As I was driving to work bleary eyed and half dazed, I had a brainwave. We talk so much about Social Networking and we are trying to build a variety of social networks. But the fact is that today's social networks are less social and more socialist. A social network treats all its members as equals. If Bill Gates and myself both signed up on Orkut, we would both be equal in priviliges. Sure, Bill will have 35000 friends more than me, and maybe a few thousand testimonials more as well (not all of them very kind I am sure :)), but other than that there won't be much to differentiate two people who in the real world have starkly different status in the society. So, essentially, social networks naively follow the socialist/idealist principle of "All men are equal". While that is great - and noble, if I may add, it makes a social network boring. And this is the reason why a Bill Gates or a Sachin Tendulkar will never join a social network. With one click of a mouse, they are reduced to the status of a commoner. Not to mention the barrage of invites, requets and spam they will attract.
On the other extreme are invite-only networks like aSmallWorld which caters to high net worth individuals. It is a safe haven for the rich and famous to communicate, and mingle in general. But by excluding the common folks, aSmallWorld also doesn't simulate the real world.
Of course, one could argue that why would one even want to simulate the real world, imperfect as it is. Well, I don't know. But it sure seems like an interesting idea to me. An anti-social network with all the class hierarchies and realities of the real world. Some would have more priviliges, more powers. Not all would be born equal, so to speak. It might have some niche application also in certain kind of networks where the class hierarchy is apparent. For example, in the world of business, the clients often have an upper hand and vendors clamor for business. In the job market, the employers often have the upper hand (unless its the IT industry - do you know DHTML? Please call me!). So who knows, there just might be a case for anti-social networks.
We hear the word "professionalism" a lot in services business. It is often sited as a differntiating factor by many companies, especially the bigger ones when they bid against small startups. Well, while I have heard this word a lot, I have rarely seen it in action (sic) - be it with our vendors, service providers, or competitors. Here is my list of the very minimal characteristics of a "professional" team in the software services industry (or any other industry for that matter):
A professional team
1. Is honest and upfront on their skills and capabilities
2. Is polite and yet open in communication with clients
3. Is responsive in answering emails and returning calls
4. Under-committs and over delivers
5. Shows same respect to clients as well as its own employees
6. Would rather get under paid than over paid
7. Never takes undue advantage of a client in "distress"
8. Knows when to say "No" to a client
Looks like Google revised its page rankings today. New Delhi Times now has a page rank of 5/10 - 2 points up from its previous ranking.
Just when Ourmedia started to make news, Google announced its own video publishing service. Google is basically going to let you sell your videos online. So though Ourmedia and Google have different goals, comparisions are inevitable.
Our role with Ourmedia is to develop the technology behind it. We are pretty resource constrained right now because Ourmedia is yet to get funded so there is just enough money to fund a couple of devs.
There is a fundamental difference between Google Video and Ourmedia. Ourmedia is not just about publishing your media online, it also aims to develop a community around what people post there. We have forums, blogs, group blog, commenting, buddy lists etc. Ourmedia is a gathering place for media enthusiasts. It is less about selling, more about sharing. Of course, it is entirely possible to use Ourmedia to showcase your work and then sell it elsewhere. And that is great. But fundamentally, Ourmedia is not an e-commerce site. It is a social networking site. Soon, we will add groups functionality to Ourmedia. So, you can go and create a group for "Fans of Bollywood Dance-Around-Tree Songs" or whatever. The power of community is behind us. And if we can harness it, Ourmedia will be unstoppable.
Not much is known about the Google video service. From what I can make out, you can upload a video and it becomes searchable through Google search. There will eventually be a way to sell your videos online and Google will probably take a cut out of it. I don't know if they plan to have community features integrated with Google video. Google already has a thriving social network in the form of Orkut which they could use to match and exceed what Ourmedia has to offer. Even then, we have a couple of innovations up our sleeves, which will emerge with time.
Overall, I am excited to have Google in this space. It can only attract more attention towards Ourmedia. We would have to get real nerdy to be able to match Google in technology. It will be interesting to see how they handle uploads and embedding videos in web pages. We have discovered the hard way that supporting unlimited number of media formats is no fun. We recently fixed some huge upload issues we were facing. So things are running much more smoothly now.
I would be interested to know what Google feels about Ourmedia. In some ways, the two can complement each other - Ourmedia could be the place where people showcase their 'trailers' or clippings and then sell them on Google Video. On the other hand, Ourmedia provides free and unlimited storage with hardly any strings attached - something that Google might be unwilling to do.
So the next few months are going to be exciting times for citizen journalism and grassroots media. Will Microsoft and Yahoo take cue from Google and come up with something of their own? Will Ourmedia thrive along with or inspite of Google Videos? Will we be able to innovate enough to make Ourmedia stand apart? Only time will tell!
So after almost 4 months of 14 hrs a day/7 days a week of non-stop slogging, my body finally gave up on me, just a couple of days after it happened to my partner Ashish. This had to happen sooner or later and now I am sitting at home recuperating. Last 4 months have been sheer madness. My current breakdown, even though a minor one, made me realize that this approach is not sustainable. I think 12 hours a day, 6 days a week is a more sane schedule and I think we will get there soon. Manish joined us this week. Our Ourmedia team is ramping up fast. We are looking for an admin to take care of routine office maintenance stuff.
Even though using cricket parlance is totally out of fashion right now, I can't resist comparing Ashish and my four month run with the Dravid-Laxamn partnership in Eden Gardens against Australia - long, boring, and slow - but it got the job done :-)
We think we have fixed some major issues we were having with Ourmedia uploads. So if you had tried before and your media never appeared, then I urge you to give it another try. We spent a lot of time on fixing these issues. I was really losing sleep over this issue. Hopefully its behind us now!
I woke up at 4 AM. Left by 5 AM. Queued up behind 5000 people at 6 AM. Was inside the stadium (if you can call it that) at 7:30 AM. Saw Sachin, Dravid and rest of the men in blue wamring up. Cheered for my team. Waved the flag. Braved the heat. No decent food, no cold water, no restrooms. no scroeboard. no tv replays. All for the team.
And what did the team do for the fans?
What a hearbreak it was to see Tendulkar get bowled right infront of my eyes.
So you would think it was an effort wasted? Nope. For many reasons it was still worth it. And I know if Delhi ever gets another game, I will go. Such is the Indian cricket fan. Very forgetful, very forgiving. Loyal in his devotion to the sport and the team.
Now if only the team would reciprocate more often.
The performance of our team in the last 3 matches has caused a lot of distress to the entire nation. There is despair everywhere. I have myself been perplexed by this total annihiliation of our bowling attack in the last game. Well, tomorrow's match is right here in Delhi and they better perform this time because I AM GOING TO BE THERE WATCHING THE MATCH LIVE!!! My dear friend JJ (to whom I am going to be eternally grateful) managed to get two tickets for tomorrow's game. And good tickets too. If you live in Delhi and read the newspaper, you know how hard it is to get tickets. JJ must have pulled some real strings to get us these tickets.
Entry into the stadium will be closed at 7:30 AM in the morning and I think we will have to leave from home latest by 5 AM. You can not take ANYTHING inside the stadium - not even water, leave alone cell phones or food. But Sehwag, Sachin, Dhoni, and Dravid can make this totally worth it. Imagine watching these guys play live in flesh and blood!
OK folks, catch me live on DD sports tomorrow morning. Maybe I will sitting next to Musharraf or something ;-)
Apparently India's services sector contributes over half of the nation's GDP Notice I say "apparently". Because I see no evidence to back that number. In fact service providers here have no clue as to what the word "service" means. I speak from personal experience. In the past few months, I have had to deal with dozens of service providers, and the local dhaba from where we order food for the office is the only service provider who has provided satisfactory service.
Here are my first hand experiences with the leading service providers of India
1. Hutch - disabled STD/ISD on my cell phone when in fact I had asked for enabling national roaming. Disabled my outgoing calls when I paid the bill 3 days and later and took whole 4 days to restore service.
2. Iqara internet - Dont even get me started. We lose connectivity every single day (thank goodness we have backup service!). Their customer service rep has the gall to tell me that their engineer will show up in 24-48 hours. I think I yelled so loudly at her that she dropped the phone or something.
3. Tata Indicom - They promise me to send somebody over at my place to install broadband on Saturday. I take a day off and sit at home waiting for their guy to show up. Somebody calls and tells me they will send somebody on Monday.
4. Reliance infocomm - Just visit the nearest Reliance Webworld. Enough said.
5. My UPS provider - Two of our UPS failed in a week after they were installed. Replacements failed in less than 2 hours.
6. HDFC bank: Their rep told us that our bank account will be transferred seamlessly from UP to Haryana. Turns out that it was just a lie he told us. They wont be getting any more business from us.
I can go on and on. But you get my point. And it makes me wonder if this is how our software services industy works as well. Because if it does, then that is both good and bad news for us. Good news because I know my company can do a better job than that on any day. Much better job. And bad news because if the industry can't provide excellent levels of service as a whole, the "Made in India" tag will become a liability rather than an asset. I have already heard from a few clients about their bad experiences dealing with small Indian service providers who ripped them off. That makes them wary of giving outsourcing a second chance. That can't be good for us.
So, my request to fellow members of our software industry -- lets pull up our socks now! We can't compete on cost for long. Because the Chinese, Vietnamese and Bulgarians are coming!
Last night I blogged about the bad vibes I was getting about today's match. And look what happened. We lost on the last ball of the match after making a 300+ score. I was just getting this feeling all day yesterday. And today also, even after India scored 315, I felt Pak would get there.
Well, the good thing is that I have no vibes whatsoever for the next 2 games. So maybe all is not lost yet :)
Manish told me today that an astrologer had predicted that India would win the firt two matches, lose the next two and then win the last two. Hmm...lets see.
The recent increase in popularity of Firefox might have an uninteded consequence. One year back, when IE was the supremely dominant browser, web development was simple. There was only browser to support. And IE, with all its black magic, would respectably render badly written, non-compliant html. So life was easy. The test matrix was small. Sure, netscape/mozilla/safari were still there but for most web developers supporting 99% of the users was good enough.
Then Firefox came into the picture. The 99% IE userbase shrunk to 90%. Firefox became a religion. People demanded that web content look right in Firefox. So suddenly there were two browsers to support. Worse, it turned out (and this is hearsay - I don't know for sure), that IE employed all kinds of sleazy non-standards compliant tricks to make web pages look right. This meant, that the more standards compliant Firefox couldn't render the same stuff right. And in my personal experience with web development in the past few months, this is a cause of serious grief.
So I wonder if Firefox might eventually lead to the demise of HTML. There is already a move towards developing richer internet applications. And a lot of solutions have been proposed which sideline HTML completely. With broadband getting more prevalent, there is no requirement that web pages be just a few kilobytes in size. And now, the additional overhead of ensuring browser compatibility might just the last nail in the coffin.
It looks like corporate India will be working at a half strength tomorrow. India plays Pakistan in a crucial 1 day match tomorrow and if FM stations are to be believed, many are planning to skip work. On Radio City, people were invited to call in and tell their excuse for skipping work tomorrow. The winning entry was this guy who told his boss that "ladki waale dekhne aa rahe hai".
I am having bad vibes for tomorrow's game. Of course I would love to be proven wrong!
So it turns out that invites to Yahoo 360 (the latest social network on the block) are much in demand. Well, I have 100 of those, thanks to Marc Canter, the big daddy of social networks.If you want one, let me know.
Now the BIG 3 all have shown an overt interest in social networking - Google has Orkut, MSFT has Wallop and Yahoo has 360. Orkut is definitely the most popular of 'em all. It is also the slowest and the buggiest of them all. Wallop is really experimental and not main stream at all. It will be interesting to see how 360 fares in an already crowded space. It has nice integration with My Yahoo and other Yahoo services. But just like Orkut, it lacks focus. I find no compelling reason to visit Yahoo 360 or Orkut every day - or any day for that matter. On the other hand, networks with a narrow focus - like LinkedIn or our own Ourmedia.org are there for a purpose. They cater to a very specific audience. You want to come back to Ourmedia to see what new cool videos got posted - or who commented on your media since you last logged in.
A social network can't stand on its own legs. Buddy lists, blogs, groups etc are all groovy. But they need to revolve around a central theme to create a compelling Portal 2.0 experience.
I have not seen anything this cool on the web for a long time. Check out this rich internet app (RIA) built on top of Laszlo
Browser based rich UIs are the new rage right now. AJAX is one set of technologies that are being used to develop rich browser apps. Laszlo still seems new and almost like a well kept secret. But I bet you will hear a lot more about them soon.
And doesn't their XML markup remind you of Avalon? It sure does to me :)
It has been exactly 2 months since we started and we are 8 people strong now. I am feeling really good about the team that we have been able to build till now. We have a good mix of experienced as well as fresh talent. There is lot of positive energy in the office and the 'startup feel' is definitely present. The work is exciting as well and we are exploring new oppurtunities all the time. I can see so many different possibilities for innovation in the domestic market as well. During these 2 months I have had the good fortune of interacting with lot of incredibly wise, incredibly talented and incredibly successful people. I have learnt about open source development. I have learnt about managing people. I have learnt about managing money...I guess I need to write a seperate post about my learnings :)
As a small company you have to survive from month to month and yet not lose focus of the bigger picture. Our immediate focus is on delivering quality to our existing clients. Longer term focus is on finding a few more senior people who can complement our skills and experience. We also need a 'real' business plan as well - what is our vision? What is our mission? Where do we see the company 5 years from now? Are we a services company or a product company or both?
I hope 6 months from now, I will have answers to all of these questions! :)
It turns out homosexuality is considered illeagal in India as an "unnatural act". The matter has been taken to the Supreme Court by an NGO. Let us see how that goes. Gay marriage is a delicate issue in the US. I doubt it will ever get politicised in India though. I don't even know if there is a word for "gay" in Hindi.
