/home/siddhi

Bathing Pool

2012-01-30T14:33:00.001+08:00

Bathing Pool
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

This is an image of the Roman bathhouse at Bath. It was built around 50 AD by the Romans and has been preserved until now. The water is an unusual green colour because of algae growing in it.

Minimum Viable Product & the Tour My App roadmap

2012-01-09T01:47:00.001+08:00

Recently there has been a lot of noise made about minimum viable products (MVP). MVP was the topic at this month's Chennai Open Coffee Club. Unfortunately I couldn't make it at the last minute, so there are my thoughts on MVP and our approach to building Tour My App.

We recently launched a new product called Tour My App. This is a product through which you can create "tours" to guide users step by step through the actions required to complete tasks in your web application. In this post I'll explain how we are applying the MVP concept in Tour My App.

First some history.

We've always wanted a tour functionality in our other product - Tools For Agile. We searched for various solutions, but didn't find anything that fit our needs. In the meantime, The Startup Center had an event called In 50 Hours. The premise of the event is simple - build a product from scratch in 50 hours. Kausikram went ahead and built an initial prototype of Tour My App over the weekend. The idea was to later on incorporate that into our product. However, during the demo at In 50 Hours, many people expressed interest in having that functionality in their products as well. We then decided to split this functionality into a separate product.

Tour My App was born.

Having decided to build it out into a separate product, we now needed to figure out our release plan. Here is where the MVP concept enters the picture. MVP is a principle to build just enough of the product to validate your assumptions. They may be assumptions on user adoption, pricing model, sales model, technology... anything relating to the product. We have some idea about all these factors when we start, but they are all assumptions. How do we validate it? What we do not want to do is to build a big product and then learn that many of our assumptions are wrong. So, our goal was to build the product piece by piece in order to answer the most important questions up front.

Out of all the questions, the top questions right now were

Is Tour My App solving a real problem?
Will people pay to have this problem solved?

The idea for Tour My App comes directly from a problem we faced ourselves. We badly wanted this functionality in Tools For Agile. Our analytics showed that many users signed up for Tools For Agile but would leave before they performed a single action. If we could get users started easily, then we could make our users much more productive - and increase the chance they would become heavy users.We were ready to spend money to get this solved, but we couldn't find any other product that we could use. We were desperate to get a solution. That is why after a few months of looking, Kausik decided to just write it himself.

But this is just one data point. Were there other companies like this? And would they pay to have it solved?

These were the questions we wanted to answer.

So we did something unconventional - we charged for the beta.

Generally beta testers get the product free. So why did we charge for it? In usual terminology, beta testers are testers. This means that they are given a buggy product and are expected to report bugs. In exchange for this service, they get the product free. In our case, the product is not buggy. We even have a demo page showing it in action. We want people, not to test the product, but to solve their problems.

The initial beta pool is a set of companies who really have a serious problem, are willing to pay to get the problem solved and the problem is serious enough that they want to explore solutions right now, rather than wait for the application to go live later.

In other words, we want to filter out the people who signed up for beta expecting a free toy to play with, and focus on those who need Tour My App.

So what does all this have to do with MVP? And if the product is production quality, then why are we in beta? Simple, the quality is at production level, but the product isn't finished.

You see we only built the bare minimum functionality to run a tour. There is still no UI, no sign up page, no login page. In order to save a tour, we have to go into the database and create user accounts and store the data manually.

Why did we do this? Because building those features now doesn't help us answer the questions we want answered at this point. The MVP is the minimum you need to build to get answers to your questions. So we cut out these features for now. We'll build it later.

We are sitting down with the beta companies, and together figuring out what different kinds of tours they need. Based on that we will add the data to run the tour into the database and the tour can then be deployed live into the app.

The discussions will also highlight whether we need to add more functionality into Tour My App or not. We have thousands of potential features in our minds. We are not going to implement any of them until we come across a beta customer that needs it. Then we will build it. So we are not building features based on assumptions, or coolness, but only when see a need in front of our face.

In this phase we want to answer the question: Can we build the kinds of tours that customers need?

Once we figure out the answer to that question, and are satisfied that we are doing a good job of solving beta customer problems, only then will we build out the frontend, the website, the signup page, login page and all that. All that is simple - there is no unknown risk there.

Then we will open to the public with the live application.

PS: Do you think you are losing customers (and therefore, lots of revenue) because some proportion of users cannot figure out the steps required to complete tasks in your web application? Is the problem so bad that you want a solution right now and are willing to pay to have it solved? Then give us your email and we'll bring you into the beta program.

Review: The Cat and The Coup

2011-12-18T00:06:00.000+08:00

The Cat and The Coup is a free to play documentary game about the life of Iranian Prime Minister Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh. The story mostly centers around the 1953 coup. This is a very short game, and wont take more than an hour to complete. You play as the cat of Dr. Mossadegh through scenes that chronicle his life, starting from his death and going backwards. Each scene has a small puzzle that you must solve as the cat in order to progress to the next scene. The art is done in a very distinctive style and transitions between scenes are very nicely done. If you like history, and you like games, then go and download this game right away. You can get it here - http://coup.peterbrinson.com/

2011 Games in Review

2011-12-15T12:55:00.001+08:00

Unlike the past few years, I actually managed to complete quite a few games this year. Here is the list of games completed in 2011.

In addition, quite a bit of time was spent on Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2

Update 17 Dec: Add Another World: 15th Anniversary Edition and Limbo to the list!

Reviews will follow shortly.

pip re-installing wrong version of a package

2011-09-02T13:11:00.002+08:00

I recently ran into a pip gotcha that left me scratching my head for hours.

When you install a package for the first time using pip, it will download the package into a build directory, unzip it there and install from there. Even if you uninstall it, the copy in the build directory remains intact. The next time you reinstall, pip checks if there is already a version in the build. If its there, then it directly installs that without downloading it again.

This is usually fine, unless you uninstalled in order to install a different version. In that case you might be mystified as to why the same old version is installed again.

pip install pycrypto==2.3

pip uninstall pycrypto

pip install pycrypto==2.0.1 # still installs pycrypto 2.3!!

The solution to this is to simply delete the package copy from the build directory.

If you are using virtualenv, then the build directory will be a top-level folder inside the virtualenv.

Installing Python Imaging Library on Ubuntu

2011-09-01T01:03:00.002+08:00

Continuing on setting up the VPS, its now time to install the Python Imaging Library. This is another major pain in the neck.

On Windows, PIL comes nicely bundled with everything. On Linux, it gets compiled, and the stupid part is that different bits of support get compiled in depending on what you have installed. PIL will silently skip components and say that the compile was successful. It's only when you run the application do you find out that some parts of PIL are not installed. Big, big, pain. If you are doing automated provisioning of machines, then you have to be careful that you have the right packages in place before you pip install PIL.

The two components that I am interested are PNG support and Truetype font support, because thats what we use for our app.

PNG Support

If you want PNG support, you need to have the zlib library installed.

sudo apt-get install zlib1g

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

JPEG Support

JPEG requires libjpeg62

sudo apt-get install libjpeg62

sudo apt-get install libjpeg62-dev

TrueType Support

You'll need the libfreetype6 package installed

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev

Setting up Postgres on Ubuntu 10.04

2011-08-31T23:29:00.003+08:00

We've just migrated our Django build server to a new box, and I'm currently installing all the necessary dependencies. Even though I've done this many times, I still keep forgetting the steps to do it properly, so this blog post will document the steps for future reference.

PostgreSQL

Installing postgres is a major pain, because there are so many annoying small things to do to get it working properly.

First, before you do anything you want to ensure that you set up your locale to UTF-8.

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

If you forget to do this and its not setup by default, then postgres will use ASCII which is probably not what you want. If you sill forget this (yes, I forgot), and you haven't put in any data yet, then you can drop and recreate your postgres cluster.

pg_dropcluster --stop 8.4 main

pg_createcluster --start -e UTF-8 8.4 main

Okay, with that out of the way..

Installing Postgres

The latest version of Postgres on Ubuntu 10.04 is Postgres 8.4

sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.4

You'll also need the dev package to compile psycopg2 later

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

And don't forget the python dev packages to compile psycopg2

sudo apt-get install python-dev

Setting up Postgres

By default postgres is configured to use your system users for authentication. If you want to use a specific user/password combination, you'll need to change this.

Open up /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/ph_hba.conf and change

local all all ident

local all all md5

Then restart postgres.

Create a postgres user and database

These are the two commands for creating a user and database. If you intend to run the Django unit tests, then dont forget to give CREATEDB permission for the user.

CREATE USER username WITH PASSWORD 'password' CREATEDB;

CREATE DATABASE db_name OWNER username ENCODING 'UTF-8';

Compiling psycopg2

You should be able to pip install psycopg2. Note that it needs to be compiled, so you should have build-essential package installed beforehand.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

pip install psycopg2

There is a gotcha here: psycopg2 version 2.4.2 is NOT compatible with Django 1.3. Either use the trunk version of Django or use psycopg2 version 2.4.1.

pip install psycopg2==2.4.1

Troubleshooting

make or gcc is not found: install the build-essential package
postgres gives the error "ERROR: new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII)": You haven't set the locale properly before installing postgres. See the top of the post for setting the locale
Django gives the error "Got an error creating the test database: permission denied to create database": If you want to run unit tests, the user must have the CREATEDB permission
postgres gives the error FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "username": You need to edit the pg_hba.conf file to turn off ident authentication and set it to md5 instead
psycopg2 gives the error 'PyType_GenericAlloc' undeclared (first use in this function): Install the python-dev package
psycopg2 gives the error pg_config: command not found: Install the libpg-dev package

My Django Dash 2011 experience

2011-08-01T12:40:00.004+08:00

About Django Dash

Django Dash is an online, weekend Django hackathon. You get 48 hours to develop a Django app of some sort, from scratch.

Apart from being a lot of fun, its a great way to squeeze in a bunch of learning over a short period of time. Kausik and I set out to build a badge generation application.

(View the site here - Make My Badge)

The idea

A lot of people probably know about the badge generation python script. This is a script that takes a list of people, a badge template and generates badges for all the attendees. The badges can be printed out and laminated beforehand for attendees to pick up at the event registration.

The badge design itself is based on a simple principle (surprisingly violated by a huge number of events!) - keep the name large and easy to read from across the hall. We wanted to avoid badges where the name of the event is prominent but the name of the person is tiny. I'm also not a fan of handwritten badges. Not only do they look ugly, but the scribbling is rarely readable.

We also wanted to auto-scale the font size based on the length of the name, and to split long names into two lines so that we could use larger font sizes. These badges have been used in a number of events in Chennai, and have always been popular, with some people even preserving them as souvenirs. (See the badge in use)

One of the problems with the script is that you need some technical knowledge to generate the badge. This made it complicated for a people to generate badges for an event. It also made it difficult to generate and print badges on the fly at the registration desk for on the spot registrants.

We decided to build a web app in 48 hours to do everything that the badge generator did, but as a Django site.

Something that we wanted to do (apart from developing the site of course) was to get up to date on the current cutting edge technology in the Python/Django space. Sure we use a lot of cutting edge tools for ToolsForAgile.com but that application is now almost 3 years old. Although we do keep updating it, its a big application and updating platforms and infrastructure can take time. Plus we wanted to do a quick spike of some of the technologies so that we could take the learning back to our product. Django Dash was the perfect opportunity for that.

Here are some of the things we learned

Django deployment scenarios

When we first developed our product, the only option for python and django deployments was to use Apache with mod_python. Then the WSGI standard was finalised and mod_wsgi came along. mod_python is now officially end-of-line with no more support available for it.

Today one popular deployment configuration is to use an nginx frontend server to serve static files, with a reverse proxy to an Apache + mod_wsgi configuration to serve dynamic files.

Apart from Apache, a lot of other backend servers are becoming popular, most notably gunicorn.

Django hosting

There are now a gazillion hosting providers for Django. When we started out with ToolsForAgile.com the only option was to roll your own setup on a VPS or dedicated server. You still want to do that for complex deployment setups, but there are now any number of django specific hosts for the common scenarios - ep.io, gondor.io, Stable, Dotcloud, AppHosted, DjangoZoom. Ken Cochrane has an excellent series of blog posts with a comparison of django hosting providers.

All these services allow you to simply deploy, while they handle setting up the deployment stack, load balancing and auto scaling for you.

And of course, for the simpler use cases, there is always good old Webfaction. I've hosted various sites with them for four years, with not a single problem so far.

ep.io

ep.io and gondor.io were sponsoring Django Dash, so apart from setting up a custom stack on a Linode VPS, participants also had the choice of deploying on one of these services. We decided to try out ep.io for our submission.

Overall, I must say that I really liked ep.io. It was a bit complicated to get my head around first. It took a while to get file uploads, static files and celery set up. That was more to do with the fact that we were using ep.io for the first time. Once setup, deployment was a breeze. All we had to do was to upload the project using their command line client and ep.io would automatically provision the app with all the required services. They also have an interface where you can push your project directly via git or mercurial.

I should note here that the ep.io client only works in linux as it requires ssh to execute remote commands. Since we were on windows, it took us a fair while to hack up the client and hook it up to do its work through Putty instead.

pip

This is the first time we exclusively used pip along with a requirements.txt file to sync up the python dependencies of all the local dev environment as well as the remote server setup. It worked really well. pip rocks!

Celery

Celery is a distributed task queue. It's amazing how popular it has become in such a short span of time. For our submission, we decided to try out celery to generate the badge images asynchronously through the tasks queue.

Celery can work on top of a number of transports. Popular configurations are to use it over an AMQP broker like RabbitMQ or over Redis. We used it over RabbitMQ (which in turn requires Erlang), whereas ep.io supports celery over Redis. The nice thing is that we just had to tell ep.io that we wanted to use celery and it would set everything up, including launching the celery daemon, configuring it to use redis and what not.

On our side, we used django-celery, a Django integration of celery. With djcelery you can create a tasks.py file in your app with a bunch of task definitions which you can call asynchronously through a view.

After some initial setup hiccups, it worked like a charm, allowing us to push out the badge image generation out to the workers. When badge generation was done, it would trigger another task to zip up all the images and allow the user to download a single zip with all the badges. Everything happening through Celery. It was pretty exciting to see the whole flow in action.

Django 1.3

We used Django 1.3 for this submission. Our product is built on a version of django that is somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2.

We got a chance to play with some of the new stuff in 1.3. We got a chance to try out class based generic views, the new logging setup, TemplateResponse, some improvements to the admin, and a bunch of other stuff.

The admin interface itself is a huge section to explore. We briefly thought about doing the whole site through a custom admin interface, but we were running out of time so we shelved the idea for the time being.

Django 1.3 also has a completely new way of dealing with static files. The old django-staticfiles app has been added as a contrib package and is now the official way to handle static files. The old way had a single static directory with all the static files in it. You now have to put your static files either under an app folder, or in a global static dir. You then call the collectstatic management command to pull in all the static files into a directory that the frontend server will serve.

Similarly, there seems to have been a change in the way uploaded files are handled. Previously they used to go under the static folder. They now get a folder of their own.

What got done in 48 hours

We eventually ran out of time on all the features that we wanted. Thats not surprising, with the amount of new stuff we were using for the first time. It took almost one and a half days to setup and get comfortable with ep.io, celery, django-celery and all the changes in Django 1.3, and getting them to work properly on the local dev environment and online on ep.io.

However, since we built the whole app incrementally, we managed to get the important features in. If you go to Make My Badge you'll be able to login, generate and download a sample set of badges. You can create events, though you need to go to the admin interface to add people to the event.

What is left to do?

We ran out of time before we could integrate django-registration for new users to register. We've created a sample user through the admin interface for now. We also wanted to be able to upload a list of event attendees through a CSV upload form, but couldn't put that in. As a workaround, you need to add people through the admin interface.

Apart from those two main features, there were lots of UI design work that we wanted to do which we couldn't finish.

Where are we going from here?

Once the event judging is over, we have a bunch of enhancements to add. The CSV upload feature, for example, got done about 2 minutes past the deadline. We want to put that in. Integration with django-registration is also ready on the development environment.

We want to eventually add integration with a payment system. Charge Rs.1 per badge generated or something like that.

Overall Impressions

Django Dash was awesome fun. Although we couldn't complete everything we sure did learn a lot of new things that we can take back into other projects. And now that we know the tech, I'm pretty certain we can have a similar app complete in 48hrs.

I was just going through some of the teams, and here are some submissions that I found. Remember, all these were done by scratch in 48 hours! - Drawn by, Family Feed, ProposalMatic, FutureFI, Goal Rally, Django Lint, ConsoliTweet, Courtside, Linky, Git Awesome, Stardust, Set With Me, Libman, Show Offfr, SmartLinky, Staste, Django Docs, Code War, Grepo, Codr Space, My Img, Gearoscope

Why your startup should not start with a Freemium biz model

2011-03-17T23:09:00.003+08:00

I'm reading Ash Maurya's book Running Lean that I picked up from AppSumo's Lean Startup bundle [The bundle gives you $6000 worth of ebooks and web app subscriptions for only $99. Its a total bargain, but only 3 days to go before the offer expires, so get it soon - use this link and I'll get a $10 credit :)].

There is a section on the freemium pricing model and why startups should not start with freemium. This part really resonated with me because we fell into many of these problems early on. The reasons against freemium are:

Low or no conversions: Startups often give away too much in the free plan, leaving users with no need to upgrade
Long validation cycle: Conversion rates on upgrades are low, so its hard to validate the pricing model
Focusing on the wrong metric: Causes a premature shift in focus from building the right product for paying customers to new user sign up
Low signal to noise ratio: Free users may give feedback that paying users dont care about
Free user's aren't free: It costs time and money to support free users

Do you think freemium works? What are your thoughts?

Why New Ideas Can Be Bad

2011-01-18T17:32:00.004+08:00

This is a great post from Tim Kastelle: Why New Ideas Can Be Bad which ties in with my blog post from last year: Too many people are ideating, not enough are executing.

Tim references a talk by Scott Belsky at the 99% conference. Here is what Belsky says:

When ideas are new, we have lots of excitement and energy. However, once we settle into trying to make the idea real, the levels of both excitement and energy go down – it starts to feel more like work. How do we respond to this?

According to Belsky, the natural response is to look for the excitement of a new idea again – and succumbing to this temptation is deadly.

Read the whole thing.

Windmill

2011-01-17T20:10:00.001+08:00

Windmill
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

Sunset at Fontville

Sales Stories

2010-12-21T17:24:00.004+08:00

This post is the first in a series of stories on selling.

This stories in this post are from the book Hope is not a strategy.

On targeting the pain point

Early in my sales career as an account manager, I was in the back of the room while one of my product specialists was presenting a system. We were extremely proud of the functionality and about halfway through the presentation, our product rep put up a slide and said, "Now, if you were a hospital, you'd really like this feature."

What!? I was utterly stunned. I thought to myself, "They're not a hospital-they're a bank! They're never going to be a hospital; they'll always be a bank!"

How preposterous, the idea of showing a hospital feature to a bank.

But this is no less preposterous than showing somebody a solution to a problem they don't have-or a feature for which they have no need. You might as well show a hospital feature to a bank.

On trust

The evaluation process was grueling. Two vendors were pitted against each other and were required to do detailed benchmark implementations in the evaluation of their products. It was an exhausting, detailed process with perhaps twelve to twenty people on each vendor's side.

In the end, we won by a couple of points, but we broadened that advantage into a business partnership. Their executives met our chairman. We had a corporate visit. We continued to talk about implementation and support and widened the gap. We actually reached a measure of business partnership before they signed the contract.

At dinner the night before the contract signing for multiple financial systems, the client said, "Oh by the way, do you have a fixed asset system?"

"Certainly"

"How much is it?"

"Seventy-five thousand dollars."

"Add it to the proposal."

I thought, "They just bought a system sight unseen. How could they have required such detailed evaluation in the beginning and now they have bought a system they never even looked at?"

But they went further.

They added the graphic user interface for all the systems, which they knew was in the prototype phase. There were no references for this three-hundred-thousand-dollar product at that time. The opportunity went from six hundred thousand dollars to almost a million dollars, and forty percent of it was on products they had never seen.

How could they evaluate in the beginning in such detail and buy products sight-unseen now?

The answer is trust. They trusted our products based on the ones they had evaluated. If those worked, then these must. They trusted us as a company because they had met our top executives, they'd been to our headquarters, and they knew we were a stable industry leader with a good track record of delivery. And they trusted us personally because we understood their business and we had become friends

Got more stories that you would like to share? Add it in the comments below.

The Scavenger app from my Chennai Geeks presentation

2010-12-19T11:07:00.004+08:00

This weekend I presented at the Chennai Geeks meet on using HTML5 to build mobile applications. As a part of the talk, I showed a sample scavenger application that was built using HTML5.

The application defined a list of scavenger locations, and used the Geolocation API to check you in when you were close to one of the defined locations. The app used Local Storage to save the list of previously visited locations and the timestamp when you last checked in. Finally we used some CSS3 Media Queries to show some additional information when the app was accessed through a desktop browser.

To run the application, just copay and save the code below and open the html file in Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome, iPhone or Android browser.

Here is the source code for the application:

<html>
<head>
  <title>Fivesquare</title>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="json2.js"></script>
<style>
header {font-size: 11px;}
h1 {font-family: Verdana,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:25px;}
.error, .notice, .success {padding:.8em;margin-bottom:1em;border:2px solid #ddd;}
.error {background:#FBE3E4;color:#8a1f11;border-color:#FBC2C4;}
.notice {background:#FFF6BF;color:#514721;border-color:#FFD324;}
.success {background:#E6EFC2;color:#264409;border-color:#C6D880;}
.location {background: #eeeeee; border-radius: 15px; -moz-border-radius: 15px; -webkit-border-radius: 15px; margin: 5px 0; padding: 10px;}
.visited {background:#ccff99; font-weight: bold;}
.location-distance {display:block; color: #555555; font-weight:normal; font-size: 0.8em;}
.location-checkin {display:block; font-weight:normal; font-size: 0.9em;}

/* Dont show distance and timestamp on small screens */
@media only screen and (max-width: 480px) {
.location-distance {display:none;}
.location-checkin {display:none;}
}

</style>
<script type="text/javascript">

Number.prototype.toRad = function() {
    return this * Math.PI / 180;
}

// List of locations. Format: ["location name", lat, long]
var LOCATIONS = [
  ["Thoughtworks", 13.01245, 80.201451],
  ["Ashoka Pillar", 13.035028, 80.212512],
  ["Kathipara", 13.007359, 80.20394]
];

// Haversine formula to calculate distance (in km) between two lat/long coordinates
function distance(lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2) {
    var R = 6371; // km
    var dLat = (lat2-lat1).toRad();
    var dLon = (lon2-lon1).toRad(); 
    var a = Math.sin(dLat/2) * Math.sin(dLat/2) +
        Math.cos(lat1.toRad()) * Math.cos(lat2.toRad()) * 
        Math.sin(dLon/2) * Math.sin(dLon/2); 
    var c = 2 * Math.atan2(Math.sqrt(a), Math.sqrt(1-a)); 
    var d = R * c;
    return d;
}

function check_in(index) {
    jQuery("#status-bar").html("<div class='success'>Checked in to " + LOCATIONS[index][0] + "</div>");
    var check_ins_str = localStorage["check_ins"];
    if (!check_ins_str) { check_ins_str = "{}"; }
    var check_ins = JSON.parse(check_ins_str);
    var location = LOCATIONS[index];
    check_ins[location[0]] = new Date();
    localStorage["check_ins"] = JSON.stringify(check_ins);
}

function show_distance(index, d) {
    var container = jQuery("#locations-container").find("#location-"+index);
    container.append("<span class='location-distance'>" + Math.floor(d*100)/100 + " km away</span>");
}

function success(pos) {
    var distance_list = [];
    for (var i=0; i<LOCATIONS.length; i++) {
        var d = distance(pos.coords.latitude, pos.coords.longitude, LOCATIONS[i][1], LOCATIONS[i][2]);
        show_distance(i, d);
        distance_list.push([i, d]);
    }
    distance_list.sort(function(a,b) { return a[1] > b[1]; });
    if (distance_list[0][1] < 2) {
        check_in(distance_list[0][0]);
    } else {
        jQuery("#status-bar").html("<div class='notice'>No checkins</div>");
    }
}

function error() {
    jQuery("#status-bar").html("<div class='error'>Unable to get position</div>");
}

function locate_user() {
    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(success);
}

function render_previous_check_in(index, check_in_date) {
    var container = jQuery("#location-" + index);
    container.addClass("visited");
    container.append("<span class='location-checkin'>Last checked in on " + check_in_date + "</span>");
}

function show_checkins() {
    var check_ins_str = localStorage["check_ins"];
    if (!check_ins_str) return;
    var check_ins = JSON.parse(check_ins_str);
    for (var i=0; i<LOCATIONS.length; i++) {
        var previous_check_in = check_ins[LOCATIONS[i][0]];
        if (previous_check_in) {
            render_previous_check_in(i, previous_check_in);
        }
    }
}

function show_locations() {
    var container = jQuery("#locations-container");
    for (var i=0; i<LOCATIONS.length; i++) {
        container.append("<div class='location' id='location-" + i + "'><span class='location-name'>" + LOCATIONS[i][0] + "</span></div>");
    }
}

jQuery().ready(function() {
    show_locations();
    show_checkins();
    locate_user();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
  <header>
    A HTML5 mobile app demo by <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com">Siddhi</a>
    <h1>Fivesquare</h1>
  </header>
  <div id="status-bar"><div class="notice">Checking your location...</div></div>
  <div id="locations-container"></div>
</body>
</html>

HTML5 Multimedia: My presentation at Doctype Html5

2010-11-29T11:40:00.001+08:00

Here are the slides from my presentation at Doctype Html5 (Chennai edition). The presentation is a very quick, very high level overview in using SVG, canvas and video with HTML5.

HTML5 Multimedia

View more presentations from Siddhi.

Really disappointed with TiE Entrepreneur Awards

2010-11-24T22:22:00.003+08:00

I attended TiECon Chennai today. This is the big annual event organized by TiE Chennai for the entrepreneur community here. I'll put down my detailed experience notes elsewhere, in this post I want to talk about the TiE Chennai Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

TiE gives these awards to entrepreneurs every year in a variety of categories - social entrepreneur, start up, family entrepreneur and so on.

This time I had a chance to check out the award winners for the last three years, and to say I was completely disappointed is an understatement.

The entrepreneur awards were all given to huge, well established companies. Most of these people had been running their companies for 15 years or more. Some over 25 years. I can understand giving them an award when they were in the startup phase, but 20 years after they established their company? And we are talking companies that have hundreds of crores in revenue. Many of these are publicly listed companies. See the previous award winners here.

How the heck can you call these startups? Why is TiE giving Entrepreneur of the Year awards to them? Will we see Narayana Murthy and Mukesh Ambani being awarded next year?

There is no way that entrepreneurs in the audience are going to relate to these companies. Far from being an inspiration, it is extremely deflating that a forward thinking organization like TiE chose to ignore actual startups and instead promote the big, well established names :(

3 Oct OCC Meetup Roundup

2010-10-04T12:55:00.003+08:00

We had the October 2010 meetup of the Chennai OCC. Tony Aug, VP IT of Sanmina had come down to attend the meet. Once of the big problems startups often have is understanding how large enterprises make decisions. This is really important in the context of B2B enterprise sales. So it was really good to have Tony come down and talk about the executive perspective when purchasing software.

Some points from the meetup -

The #1 reason for purchase in a recessionary environment right now is to cut costs. If you can show substantial cost reductions, then that is a big win.
Many cloud/SaaS startups dont understand the security and privacy needs of enterprises. Eg: A company like Sanmina with operations in 20 countries need to run only on certified infrastructure that comply to EU security and privacy regulations, HIPAA, and a host of other regulations. Startups right now cannot guarantee all this
Pricing: $10/user a month sounds reasonable, but multiply it by 50,000 users and it becomes huge. So you will need to find a way to get it into the team on one pricing model and then switch to another pricing model (possibly a flat price) when rolling out to the whole organization
Dont forget about switching costs. Once an organization has spent tons of money on training and integration, it is unlikely that they will switch over, even to a superior product, unless there is a really easy path for them to do so
Subscription pricing is great because it allows organizations to get started without expensive capital expenditure. The old model was to buy expensive servers, install expensive software, training, integration and then you could look to get RoI. The new model is to subscribe and cancel if it doesn't work out
You can expect a small team to pay by credit card, but larger orders will need a purchase order and go via the purchasing department. Once that happens a lot of other stakeholders will look at it and question the need for the purchase. So you will have to answer to these other stakeholders too.
Lock-in is important in a subscription service. Most companies will want to be sure that they can get their data out at any time
Sanmina is a huge believer in open source - cuts costs and there is a community to help. For mission critical systems they pay for commercial support
Escrow: Larger companies will usually ask startups that the source code be put in escrow. In case the startup closes down, the company gets access to the source.
Using tools like Linkedin, it is really easy nowadays to find a path to get to a decision maker in any company

The difference between a conference and an unconference

2010-09-22T13:17:00.003+08:00

One of the things I really like about unconferences is that there is very little "gyan" and a lot of experience sharing. This came home to me when participating in a session on hiring.

The question was: "What strategies do you follow for hiring and building a team?"

This same topic was discussed in a panel in the NASSCOM Product Conclave last year, with some VCs on the panel. In typical panel style, a lot of gyan was thrown around: "Hire only the best people", "Top people create top teams" etc.

That's stating the obvious. I mean which startup doesn't want to hire the best people? Do these VCs believe startups are intentionally hiring poor people because they believe its a better strategy??

The fact is that there are a lot of on the ground challenges to hiring that these panelists are hand waving away with their gyan:

Startups are always short of cash and cannot match the compensation in bigger companies
A lot of startups hire good guys only for them to leave in 6-12 months
Really good guys are hard to find
Most employees are not interested in stock options (a lot of Silicon Valley returned VCs talk about stock options... one wonders if they have actually recruited in India)

At the end of the panel, the audience is usually unsatisfied. The panelists tell them what they already know without a word on tackling ground level challenges that they face.

Now compare that with an unconference. Once more this topic came up at the TiE unconference.

Look at the answers this time:

Many top people are around in smaller cities, who are not taken by big companies because of a lack of english skills. They are smart and make good startup employees
Find a few people who believe in your vision and then complement them with freshers
Look at 6 month internships - lots of smart people available as interns
Look at your requirements - not all types of work require the best people. Some types of work are repetetive and may just make good employees bored.
Look at the attitude and teach the skills

These are strategies that are coming from the experience of people who actually have to tackle these on-the-ground problems. At the end, the participants feel charged up with ideas to take back and implement the next day.

This is really what makes an unconference different for me. The focus on real solutions to real problems is invaluable.

Interesting Themes for the TiE unconference

2010-09-11T21:42:00.005+08:00

I was looking at the position papers for the TiE Unconference. Position papers are topics that participants want to discuss at the unconference.

I've taken some that caught my eye and organized them into themes.(Find these topics interesting? Then register for the TiE Unconference and participate in the discussions)

Product-Market Fit

You may have an initial hypothesis about why your product is useful to enterprises. How do you validate it? There are several factors: which customers to reach out to feedback? How do you identify the *right* person within the org. for feedback? How do you evaluate their response? etc.

How does an entrepreneur determine if his product really has a market fit that can guarantee rapid growth for the enterprise? The question becomes relevant when the product addresses a latent need that is not very explicit in the market place. What are the typical pointers to a 'successful' or an 'unsuccessful' product?

Scaling

there are many good companies which are doing great jobs in their niche. but very few Ideas scale, how can these companies tweak their business model, and focus to become large profitable organization

A good idea and you start enthusiastically by yourself or with friends. The founding team is all excited and there are no 'rules'. Works for sometime, but after a few years, when revenues start happening and the start up has to move to next level....

Marketing/Sales

Bootstrapped startups have very low or nonexistent marketing budgets. If you're making a product for the global market, how can you make sure your product is found by the right people?

We are a young startup with a service offering of online ERP and HR software. We are facing a lot of roadblock in marketing SAAS to our target clientèle (which are mostly old-style brick and mortar firms) and especially with a slim sales force. Would like to see if some inputs could be got on this.

We are a startup with a service offering of Management Consultation and Leadership training. We are facing a lot of roadblock in marketing our Webinar to the right audience inspite of knowing them. Would like to see if some inputs could be got on this.

The idea is to understand the dynamic behind catching customers into a cloud and to retain them by providing continuously improved services.

Building a product that can be consumed online implies that it's location agnostic. How to target companies in the valley being in India ? Is it a necessity to be in the US?

Would like to hear about market entry experiences of product startups with specific reference to early stage high yield marketing techniques.

Direction of TiE

For TiE education, Mentoring and Networking are the pillars. These are delivered through various events in different formats: Talks, My-Story sessions, Panel discussions, Member networking sessions, Unconference (from now) etc..It will be useful to know how our members value these and what additional or alternate delivery formats and activities should we consider to be relevant and aligned with our members' expectations.

To understand better where TiE stands in the entrepreneur ecosystem today, and what role do start ups think TiE can play for them and how?

Innovation

There is no dearth of ideas on solving problems. How can we leverage all the collective intelligence in the high tech industries to foster social innovation. How can we leverage technologies to improve the life of rural folk?

Recruiting

How do we identify great co-workers ? How do we build a team that lasts through the rough years ? How do we build a team that creates great products ?

How Recruiting the right people is the Key to Scale up and Establish your Start up

Services to Products

The difference starts from recruitment, development, environment and also the technology. The things to be taken care for getting the people shift their base from project based working to products.

Twelve Reasons Why Businesses Fail

2010-09-10T15:30:00.000+08:00

From Naeem Zafar's book Seven Steps to a Successful Startup:

Solving a problem that most users are not willing to pay to solve your way
Thinking that you can do it all by yourself
Lacking trust among team members
Being overconfident and not questioning yourself
Lacking a crisp, singular focus&emdash;Trying to be everything to everyone
Marketing myopia
Confusing a hobby with a business
Pricing incorrectly and not knowing your real competition
Failing to properly define your market and customers
Not having enough financial resources available
Focusing on a market segment too small to sustain you
Starting a business for the wrong personal reasons

5th Sep OCC Meetup Roundup

2010-09-06T12:18:00.007+08:00

A couple of links from the discussions at yesterdays OCC meetup

- Naeem Zafar's Seven Steps to a Successful Startup - http://www.scribd.com/doc/15245595/7-Steps-to-Successful-Startup
- Steve Blank's blog - http://steveblank.com/

We started out with a theme - How do you find your first customer?

Suresh pointed out that we need to differentiate between customer (who pays) and a user (who uses the software). What we really need in the beginning is a user who can validate our assumptions. Once you have a validated model, then it is a lot easier to find a paying customer.

The conversation went on to How desperate is your customer's need? The more desperate the need is, the easier it is to find and sell. Sometimes entrepreneurs work on products that that are not solving really desperate problems. A company may have a hundred problems, but stakeholders only have time to only solve 5-10 of them a year. Is the problem you are solving in their top-10?

Here is a story from Steve Blank's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany (summarized):

Imagine a bank with a line as customers wait for an hour to cash paychecks. You have a product that could reduce waiting time to ten minutes. You meet the president and tell him you have a product that could solve his problem. What does the president say?
"What problem?" - The president doesnt realize they have a problem. They won't become customers anytime soon. They are late adopters
"Yes I feel bad about it and give them cups of water" - They know they have a problem but are not motivated to solve it. It's not an important problem to them.
"This is a big problem, we are losing $500,000 a year! I'm looking for a a product that will cut processing time by 70%, cost less than $150,000 and integrate with our back end" - Getting warm. Recognize they have a problem and have visualised a solution
"I requested our IT department to develop a solution, but it doesn't work and keeps crashing." - Hot. They have a problem and are spending money on solutions, but nothing works.
"Boy, if we find a vendor who solves this, we can spend the $500,000 I've budgeted for it!" - Fiery hot. Ready to spend big, but no solution in sight. Perfect first customer

In case we thought the last type of customer doesn't exist, Dorai told a story of how he was talking about his vision to a customer and it was such a desperate problem that they paid him in advance to create a product to solve it. You know you have a market when customers are willing to part with their money even before you have started development. Steve Blank calls these customers "Earlyvangelists".

This tied in with the theme of a track at the upcoming Nasscom Product Conclave, which is Sell, Develop, Market, Sell. In other words, first sell your vision, and get someone to buy into it. Only then start with development. Where most of us think of selling as the last step, it really should be the first one.

From there we went into Steve Blank's Customer Development method and Naeem Zafar's 7 steps (links above). Both methods advocate having a customer to validate assumptions even before you start development.

The discussion also went into 2 common product development strategies

- Find a customer, then develop the product (Customer Development method)
- Create products, launch, and go for customer usage (Web 2.0 VC method?)

and the pros and cons of each method. With that we broke up for networking.

Chital, Mock Fight

2010-09-05T11:37:00.001+08:00

Chital, Mock Fight
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

Two young chitals practice fighting at Kabini

Usability: Webinar timings

2010-09-04T12:29:00.002+08:00

Here is an image from a GoToMeeting's webinar page. I've logged into the webinar and it tells me to come back at another time.

Here is the problem:

Now I have to go to a timezone page and figure out the local time when this event is happening. And if daylight savings is involved there is a really good chance that I'll be off by 1 hour end end up missing the event.

This is not just an issue with GoToMeeting. I've seen it time and again with most webinar providers. And I've missed my fair share of webinars because of messing up the conversion (especially with daylight savings involved!!).

Why does it tell me the time in the PDT timezone? Why can't it use javascript on the browser to convert the time into my local timezone?

Or, at least have a message like "This webinar starts in 12 hours, 45 minutes". That way I get a fairly good idea of when it's going to happen.

Review of the Facebook Live Stream widget

2010-09-02T01:47:00.003+08:00

At today's Agile Chennai event we tried using Facebook's live streaming widget to live stream event updates.

There were a couple of major problems which prevented it from really being useful.

The live stream only shows some of the live stream updates. So some people see one set of updates, others see another set of updates, all chosen randomly. This kind of made it a lot less useful as people miss out updates and lose the context
Every update made on the widget is also posted on the wall, so if you make a lot of updates, it ends up spamming your wall
The wall updates look just like regular wall updates, so friends miss out the context that you are actually commenting on a live event, instead thinking that it is a regular status update about yourself
Friends commented on the wall updates, which was nice. Wish there was a way to pull in these conversations into the live stream too. Otherwise there are fragmented conversations on each person's wall, plus the live stream

Anyone know of solutions/workarounds to these?

Usability: The facebook event page

2010-09-01T12:12:00.004+08:00

The image above shows an event page in Facebook. Notice that there are two links called Share (highlighted in red).

The top link shares the event with your friends on your profile. The other one, much more prominent, just writes on the event wall for other attendees to read.

What is the chance of mixing them up (or even missing out the top link entirely)?

I've seen instances where people intending to share the event with their friends use the link below, and end up writing on the event page wall.

Is there a way to make this clearer?

Dont forget to validate your assumptions

2010-08-17T10:53:00.006+08:00

There is just so much you can learn from customers (or potential customers) that you should spend at least one day a week talking to them. You'll be amazed at what you can learn.

Technical founders especially love dreaming up cool stuff and getting to coding.

This is a huge mistake.

I recently spoke to one of our customers and asked them what their favourite feature was. I was stunned when they mentioned that sending email when a comment was added was a killer feature for them.

The shock was because we always thought this feature as a commodity feature. I mean, every tool out there has the ability to send email when a comment is added. We had a whole lot of really killer features, but this was one of the key features??

So I probed further.

Turns out that other tools only send out emails for discussions that you are involved in. Our tool sends out emails for everything. Think of a mailing list - you get every email whether you participated or not. Whereas a forum only sends you notification for new replies in the threads where you participated. It was something like that.

We always thought sending email for everything was a limitation. It was on our roadmap to refine it and make it send email selectively.

Well, guess what? Rather than being a limitation, it was actually a feature! And a killer feature for them.

So I called another customer - and this was an important differentiating feature for them too!

In a startup, we make a ton of assumptions. Don't forget to get them validated. Usually what the customer thinks is important is not what you assumed it would be.

Too many people are ideating, not enough are executing

2010-05-30T16:52:00.005+08:00

Here is a pet peeve of mine that is strong enough to actually wake up this blog from hibernation.

I've been seeing this "ideating" word being tossed around as the new cool thing. Every event now seems to have an ideation workshop or innovation workshop. We've been doing innovation jams at Proto.in for ages now. This weekend we had an IdeaCamp event here in Chennai.

These days even organizations like Nasscom and CII are jumping on the ideation bandwagon.

The premise is simple: get a bunch of people together, bounce ideas off the crowd and make it better.

As an entrepreneur, I find these sessions seriously turning off. I used to be excited about them, but not anymore.

Invariably no one brings up the hard questions: Whats the market for this idea? How will you price it? Are there any competitors? How much will it cost to build? How will you fund it?

And finally, when the event is over everyone forgets the idea and gets back to normal work.

Count up all the ideas from all the innovation jams, ideation sessions, BarCamps, IdeaCamps over the last four years... then count out how many have been executed on. My guess is zero.

The ideas are basically dead on arrival.

So why do we have so many ideation sessions?

Its fun. Its collaborative. And everyone likes to escape from the present and imagine the future. Execution is hard, and execution is definitely not-fun. Ideation is instantaneous, and best of all free! I feel sorry for execution - its hard, long, time consuming, and expensive :(

But lets face it: ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is what counts.

Everyone remembers Edison's quote: Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

So, how about we stop ideating and start executing?

Leveraging FOSS for Startups

2010-01-14T00:07:00.001+08:00

I've uploaded yesterdays presentation at Anna University on Leveraging FOSS for Startups.

Leveraging Free and Open Source Software for Startups

View more documents from Siddhi.

Test Driven Development in Python

2009-09-28T17:39:00.002+08:00

Here are the slides for my talk at Pycon India this weekend. The talk was on doing test driven development in Python and it looked at 3 frameworks - unittest, py.test and nose.

Test Driven Development With Python

View more documents from Siddhi.

Pattern Matching With PEAK-Rules

2009-05-13T20:59:00.004+08:00

I came across this interesting article on Pattern matching in Python. The article asks: Can we recreate in Python the pattern matching semantics present in languages like Haskell and Erlang.

For those not familiar with the way pattern matching works, I've copied the example from the article above.

%% handle(Path, Method)
handle("/", _) ->
  not_a_resource;
handle(Path, 'PUT') ->
  create_new_resource(Path);
handle(Path, 'POST') ->
  update_resource(Path);
handle(Path, 'GET') ->
  retrieve_resource(Path);
handle(_, _) ->
  invalid_request.

What the above code does is to return "not a resource" if you call the handle function with the path parameter as "/" and any method. If you call handle with any path and method parameter as "GET" then it calls retrieve_resource(Path) and so on.

PEAK-Rules

A method to replicate this in Python was given using match objects, but I thought hey why go through all this trouble when PEAK-Rules does most of this for us?

Multimethod Dispatch

PEAK-Rules is a library that enables multimethod dispatch in Python. Those with an OO background will recognise a specific instance of this in method overloading. When an overloaded method is called, execution can go to different method implementations depending upon the type of the parameters passed. In generic multimethod dispatch, you can route execution based on any criteria that you define. PEAK-Rules brings this sort of generic multimethod dispatch to Python.

An Example

So lets take a concrete example. Our goal is to rewrite the above Erlang code in Python using two libraries: PEAK-Rules and an add-on called prioritized_methods that allows prioritised method ordering.

First, you'll need to get install PEAK-Rules and prioritized_methods. You can pick them up from the links given or if you've got setuptools, then you can just easy_install them.

Then type out the following code:

>>> from peak.rules import abstract, when
>>> from prioritized_methods import prioritized_when
>>> @abstract()
... def handle(path, method):
...     pass
...
>>> @prioritized_when(handle, "path == '/'", prio=1)
... def not_a_resource(path, method):
...     print "not a resource"
...
>>> @when(handle, "method == 'GET'")
... def get_resource(path, method):
...     print "getting", path
...
>>> @when(handle, "method == 'PUT'")
... def create_resource(path, method):
...     print "creating", path
...
>>> @when(handle, "method == 'POST'")
... def update_resource(path, method):
...     print "updating", path
...

Here is what is happening:

We first define an abstract function handle(path, method). Do this by placing the @abstract() decorator on it.

Now consider this snippet:

>>> @when(handle, "method == 'GET'")
... def get_resource(path, method):
...     print "getting", path
...

This defines one implementation for the handle function. It says, when the handle function is called, and the condition given is True (in this case method == "GET"), then call the implementation given below (here: the get_resource function).

Similarly we define the other implementations to be called on some other conditions.

The only thing left is the usage of @prioritized_when. Now, when a call is made to handle("/", "GET"), we see that the condition for not_a_resource as well as get_resource are satisfied. Which implementation should be called? In this case, we use the @prioritized_when decorator and set the priority to 1. This tells the system to give priority to this implementation in case of conflict in match.

Here is how the output looks:

>>> handle("/", "GET")
not a resource
>>> handle("/", "POST")
not a resource
>>> handle("/home", "PUT")
creating /home
>>> handle("/home", "POST")
updating /home
>>> handle("/home", "GET")
getting /home

Pretty cool! The best part of this is that you can dispatch on virtually any condition. While the resulting code is a little more verbose than the Erlang example, its not too bad and it does the job well.

Wall Street Arithmetic

2009-04-02T19:57:00.001+08:00

From Philip Greenspun:

I attended a seminar this evening presented by one of our largest banks (name not mentioned to protect some friendships). A middle manager introduced Eugene White, an economist from Rutgers. “I earned nothing last year,” said the hard-working bank employee. “Zero for 2008. No bonus. No options. No stock.”

Over dessert and coffee I asked one of the guy’s subordinates if the boss wouldn’t also have gotten some sort of base salary. “Sure,” he replied, “but maybe as low as $500,000 per year.” How did that round to zero? “Well, he might have made $12 million the year before.”

And you thought Peano arithmetic was challenging….

10 Trends in ICT: My Talk At VIT Entrepreneurship Awareness Camp

2009-03-15T11:55:00.003+08:00

Here are the slides from my talk at VIT yesterday. The slides may not make much sense without the actual talk though.

10 Trends in ICT

View more presentations from Siddhi.

"Cutting Costs With Agile Software Development" Seminar In Chennai

2009-03-05T17:42:00.003+08:00

The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Govt. of India)
(MSME) is organising a 1 day seminar series on "Cutting Costs with Agile
Software Development" on Friday, 20th of March.

Topics that will be covered:

Business Case for Agile Software Development

Introduction to Scrum

Adapting to changing requirements

Benefits of self organising teams

Releasing quality software

Agile metrics

Plus an open discussion where you can bring up the topics you're most
interested in.

Click the image on the left for all the details regarding content and registration.

The crisis of credit explained

2009-03-01T02:31:00.001+08:00

Via hatke, check out this awesome video on the credit crisis:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Yahoo Groups running on Python?

2009-01-22T22:07:00.000+08:00

I tried to post a message today and go this error:

My Talk at Genesis

2009-01-18T14:59:00.004+08:00

I gave a talk last Sunday at Genesis in IIT, Madras. My talk was on planning the operations. Here are the slides for the talk. Since they don't make much sense without the commentary, I have attached a bit of commentary as well.

IIT Business Plan Workshop

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: genesis event)

Why Plan

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

- Alice in wonderland

The first part of the talk was about why you need to plan in the first place. Many students believe that the idea of the operations plan is so that you can show it to venture capitalists and get funded (or perhaps win business plan competitions). The point I tried to emphasise is that the plan is something that helps the entrepreneur with the big picture. Running a startup is not a matter of following a fixed set of steps until you get rich. Rather, you will be fighting fires every day as something or the other goes wrong. When you get consumed with all these small fires, it is easy to lose the big picture, and thats when you need your operations plan to get back on track.

Rules for operations planning
With that I talked about 5 rules of operations planning. Here they are:

1. Know Where You Are
At any point you need to know where you are. If your plan calls for one year of development before you release a product, then you should be able to know if you are on track at any point. For this, you need to have intermediate milestones where you can check your progress and adjust your plan accordingly. For a software startup, I would say you need a milestone at least once a month. This would be a release with a subset of features of the final product.

2.Churn, baby, churn
You may have done a lot of market research, but you cannot gauge the market reaction until you actually get your product or service into the market. Therefore, get it out as soon as possible - even if it is only a small subset of your final vision - and then use market feedback to drive the product. In order to do this, you need to break up your product or service into chunks that are complete and can be released.

3. Be Flexible
Often opportunities arise that could not have been predicted at the start. Maybe users are using your product in ways you did not plan, or perhaps a new opportunity presents itself. A startup needs to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. A small team of generalists will usually trump over a team of specialists, because generalists can change direction quicker.

A story: Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith wanted to start a company to do web based databases. It was entirely an accident which led them to develop the first web based email system - Hotmail.

4. Know What Is Important
You need to know what is important for the product to be developed. Focus on what needs to be done to get your product in the hands of your target customers. Startups will sometimes spend money on a nice office and save money on developer workstations. While this is great for the founder's ego, it's counterproductive for the business. As far as operations go, spend on productivity enhancements rather than ego enhancements.

5. Be Ready To Start Again

"Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable" - Dwight Eisenhower

Operations planning is not something that you do at the start, but it's something you need to be continuously doing. New information keeps coming up which invalidate your old plans. Rather than stick to the old plan, throw it away and plan again. Don't be attached to your operations plan - its essentially useless - but the act of planning is very useful.

Silver Catalyst reviewed by BangaloreInc

2009-01-06T11:45:00.003+08:00

Silver Catalyst has been reviewed by Praveen over at Bangaloreinc. Check it out: Silver Catalyst - Web Based Agile Scrum Tool For Agile Bookkeeping.

Silver Catalyst: Agile Project Management

2009-01-03T15:09:00.002+08:00

We've been pretty busy at work at Silver Stripe Software and today we're happy to announce the release of the online version of Silver Catalyst.

Silver Catalyst is a project management tool for teams that follow an agile software development model. We're in beta and there are a few free accounts during the beta, so if you are doing agile development, you might be interested in giving Silver Catalyst a run. Head over to the Silver Catalyst website and sign up.

Proto.in Registrations Open

2008-12-25T10:33:00.001+08:00

Registrations for the fifth edition of Proto.in are open! You can register here - http://proto.in/register/

Proto.in is an event that aims to bring together startups, investors and industry people in one location. Its a two day event. The first day will have a number of talks on startups. Usually these cover topics like funding, business plans, bootstrapping and so on. There are also technology talks. The second day has some selected startups presenting their product followed by an open house where you can interact with startups and investors.

This event is the fifth edition of Proto.in. The first three editions were in Chennai, the fourth in Delhi. This edition is going to be held in Bangalore, so its pretty convenient for people from Chennai to attend.

Find out more about Proto.in here - http://proto.in/

The cost of registrations is Rs.750 for one person or Rs.1000 for two.

Again, this is the URL - http://proto.in/register/

Zebras fight for dominance

2008-11-08T10:55:00.001+08:00

Zebras fight for dominance
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

I took the photo on the right in September. It shows two zebras fighting for dominance.

This is part of a complex ritual that zebras use to show dominant behaviour. It starts with zebras pressing sides together and rubbing cheeks and ends up with both zebras jumping on their forelegs. The entire ritual is explained in more detail on this page.

The first time I saw this, I was completely unprepared to take a photo. I have a photo with the heads cut off because I didn't expect them to stand up. I was better prepared after reading about the ritual. The next time I saw a zebra issue a challenge, I waited with the camera in position knowing that they will eventually jump. The result is this photograph.

Chennai OCC November Meet: New venue - Ascendas Food Court

2008-11-01T23:22:00.004+08:00

The November meetup of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club is tomorrow. There is a change in venue this month. We are meeting at the Ascendas food court at 3pm instead of the usual location at Amethyst. If you have never been to this food court, then the website has a handy map with the location of the venue. Basically it at Taramani, behind IIT and Tidel Park.

Now if you are unsure of what the Chennai OpenCoffee Club actually is, its a place for entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs, and everyone else involved with startups to meet informally (that means no need to join a group or pre-register and no entry fees). We have a meet on the first Sunday of the month. The meetups are open to everyone. Join the Chennai OCC website to get an email notification before every meetup.

On the topic of the OCC website, I just wanted to point out the Chennai OCC website has a forum, so do join in the coversations.

Plus a new feature that is available is that all discussions on the website are now available as an RSS feed — Click here for the Chennai OCC forum feed — so its a really good idea to subscribe to the feed in your favourite blog reader. That will allow you to keep track of the Chennai OCC forums and, if you have joined the website, you can then join in the coversation.

Must watch videos from DjangoCon

2008-10-22T10:44:00.003+08:00

I was recently going through some of the videos from DjangoCon. Two must watch videos are Cal Henderson's talk titled "Why I Hate Django" and Mark Ramm's talk "A Turbogears guy on what Django should learn from Zope". Both Cal and Mark bring in interesting outside perspectives that I hadn't really considered before. Both talks run around an hour each and are well worth watching if you have the time.

Cave Story coming to WiiWare

2008-10-09T00:04:00.003+08:00

The most exciting news I've heard in a while. Cave Story is coming to the Wii through its online WiiWare distribution channel. Cave Story is a totally kickass game. It's actually a free game on the PC (Get it here). I played it earlier this year and it was really awesome (Cave Story Review). And it's free. So I can hear you ask - if I've already played it, and its free on the PC, why pay to play the same game again? Hmm, good question. Because its an awesome game? Plus a good way to give back and support the time put into the free game. And there is going to be new content not found in the free game. Can't wait for this one.

Choosing a scripting language

2008-08-31T18:11:00.004+08:00

CIO magazine has an article titled You Used THAT Programming Language to Write WHAT? They took five "scripting" languages — Ruby, Python, Javascript, PHP and Perl — and then get Zed Shaw, Martin Aspeli, Michael Morrison, Kenneth Hess and James Turner to write about what kind of applications the language is good for, and where you are better using another language. Check it out.

Formation

2008-08-22T20:20:00.001+08:00

Formation
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

F-16s fly overhead. Singapore National Day, August 2003

Github and Webfaction rock

2008-08-15T11:08:00.001+08:00

Just wanted to chip in and say that Github rocks. And also Webfaction.

India Unconferences and Events

2008-08-14T11:24:00.000+08:00

Chennai OCC isn't the only thing to turn one year old this month. India Unconferences and Events, a group to track unconferences and community events in India also turns one.

Over the last year, the number of community events has increased by leaps and bounds. There is an event happening somewhere almost every week. Unfortunately, it isn't always easy to track these events. Often, you only find out about the event when someone blogs about it after it's over :(

Thats where the India Unconferences and Events group helps. This group tracks tech and startup community events happening around the country. Over the last year, this group has tracked more than 120 events around the country (check out current events and past events tracked by the group)

Once you join this group (you just need a Yahoo ID to sign up), you can subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of events as they are added. It's an open group, so if you come across a tech community event that is not in the group, you can add it to the group.

The problem with ebooks

2008-08-05T11:03:00.003+08:00

The problem with ebooks is that its too easy to lose them. I recently bought an ebook, and now I have no idea in which directly I put it and I can't find it. Rather more difficult to lose a paper book. How do you solve this problem? Do you keep burning ebooks to a CD after you buy them? Give me some ideas.

From Good To Great ... To Below Average

2008-07-31T15:49:00.004+08:00

There is an interesting post on the Freakonomics blog titled From Good to Great … to Below Average. The post talks about how many of the companies profiled in the book are not all that spectacular today.

Ironically, I began reading the book on the very same day that one of the eleven “good to great” companies, Fannie Mae, made the headlines of the business pages. It looks like Fannie Mae is going to need to be bailed out by the federal government. If you had bought Fannie Mae stock around the time Good to Great was published, you would have lost over 80 percent of your initial investment.

And at the end:

What does this all mean? In one sense, not much.

These business books are mostly backward-looking: what have companies done that has made them successful? The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success.

Read the whole post here.

Designing Sustainable Startups

2008-07-30T18:12:00.002+08:00

via Sampad: Niraj Bhatnagar's presentation at Barcamp Delhi 4.

Designing Sustainable Startups

view presentation (tags: entrepreneurship sustainable business social)

Funny gmail bug

2008-07-27T15:16:00.002+08:00

Spotted this in my Inbox today. Although it says -64 mails, all the mails are there, so I suppose its kind of a harmless bug.

Window with Sunflowers and Pine Cones

2008-07-24T11:54:00.001+08:00

Window with Sunflowers and Pine Cones
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

Window in Roussillon a small ochre mining town. Near the town are some beautiful coloured cliffs.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Turns One!

2008-07-19T11:48:00.013+08:00

It's hard to believe but the Chennai OpenCoffee Club will soon turn 1 year old. Vaidhy and I started it with the first meetup on the 5th of August, 2007 at Subway (Read about it here). Since then, OCC has spread out to Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Noida and Kolkata (See the links at the bottom of this post to join these OCC groups).

What is the Chennai OpenCoffee Club?

Here's the blurb from the website

The Chennai OpenCoffee Club is a place for people involved in the startup ecosystem to meet in an informal setting. Anyone involved with startups - entrepreneurs, developers, lawyers, investors - is invited to come and join the conversation.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Links

Media Coverage

OpenCoffee Clubs In Other Cities

If you are from another city or traveling, you might want to catch up with one of these other OpenCoffee Clubs

Book Review: Johnny Bunko

2008-06-28T12:09:00.004+08:00

I just finished reading Johnny Bunko by Dan Pink. This book is aimed at being a career guide to students fresh out of school and college or for those new to the workplace. The first thing that you'll notice is that the whole book is in manga format which I really enjoyed. It was pretty innovative to try something different to reach the audience. Although the book is subtitled a career guide, it isn't one at all, more like a general life guide. The whole book is pretty short — it only took me about half an hour to read. Thats both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, it is a bit light on content, making only six points. On the other hand, it makes it easy to read and finish, unlike other books which go on for far too long. Overall, I think it works.

114 Execs leave Yahoo!

2008-06-23T14:26:00.002+08:00

Yahoo's troubles seem to be making all the wrong kind of news. Now TechCrunch has published a list of execs who have left Yahoo. Apparently more than a hundred since the start of last year. Thats a lot!

Screencast: Using Amazon S3 with Django

2008-05-30T02:48:00.005+08:00

Many thanks to Balaji and CSS for organising the second Amazon Web Services meet in Chennai and to Jinesh for being able to make it. (Also check out my live blog of the event on twitter, starting here)

As a part of this meet, I had prepared a demo showing how to build a simple gallery application using Django and Amazon's S3 service. I've recorded it as a screencast and uploaded it on ShowMeDo. It's really simple to use S3 with Django, so take a look.

This screencast uses the Boto python library for accessing AWS.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

This video originally comes from here at ShowMeDo from the Python category.

2008-05-02T12:08:00.002+08:00

TechCruch says that twitter is about to abandon ruby on rails, to which Evan says:

FWIW: Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR. Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though. Maybe that's why people are confused.

Lots of the code is not in RoR? I always thought that they had done twitter completely in RoR. Interesting.

Must watch video for startup founders

2008-04-21T18:03:00.002+08:00

DHH gives a fantastic talk at the Y-Combinator Startup School. Every startup founder should take half an hour out and check it out.

The Chennai Photowalk: April

2008-04-18T10:25:00.002+08:00

I've just uploaded some of the photos from the april chennai photowalk here. The route was along OMR from Madhya Kailash to NIFT.

The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing

2008-04-18T00:12:00.001+08:00

From HBR: The Surprising Fit for Software Testing

Google announces App Engine, takes on Amazon?

2008-04-09T11:34:00.004+08:00

So Google is getting into scalable web infrastructure with the announcement of Google App Engine, apparently taking on Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. Having taken a deeper view however, it seems like they are addressing completely different spaces.

EC2 and S3 offer a whole lot of flexibility. They are independent of each other for a start, which means you can use S3 alone, or EC2 alone, or in combination with Amazon's Simple Queue Service. Secondly, with EC2 you get complete control over the image. You can put any programs in it and you can configure them however you want. You can even run anything on the instance from serving pages to performing computations.

Google's offering is completely different. You can only run web apps. It has to be in Python. You have to use their APIs for accessing data or fetching URLs. No sockets, no subprocesses, no threading, no filesystem access. So there are a lot of limitations.

BUT, what you get in exchange is extreme simplicity. App Engine is perfect for web app that needs to store some stuff in a database and interact with the user via a web server - and that's most of the apps out there. You've even got an SDK to develop offline and then sync it online.

Another bonus for Django developers: The APIs seem to be heavily influenced by Django. What this means is that if you are a Django developer, it should be relatively straightforward to deploy your applications onto App Engine. In fact, there is even some official documentation for doing just that.

If you design your application well, it shouldn't be too complex to take a Django app and port it to use the App Engine API, and vice-versa, take an App Engine app and move it to Django on another web host. That way you do not have platform dependence to Google and you can still move to another web host in the future.

Roundup of Barcamp Mumbai 3

2008-03-31T12:05:00.004+08:00

Vijay and I were in Mumbai on Saturday for Barcamp Mumbai 3. I had checked the wiki the day before and there were over 600 registrations. Wow. Out of that I guess about 200-220 turned up, which is still a pretty big crowd.

There was some confusion at the start especially with the schedule board with a big crowd putting up sessions only for everything to be rearranged by track so that all startup demos go into one room and so on. Eventually by the time everything started we were running about 90 minutes late. The other problem was the wifi. I asked about five of the volunteers, but no one seemed to know the settings. I finally got the wifi configured thanks to one of the students sitting next to me.

I first headed out to the startup demo track and checked out demos of on2biz, MediaMelon and WikiSlice. on2biz is a workflow management web app. From the demo, it looked like it is targeted towards the sales cycle. MediaMelon is a video delivery network that uses p2p to deliver the videos. I would have loved to have seen a demo, but apparently the firewall was blocking the app. WikiSlice is a UI layer around wikipedia that allows you to browse topics better (grouping related pages, subtopics etc). They have also made it work with an offline wikipedia dump. My initial reaction was why anyone would want wikipedia offline, but the discussion brought up some interesting cases like rural access.

I headed out for the Firetalk track, but it seemed to have fizzled out, nothing was happening there. I went to the tech track. A talk on jQuery was going on but both the wifi and the projector were not working in this room. The laptop was connected to a computer monitor making the slides unreadable, and the lack of wifi meant that the online demos didnt work.

The next talk was on Asynchronous IO by Bhavin. This was a really good talk, and fortunately it didn't depend so much on the slides. A couple of points - having worked with async IO, it really complicates the application logic, especially state management, so thats a tradeoff that must be made. The other problem with not handling each request in its own process is that if there are any misbehaving callbacks, they can bring down the whole server. A pretty interesting talk.

Next was my session on some of the homebrew stuff that people have done on the Nintendo DS, following which was a session on Facebook API, except the speaker didn't show up, so I left the room. I spent the rest of the day floating between rooms and the lobby area.

I managed to catch bits of Aalaap's demo of linkbunch, Aditya giving a session on Startup Saturday and Aditi doing a session on the iAccelerator program for startups at IIMA.

Just as we were leaving, we met Grishma from Whirlybird Electronics. This is a company that builds measurement and control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles. Pretty cool stuff.

One thing I was quite impressed was how many people had heard about Proto. They would mostly go "Ohh you're from Proto." If you dont know what Proto is, it is a two day event that brings together the startup ecosystem - startups, investors, invited guests, industry experts etc - and gives each selected startup six minutes to pitch to the audience. The event also has a series of talks by industry experts on technology and business topics. See the agenda for the previous edition and join the Proto.in facebook page to get a better idea.

By the way, the nominations for the July edition of Proto have just opened. If you are a startup and you would like to present at Proto, head over to the nomination page and nominate your company

Yellow burst

2008-03-27T02:00:00.001+08:00

Yellow burst
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

Fireworks during the national day parade 2003

Why doesn't Django find my unit tests?

2008-03-25T20:20:00.004+08:00

I ran into a Django gotcha today. I had an app for which it was simply not running the unit tests. The tests were there in the correct location. Django was correctly running the tests for all the other apps. Why was it not running the tests for this one? I checked settings.py to see if the app was in INSTALLED_APPS. It was. It worked fine through the browser, and the test code looked good. What was worse, it was working when I last ran it before the weekend. Why did it suddenly stop running?

I got my answer after some digging around in the Django source. It appears that you must have models.py in the app for tests to run. It so happened that this app has no models, only some views that do some calculations. Since models.py was empty, I had deleted it and didn't think too much about it. Whoops! The tests stopped running.

Once I had that figured out, the solution was simple - recreate the empty models.py, and the tests started running again.

This whole thing is really unintuitive though. Who would have thought that removing an empty file would cause the tests to stop running? There doesn't seem to be any connection between them at all.

In a broader sense, any piece of code that uses django.db.models.get_apps to get a list of installed apps is likely to run into this problem. Don't be surprised if you remove an empty models.py and then something breaks and you are left scratching your head as to what exactly happened.

This is exactly the kind of unintuitive "magic" that we Pythonistas hate :) Explicit is better than implicit etc.

What I don't understand is that the list of installed apps *IS* explicit. It's sitting there called INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. Why does Django go about hunting through the models when it could just read this value? Any clues?

Has Django reached the tipping point?

2008-03-22T23:52:00.003+08:00

Antonio Cangiano thinks so. The numbers used to come to this conclusion are not exactly scientific, but there's no doubt that Django is getting bigger (and better) everyday.

Tracking upcoming community tech/startup events in India

2008-03-14T11:41:00.004+08:00

If you've been reading this blog via an RSS reader, you might not have noticed a new addition to the blog sidebar. With the number of unconferences and community tech & startup events rapidly increasing over the last year, it's been getting harder and harder to keep track of what is happening.

A few weeks ago, I created a widget to pull in the RSS feed for the upcoming unconference and tech/startup community events in India. If you visit the blog and then scroll down the right sidebar, you'll see this widget with a list of upcoming events.

The cool thing about the widget is that its sharable. If you click the "Options" menu below the widget, you'll get options to share it in a number of ways. If you would like to put this widget on your blog, click HTML and copy and paste the code onto your blog. You can also put it on a whole number of social networking sites. There is even an option to put it on your desktop as a gadget (you'll need to download some software though).

So much for sharing the list of events. How can you get an event onto this list? Good question. These are the steps -

First, you'll need an account at Upcoming. If you have a yahoo account that should do
Next, join the group India Unconferences and Events. This is the group that tracks the events
Third, create the event on Upcoming
Once the event is created, you can assign it to the group by clicking the "Send to group?" link on the right sidebar of the event page
Once you have tagged the event in the above manner, it will be picked up by the widget and displayed wherever the widget has been shared (pretty cool no?)

So, hopefully you'll no longer have a situation where you learn about an event only after reading the post-event coverage :)

Ultimate Frisbee in India

2008-03-06T13:08:00.003+08:00

Anand has created a cool new website for Ultimate Frisbee in India: http://www.ultimatefrisbee.org.in/

Apart from that, here are some regional websites:

Chennai: http://chennaiultimatefrisbee.com/
Ahmedabad: http://ultimate.indicorps.org/
Delhi: http://groups.google.com/group/delhi-ultimate

Plus, there are a couple of groups on Facebook:

MoMo is back in 2008

2008-02-13T21:11:00.001+08:00

The first Mobile Monday meet in Chennai for 2008 kicks off on the coming Saturday, 16th Feb.

What?

MoMo Chennai Feb 2008

When?

2 PM to 5 PM, 16th Feb (Saturday)

Where?

Gandhi Nagar Club, Adyar, Chennai (Map)

Talks

Going to market with Nokia - Find out how - Prakash Sayini , Developers Relations ,Forum Nokia
Getting started with WRT (Web Run Time) development on S60 - Balagopal K.S, Technology Expert, Forum Nokia India Team
Building Standards compliant mobile sites for free with mobiSitesgalore - Prashanth , Akmin

If you would like to attend, add your name here. Find the official announcement here.

Screencast on many to many relationships between Django models

2008-02-11T20:48:00.000+08:00

My third introductory screencast for Django. It follows on from the first screencast and the second one.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

This video originally comes from here at ShowMeDo from the Python category.

NEN organising E-Week in India

2008-02-06T15:10:00.000+08:00

NEN is an organization that promotes entrepreneurship among college students. One of their initiatives is the E-Week (Entrepreneurship week) where colleges conduct activities related to entrepreneurship. This week, 2nd Feb to 9th Feb is E-Week this year and as a part of the E-Week, a few students joined us at the Chennai OpenCoffee Club's Feb meet on Sunday. The idea was to connect students who might be thinking of starting up with entrepreneur groups in Chennai. Also as a part of E-Week, Kausik invited me to give a talk on "Bootstrapping Your Startup" at his college.

Here is a photo of Vaidhy discussing with the students at the chennai opencoffee club:

Day 1 Photos from Proto.in

2008-02-03T10:52:00.000+08:00

There are tons of photos from the just concluded Proto.in. Here are a few photos from Day 1 of the event.

Ravi Narayan of Mentor Partners talks about "The Role of a Mentor in a Startup"

Roopa Doraiswamy on legal issues for startups

Vishal Gondal (Indiagames)

Rajiv Dingra of WATBlog and WATShow

Alok Kejriwal (games2win.com)

Bijoy Singhal (Microsoft)

Me :P

Gaurabh Mathure on the role of design

Chintan Mehta (Yahoo!)

Sujai Karampuri of Sloka Telecom (Incidentally, Sloka presented at the very first Proto.in)

Laura Parkin (NEN)

Atul Chitnis

Surojit Niyogi on writing Facebook apps

Mohanjit Jolly of DFJ on bootstrapping a startup

Samir Sood (Google M&A)

DEMO live blog and other interesting articles

2008-01-30T02:07:00.000+08:00

If you've been following Proto.in, you might know that the initial inspiration came from the DEMO conference in the US. Well, DEMO is going on right now and it's interesting to follow the conference and see how everything happens there. So, if you are interested, check out these links

Homepage for DEMO
Day 1 live blogging from the conference
DEMO Diary: Follow a company as it prepares to present at DEMO
Videos of past presentations (For those who say that six minutes at Proto.in is too short, take a look at these videos)
Some interesting tech from DEMO '08

Coverage of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club

2008-01-28T23:03:00.000+08:00

Chennai OpenCoffee Club has been profiled in an article on Hindustan Times' Mint business paper. Titled 'Entrepreneur meets turning Chennai into start-up hot spot,' it gives a nice overview of what has been happening in Chennai the last year.

On a related note, the Chennai OpenCoffee Club completed six months after the January meetup. It's hard to think that its half a year already. Time flies. The next meetup is on the Sunday coming up, the 3rd of February. The website has more details and a map.

A whole bunch of events are coming up

2008-01-24T22:23:00.001+08:00

Now that Proto.in is over, what next? I was checking out the list of upcoming events and February is quite packed.

To start with, FossConf Chennai takes place from 1st to 3rd of February. Take a look at the talks that have been lined up.

The next meeting of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club also takes place on the 3rd of February at Amethyst.

The weekend after that sees DevCamp at Bangalore. DevCamp was started after frustration that the Bangalore BarCamp is becoming less technical these days. So DevCamp will probably be a hardcore tech unconference. No "intro to xyz" talks here. Speakers can assume the audience has a sufficiently deep tech background and style their talks accordingly. Oh, and Martin Fowler will be attending as well.

Later in February is WebCamp in Chennai. This camp will discuss different web frameworks. I'll probably give a talk on Django. The hover.in guys are working in Erlang, so I expect that they will talk on writing web apps in Erlang. Expect a session on RoR from Vamsee or the RailsFactory guys. The dates are not finalised yet, but I'm hoping that this happens on the weekend of 15th.

(Hint: An easy way to keep track of community tech events happening in India is to join the India Unconferences and Events group on Upcoming)

Proto.in 2008 roundup

2008-01-23T18:59:00.000+08:00

So another edition of Proto.in comes to a close. This edition of Proto.in is special because it's going to be the last one in Chennai. The next edition will take place in Delhi (or maybe Mumbai) in July later this year. Since the event will be moving out of Chennai, there will be a new set of volunteers based out of Delhi/Mumbai to take this event forward.

Now that Proto.in is done, what is everyone saying about it? In this post, I'll collect various posts on the event from around the blogosphere.

To start with, head over to ReviewSaurus. Mayank, who writes the blog has reviewed a bunch of presentations with videos. So far, reviews of The Viewspaper, Antya, At One Place, Instablogs, Hover.in and Deskaway have been posted.

Next, Rajiv and friends over at WATBlog cover a number of talks from Day 1 of the event. Take a look at the overview of talks by Samir Sood, Atul Chitnis, Rajesh Jain ( and another one), and Surojit Niyogi.

Gaurabh Mathure gave a talk on Day 1 titled "Sexy. Trendy. Design. Technology." Read about his experience in this blog post.

Sujai of Sloka, one of the companies at the first Proto.in (and selected for this year's Headstart) came back to give a talk on Day 1 about how unglamorous a startup really is. In this post, he gives his views on events like Proto.in and Headstart.

Leonard Badi from Mundial Communications (a South African startup) was one of the presenters this time. He has a blog post on his product to follow up from the presentation at the event.

Another presenting company perspective, Arun of Hover.in, a company that presented this time, gives his take on the event. He's also got Vijay's "The One Percent" presentation on his blog.

Coming to the audience reactions, Vamsee has some hard criticism of the event, saying that it has lost community focus and is charging too much (i.e. become too commercial). Well we did have many long discussions on how much to charge while planning the event, and ultimately it comes down to whether the companies are getting the value for which they are paying. Finances are extremely tricky to manage for an event like Proto.in, and we constantly have to balance sponsorships and entry fees to make the event viable.

Dorai gives his views on the event in this post, saying that it was difficult not to get infected by the enthusiasm and optimism.

Soham Das has blogged about Day 1 at Proto.in and Day 2 at Proto.in.

Srinivasan, a blogger who came by bus all the way from Cuddalore to attend Proto.in takes us through the event in pictures.

Finally, here are some photos of the event put up by various people. Srinivasan's blog post has a lot of photos in it. Apart from that, Swami has put up some photos here and Vijay has uploaded more pics here.

Flower

2008-01-10T19:04:00.001+08:00

Flower
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

Taken at the Singapore Botanical Gardens

10 days to Proto.in

2008-01-10T12:10:00.000+08:00

The third edition of Proto.in is almost here. Just 10 days to go. If you've been planning to attend, register fast before it closes. The agenda for the event has also been released (Download the agenda here).

The agenda is roughly modeled on the previous Proto.in event.

On Day 1 (thats the 18th), we have two tracks of talks. One track covers business and the other technology. Take a look at the agenda, because the talks look very interesting indeed. As usual, its going to be tough choosing which talks to attend.

Then move on to Day 2 (the 19th) for the core event. The twenty startups that have been selected will come on stage to present their products, followed by an open networking session.

If you attended Proto.in last time, then you already know why you should attend this time as well. If you haven't attended Proto.in before, then now is the chance to come and see what it is all about. You can register for the event here.

PipesCamp features on Y! Developer Network Blog

2008-01-10T02:14:00.000+08:00

So I get back from vacation and what do I find? Y! Developer Network has featured PipesCamp on their blog. Super cool!

My hack at PipesCamp HackDay

2007-12-25T01:10:00.001+08:00

One of the coolest parts of PipesCamp on Sunday was the HackDay part of it. Okay, it wasn't a whole day, more like about three hours, but it was still fun. You can find my pipe here: MTC Mashup.

You can type a bus number in the input box on the top and it displays (or tries to display :P) the places visited by the bus on a map.

Check it out!

The raw data comes from the Chennai MTC website (Yes, they have a website). There is a section that gives the stages visited for the bus number that you enter in a form. However, the output is quite a messy bit of HTML, quite a pain to parse through. Luckily, Rabin Vincent has taken this data and put out a much cleaner bus query interface over it.

So, Rabin's site provides the raw data for the pipe. Given a bus number, we construct an appropriate URL and query Rabin's site for the bus route, then parse the HTML to extract out a list of stages that the bus goes through.

Now that we have the list of stages, the next step is to figure out the latitude and longitude of these places. For that, we used Yahoo's Geocode service. This service takes a string address and returns the latitude and longitude of the place. Once we have the lat/long coordinates of each of the stages, we send it out on a yahoo map.

Now for the hiccups:

The biggest by far is ambiguity while searching. For example, the MTC site refers to the Central Station stop simply as "Central" which when passed to the Geocoding API gets confused because a lot of things match this. At the other extreme, a bus stop like "P. Orr & Sons" does not get any hits on the Geocoding API. So, sometimes the lat/long positions can be all over the map depending on whether the Geocoding API returned the right place or not.

An obvious solution is to create a small web service that takes the names as specified on the MTC site and return the correct lat/long for that stop. So we know that Central refers to central station, and we can return the position of that stop accurately.

The other thing that I could not figure out was how to get the data on other maps. By default Y! Pipes uses Y! Maps (Worldwide) which does not have good resolution for Indian cities. However, there is a India specific Y! Maps, which has good detail for Indian cities. How do I get Pipes to output to the Y! India maps instead of the global Y! Maps? I couldn't figure that one out.

Right at the end, labsji took my mashup, downloaded the KML data and imported it into Google Earth, so that the whole route was superimposed on Google Earth and it automatically ran an animated tour between the stops.

In the end it was a fun experiment, and something I would not have done without PipesCamp. When I first started this hack, I though it would be impossible, but Y! Pipes allowed me to create the whole mashup in a few hours as a total newbie. That's pretty cool if you ask me.

PipesCamp on Sunday

2007-12-21T16:19:00.000+08:00

Hot on the heels of the AWS meet comes PipesCamp to discuess Y! Pipes.

PipesCamp is on the 23rd of December (thats the coming Sunday) from 10am to 5pm at Hotel Shan Royal, 85, Poonamallee High Road, Near Koyambedu Circle, hennai, India. (The wiki has more details, including the map to the venue)

Y! Pipes is interesting because it is an attempt to do programming visually. I remember Bosky's talk at DCamp about End-User Programming, and this is an interesting attempt by Yahoo to bring feed manipulation programming to the mainstream. With RSS becoming more popular, and mashups seemingly the in thing these days, it should be pretty interesting to see what happens at PipesCamp.

Amazon Web Services Meet: Jinesh Varia Videos Uploaded

2007-12-15T17:08:00.000+08:00

Videos from the Amazon Web Services Meet in Chennai are now available online. Get 'em here -

The best part? Around the 2:00 minute mark in Part 1 he says that of the Indian cities, the highest intensity work seems to be done in Chennai :)

Amazon Web Services meet in Chennai today

2007-12-13T10:59:00.000+08:00

Jinesh Varia, evangelist for Amazon Web Services is in Chennai today, so labsji has organised an Amazon Web Services meet. The meet will be held at the Rails Factory office in Jafferkhanpet, Ashok Nagar. It starts at 5:00 PM, but you can come earlier and hang around if you want.

The rough agenda is

5:00: Welcome and Introduction
5:05 - 5:45 : Speed Geeking, networking and demos - over snacks.
5:50 - 6:30: Presentation by Jinesh Varia, and Question and Answer session.
6:31 - 7:15: Suggestions, Feedback, and Wishlist for AWS by AWS users and wannabe.
7:16 - 7:30: Discussion on next AWS Chennai meetup, closing.

and the address to the venue is

RailsFactory, 9/55, Karikalan Street,
Jafferkhanpet, Ashok Nagar,
Chennai, TN, India -600083
[ ~1.2 Km from Ashok Pillar, 200 meters from Kasi Theatre junction.]

(Google map here)

For more info, check out the AWS Chennai wiki.

MindTree tries out an unconference

2007-12-01T16:10:00.000+08:00

Since I'm maintaining the India Unconferences and Events group on upcoming, I often spend a bit of time looking for events to add. While doing that today, I came across Osmosis. Apparently, Osmosis is MindTree's annual technology festival, and its coming up in December this year - with a difference.

This year, the event is going to be held as an unconference, and they are opening it up to external participation. Which means (if I understand correctly) that anyone can attend.

Open space technology (closely related to unconferences) has often been applied in corporate environments, so it will be interesting to see how this works out.

One thing that caught my attention was this line from the site

Osmosis final day will be an ‘unconference’ where MindTree Minds will decide the topics to be discussed. In the true spirit of an unconference, MindTree Minds will decide, organize and lead the discussions on the final day of Osmosis.

Now, I'm not sure who a "MindTree Mind" is. Does it mean a general participant? Or it is a select group of people? If it is a select group of people who will decide the topics etc then it might just defeat the purpose.

Anyway, if anyone attends, I would be interested in knowing how everything went. The website is http://barcamp.org/osmosis and the event takes place on Saturday, 15th December 2007. Check it out and let us know what happened.

Proto.in 2008 Nominations Open

2007-11-26T13:00:00.000+08:00

Nominations for Proto 2008 are open. If you are a startup in India and would like to present at the event, head over to the website and nominate yourself. The next Proto will take place on the 18th and 19th of January 2008.

Ahmedabad Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 2007

2007-11-16T21:08:00.000+08:00

Check out this cool YouTube video from the Ahmedabad Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 2007. Ultimate in Ahmedabad is organized by IndiCorps where they coach underprivileged youth to play Ultimate Frisbee. Check out the Ahmedabad Ultimate website for more information.

BarCamp Kerala

2007-11-13T21:06:00.000+08:00

Mani Karthik has a post on BarCamp Kerala on Daily SEO Blog

This is exciting news! The first and foremost BarCamp is going to be held in Kerala, this November 24th. It’s probably going to be hosted at the Technopark Auditorium, Trivandrum, (actually the venue is not decided yet.)

It's pretty exciting to see BarCamps coming up all over the country. If you are in Trivandrum, think about dropping in - and then blogging about it afterwards :) The homepage for the event is here: BarCamp Kerala

Updates on Co-working space in Chennai

2007-11-12T17:32:00.000+08:00

I had previously asked about co-working spaces in Chennai back in July. Since then, there has been some progress on this with a bunch of people opening up spaces for co-working.

Rajat, one of the guys behind Review Saurus has opened up his office for co-working. Vamsee and Bhaskar are already in the process of moving into the office with their co-workers. Rajat's office is located in Adyar.

Balaji has an office (house actually) that he would like to open up for co-working. The house has an Internet connection. For more details, you can leave him a comment on his blog.

In the comments to the previous post, Bhaskar mentions that the new STPI office is likely to have co-working space on one of the floors. In Bangalore they get cubicles, Internet, cafeteria, conference rooms and all that for Rs.5000 a month per seat, so we can expect something similar in Chennai as well.

Also in the comments to the previous post, G.Padmanabhan says that he is starting a co-working space in Nungambakkam with 6 seats. You get a cubicle, broadband Internet and access to conference rooms, printer and fax, admin services and so on. Send an email to gp [at] indelect [dot] com or call him at 94440 26983 for more details.

Kiruba is also opening up his new office space at Virugambakkam for co-working. For more details, you can get his email address and phone number via his blog.

Setting up a Pvt Ltd company in India

2007-11-07T19:55:00.000+08:00

Kumaran has a nice writeup about the steps to be taken in setting up a private limited company in India.

Cricinfo XML feed of live scores

2007-11-03T00:13:00.000+08:00

Did you know that Cricinfo publishes an RSS feed containing live scores of matches in progrss? I had no idea either until I came across this python script on bangpypers that uses the feed to display live scores on the desktop. Very interesting.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Announcements

2007-11-01T18:37:00.001+08:00

A couple of announcements. First, the November meet of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club is coming up this Sunday. The venue will be Amethyst as usual. Here are the details

4th November, 3:00 PM at Amethyst (Map)

Second, we have opened up the Chennai OpenCoffee Website so that anyone can now join. It used to be that you had to attend a meetup before you could join, but now that we've had a few meetups, we thought its time to open it up. So if you are interested in joining, head over to the website.

3:11 PM

2007-10-31T15:45:00.000+08:00

3:11 PM : You've seen photos where you photograph the same objects at different times right? 3:11 PM does the opposite. To participate, take a photo at 3:11:00 on the 3rd of November from wherever in Chennai you are and upload it to a flickr group (the website has the details). Once all participants have uploaded their photos, you will be able to see Chennai through one instant, what everyone is doing in different places at the same time.

Microsoft gets into web analytics

2007-10-31T12:38:00.000+08:00

Adi just passed me a link to Project Gatineau, Microsoft's answer to Google Analytics. Project Gatineau is currently in invite only beta.

Just like how Google Analytics has tight integration with Google's AdWords, Project Gatineau has tight integration with Microsoft's AdCenter. Looks like the fight for the search engine marketing space is heating up.

Looking for Django developers?

2007-10-30T22:51:00.000+08:00

Check out Djangogigs.com. Djangogigs is a new website for matching Django developers with Django jobs. If you are looking out for some Django work, add yourself to the site.

OpenCoffee Club @ Mumbai

2007-10-23T16:47:00.000+08:00

The OpenCoffee Club meme spreads some more. Mumbai is having its first OCC meetup on November 4th. More information here. You might want to attend if you are in Mumbai at that time.

Django Screencasts

2007-10-23T11:26:00.000+08:00

A few people have been asking for introductory Python + Django material, so I thought I'd just link up to the two intro screencasts that I did for Django.

Learn Django: Create a Wiki in 20 minutes

This is a beginners screencast that assumes no previous knowledge of Django. We illustrate the basics of creating a web app in Django by developing a simple wiki application.

Learn Django: Extending the wiki with wikiwords and search

Following on where the first screencast left off, this screencast introduces some more django features such as template inheritance, filters and newforms library.

Obviously I've managed to fool a lot of people

2007-10-19T14:38:00.000+08:00

I had nothing much to do yesterday so I actually started looking at the facebook apps that I had installed. One of the apps on facebook is My Personality, which basically gives you one of those personality tests (this one is the Big Five test) and then ranks you on five axes. The app rated me on what would be the equivalent of "individualistic lazy daydreaming introvert" which is a pretty accurate description of who I am.

Another feature of this app is that you can get your friends to rate you. And can you believe it, they all rated the opposite.

The two offenders are Conscientiousness and Extraversion. While my Extraversion rating was 23% (highly introverted), the friend rating was 67% (extroverted). Something wrong there? The test rating for Conscientiousness even more mismatched. My rating was 15% (i.e lazy procrastinator) while the friend rating was 96% (always gets stuff done)!!

Obviously I've managed to fool a lot of people.

Want to upgrade your Silver Catalyst trial license?

2007-10-16T01:18:00.000+08:00

If you've been following my agile tools blog, you would have known that Silver Catalyst v1.5 was released a few days ago. You would also have known that the free version of Silver Catalyst comes with a three team member license. This is perfect for use with small teams and for evaluation purposes.

But wouldn't it be cool to use the tool on a real project with the actual team? I know a lot of people would love that.

So I'm doing an experiment. Till the end of this month, I'm giving away a free upgrade of the trial license than can be used by fifty team members. This will probably cover your entire team, so you can use it on a real, live project. It is a license with no time limits and no feature limits. The only thing is that it's still a trial license so it won't be eligible for 'official' support. Not that it matters, because you can shoot me an email anytime nevertheless.

How do you get this upgraded license?

Download the latest version of Silver Catalyst, use it and then review it on your blog with a link back to the Silver Catalyst homepage. The latest version of Silver Catalyst is 1.5.1 released today, so if you've got an older version, you might want to download the latest one. There are no conditions on the review. It can be positive, negative, whatever. Just keep it unbiased and write what you really think about Silver Catalyst.

Then email me at siddharta@silverstripesoftware.com with the URL of your blog post and I'll reply with the upgraded license.

Sounds simple? It is. I'm looking forward to reading the reviews!

Introduction to Agile: Agile Chennai 2007 Presentation

2007-10-15T19:02:00.000+08:00

This is the intro to agile presentation from Agile Chennai 2007. It was done jointly by Bala and myself, although Bala did most of it. I just spoke for five minutes at the end of slide 83 about how agile is not a set of techniques.

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Effects of ultimate frisbee

2007-10-07T12:51:00.000+08:00

I've got rotator cuff tendonitis :-/

SearchCamp

2007-10-06T15:17:00.000+08:00

I'm at SearchCamp. I'll be blogging from SearchCamp on my pownce stream.

Astreal

2007-09-30T14:59:00.001+08:00

Astreal
Originally uploaded by Siddhi

The Singaporean band Astreal performing during Baybeats 2003