

2007-04-17T00:14:00.000+05:30

I was going through some of the pictures we had taken at Wirkle over the past 2-3 months ... it feels great to back at how things have changed over the past couple of weeks where we have been hiring like crazy and have more than doubled in size.

As you can see from the pictures the Wirkle family has grown quite a bit (17 now) ... and continues to grow !!!

Stay away from Serverbeach

2007-04-04T14:44:00.000+05:30

As a startup, one often needs to rely on some externally hosted servers. As an example - to host your web based service for which you need a dedicated server or to host some service which can be used between you and your customer ... now obviously such a service cannot reside within your intranet.

One of the big reason for us to go for a server hosting provider was that we didn't have the bandwidth to manage the servers, i.e., getting a static IP, making sure there is no power failure etc.

When we were out on the looking for a server hosting provider we got to know about serverbeach ... I think the first time we read about it was on Russell Beattie's Notebook ... now when I look back, I think it was a very very bad decision.

In the recent months the kind of incidents that we have been through ... it is amazing how a server hosting provider could do something like this. Let me take you through a few things that have happened.

One of our servers (at serverbeach) which was hosting one of our products was attacked by a virus and that virus in turn started making requests to other servers ... usually serverbeach would inform you and tell you to address the situation in 24 hrs or else they'll bring the server down, in our case ... we never got those 24 hours, we realized that the server was down once the customers of our product started complaining that the service was not longer accessible.

This story is amazing - serverbeach has this automated system that is continuously looking out at the servers and zeroes out any server that it thinks can be claimed. Unfortunately, we were the lucky ones this time around ... it suddenly took over our system, zeroed out the disks and voila ... not only was our server down, all data on it was gone which we then had to get back from our backups.

Well, for the server that was zeroed out ... our old disk was mounted on it in case we could recover any data and were told that we had a time of approximately 1 week to recover any data that we needed. However, again serverbeach failed to meet their commitment, not only did they remove the disk on the second day itself, they also just halted the system ... AND they did not even feel the need to inform us.

It looks like serverbeach reserves the right to play around with any server that it might give to you ... whenever they feel like it.

Anywayz, my objective behind this post was to tell you the kind of things we have been through with serverbeach. Im hoping that when you have to select a server hosting provider ... you make a wise decision.

Wirkle.com ... new, improved and much better than before

2007-03-04T23:23:00.000+05:30

This is a follow up on my previous post "The importance of the Web". As promised, we have been working on changing the look and feel of Wirkle.com ... check out the newer, much improved version here.

I think this version is better than the previous one, however, still there are 2 things that can be improved further

The front page I think is a little cluttered, we need to work on fixing some of that.
The animation at the top ... Im wondering if it can get annoying because it kind of shows up on every page.

Plz comment on this post if you folks out there have any feedback for us.

Where the CEO gets beaten up !!!

2007-03-03T13:12:00.000+05:30

Im sure the title of this post will attract your attention. Well, the fact is ... this really IS true. On my birthday (28th Feb), as per college traditions the Wirkle team picked me up and kicked me ... the more well known terminology for this is "birthday bumps".

Nonetheless, I want the readers of this blog learn about the culture we have at Wirkle ... very similar to what you would see on a college campus, where work and fun go hand in hand and corporate hierarchy does not come in way.

So if you are a smart engineer and are looking for a fun place to do some cutting edge mobile technology work send us an email at jobs@wirkle.com, we are hiring !!!

Wirkle goes Global

2007-02-10T17:58:00.000+05:30

Wirkle was selected among the finalists of the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards 2007. Stay tuned to hear us at the Global Peer Awards in Barcelona on Feb 12. We'll have Harsh Dhundia, our director of business development, representing us.

The one bad part was that the finalists were announced a week and a half before the event. Now for us in India, getting a visa for Spain takes time approximately 2 weeks. Even for Harsh who's in the US we got the visa on Friday and he had to fly on Saturday.

We owe this to our COO, Lomesh Dutta, who nominated us for the awards from the Mobile Monday Delhi chapter, prepared our pitch for the event, made sure that we get selected and even coordinated the visa/travel for Barcelona ... thanks Lomesh.

Wirkle at Mobile Monday Delhi on Jan 20, 2007

2007-02-08T12:56:00.000+05:30

The second Mobile Monday of the Delhi chapter was organized in Noida on Jan 20. Wirkle was one of the proud organizers of the event and I had the opportunity to talk about what we do at Wirkle and our vision ... yup, thats me.

My presentation was centered around whats going on in the mobile web and what does the future hold for us. Today, the mobile web is a happening space with lots of stuff happening all over the globe. Lets discuss some of those.

The conventional web - i.e., viewing existing websites on the phone ... opera mini is by far the leader in this space. I think the opera mini is one of the best mobile browsers around, however, given that the web as it stands today was designed for the PC, the experience that you would get on the phone can never be as good.
The mobile web - i.e., all your wml, chtml, xhtml websites that are specifically designed for the phone. The user experience therein is definitely better than conventional websites but there is still room for improvement. The reason I say that is ... people often have to resort to mobile apps to provide that level of usability, e.g., despite there being a mobile portal to access gmail ... they had to come up with a mobile app for gmail. If we analyze that in a little more detail ... I think this comes up from that fact that the mobile markup languages have their roots in html and html was never designed for the phone.
Mobile Applications - Mobile applications provide a highly usable interface to access content, however, they don't give you the capability to access any content. Those are specifically designed for a particular type of content and one can only access that.

We at Wirkle have our own vision / technology for the mobile world and all of our products are centered around that. Take a look at my slides below ... and see if they make sense to you.

Lousy Blogger

2007-02-02T19:23:00.000+05:30

I must admit ... I am a very lousy blogger. My last post was on Jan 13, approx 3 weeks back. The fact is that Wirkle has kept me awfully busy these past days ... and a lot has been happening. There is a lot to write about ... stay tuned !!!

Wirkle at Comsware 2007

2007-01-13T01:07:00.000+05:30

Yeah, yeah ... I know you folks have already read this on Sunil's Blog and Harsh's Blog. You think this old news now ... well, yes and no. The news is old but what I am writing here will be new information, so read on.

Im writing this on my way from Bangalore to Delhi ... on the way back from Comsware. We are also presenting at Proto.in the coming weekend, Sunil is flying down to Chennai for that. You are also going to hear us speak at Mobile Monday Delhi ... and guess what, we are one of the proud organizers of that event.

You can tell we're upto something here, but the reality is ... we're experimenting. For the most part till now we have been an inwards focused organization. Sometime back we realized how important is the external face to any company, because thats where the business comes from. Again this is something which Im hoping other entrepreneurs realize earlier that we did.

Now lets talk about the external face, every company has multiple avenues via which they publicize themselves to the external world, conferences, the web, articles in magazines ... and the list goes on and on. Now if you have "x" dollars how do you decide which one of these is best for you.

I don't really have an answer to the above and I think it varies from company to company. For Wirkle, we're trying to get business more than anything else, so in our case we publicize ourselves where we think most of our customers will be.

Coming back to comsware, this was our first exhibit ever ... overall I think it went good, we met lots of people. At the same time, I think it could have gone better. Actually, comsware is combination of research/acad and business, comsbiz was the business segment of the conference and thats where our target audience was. Now the bad part was that, comsbiz was on 9th and 10th, while the exhibits were on the 10th and 11th ... I think the exhibits should have been aligned with comsbiz, that would have made more business sense for the companies exhibiting at the conference.

Also, the exhibits should be where the people are, in case of comsware, the exhibit hall was a little off from the mainstream where the segments were taking place. Later on they did address some of that by having the tea/coffee breaks right where the exhibits were, so thanks to them for taking care of that.

The importance of the Web

2007-01-04T20:08:00.000+05:30

The other day I was having coffee with Nikhil who's the founder and CTO of a 40-50 people company. I won't disclose other details here but Im sure if he is reading this he'd know. His company is a provider of specific enterprise solutions. They employ sales people who target these enterprises, reach to them and sell them their solution. Some time back they tried out google adwords ... and this will surprise you - today, majority of their business comes via google.

Another friend of mine, Gaurav, who's also the founder of a 40-50 people company and is doing very well indicated how sitting in India they get business from the US and most of their customers find them via the web.

This forced me to re-think some of our strategy, now on one side you would have a sales strategy where you reach out to potential customers, e.g., you send emails to a 100, 5-7 might reply back and you might close a deal with 1 if you are lucky. The other side of this is that you'd publicize yourself at a place on the web where your customers are most likely to come and once you have done that your customers come and find you. Now for a startup with limited funding where you don't have all the sales people you'd need, your web presence might prove to be handy.

So what does this mean, well ... expect lots more about Wirkle on the web in the coming days!!!

Where is Wirkle ...

2007-01-04T19:25:00.000+05:30

The other day I was just staring at my blog, I looked at the title of my blog "the inception of wirkle" and then I looked at my posts. Hmmm ... Im writing about mobile, Im writing about the conferences Im going to ... but where the heck is Wirkle?

Well, better sooner than later ... at least I realized this. Not that I am not going to write about mobile or conferences ... just that I am going to also write more about Wirkle and our experiences as we move along.

My last post of 2006

2006-12-31T10:20:00.000+05:30

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007 FOLKS !!!

PAN IIT 2006

2006-12-31T08:42:00.000+05:30

As promised, I am going to write a little about the PAN IIT conference in Mumbai from Dec 23-25.

It was a grand event, over 5000 attendees with well known personalities from all over India and US. The event was inaugurated by the President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. I missed this piece ... remember my flight had got delayed !!!

The first day was more general I'd say, wherein we had people from the Indian govt, UN ... speak about India, the IITs and the challenges that lie in way of progress of the IITs and the nation. Personally speaking I had a tough time networking because the attendees, although all IITians, were from from varied industries, e.g, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals etc. It was hard to find the people relevant to what we do at Wirkle. The second day was good, really good, with 7 parallel segments each with a different focus. The one that I went to was the 6th one ... entrepreneurship - from starting up, to scaling it and making it big. This time networking was great !!! The 3rd day was mostly wrapping up wherein there was a discussion around how IITians could play a role in nation building and a set of action items.

I was one of the volunteers in the first Pan IIT event that had happened in the bay area in 2003. This one was better ... the theme of this conference was more clear, the media coverage was much more and besides the objective was to kick start the effort of nation building which I think is a great cause. Hats off to the Pan IIT team !!!

The Startup FAQ - Post 1

2006-12-26T11:44:00.000+05:30

Wrote this on Dec 23rd, posting it now. Here goes:

Here I am on the flight from Delhi to Mumbai, the flight time was 615am in the morning, its already 915am and the flight is still in Delhi. Yes you guessed it right, its the fog. The winter season is delhi is accompanied by fog, always ... which means early morning and late evening flights are almost guaranteed to be delayed.

Well, I have talked on the phone, solved a few Sudukos, ate some stuff ... so what next? I just realized my dear friend "blog".

I have been thinking on writing about my experience on startups for quite some time ... so what could be a better time than this. So if you are a first time entrepreneur and an engineer, then this is for you.

Passion is Step 1
So here's the deal, the road that you are embarking on is a tough one, you won't get the nice office that your employer might have provided to you in the past, you won't get those multi digit paychecks, you won't get all those benefits, you won't get the work-life balance ...

Everything sounds so negative, so whats my motivation?
Thats right, the road is tough ... but the end is rosy, provided you make it. Most people drop out early, others struggle for some time and then drop out ... only a very few make it.

The only thing that will keep you going in these tough times is the passion that you have for what you are doing. Hence I say, make sure you are very very very passionate about whatever business you have chosen.

Okie, what next?
Revenue, revenue, revenue ... don't think investment, don't think technology, don't think anything else, just focus on who your customers are going to be, why will they pay and how you will reach them.

I know this can be hard, I have been through this myself. Being an engineer the thing that really excites me most is cool technology. But see we're here trying to run a business, and a business must make profits and for that you need revenue ... so really there isn't a way out.

But lots of companies, e.g., many Internet companies don't have a revenue model when they do their first launch?
Yes thats true, and this exactly what the 2000-2001 dot com bubble was all about, a lot of people have already made this mistake, you can avoid it and you should.

But the Internet companies of today have an automatic revenue model called google adsense.
Yes thats true, but do you know how much revenue that will get you exactly? Before you rely on it too much make sure you have done the math. Even google gets most of its revenue from google adwords (the ads that show up on its search page) and NOT google adsense and there is a good reason for that. So make sure you have done your research before you rely on it too much.

... shall have more in my next POST, until then Happy Entrepreneuring.

Headed to Pan IIT 2006 tomorrow

2006-12-22T17:11:00.000+05:30

Im flying to Mumbai for Pan IIT 2006 tomorrow, the agenda and the vision for the meet sounds really exciting and hoping to meet a lot of people. More updates on my blog shall follow.

10kms ... more to go

2006-12-22T16:51:00.000+05:30

I should have posted this yesterday, anyway here goes -

Today morning was good, really good ... for the first time in my life I ran 10kms in one shot, really speaking it was 9.6kms, but saying 10kms just makes me feel good :-)

I run in Dwarka's Sports Complex, a lap is 0.8kms so I usually do "x" number of laps, I did 12 laps = 9.6 kms today. It took me exactly 1hr, which means on an average I ran at 9.6km/hr. Ideally I want to improve on 2 things

1. The distance that I can run
2. The speed at which I run

Currently I am focussing on more on 1., just want to increase the distance and I'll worry about the speed later. On an average I run 2-3 times a week, out of which 1-2 times I would run less say 5 or 6 kms and on one of the attempts I would run more than I have ever.

Next week Im thinking I won't go beyond the 10km, afterall my legs need a break too ;-)

TiE New Delhi (Dec 16) and the corporate ladder

2006-12-19T00:07:00.000+05:30

I was there at TiE New Delhi this Saturday, the theme was "Effective CEOs" and Dr Prasad Kaipa was the key presenter.

There was one slide which I thought made a lot of sense. It talks about the 5 steps of the corporate ladder ...

Step1, Individual Contributor - Most of us start out like this in our careers, where we apply our knowledge and understanding to accomplish individual tasks that are assigned to us.

Step2, Team Contributor - At this point in our careers, we apply our knowledge and experience to the team as a whole resulting in success ... not as an individual but as a team.

Step3, Team Manager - At this stage an individual takes the responsibility of executing a task and organizes a team to get it done.

Step4, Team Leader - A leader is a person who has a vision, motivates and inspires people along the lines of the vision and drives the execution.

Step5, Executive - .... to tell you the fact I didn't really understand this much, or maybe it is just that I cannot relate to this, yet !!!

Anywayz ... so Prasad's theory is that, a successful CEO usually goes through all the steps and most CEOs are somewhere between level 4 and 5 ... anything below that, you're probably not ready.

Barcamp Delhi - Talk by the Opera guys and the mobile web

2006-12-12T16:55:00.000+05:30

I was there at barcamp delhi this past weekend, it was great by the way, great job done by the organizers.

There was a talk by Sigbjorn Vik, Opera Software, which was really interesting ... he talked about the developments that are planned for the Opera browser, both on the PC and mobile. Some of the things that I found interesting -

- Calendar : On travel sites where travel dates are to be entered by user, usually these days you'd see a calendar pop-up allowing you to select the dates. This is common with almost all travel sites except that all have to make their custom implementations of the same. So Sigbjorn mentioned that they plan to put this functionality in the browser itself so that no custom implementations are required ... now that makes sense.

- xHTML + voice - Having speech to text conversion built into the browser allowing users to easily fill up information on web pages without too much work for the developers who make the website.

... and there were a bunch of other features as well. Now the key thing to notice here is that, at a high level they are trying to put that functionality in the browser which users are likely to use or are already using and simplify the job of the web developers or enable them to do things which they couldn't have done on a browser today.

Now lets look at the mobile side of the picture ... how should our mobile web look like, our mobile web should have constructs that users are likely to use or are already using today. For example,

- if you launch the menu of a phone today you'd see nice icons laid out in a matrix, when selecting one of them you have it blow up in size then you select what you want to do with that from your options menu.

- similarly your addressbook has a list of contacts, and you move up and down between them and use your options menu to perform actions on that contact.

... and so on. Now lets think about it, this is what users are doing ... so why aren't we trying to take mobile web in this direction and instead focussing on optimizing webpages with hyperlinks for phones. The day we look at the mobile web from a user standpoint instead of thinking about fitting HTML pages on phones, the mobile web would be much more successful.

Think about it ... HTML was designed keeping in mind the PC, instead if you had phones come first would HTML be the way it is today?

Mobile Social Networks, are we there yet?

2006-12-10T15:04:00.000+05:30

Mobile is hot these days, with a lot of investment going into it and so are social networks (myspace, youtube ...). Now lets focus on the niche when we merge these 2 concepts, i.e., mobile social networks ... is the picture still as rosy?

We have been through some of that with our product LinknSurf, and there are a lot of observations that we have made ... my understanding is that it will still be sometime before mobile social networks are ready, the infrastructure is still not there yet.

For a social network to be successful, you need to get together people of similar interests and allow them to communicate over their common interests. Talking about communication on the mobile phone, lets see what we have today:

- Voice: A voice based social network, hmmm ... somehow that is hard to imagine, or is it just my imagination ;-)

- SMS: SMS based social networks would come with their own limitations - 160 chars, always alerting behavior, cost involved on a per SMS basis ...

- Mobile web: Now this could be close if mobile sites were more usable, there weren't latency issues with accessing those and if everyone with a mobile phone had GPRS. The reality is that mobile web is still not there yet.

- A mobile app like j2me, symbian: This is better than mobile sites because of the usability that it offers, however, there are still 2 factors that would prevent this - varied devices not all of them could support a feature rich app and most people with mobile phones don't have GPRS.

There are a bunch of mobile social networking apps like Rabble, fotochatter, litefeeds etc. but the userbase growth has been limited ... the key issue being ... if I as a user want to connect to a user with whom I share a common interest what is likelyhood of that person having
- GPRS access ?
- A supported handset ?

So the millon dollar question is, how could we make a social network on mobile phones successful, any answers?