February 2006 Archives

The much blogged about service Edgeio launched today. Edgeio lets bloggers post their classified ads directly to the Edgeio website by tagging their posts with the keyword "listing". So basically Edgeio is a classifieds aggregator. I am not very convinced about this idea thus far. Classified ads, by definition, need fine classification to be relevant and easily discoverable. I need to be able to say what I am selling, for what price (and currency), what model, till what date is my ad valid etc. This is important because otherwise people can't search on these criteria. I doubt that can be achieved with plain old text blog posts that Edgeio is harvesting right now.

This is a problem that has been given considerable thought and in fact this is at the core of the whole philosophy of the "semantic web". Web 2.0 is supposed to be structured and machine readable. Blogs and RSS syndication was the first step in that direction. When you make a blog post, your RSS feed gets updated and hence in a way, your blog becomes machine readable. That is why sites like Technorati can know exactly when and what you blogged. And that is as far as services like Edgeio can get to today. But suppose you posted a review of a restaurant you went to, or a movie you watched, how do you let Technorati know that it is a review? And more specifically, a review of a movie which you rated 3 on a scale of 5? For a machine, it is all just plain text. So as far as a dumb machine (and they all are) is concerned, a blog post is no different from a movie review is no different from a classified ad.

Structured Blogging is an attempt to solve this problem. The basic approach is to allow the user to specify what type of content they are posting (review, event, blogpost, video, audio etc) and then based on the type of content, let them specify more specific "metadata". The input data is then published as XML (using well defined schemas) as well as embedded (well defined) XHTML. Since the format is pre-defined, the content is machine readable.

While this might sound like lot of geek talk, wide adoption of structured blogging will have huge implications. Applications like Edgeio will be able to provide much better user experience. Search engines will become smarter at answering queries like "show me all events related to XML happening in Gurgaon between this and this date". There will be services which will aggregate specific user generated content (as opposed to sites like Technorati which aggregate all types of blogs) like movie reviews or tech. events. The possibilities are endless and I am excited about this next to next generation "web 3.0"!

At Tekriti, we have added Structured Blogging support in most of the stuff that we do (GoingOn and People Aggregator being two big ones).

BarCamp Delhi has gotten amazing response! Over 60 people have signed up so far! Many are flying in from outside of Delhi to participate. Over 20 sessions are already scheduled thus far on topics raging from AJAX to entrepreneurship to open source sofware. We put in order for t-shirts just today so we will have to pray that we get the Tees on time! I have to say I feel proud of apni dilli. Delhi is usually labelled as the "BPO capital" and not much of a software/technology center. Banglore and Hyderabad take all the limelight most of the times. Well, I hope this clears some misconceptions! :)

See you at the BarCamp!

Paolo and Jon point out how some names are more often mispelled than others. Well, I am one of those whose name is almost always mispelled, especially by Americans. It is a mystery that has confounded me since the first day I landed on the shores of that glorious country and continues to puzzle me today when most of my communication with my American friends and colleagues is via email. My name is spelled G-A-U-R-A-V. But for some reason, 9 out of 10 Amercians spell it as G-U-A-R-A-V (note that the u comes before a). I am not so finicky about names and spellings but this happens with such consistency that it never ceases to amaze me. In fact, if you search for "GUARAV" on Google, you get more than 16,000 hits Though you have to give credit to Google for helpfully asking "Did you mean: gaurav". And if I run a quick search on all the email in my Outlook for "guarav", I get 159 results. That many people have mispelled my name in just the last few months!
When somebody consistently spells it wrong, I have to very reluctantly correct them. You don't want to point out this kind of stuff because it makes the other person get really apologetic and of course they didn't do it purposely! Sometimes I get interesting explanations for why people do it. Like this one time I was told that "guava" is the word closest to how my name is spelled so people subconciously type the u before the a. That explanation is, shall we say, not very fruitful. But it might have some juice in it because Microsoft Word does tend to auto-correct my name to "guava".
Oh well, like Shakespeare said, what's in a name? That which we call Gaurav by any other word would still remain me!
One day I will tell you about how my name is pronounced in different parts of the world. Now that I am safely back in my own backyard, I can laugh about it. But it wasn't always so funny! :)

Marc and others have been lately blogging about how technology conferences are often expensive paid affairs. I would love to attend conferences but I am just too poor (right now...) to be able to afford such luxuries. So what can be the next best thing? How about organising one yourself? Well, its not a conference. Actually its an "un-conference" and its called Barcamp. Like the wiki says, BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. Barcamps have become pretty popular lately and many have taken place in North America and Europe. But this one is going to be the first barcamp in whole of Asia!



The Idea
I think Barcamp is a great idea and a big thanks to Jon for taking the initiative in organising one here in Delhi. The main differentiation between a conference and an un-conference is that in the latter every attendee is also an active contributor to the event and not a mere spectator. So one could contribute by presenting on a interesting topic, or by taking notes and posting on the wiki, or by pitching in for food or by playing emcee during the day. Its a democratic process where all talks and presentations are treated equal. There is no keynote, for example. The setting is informal and most speakers are not seasoned presenters.

The Theme
The theme for Barcamp Delhi is "Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff". Yes, thats a whole lot of buzzwords but I think consumer internet space in India is at an inflexion point. The mobile revolution is already well under way. There are a whole lot of new technologies that are defining this new broadband enabled always connected world. User generated content and citizen journalism have created an information channel parallel to mainstream media. How will all this come together and shape the future? What technologies will be instrumental in creating this new Internet? Which companies will matter? What new businesses will emerge? We hope we can get some insight and interesting discussions around these questions (Dude, you can't actually answer any of these in a day!)
And also note the "other cool stuff" in the end. That is for those of you who have some really cool stuff to show off but doesn't squarely fit in the web2.0 category. Doesn't matter. I mean, it is a democracy after all. And then India is the biggest of 'em all :)

What's in it for me?
Well, the materialistic answer is "Free food and maybe a Free tshirt!". But the karmic answer is that this an experiment in open learning and sharing. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join. It's a forum for bouncing off your ideas or showcasing what you are doing. Obviously it also helps people connect and network. And hey, you get to boast that you presented at the first ever barcamp, not just in Delhi, not just in India but whole of Asia! How cool is that?

When, where, what time, how do I participate?
Barcamp Delhi is scheduled for Saturday March 4th. More details on the Wiki.
Please feel free to contact me (gaurav at tekritisoftware dot com) or Amit (amit at uzanto dot com) if you have any questions. And do add your name to the Wiki if you plan to attend. Happy barcamping!

Rang De Basanti is most certainly going to be the movie of the year. Its sheer directorial brilliance coupled with a tight storyline and top notch acting makes watching the movie a very powerful experience. The movie - without spoiling the plot for those who haven't watched it - sends across the message that the present day Indian youth is not as self centered or indifferent to the nation's problems as previous generations since independence have been. In a very unique way, the movie compares today's youth with the young revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh who fought for the nation's independence.

While it is difficult to condone the violent method of protest depicted in the movie (violence, i feel is justified sometimes. But it doesn't scale well and converts into terrorism at some point), it is true that something has changed in past decade or so. The Indian youth does seem to have awakened from the slumber it went into immediately after independence. The boycott of fire crackers by kids as a protest against child labor is an example. The recently launched political party Paritrana led by IITians is another example. Even college students from middle class families who don't need to work sweating it out in McDonalds represent the change in attitude of the youth.

It is an interesting exercise to try to analyze what caused this change. And how did it happen so fast? And why did it happen now? I think the breakdown of our pseudo socialistic systems is one reason for this change. It is no coincidence that this awakening of youth happened alongside with economic liberalization. Socialism, by definition, promotes mediocrity and kills motivation. The post-independence license raj stifled enterprise. A "government job" was considered highly coveted even though it was low paying because government never fired anybody and promotions were time based. Taking up a "private job" or doing (gasp!) business was looked down upon - not wrongly so because businesses spent so much time greasing the govt. machinery to get work done that almost no private business was completely above board. In such an environment, it is no wonder that the youth remained indifferent and uninspired. Amitabh Bacchan's depiction of the "angry young man" in several movies from the 70s sums it up nicely!

Then, in early 90s, international pressure forced India to do away with license raj and accelarate economic liberalization. Oh, what a blessing in disguise it was! Almost overnight, world's largest companies were knocking on our doors. Not only did that expose India to the western (or rather capitalistic) work ethic, it also forced Indian businesses to shape up and stop relying on government protectionism. This opened the floodgates of oppurtunity. Economic boom created the Indian "yuppies" for the first time. The introduction of cable TV gave us our "MTV generation". The internet brought outsourcing and IT boom. No wonder today's youth is wide awake and raring to go. I bet the next decade will witness the awakening of the rural youth as well.

Finally, as has been fashionable in the blogosphere when talking about this movie, I will close with this quote from RDB -
yeh dekh ke jiska khoon naa khuala woh khoon nahi paani hai.... jo desh ke kaam naa aa sake woh barbaad jawani hai...

Staring at the screen
clouded thoughts and empty mind,
what to blog?

Today Tekriti Software completed one year of its existence. Entrepreneurship is harder than I thought it would be. But it is also more fun than I ever thought it can be. And sometimes it is extremely rewarding - like today. The team came early today and decorated the entire office before any three of us reached office. What a surprise it was! But there was more. We also got a beautiful framed painting of the world map (Tekriti has global dreams, of course!) and even cut a cake. It totally made my day!

We had a pretty good first year. We got very lucky, shipped lot of code, made clients happy, worked hard, grew the team, and most importantly had fun along the way. On Saturday we had an interesting session where each Teknokrat talked about where they want to see Tekriti 5 years from now. And going by the ambitions and dreams of this team, we have a long long way to go!

Google, as we all know, is in the business of selling ads. They display ads related to the what you are searching for. So the typical experience is that the user searches for some keywords and sees  a whole lot of search results in the middle of the page and related ads on the right panel. Now, at this point, the user can take two actions - either click on an actual search result OR click on the text ad on the right. Guess which of those clicks makes money for Google? Does the search engine want the user to click on the actual search result or on the ad? This discussion came up yesterday and it made me think that as long as Google is a dominant force in the search engine space, improving their search results doesn't seem very compelling from their perspective. If search engine technology was perfect then it would return the best and most relevant search results. So when a user was specifically looking to buy something online (which is when they are most likely to click on google ads), they would anyway get the best results in the middle of the page and never need to click on an ad.

Of late there has been lot of noise about how Google search has started to deteriorate and how SEO companies are manipulating Google results. This appears to be quite similar to how Microsoft had stopped working on IE once they had annihiliated the competition (netscape). It took emergence of Firefox to shake Microsoft out of the slumber. So, we really need MSN, Yahoo and other search engines to give a decent fight to Google so that they would start putting more of their billions into improving the search experience!

I am terribly guilty of not responding to some very interesting comments on my blog of late. Last week or so has been really busy with many things happening at the same time. We completed what we call the "vanilla" version of People Aggregator and I am really glad to see how fast and zippy it is! We are also building some neat media upload technology which is starting to look very cool. At the same time, I am having to do some serious paper work to get the STPI status for Tekriti. BTW - here is a lesson we learnt the hard and expensive way - if you are planning to setup an export oriented software business in India, get your STPI registration done even before you accept your first payment. STPI status gives you complete tax freedom until 2009! We waited too long and consequently we ended up working 35% of our time for the government of India :)

Today we also had one of those fun multi-continent conference calls - Marc in SFO, Phil in New Zeland, Martin in Germany and us in Gurgaon. Its always interesting to hear Marc speak. His ideas are so futuristic that it takes every single brain cell to simply keep pace with him and his thoughts. But he has always been ahead of his time and more often than not been right in his vision for the future. So I am excited to see how things are shaping up and how much Tekriti is involved in defining the future of the web!

To top it off, we are taking the company through an exercise of "training needs assessment" to see what kinds of trainings we need to organize in the coming year. Dr. Nigam from TeNeT is here working 1-1 with each Teknokrat. We will be discussing the results tomorrow in a group meeting.

So, sorry for not being able to respond to all those interesting comments but its been a busy busy week!

hmmm..... check out the comments on this post. People have setup their own mobile phone shops on my blog. Hey, I should be charging them for this!