Thought Clouds

SearchCamp.in - Search Marketing Unconference

2007-10-05T08:49:06Z

I am going to be at SearchCamp.in this weekend. If you would like to attend please register here by adding your name. You can provide additional information about yourself or your company here.

[ I am sorry for posting so late. However in case you drop in, it would be good to meet you. ]

A two day search marketing event at chennai- a terrific time and a superb domain for me given I spent majority of time at uGenie on SEM. I have been highly passionate about that space.

I would possibly cover the event live. Last time I attended Proto.in, I did a blog post on Proto.in post the event giving a gist and my opinions.

Regarding SearchCamp, (excerpt from SearchCamp.in) it is a two day event aimed to bring together the best minds from the Search Engine Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. This event is the first of its kind in India and will feature workshops, debates and keynotes on the present state and evolution of Search Engine Marketing.

To add to it, many of the sponsors are leading Search Marketing firms. There are also lot of independent SEO specialists who are actively taking part. I see a great level of participation from the Indian Search Marketing startups or with a dominant footprint here - pinstorm, position2 etc. efrontier the leading Search Marketing firm is also a sponsor and there are lot of talks from folks from these companies. There are also the big spenders in Search Marketing space who would be able to give a perspective in terms of how this is defining business and how they might want this space to be or their expectations.

However, in all I fear that this is too much of SEO and less of PPC. Of course, Paid Marketing interests me more given my interests in analytics and stats.

I was thinking of presenting something on Effective PPC management or on taking Search Marketing in-house. However due to some constraints I won't be able to do so.

We at Ugenie, decided to take Search Marketing in-house. I was more focused on Paid Marketing - PPC - and very less on SEO, which targets organic traffic. We automated a lot of keyword generation, coming up with campaign structures, keyword pricing and bidding. It is a massive system. Building something generic is pretty hard. Even custom implementation itself might not be feasible for a lot of companies to build and maintain in-house especially hard for startups as the resources are constrained and day to day bidding management would demand a lot of time and focus. However, for companies focused on Search Marketing or big spenders this would mean a great level of control and hence higher level of tuning on ROI and targeting. Even for smaller companies this would mean that they can position themselves to target the long tail to bring their costs down and yet not compromise on traffic or sales.

I will have a lot to write about the current market, trade-offs, tips and tricks in SEM post the event. Keep a watch.

Where have I been

2007-10-02T18:32:55Z

Its been a long time.. so what's up..

That explains the long silence on the blog.

Anyway past is always more clear, I can at least jot that down. And future no one has any clue anyway. So here is a quick update on life.

Work - significant milestones. iRead is now a mainstream business, the biggest book sharing application on Facebook, soon to hit half a million users. Harry Potter Magic Spells application which gave me and mekin a mention in top developers for more than a week is now at 1.3 Million users. And as far as other facebook applications we have launched over the last 3 months I have lost track! Overall we now have a user base of 2M users. All this due to a sweet accident over a weekend! I wonder if it is good or bad :D Thats about the action at work.

I got an iPod Classic woahooo! :) (as the long hunt for a genie lamp failed). A pleasant surprise! This was actually to mark the uGenius award I was given in January '07 for the marketing efforts to hit the board targets. The ipod is pretty cool, a little bulky to carry around. I felt the sound quality is not that great but I was amazed by the image quality. I and my cousin Vijay were condemning as to what a waste it was to have the 2 inch video screen but now i find myself shuffling through the photos and few video songs.

We had a day outing to mark uGenie's first b'day. [Pictures] A bit late but perfect timing given we had good milestones.

Weekends - fun, confused. There is so much to do on weekends like reading, catching up with friends, cribbing ;), playing badminton, spending those lazy afternoons with old friends. And as always there have been long sessions trying to figure out LIFE!

Home - Finally went home for the festival after 2 months.. (yes 2 months is long given my hometown is 120 kms away from here). Went home again for a little longer when I took vacation. By the way this time around I got dial up working from my home town. Yippee! The township is as quiet, nice and pleasant as always. Our green farm lands always beckon. Apart from that things are a little weird with mom. She was the one who kept stretching me all through my childhood and now she wants to just let it out to flap :P

Outings - lots. An impromptu outing with my sister to Tippu's summer palace. Many in Bangalore are not aware of this magnificent monument right in the center of city next to Minto hospital, KR Market, Bangalore. A good write-up on this historical monument can be found here.

Also did a 2 day trek to Edakkal Caves, Meenmutty falls and Chembra Peak - all in and around Wayanad, Kerala with mountainroarers (A very vibrant and friendly group with a passion for adventure. Just loved the company) . This needs a complete blog post, which I hope I would do soon - for now you can see some pictures.
A visit to my friend at Gurgaon. It was quite hot in Delhi even at this time of the year when we look for sweaters and blankets here in Bangalore. I had loads of fun with the folks working at his company, spending late nights watching movies, drinking tea on the terrace, more driving to coffee shops at 12 in the night, quite a bit of fun. Over the weekend we went to see Qutub Minar, watched a play at India Habitat Center (this one is covered in Rang De Basanthi), shopped a bit and tasted a variety of food from the food stalls of each state at Dilli Haat and roamed around a bit.

Anything else - hmm err.. later...
My Blob

Addicted!

2007-08-13T18:11:23Z

New heights - listed in the top 5 developer list!!

2007-07-15T07:41:46Z

I can't be more happy. My adrenaline levels are running high. I and mekin are listed among the top 5 facebook developers :).

Since the leader board is bound to change quickly (We were #2 and #3 yesterday and moved down by 2 positions today) here is a snapshot.

Not just that..
Our new application Harry Potter Magic Spells was ranked the most viral application one day after we launched. We grew from 1000 users to 9000 users in a 12 hour time period during US day time. We are now at #2. Snapshot below.

iRead has been doing great too. We crossed a milestone. Read my earlier post on iRead here. There is something more that I am more excited about which is on its way and I hope all goes well :)

This is a tremendous booster for both of us.

This whole facebook exercise as mekin said in his post has been a tremendous amount of learning and a great sense of accomplishment. We could probably do better and we would constantly strive for that. Some day i would like to take time out and put up a brief article on the learnings.

Best things in life are not things- Part 1!

2007-07-09T18:36:27Z

I was at Chennai from thursday night till sunday night. After a long time, I found myself amidst art at dakshina-chitra, I also met my teacher of oil painting for 3 weeks - Dharma, who now works at amazon chennai, courtesy vinaygmurthy I also got ample time to buy some glass articles and paints at chennai city center (while killing time), and with the freedom that prasannasv showered on me I could happily scatter all my colors at his house and paint!

So this was my holiday at chennai, part 1 - celebrating colors

Little Baskets displayed at rural houses setup Dakshina Chitra

Painted Pots

Those wonderful days as kids

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Art with plaster of paris

CTO Error

2007-07-04T06:44:40Z

Wonder what it is ? Don't you think the ultimate person responsible for an error on a website is the CTO ;)

PS: thankfully it not that perfect a coincidence it is Cto and not CTO.

a spree...

2007-07-01T10:42:54Z

Its probably close to 8 am... still in bed, probably the plans for the day are already working on in my mind. From the sound I know its my maid who is rolling the mat that is on the floor. In all probability even my laptop is lying over there and she would lift it with a lot of care and keep it on the table. Was it 3 or 4 am when I slept or even 5.. I probably don't have the time to think. All I know is I got to get up now and check the number. Yes from past one month that is how life has been. Even before I rub my eyes, my hands go straight to the laptop and I switch it on. By the time it comes out from hibernation, I need to be out of mine! So I hurry up, wash my face and I am quickly back to iRead.

First thing in the morning I hit this page.

Its been a spree, a month now. I and mekin had launched the application in 3 days. It is an application on facebook called iRead - where users can share what they read or want to read, check out what friends are reading, lend and borrow book, rate and review books.. many more features. From then on its been quite a ride running behind competition, matching them, looking for more..

When I and Harish, my manager had spoken about it I guess we both took it very lightly, Harish said "For next 3 weeks you can probably try this side by side", I had said "yeah lets see if it works out". Oh boy! it did. And now it has so much traction and has created a lot of buzz inside Ugenie. And what a race it has been, I loved it!

mekin has already blogged twice about the initial stages and about growth.

This whole exercise has been a holistic experience on idea, execution, people, product, infrastructure, marketing, business, growth and more. It has made us go through success, failure and realize how things should work in a startup. It would take me long to consolidate my thoughts and put them on paper.. A quick one liner would be - "Execution and timing is all that matters".

Right now we are at 72000 users, 1.5 million books added by them with 150000 unique books. Our top user has close to 2000 books, that means she has read 2000 of them. A quick real time peek into our growth here. We have been growing at 4K users per day, since this is more of a serious application - we haven't been very successful at making it truly viral, though we have been trying new ideas, games and the like.

I think 100K users is the minimal milestone to even start gasping for breath and take a break. More importantly, we have a new competitor - visual bookshelf who is moving at a faster pace.

Unfortunately I am already a bit exhausted, saturated, disoriented.. don't know what. I think I just wanted a break. I haven't worked yesterday, may be I couldn't or I did that consciously. Its time that i get charged up again and run at that full pace :) Wish me good luck!

By the way I hope you have checked out the application. If not please create an account on facebook and add iRead. Write to me as to what you think about it, any ideas to make it viral.

Random Ramblings

2007-06-14T11:50:18Z

"When People stop growing, the organization stops growing and then the decline starts ..."

-- From a senior person at my previous job whom I appreciate very much.

Save Life on Earth! Call for Collective Intelligence

2007-05-15T12:40:13Z

.. we have entered a period of consequences
-- Al Gore states introducing his film An Inconvenient Truth.

Today we live in a world which in the recent past, facing a very high number of natural calamities, gives us a tremor in the nerves as we put forth each and every step. Every day we learn media and activists are trying to highlight, find solutions/preventive measures for the innumerable, insurmountable problems/challenges due to imbalance in nature - global warming, mutations, extinction of species and imbalance in food chain, scarcity of drinking water and what not.

Have things gone out of control already? Not completely but we are definitely sitting on a time bomb. Its time to act. We all have been bombarded with emails, newsletters, talks on what we can do individually to help. Today, I came across something very different.

Two companies, Zerofootprint - a company dedicated to reduce our environmental footprint/impact and Business Objects - a leader in Business Intelligence have joined hands to target the problem in a highly systematic manner, involving the community at large, and leveraging collective intelligence in the real world.

Insight, the web community that has been setup, is a call for highly enthusiastic number crunchers - passionate individuals, data lovers, analysts, students and teams - to join hands to tackle the hardest problems in business and society.

Their specific step towards the problem of global warming - Open Data to reduce cities' environmental impact - requests all responsible individuals (esp urban dwellers) to participate and provide valuable data on their consumption of energy - such as miles driven each year, miles flown, kilowatt hours used, location of home and office - and the tool powered by BO provides you the impact you have on Planet Earth, the only planet known to have life. They also provide measures to reduce negative impact - like carbon dioxide emitted directly or indirectly through your actions. You can even track and visualize your impact.

There is something more, definitely exiting to lot of you out there, all this data would be available in the insight database, and analysts all over the world have access to this data, pose solutions and help cities reduce their negative environmental impact.

Please REGISTER HERE to participate in the collective intelligence drive to save life on earth.

PS: There is an ongoing web cast (15th of May) of a series of discussions on Collective Intelligence - 24 hours of light
Even I came across it very late and am not able to participate in the event. You can view the video here. I hope they will have a recast or a write-up.

Update: Changed occurrences of "Save Planet Earth" to "Save Life on Earth"

Random Ramblings - Losing Control

2007-05-10T11:41:45Z

"A necessity possession for someone trying to take control is to also excel at losing control."

Many a times it becomes necessary to lose control so that you can move on to take control of something else - bigger or better or because you never should have taken control in the first place. Whatever be the cause, one of the hardest problem to cope with is "losing control".

Now, what do I mean by "control" here ? It might mean passion for something, an emotion or a responsibility- be it self inflicted, obsessed or forced. Whatever be the reason, unless you involve yourself in the process of taking control, you have not really taken control. And unless you lose control naturally, you never took control. If you ever find yourself finding it hard to lose control it would mostly mean that you really did not extract what you wanted or should have while you had control, lest it wouldn't have been hard to lose control.

Moonlit Trek to Skandagiri

2007-05-02T14:20:21Z

It was a splendid experience day before - trekking all night hoping to catch those heavenly clouds at dawn. Alas they were missing but the sunrise itself was so beautiful and nice and not to mention the feel of the gusty winds for whom you and the grass blade on the hill top are no different.

Till late afternoon on Monday, I had no clue about the adventure I was upto for the night. Pavithra, a very close friend from hostel/college insisted that I join her for the moonlight trekking that night. I was crunching numbers at office till 8:35 pm and rushed home to join pavithra with a target to catch the bus at hebbal flyover at 10 pm.
The travelogue

The plan was to reach Kalavarahalli, which is around 60 kms from hebbal flyover towards chikkaballapura. We would trek all night to the hill top, so as to catch the sunrise and hopefully some clouds (though it is summer) which are usually described as heavenly. We would come back to bangalore by 10 am the next day.

8:50 pm - Leave from home towards hebbal flyover in a ric.
9:20 pm - The ric runs out of gas at Mekri circle! We were already late and wondered if we would reach the spot in time at all! Thankfully another auto with just one passenger agreed to drop us at the spot.
9:40 pm - We reach the petrol pump where the rest of the crowd was still gathering. I meet pavithra's friends Sandeep and Anu, who turned to be a great company.
10:30 pm - 90 ppl leave for Kalavarahalli in 2 buses. We played antakshari en-route and enjoyed the travel, still wondering if I and Pavi really made it.
12:00 pm - We reach papakshi mata in kalavarahalli, which is at the base of Skandagiri betta (hill). Light dinner is served.
Dinner - Sandeep & Pavithra

01:15 am - The moonlit trek starts :) Since Sandeep, part of the organizing comitte, chose to aid/manage the last set of trekkers, we started late and trekked behind the others.

The group - From left: pavithra, myself (in front), anu and sandeep

The troupe

We pretty much trekked continuously except for a couple of breaks here and there for a couple of minutes. In the interim I captured few shots of the moon, which seemed as if we could touch it at the hill top. My camera is not well suited for night landscape mode and given that I am no photographer, I couldn't do better.

4:00 am - We are at the hill top trying hard to balance ourselves against the wind. The wind was so strong that it could carry my bag lying on the ground few feet away before I could even respond. We had to cover ourselves with shawl and jackets as it was quite cold too. We played music, talked and watched the sky till dawn.
5:15 am - Moon sets. It was much darker at this time.
5:45 am - We start seeing streaks of light through the clouds in the east. And as the sun rose above the clouds the colors were brilliant.
Dawn to Rise

I shot this video at between 5:45 - 6:15 am in the morning. Towards the end of the movie you would see some clouds or was it just wind with mist. Seeing them we hoped against hope in this summer that there would be clouds...

6:15 am - We start down hill. We hadn't climbed down beyond few meters when we sense that the wind was stronger again and clouds started moving. Being summer, it was no surprise that they sky was again clear in 5 minutes and we decided to go downhill.

Life & Light - I captured few wild flowers and vegetation amidst the bright morning light.

7:45 am - we reached the bottom but around a km away from where the buses were. There were quite a few moments to capture but my camera batteries went out of charge.

Few members of the Shanthi Jyothi Ashrama spoke to us and informed us about the ashram - anna dasoha(they serve food for everyone who visit the ashram) , vidya dana (residential education, mostly vedic scripts for kids), havana homas (prayers for the well being of people & the world), dhyana kshetra (place for meditation) etc. They offered us to have breakfast and we left for bangalore after that at around 8:45 am.

10:30 am: back in the city amidst the honking traffic far from the nature.
Thank you pavi for making it happen and Anu, Sandeep for the great company and ofcourse the folks who organised it - Lacchi (who could not be part of the trek), Deepak, Anand, Mallika, Prasanna, Sandeep and others.

The same team is organising another 2 day trek to Bandajje near ujre (dharmastala). I believe its going to be one day uphill, passing through bandajje falls. Camp at the hill top and return the next day. If you are interested I can put you in touch with Sandeep.

You're Expired!

2007-04-26T04:42:27Z

Wondering what that means, no wonder! That's the first mail I read in the morning. The subject was "You're expired". Err there was no one else around to confirm but I could sense and was pretty confident I was alive. lol

A spam mail, nope, it was from McAfee. The mail read "Your PC protection has expired. Renew today"

Wow.. hold on, creativity is fine, but this, is a highly exaggerated metaphor <should i say beyond tolerance levels>. But would I have bothered to read that mail, if the subject read "Please renew your subscription with McAfee". Can't say!

On a similar line, would you have read this blog till here.. ;) Though the blog as such might not be worth your time.. now that's the trick with advertisements. I appreciate the curiosity it brings though it could have been better in this case. It didn't have to make me wonder if it is actually my computer that holds my life ;) It might not get that bad, but possible.

Update:
>> It might not get that bad, but possible.
Google once definitely made me panic for a day when they blocked my Google Account for a day. I use gtalk to communicate with my colleagues too. Then no access to mail is obviously worrisome. Then I deal with Adwords, which is my daily bread! And then their docs, community and other miscellaneous things. At times I wonder if it is dangerous/foolish to invest in one single entity and let it control you. May be I should spread my dependancy (IM, mail, etc . ads which i can;t) across yahoo, google and msn!

And for those who are wondering, why McAfee.. I hate it too.. but that was a free version that came with the operating system. I think ClamWin , which is a open source anti-virus software under GNU GPL is much better. Any why windows.. it is because of microsoft and google again :D

Finalize Final Finally

2007-04-15T07:41:20Z

A question for you: What is the difference between final, finally and finalize?
Please answer it to yourself before you start reading. :)

A SAMPLING (Not a random sampling, it is from people I have on my IM and were online at the moment and answered]

Friend1. i hope it is java. off the top of my head, final is used to specify that a reference will not be modified hence allowing complier optimizations. finally, i think only in the exception throw clause, and finalize a method of Object that can be extended in any class to specify cleanup when the object is destroyed

are you sure that question was meant for me?

Friend2: http://allu.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/difference-between-final-finally-and-finalize/
me: Well I know to use Search too.. comeon give me a short ans
Friend2: aahaa

final - keyword used for class method and variables, final class cant be subclassed. final method cant be overridden. final variable cant be changed

finalize - method called just prior to garbage collection

finally - exception handling.... exectued after try/ catch.. finally gets executed whether or not try / catch is executed

Friend3: final -> similar to a constant, though u can set final member fields once inside the constructor
finally -> is the third block in a try-catch-finally sequence. it gets run after either of try or catch blocks are executed
me: oh man! this is too complex.. go ahead [winks]

Friend3: finalize() -> similar to a destructor in Java, defined in the Object class, overridable, but no guarantee of being called by the garbage collector when the object goes out of scope

its not too complex, finally is really simple ["love this one"]

its just the 3rd block

if no exception gets thrown, java will skip the catch blocks and execute the finally block

if an exception is thrown, after the catch block is executed, control passes to the finally block

Friend4: for a second was thinking about their meaning in english :D

Friend5:

final - is final

finalize to make final

finally is at the point where things are final

RESPONSE from the crowd: Once they doubt or realize its too unnatural for me to forget these elements of Java
Friend1: knew you'd be up to something crazy like that
Friend2: grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

jyothi down down!!

Friend3: u must have had quite a laugh when i wrote "its not complex..."
Friend4: u hiring a technical writer?
Friend5: oh you're asking a java question and some one gives an english answer
if i were the interviewer, I'd hire that guy!

EXPECTED ANSWER:
Final is an adjective, Finally an Adverb and Finalize a Verb. :)
Bingo!

MY OPINION:
Most thought about answers : #1 (he asked me if i meant in java before he started.) and #4: [instantaneous reply was good.]
Best Answer: #5 and of course a great decision too.
Unexpected: #3, I really expected this one to give me an answer based on Grammar err.. English Grammar. He has been off Programming in Java and does some mathematical modeling these days, still.

I really wonder how much influence ones work does. At least programming seems to be polluting a lot. Ask someone What languages do you know ? ;) Guess the responses would be similar though I expect it to be better, for there would be more people like #5 who would first think normally [or to say crack the joke] and then ask did you actually wanted to know programming languages ? ;)

Now the next one: Why do Programmers like Ruby ? Let your imagination flow.. ;)

Fighting Click Fraud

2007-03-02T08:18:01Z

Google again has distinguished itself from the other Advertising networks by allowing advertisers to block IP's that they don't trust or flag them as fraudulent IPs.
Excerpt
...
Thus, starting in March, Google plans to allow its advertisers to "blacklist" certain IP addresses for whatever reason, such as suspicion of click fraud or simply because their clicks never lead to a sale, he said.
"IP filtering is going to allow advertisers to say: 'If I believe a given IP address isn't producing productive traffic for me, then I don't want to ever show my ads to that IP address,'" Ghosemajumder said.
...
Read more about Google's propositions to fight click fraud.

Overture too allows you to block them on request, but I hope google will allow advertisers to directly block IP's.

If you did not know already, I do SEM (search engine marketing) for ugenie. Recently generating click fraud reports have been taking a lot of my time: analysing, reporting and following up with the Ad Networks. It has been a little frustrating too as data is a lot messy and our user tracking framework is still maturing.

Fake Mask of Customer Service

2007-02-03T12:20:50Z

Customer is God only when the Company/ Producer is in Hell and wants to see some light in the tunnel!

(I am definitely influenced by working for Trilogy and its Business Value Model, breathing the core values day in and day out )

I have been having a really hard time discussing, following up and almost shouting at the Airtel folks. I moved from relative outskirts of central city to the city center: From Banashankari to a few meters away from ramakrishna ashram, basavanagudi. Airtel which happily set up a new internet connection at my old place in 48 hrs time now takes 60 hrs before getting back to me that too after creating a chaos for the 5 days and wasting 30 minutes of mine everyday. One person out of some 13-15 calls i have made was even rude.. to an extent that i hung up.

After all the miserable time for the last 7 days the Final verdict: Airtel cannot provide service at my new place.
Reason: The nearest point of existing connection is 100 meters from my place (yes It is not kilometers it is meters).
Possible internal reason: Its older bangalore, mostly residential and everyone there has a BSNL phone at home. No prospective new market share there.

I wish I had some documentary evidence of all the conversations I had with Airtel for the past 6 days, the chaos and the false promises and sue them for the time and energy they have cost me.

By the way the lack of connectivity at home has affected my life a lot.. I am realising how dependent I have become.

Starting late...

2007-01-26T14:13:08Z

"Girls 100m heats 2 get ready" came a shout
I watched the other girls tighten laces of their spikes and keeping their blocks ready. I had nothing to do and just waited for them to read out the names and the track numbers. I was told that i was to take position in track #2. I walked up to the track, measured step from start line and took position within 30 seconds. I turned to find out that everyone else was still busy setting up their blocks.

I was at the State Level Athletics meet 96-97 organised at the Mangala stadium, Mangalore representing my district in 2 track events. It was november 1996. I had kept everyone astonished at the district level sports meet a month ago winning two track event back to back. Everyone was speaking of the girl in blue shirt and blue shorts. But here I was amongst girls from sports schools, girls who have been training under eminent coaches, even otherwise participants with lot more exposure than I had at that time.

I was to run bare foot and without blocks or any other accessories. To be frank, till then I had seen blocks only on athletics meet telecasted on TV. I had tried to run with spikes few weeks ago. You need considerable practice even to get used to them and use them to your benefit. So I had decided I would run as I always did.

Was I funk? Yes.

"Everyone ready?"
All of us keep our focus completely on our tracks trying to keep the focal length reach the finish line.

"On your march, Get set <fire>"
splash..It would have been hard to notice that the girls had leaped 5-6 feets in each step as they started, if the girl in track#6 had not fouled. A whistle goes into the air. I find myself at least 5 mts behind the girl who was leading.

Words from our unofficial sports guide ring in my ears "If you lose the first few seconds in short sprints, you have almost lost"

"Foul track 6. Everyone back to position"
We all get back. Again the girls take a little time to kneel and take position. Girl on track #6 was warned that she would be expelled if she fouls again.

Second time, "On your march, Get set <fire>"

Spree.. I finish last but one. :|

I got back to the stands where teachers and students from my district were seated. There was no one from my school except for Hari, with whom I used to practice 400m everyday in the ground near my house. This ground only has a 200m track and the outer circle is actually 400m but you can only use that to jog and warm up. We all talked about how good and well trained everyone else was. Their accessories, gadgets, energy drinks they used. How old the other participants looked and doubted that they may be above age limit and would have given wrong DOB during registration etc .. In fact they were just much stronger by physique, which is expected for people in sports.

Though I knew I couldn't have made it in the race, it somehow made me a little upset. Hari spoke to me in the interim and tried to boost confidence giving reasons why 400m is going to be different. And why spikes or blocks would not affect so much there. Simple its a longer distance.

400m heats were supposed to be held right after lunch. Damn I was already tired and I can't have a good lunch.Had to live with more glucose instead.

"Girls 400m heats 4, everyone there"
We get up from the ground, jump around a bit and move around warming up. They start calling the names with track numbers.

"track 1 abc ... track 6 xyz.. "
Damn I am going to be on the outer-most track. I was very good at covering at the the curves of the inner track.

"track 8 J T Jyothi.. err.. amayee, Tumkur district"
Tough time pronouncing my name. I quickly waved avoiding to hear that and walked past everyone to take lead position on track #8. I notice that again I am only one without spikes. Hmm.. I take a second, shed all fears and made sure I focus just on the race ahead.

"Everyone ready?"
"On your march, get set <fire>"
I felt very confident this time around probably coz I was leading as I started from track#8 and good thing was I maintained it. I kept the speed constant for 2 hundred metres and the 3rd I improved pace. But somehow I couldn't collect energy to increase pace on the 4th hundred. It was a very poor finish.

Whatever I was celebrating in the glory that I came first in the heats :)

Now the 400m finals was on the 3rd day and I had to wait. We had loads of fun in and around Mangalore. Most students in Sports meet are usually very notorious and very different from those nice obedient kids in schools. I learnt that it is not surprising that boys of our age (then 14-15) drink. Rubbing iodex sitting in those vacant class rooms in the evening and making the dias your bed in the night to get rid of all the pain was nothing new after being to many sports meet up the ladder. We all visited a private beach called Summer Sands where the sand was almost white and the water not polluted and clear. Astonishingly that place in Mangalore is called "Jyothi". We also went to this street which is full of icecream shops. This was interesting that Mangalore has dedicated streets for shoes, leather articles, clothes and so on.

The day came, I definitely did not keep high hopes having seen how better the other heats were. I did descently well, I could finish and I finished 4th.

May be by next time I will coax appaji to get me a pair of spikes, practice well. I also made sure I run longer during my jog to increase my stamina. I almost ran the 400m at constant speed but still hadn't aced it. Proof the heats.

I learnt: Starting early is important. It really has its edge. You can probably hope to make up for a poor start over the long run IF you are very strong and execute brilliantly but never when you need to capture a spike. At times you need to understand this and give up but on the other cases it might be necessary that you don't lose hope and strive towards success.

I found myself in a similar position yesterday under a very different context and it was really nice writing this article taking my thoughts 10 years back..

By the way on my athletics stint: I put myself into intense practice following the state level meet. However I had a fracture of my right leg when I was in class 10 and had to discontinue practice and gradually it died.

The Weekend: Proto.in

2007-01-22T09:20:13Z

Where was I this weekend? I was on an awesome ride with Srini (my friend from Trilogy) enjoying the early morning weather of Chennai and riding at 90kmph :). But it got really humid and hot over the day even in this winter. Thankfully I was more absorbed in some live action of some new emerging products /services coming out of Indian startups. I was at Proto.in
umang was supposed to accompany me and dropped off due to inevitable reasons (hehe). Oh my! what was I to do alone there. Should I go ? I did and I was lucky to meet Yashwant and Srikanth TS from my college, who were a great company. More, Pravin, a colleague and ex-Trilogian was also there with his IIT gang. I also met swaroop, the python guy from college :) and his friends. So I definitely had a crowd as against my fear of being left alone :)

About the event:
Proto.in is a great start in India. There were 250-300 people present there yesterday. The arrangements were good and presentations were quite organised too. It was many others opinion too that they could have done better with lot more publicity and getting more people to participate.

The event as such was focused more on providing a forum for the companies, VCs and others to peep into the innovations and trigger interest. There were around 30 companies that presented their product yesterday out of only 115 registrations that had happened. There were a few VCs and a couple of angel investors too.

Each team got 8 minutes to present, No Q&A session following that (sigh!) and frequent breaks to network. Areas were: Telecom, Infrastructure & Development Platforms, Internet & Web 2.0, Consumer Electronics, Business & Productivity & Mobile.

More Details
There were few ideas or pilots that interest me.
- DesiCrew [New]: Rural BPO - a distributed model of outsourcing operations in Rural India (I think this is great and I believe there is lot of locked potential in Rural India. It is definitely tough to execute and maintain)
- NetPC[Relatively New]: A low cost connectivity solution. live and running for quite some time. Internet to the masses is their pitch. I believe this can act as a solution for the basic problem of reaching more people in India and for many ideas revolving around online <anything>
- ValueFirst [Old]: quickly pluggable mobile enabled services. They are old and have a huge user base already. They can grow big with more features and add ons with the setup and user base they already have.
- SpotEasy [New]: product search and recommendation engine (lacked business focus or ideas of expansion but might be a good technology acquisition if they are really good at search and recommendation as a service) [cannot find their website and I doubt if they own spoteasy.com. I have requested for a private alpha invite]
- StoreGrid [Relative New]: A higly configurable and convenient data backup manager, easily affordable and good features and service.
- Picsquare [Relative New]: Targeted at NRIs wanting to share photographs with folks back home. They have a model where you can upload photographs, share and also order to deliver paper prints, cds, calendars, greeting cards to a postal address. They are already operational and I believe are running profitably. However, Yash told me that Indian Postal Service already has a similar service and definitely has low costs on operation with its wide base. They are probably lacking marketting.

The list of VC's who were present :Mr. Vardha representing iLabs, Canon partners and couple of angel investors Asif & Arif from Vakil group, NS Raghavan of Nathur holdings. I believe there were at least 15 of them in all (but no big names I think) . Only a few were available on sunday and we ofcourse could interact with a much lesser portion of the ones available.

DISCLAIMER: There were more companies and would post more in detail in a followup entry.

<Update> If you are looking for more details -
A very crisp and comprehensive coverage by Swaroop
An exhaustive Live blogging by Gokul
</Update>

Opinions: [A little long, did not spend time to condense, so read on if you can bear with it :) ]

Not representative: I personally felt that there are a lot many companies based in India (targetting Indian market too) doing lot more interesting stuff and with strong bases which were not present at proto.in yesterday. I definitely had expected to see a lot more @ proto.in with all the buzz we hear.

India is not there yet : From above proto did not represent the action in India. Even otherwise I have started to think may be India really lacks enough action or business focus at this point. There probably could have been lot ideas in domains like travel & transport, telecommunication, finance & insurance, network & connectivity which already have a base infrastructure, need and reach.
Do you also think that India is low on action, planning, execution and just about the real action beneath the buzz around startups ?

Orientation: Most companies focused on their demo and I can hardly remember any team that covered the market state, competition, positioning, revenue model or barrier to entry as they see. Few lacked to bring out their key distinguishing features too. A lot of them are in private alpha or earlier stages and hence cannot really play around with their products. I could still meet some of the people working on them and dig deeper during the break hours. But astonishingly found that very few break their heads thinking whether the idea will survive, sustain, and make money!!

Where is it happening: Was chennai the wrong place for proto.in ? Most of the companies who came there were based out chennai. But we all know there are so many more startups blooming one every week almost in Bangalore. I personally think that Bangalore and even Gurgaon is much happening place and many would have restrained due to the time and place factors. If the reach (I mean people) doesn't improve I don;t think I will travel all the way to chennai for proto.in next year.

Commitment or so they see: People do expect you to put in full time to buy your idea or believe it. You have to even believe in what you are doing :( so much that you give it full time taking all risks or uncertainties. Quit your job seems the motto for young entrepreneurs. Even if you think or say you are competent of doing 2 things (say regular job and a not-a-hobby project) at the same time the impressions vary with a person putting fulltime and balancing two things.

Will you rise funding: There is huge inclination for funding and support for startups in India. VC's all over the world are looking to invest in India. So this I see contracdicts my view on Indian startups today. Anyway, do you have an idea ? You need to know your business and If you need funding pitch it with confidence and ofcourse as said below: Quit your job before that and focus ;) .With a very high probability you will rise sufficient funds.

The big event: Thanks to the proto team for giving a peek into the whole stuff. I spoke to one of the key organisers: Vijay Anand. They have definitely put a lof of effort in making it happen. I am sure they will be doing a great job in the following years. However I think proto has to focus on two things:
First, Defining what they want proto to represent. From what Vijay explained about the selection process and what they wanted teams to present at the event: This years focus was more on the providing a forum for companies from dedicated teams (refer full-time commitment above) which have not any significant funding. Making it representative of the happenings around would be lot more interesting and valuable for varied groups of people. It is also good to position each product/service and evaluate relatively.
Second, Proto needs a lot of Publicity and Marketing (nothing wrong). The publicity and targetted pitches would automatically attract more companies, more VC's and angel investors, more attendee registrations which would make it more popular and hence more valuable. Its a cycle.

Should I stop :) :
There are lot more things that ran through my mind sitting in ICSR auditorium yesterday, I have jotted down few things and more observations post that. Were you also there at proto.in ? If yes, why don't you tell me about your thoughts on the event and things to follow. If No, tell me if you like to hear about any specific company, product or anything more about proto.in.

By the way I am thinking about DesiCrew pretty seriously. It has a lot of potential. But any distributed model is tough to collabrate and make it a success.

A bottle of scotch, couple of movies and Microsoft Excel 2007..

2007-01-03T19:29:33Z

That is definitely not me, at least given the former. This was what my new colleague Suvomoy exclaimed when asked "So what are you doing on New Year's Night"

I got my own hands on Excel 2007 today. (I know its pretty late, yet better late than never!)
My first thought "Am I using Harish's mac by mistake?" [Harish is my manager cum co-founder/president of uGenie] The new look of excel: so sleak, so light and aimed at providing you a very pleasant satisfying user experience. (Or may be coz I was stuck in the drought lands of Open Office for very long)

Before I brief you on my findings today,
DISCLAIMER:
1. I am not an extensive user of spreadsheets
2. I only have 2 or 3 excel sheets open on my machine most of the times. I guess (rather hope) I am getting there..
3. I don't code in VB. I don't even use 75% of the functions available on even older versions of Excel.
4. I have had just a couple of disgruntled moments when I had to live with databases or other crude ways because the data I wanted to look at had more than 65K rows.
(My company isn't going to get a Reporting tool for another one month :( )

Now back to the point
- Higher limits on many things.
Excel now supports 1M rows!! 16K columns. I can sort with 20 times more fields than older versions (3 fields only).
- Look and feel
Just create a simple pivot table and you will know what I am talking about.
- High user experience
Eg1. check out the tool bar menu and the layout. On a click on each menu item, the options under them appear flat replacing the shortcut panel which was static before. (However, I sort of still like the old drop downs as it would have occupied lesser space, and also gives a more organised feeling or has a high recap value)
Eg2. Options available for conditional formatting. They are all there! neat job.
Eg3. Best of all: Easy to use pivot table assist dialog. Can it be made any more intuitive or useful. I bet its tough.
I also think this version has better formatting , charting and recording packages.
- Better colors, more formatting options. In short better presentable features.

The exploration continues... no scotch, no movies, just Excel 2007 and ofcourse numbers :)

The last email..

2006-12-24T15:49:40Z

An old incomplete blog entry.. restored from the draft today

Date: Oct 29
Srini left bangalore today morning. He was one of the closest pals at Trilogy. After all, we slogged together for 2 long years in the same team.

Shyamal & Nishanth, who were the very first members in India, both headed out to start their own ventures.

Vinay, my dearest and oldest teammate from the days of TU, is pretty much the only one left from the old team in India, which they always referrred as core team. (yeah given that our team was setup during out TU, its old even for just 2 years, and we were founding members :D)

I looked at my own goodbye email, the mail I sent on July 15, 2006. (The journey had started on June 21, 2004 after my engineering)
====
Subject: au revoir!
Date: Jul 14, 2006 3:58 PM

I am off the train to bonusville.... I am getting off this journey as a Trilogian. Can't believe it myself!

2 wonderful years, so many great moments to cherish, many people to thank, I definitely can't put them in a couple of lines. I thank you all making this a memorable journey so far.

A snapshot of the innumerable thoughts coming to me ....

.... and the journey continues..

I would be joining a startup and would continue to be in Bangalore. Do give me a call sometime if you want to catch up :)

I will miss you all!

Best wishes,
Jyothi
==========

Stumbled upon this link on Ryan's family website(Ryan was our Program director. Very competant, efficient and connects deeply with folks in India)
November 11, 2005: Ryan takes a quick trip to India! He was only there for 4 days (which hardly justifies the 3 days of travel!) but still had a wonderful time.
Very hilarious to read now, pretty much drifts our(the TIS team) memory back to those days.

Current update: Date Dec 24
The good news is:
1. I have started to see the energy in uGenie. Its certainly very exciting times ahead.
2. Srini is happy staying with his parents and gets good time to spend with his SO also(now not just on phone).
3. Vinay seems to be getting the credit and lot more relaxed times (yes being in Trilogy). New organisation structure seems to have clicked well. He says I missed it! He sounds very content now though he is one among those highly confused guys still.
4. Shyamal must be doing good. Last met him at Srini's farewell dinner. Can't find updates on his company TechJini blog though.
5. Nishant was in Bangalore this week. He has started hiring for his own startup - Cobaan He has put up a slideshow why-you-should-quit-your-job-and-join-a-startup too :)

Plans ahead: Make a trip to Pondi (hopefully Vinay would join) in Jan '07 and meet Srini :)

starting a venture, running a successful company and establishing

2006-10-28T04:19:25Z

One thing I really want to take time off is to spend some time to think, compile and post about Learning from a Start-up A couple months back I joined a start-up which is soon going to make a beta release, (an impressive fast cycle!), but everyday I come back to think couldn't we have done better at this one thing, aren't we missing on this crucial piece.. Thoughts span: Design, technology decisions, leadership, hiring, project management, motivation, strategies, priorities, culture..

A bunch of techie people can always come out with something smart to get sold for millions of dollars.. But now what makes a startup reach the state of a establishment, a brand.. "A company I want to work for" - A tough one

I think my previous employer had most of the traits: After all everybody speaks about them, Harvard has case studies. The India establishment of the company seemed to have delineated the values, the culture the company had, the tech diff and thus hurting the reputation the company had. I have had many talks with people with different responsibilities, different views and experience. Our GM, our director, one of the founders, a leadership team in the spin off which started to attract more people, people who managed me, who mentored, junior who looked up for advice, peers, the top few, the failures, new hires, school kids as interns, people who moved to the spin off, who moved out, outsourcers.. There is a ton of information to compile there.

Then the new startup.. few apparent mistakes, of course reasonable given the time line and the rush! Still I think few things like leadership, motivation, accountability, metrics, key people cannot be compromised for anything.

If I compare what I accomplished out into the industry as a School kid during my TU (a 3 month period) to what I am doing today in the startup after having spent 2+ years (I know its peanuts) in a great company.. I am disappointed a little. So what made TU a high energy, high innovation point. Now I definitely have a better process in place, better forethought, something more complete and more valuable.. but why can't we have the better of both worlds...

Keep a watch! I will return with more precise thoughts and open questions to discuss.

Dreamer soul

2006-09-28T18:30:11Z

Couldn't agree more with this :

You Are a Dreaming Soul

Your vivid emotions and imagination takes you away from this world So much so that you tend to live in your head most of the time You have great dreams and ambitions that could be the envy of all... But for you, following through with your dreams is a bit difficult You are charming, endearing, and people tend to love you. Forgiving and tolerant, you see the world through rose colored glasses. Underneath it all, you have a ton of passion that you hide from others. Always hopeful, you tend to expect positive outcomes in your life. Souls you are most compatible with: Newborn Soul, Prophet Soul, and Traveler Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

Few more seconds..

2006-09-27T19:51:45Z

Life has been extremely difficult juggling around with a new job in a start-up, sister's marriage discussions, my own deep thoughts on relations, leaving out thoughts of higher studies.. and more!

Was telling a friend that no time seems sufficient. Coincidentally was looking at the manual pages of date to extract date in a specific format and tumbled upon this interesting piece of comment:

"Time runs slower at the beginning, faster at the end of a period; for we tend to conceive of periods in terms of time remaining rather than time elapsed, and minutes near the end of a period constitute a greater percentage of remaining time than minutes near the beginning.

Time at the beginnings and ends of periods is generally fragmented. We sit down to read for two hours and spend the first few minutes arranging ourselves in our chairs, stationing our lamps and generally trying to free our minds from the immediate past and burrow them into present concentration. A hundred-odd minutes later our concentration begins to flag. We look at our watches more frequently, stretch stiff muscles, and deal with the anticipation or anxiety which inheres in the activity to come.

It is at the center of the period, distinct from these two extremes but protected by them, that the heart of the activity and the real value of the involvement lie. Two obvious corollaries spring from these principles: (1) In planning ahead we should remember that usable time is at best 80 to 85 percent of total time. (2) Long unbroken periods contain more usable time than do short periods totaling the same length."

.. thats the key.. Long unbroken periods, I really have to keep aside time for all my contradicting demands. Else I would be splitting the entire spectrum into fragments and the effective time on these fragments would be much less than 80-85%

Boy! Days are flying by.. wishlists continue grow! Hope freedom doesn't diminish

More at Time and the Art of Living
Very tempted to buy this book, but then where's the time to read!!

Quotes from Tagore

2006-08-15T14:57:58Z

Its 60th year of Independence. Most of us would have sung the National Anthem today (at least heard). I know a lot of the crowd don't fancy these things any longer. I would not be surprised if you tell me you were still asleep at 8 on August 15th.

I was at my sister's hospital for the flag hoist. The ceremony was short and sweet. No, I am not going to describe anything here..

The intent of this post was to appreciate Tagore and his brilliant piece of literature. Off-late I have read quite a lot of Tagore. Geethanjali, Farewell my Friend, The Garden and a lot of quotes and snippets from his poems and novelettes. Just brilliant, have not read anything better that describes emotions. He seems to have had a eclectic taste and commands understanding into many domains! I have become an ardent fan!

Few stray birds..
"His own mornings are new surprises to God"

"Man does not reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it."

"Take my wine in my own cup, friend.
It loses its wreath of foam when poured into that of others"

Shall also quote a line from Farewell my Friend for today, which is a very sensible romantic novelette.

"When an impediment crosses the way of love and we are prevented from loving someone whom we might have loved, then such a person becomes for us an object, not of indifference, but of the very opposite of love, blind hatred."

My favorite: "The mind, sharp but not broad, sticks at every point but does not move"

Spell Bee

2006-08-14T19:13:34Z

Which one is the right spelling

referrer
referer

Remember the Referrer bonus or if you have been sailing with weblogs a lot then you would say the Referer , oh it is indeed in the standard HTTP headers!
Beware : http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/referer
<World-Wide Web> A misspelling of "referrer" which somehow made it into the HTTP standard. A given web page's referer (sic) is the URL of whatever web page contains the link that the user followed to the current page. Most browsers pass this information as part of a request.

Installing Mondrian: Back to the same square [?]

2006-08-13T10:17:42Z

About to install mondrian on my development machine. Reminds me of a similar day 2 years back.

We were all in Trilogy University then, our pitch for the TU project was a Open source solution for Business Intelligence. Yes! The entire suite from Data ETL,(Extract Transform and Load) to reporting, Guess we would have taken years.

We did extensive research on existing solutions, proprietary and open source. Business Objects, SOS, Crystal reports , Microsoft.. lot of big players out there in this space. An open source solution even to come anywhere close seemed almost impossible. But Open source always has some solution there :) There is this tool called mondrian (http://mondrian.sourceforge.net), which is opensource's answer for OLAP, which is quite dominated by Microsoft SQL Analysis server, BO. There were a couple of not so complete solutions for reporting eg. jReports, jFreechart with mondrian.

The challenge from Joe, our CEO @ Trilogy, was that we should be able to run a very critical application of Trilogy on our proposed solution at the end of three months. The expected size of the database 500 Gigs (not sure if he said the cubes were of that size: Insane) Will mondrian even handle 100 G. They claimed to, OK lets take the challenge.

The start was terrible. It was almost a nightmare getting mondrian up and running. Something or the other got screwed up, it was the interaction with mysql then the OLAP server config and finally even jFreechart didn't spare us, this one was not compatible with few browsers, guess i was using Opera. Guess it took me 1.5 - 2 days for the weirdest of the reasons.

Then we had many more hurdles, couldn't sell the business pitch to Joe and team. Team got demotivated, people started moving out. Finally even I moved and started to work on this optimization problem in Insurance space. We succeeded. Even the BI team did a lot of good work, they finally did run a portion of the application I guess. The cubes were being processed for 3 full days.. They had not got an YES for their project. We were counting on that team so that TU hits the success margin to go for a trip. Just the night before the schedule trip and yo! our tickets weren't canceled, we were all frolicking on the beaches of Goa by evening.

I am just hoping mondrian doesn't pose problems for me now!