September 2005 Archives

(via Gigaom) According to this post on the Skype blog, the rumors of the Ebay-Skype deal were leaked by a New York cab driver who had given a ride to some Ebay execs.

I kid you not — the week before the announcement, we received a comment in our Customer Support from some NYC taxi driver about eBay acquiring Skype, and we downplayed this as a rumor, which is what it still was for us at that time. The taxi driver replied “look gentlemen, you may disregard it all you want, but I know the facts since I just gave a ride to some eBay execs who discussed exactly what would be happening”.

Our new office is nearly complete. We will be moving in early next week. Our current office was getting really cramped and the new office is much roomier and better in terms of infrastructure. Exciting times at Tekriti (touchwood!) :) Why don't you come work with us? We are looking for people at all levels (fresher to 5-7 years of experience) in dev, test and project management to join us. There are more details on the company website. You can also email me at gaurav AT tekritisoftware dot com if you want to know more about us. Come, join the party! :)

Rashmi Sinha has done a very cerebral (in the very sense of the word!) analysis of tagging. I will be lying if I said I understood all of it but it is nevertheless a fascinating attempt to explain the popularity of tagging using well established principles of congitive psychology.

Dirty laundry was never washed more publicly before in the history of Indian cricket. The email that Greg Chappell sent in "full confidence" to the BCCI is now out in the open for all to read. Sourav Ganguly was a player and captain who was much admired and respected. But his death grip on captaincy is suffocating the entire team now. It required somebody like Greg Chappell to stop putting up with the politics of Indian cricket. However, Ganguly is the prodigy of Jagmohan Dalmiya, the self proclaimed grand daddy of of Indian cricket. So I fear that Tuesday (the day BCCI is going to meet Ganguly and Chappell) might see the end of Chappell's short tenure as coach. The BCCI will probably try to defang Chappell but I doubt he will put up that kind of bullshit. That will be yet another sad day for Indian cricket fans.

I finally spent some time this morning to reconfigure my blog.The new themeing system in MovableType 3.2 alone makes it worth the effort to upgrade. I have chosen to go with the minimalist theme so that the emphasis can be on the text I write and not the surrounding eye candy :). The new font is also easier on the eyes. The image on the top is the view from our current (and soon to be former) office. Ideally I would have used the image of "newsprint" as the background ("New Delhi Times" == newspaper, got it?). But I couldn't find a suitable image and this was next best.

Feedback welcome on the new design!

I am taking my blog thru a much needed upgrade. After a few hiccups, I managed to upgrade my blogging software MovableType to its latest version. I am playing around with some themes to see what works best. If something doesn't look or work right, please bear with me. Thanks!

With two hurricanes hitting the US in quick succession, I was wondering how are hurricanes named and if only female names are chosen. Turns out that there is a bit of history behind hurricane naming. According to this website:

Prior to 1950 storms weren't officially named at all. From 1950 to 1952 they were named simply Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George...not very imaginative, but it sufficed. From 1953 to 1978 someone (my guess a man going through a nasty divorce) decided to use only female names. Finally, in 1979, they started alternating between male and female names.

Hurricanes are named alphabetically, years in advance and starting the alphabet over each year. (If you get a Hurricane Wanda, you know you have had a busy storm season.) The Atlantic and the Pacific have separate naming lists.

Interstingly, in this year's list, Katrina and Rita were not back to back (they couldn't be because both are female names). In fact, they were seperated by Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia and Philippe. So I guess all these hurricanes never reached the shores and hence never made the news.

We had our Geek/blogger/Micro-content dinner last night here in Gurgaon. Marc and Ashish have already blogged the event. The attendees were Marc, Ashish, Manish and myself (from Tekriti), Alok (newly VC and successful entrpreneur - jobsahead.com), Sunil (fellow entrepreneur, blogger and semantic web researcher - he is from the RDF camp), Jatin from Indiastreams.com, Siddharth and Sudesh from WebChutney, Neeraj from Times of India, Sachin from Makemytrip.com, Amit from Uzanto and Kunal (ex-TRAI and telecom entreprenur who will cringe on seeing Marc call him a "government official"!). So it was a mix of entreprenurs, bloggers, media people and geeks in general.

Not surprisingly, the hot topic of discussion was the Ebay-Skype deal. Sunil talked about his wireless startup and his ideas around semantic web and RDF. When asked to choose between XML and RDF, Sunil gave the diplomatic reply of "well practially XML works better but...". Alok is going to be India's first VC blogger! Cool! The guys at Web Chutney are doing some really creative stuff for very impressive clientele. They have also promised us to help us find good design folks - a skill we really need desperately here at Tekriti. Marc and myself independently made the observation that Kunal has a resemblence to Anil Dash. Marc even found the accent similar. I find it really funny that Marc thought of him as a government official. He looks anything but that. Sachin mentioned that Makemytrip.com is providing domestic ticketing as well . I hope we get something like priceline here in India soon! Amit, Neeraj and Marc had an animated discussion about something that I can't seem to remember. But I did point out to Neeraj that indiatimes.com is like Web 0.5 website in a Web 2.0 era and they are totally missing the boat on this. I spotted Manish and Jatin discussing his media streaming technology and how it could possibly get used in many of our projects.

This was a great event to have! It took effort to organize but it was totally worth it. I heard many "we should have more of these" comments. So hopefully such blogger dinners will become a more regular feature in the Delhi tech circle. There is no better way to get to know fellow techies, exchange ideas and help each other out!

Bernard Moon as a very interesting post on what motivated the VCs to fund Skype (which has of course given them mind boggling ROI). In particular the following lines exactly echo what I had written a few days back

What really seems to have sold them, however, was the ease and reliability of Skype's software, which they initially tried out in beta. Specifically, this was one of those rare pieces of software that Stavis and a far-flung colleague could download at the same time and be using five minutes later. No firewall issues, no "this doesn't work on my PC" problems. It may sound basic, but think about all the times you and a colleague have tried to download a piece of software (particularly communications software), only to find out that it works far better on his computer better than on yours.

"Regardless of the firewall, it would traverse the network and find the connection," Stavis explains. "And then it worked 100 times better than anything else we had seen."

Now the sales and marketing folks can't stop telling us techies that its not what you are selling, its how you are selling that matters. Well, take that! Here is a piece of software that stood on its own - sheer raw power of the code. No gimmicks, no fancy advertising, no $100 million marketing budgets. Pure technology. I think we will see more and more of that in the coming days. Because the web is opening up, it is no longer the playground for just the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts of the world. No amount of marketing or sales will be able to make up for bad code. In the end, better technology will prevail!

We took Marc for a tour of Delhi yesterday. Since Marc wanted to get a feel of the old city, we went to Red Fort and the flea market behind it. It was after many years that I visited that area. The last time I was there was sometime in late 90s when I had gone there to buy manjha for my fighter kites...but that is another story for another day.

Shopping all day on Janpath and kabari bazar, Marc managed to pick up two Hindi words - "Kam karo! Kam Karo!" (reduce the price! reduce the price!). I think it actually worked a few times!

According to a new report co-sponsored by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), after conflict ridden Afghanistan, it is hardest to start a new business in India.

"India ranks rather low at 116th - 25 places behind China's 91st ranking - and behind all South Asian countries, except Afghanistan, in the overall ease of doing business. However, India made noteworthy reforms to credit registries and enforcement of collateral law, making it easier for businesses to get new finance. South Asian countries are ranked as follows: Maldives 31, Nepal 55, Pakistan 60, Bangladesh 65, Sri Lanka 75, Bhutan 104, India 116, and Afghanistan 122."

It is humbling to see Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh appear far ahead of the much hyped India and China. My personal experience in starting a new business has not been as dismal as this report makes it out to be. But that is because it is relatively much easier to start a software export oriented business. Government has made special efforts to foster growth of IT industry. But we still have a long way to go as far infrastructure and reduction of paperwork is concerned. There are too many hoops to jump through, tax and accounting laws are extremely complicated and local service providers are not as reliable as one would want them to be. I hope (but I doubt) these reports actually have an impact and shake the government out of inaction and lethargy. The software industry has been blessed by the Indian govt. because it brings in lot of foreign exchange. It is noteworthy how even a little helping hand from the government can spurt so much growth and entreprenurship. I wish the government would look beyond software and ITES industries into other sectors like agriculture and manfacturing.

Intersting feature on Rediff.

At least I didn't get a second degree ;-)

On a day when it rained like never before here in Delhi, something even more incredible and unheard of happened - Ebay bought Skype for $4.1 billion. The immensity of that number left me speechless. The blogosphere will be plenty abuzz with this news over the coming days so I will not give my opinion on whether this was a fair price or not. But I will like to point out that Skype is one of those rare pieces of software that flourished purely on technological superiority.

Voice over internet had been around for much longer before Skype came into the picture. Bigger players like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL had voice solutions available with their instant messengers for many years before Skype. You know how those worked - if they worked at all. The voice quality was poor, there was no multi-party conferencing features and worst of all, most of these didn't work at all behind NATs and firewalls. So, it was an incredible achievement to create a piece of technology that worked flawlessly in almost all network configurations, provided excellent voice quality and allowed several parties to conference simultaneously. "It just works" is what made Skype such a raging success. I won't be exaggerating if I said that my work life revolves around Skype. I spend several hours a week over Skype talking to clients across the world. I have myself convinced several people to download and install Skype. The fact that it takes less than 5 minutes to get Skype up and running is what makes it so attractive to the masses. The geeks could always punch holes in their firewalls. But for humans, this was sheer magic.

So for me, Skype is a story of pure technical innovation. More often than not, sales and marketing make or break a product. But for Skype, technology made it what it is. Hats off to their dev team in Estonia! You guys rock!

Microsoft is going to offer new MSN APIs which will allow developers to access MSN Search, VirtualEarth, Messenger and MapPoint programatically and build their own applications around them. This is great! The new WWW is all about open APIs. Actually, Messenger APIs were available earlier as well. But only the most basic UI automation API was made available freely. The more useful API functions required use of a key from Microsoft which, from what I can make out, was almost impossible to get. I used these APIs quite a bit while I was with Microsoft. I hope the new APIs are not going to be just these old APIs repackaged differently.

Though Microsoft has finally arrived, I wonder why it was so late to the web APIs party. If you think about it, the credit for success of Windows platform goes to a large extent to the ease with which you can develop applications on it. The Win32 API along with VB saw hundereds of thousands of developers choose the Windows platform instead of Apple or Unix. For Windows division, developer audience has been super important, almost more important than the end user. Microsoft couldn't possibly ship everything that an end user wanted. But by making Windows an easy to program platform, they ensured that almost any possible useful application would eventually be written by somebody outside of Microsoft. The same logic should have been applied to the web and MSN from day one. Microsoft could have gone ahead and created a "web platform" similar to Windows for desktop - complete with easy to use APIs. But instead, earlier attempts at providing APIs were very half hearted and hardly evangelized. I hope this time around things will be different. We will know in 2 days, when MSN unveils its shining new APIs here.

I resisted hard to not blog about our cricket team since their dismal performance against Pakistan earlier this (of which I was a witness) However, since then, the team's performance has reached a new low - lower than a snake's belly - that low! In what must be a record, the team has lost 19 of the last 20 finals it has played in torunaments of 3 or more countries. In fact, since 1999, India has won only one tournament. And since its defeat in the finals of the World Cup, India has not won any trophies at all.

It is not the sub-par performance of our men in blue that suprises me anymore . But what I find amazing is how consistently our team has defied the law of averages. I think it must take a lot of effort to lose so regularly. There must have been at least 2 or 3 instances amongst these 19 lost finals when the opposing team was having a bad day. At those times, how our team managed to have an even worse day is beyond me. I feel sorry for our team. Even though they underperform and generally suck, they should win at least once more now - not because they deserve to, but because the law of averages should catch up with them!

So Marc Canter is going to visit us later this month. One of the things that we are going to do is have a blogger dinner here in Gurgaon. Marc is known, amonst other things, for being the founder of Macromedia. He is also considered the father of multimedia. Of late we have been working with Marc on various social networking projects. So it will be cool to have fellow bloggers come over for dinner and talk about social networking, micro content publishing, citizen journalism and other great stuff.

Stay tuned for venue and other details. But if you are coming, please try to RSVP at gaurav at tekritisoftware dot com. Of course you don't have to be a blogger to come!

Looking forward to meeting a lot of interesting folks! :)

One of the most famous (and yet fictional) IIT-ians, Asok gets consigned to be a cub reporter in today's Dilbert comic strip. Poor Asok is a smart guy but not quite adept at office politics. Can't say that is typical of IIT-ians considering how many of them have made it to the top of the corporate ladder.

See the strip here

Of late we have been doing a lot of work in the rich internet application domain. We have used AJAX extensively to create slick user interfaces that look more and more like desktop applications. It amazes me all the time that the this technology existed for years and was never put to good use. Now that its finally gaining popularity and adoption, I get a feeling its time has alrady come and gone. Sure, previously unthought of web experiences are now possible with AJAX. But can DHTML and AJAX deliver on the thin client application-in-the-browser nirvana? I think not.

Firstly, coming from an operating system/application development background, the whole web programming model confounded me. There is no easy way to seperate the UI from the business logic. I have somewhat managed to achieve this seperation with ASP.NET and PHP5 classes but still, HTML remains a crappy way of developing user interfaces. Browser compatibility makes things worse (Safari has been the biggest PITA of late for us).

Secondly, AJAX is good for a "pull model", i.e when data needs to be fetched from the backed based on user action. But a lot of scenarios require that data be made available to the client as and when it becomes available on the backend. Email clients checking for new email, or a radio station updating track information, chat applications etc are good examples. Right now, all these scenarios can be enabled only by periodic polling. Basically, true client-server model can not be achieved because the server can not callback to the client (this is not only an AJAX limitation. such is the nature of HTTP). Almost all networked desktop applications use a client-server model or a peer-to-peer model. Both these can not be achieved within the browser.

Finally, Javascript is clunky and limited in what it can do. It is hard to debug. It is clamped down for security reasons (you can't access the file system, for example). After a few hundered lines, Javascript code starts getting unmanagable and unmaintainable. So it becomes increasingly complex to create even basic desktop-app like functionality using Javascript. I can't even start to imagine somebody creating Microsoft Word like text editor using Javascript and AJAX.

Technologies like Laszlo try to ease the issues with HTML. But the real culprit is the browser itself. The browser was meant to be just that - a tool for browsing through web pages. It was not meant to be a platform for hosting entire applications. That is what an operating system was supposed to be for. But with the recent trend towards thin computing, browser emerged at the natural thin client because it was already installed on everybody's machines.

So here is my prediction for the future. Someobdy (Google?, Novatium?, Microsoft?) will develop this new uber-browser platform which will run on all major operating systems. This new platform will be like a mini-OS by itself complete with hooks and apis and a programming model geared towards developing feature rich desktop like applications which will run within this browser. The platform will allow creation of true desktop like applications which will be OS-agnostic. Most end users will not even realize the difference since it will be completely transparent to them. And THEN we would have attained thin client utopia!