Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Technora

I started writing a blog on Indian Entrepreneurship, Startups etc. You can find it at www.technora.in

I added a section "Just Baked" for those startups which come up with new products and want to reach out to people. We welcome all of you to submit your startup products or refer a startup that you like at Just Baked, and we would be more than happy to do post on it.

The aim of this site is to help the fellow entrepreneurs to get to their target audience and get appropriate feedback on their products.




Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Openings for Y Combinator summer 2014 batch

If you are an entrepreneur with an excellent idea and looking for help, then here is the chance that is worth trying.

YCombinator summer 2014 batch is accepting applications for both non-profit and for-profit startups till midnight of March 28th.

The details for applying is mentioned at details

Whose ever application gets selected needs to go to US where YC will reimburse up to $1100 per group for travel expenses.


All the best , for all those who are planning to apply.


Saturday, March 22, 2014

Life of an user!

We the users, Online users,
 
When i first came to know about internet, around 1998 or so, having an account in Yahoo was a fab and i soon created a login in yahoo mail.

Then came Orkut, and every one had an account on it. We invited all our friends in Yahoo into Orkut and many of us were very concerned about the number of posts we had.

Again, things changed and this time came Facebook. The story repeated itself and most of us did the same thing, inviting friends from Orkut and concerns about number of posts.

Yesterday, i was looking at g+ and surprised to see most of my friends there too.
I have send around 50-60 friend requests.

Again after 3-4 years, there will be some other social network and we all  will do the same thing again.

We invite our friends, share statuses and upload content and help build a social network and click on their advertisements to make them worlds largest social network.

Luckily, the duration of survival of these networks has been around 7-10 years, if it had been say 2-3 years, we would have wasted most of our time in creating accounts and inviting friends.

Feel free to mention your thoughts.

Patents Maze

I got an idea related to online video portals and was on cloud9 for 2 weeks or so until i searched google patents website to see the prior art.

I was kind of surprised to see the number of patents that were granted related to almost the same idea and the little variation between each patent.  The more alarming fact is that these patents didn't see the light of the day as they are not implemented which means that they are not helping the online audience.

This reminded me of something, that used to be a norm in  Indian buses some 15-20 years ago. The moment a bus comes into the bus station, people will jump in and keep their hand kerchiefs or news papers or towels even before getting into the bus as a sign of that seat being reserved for them. Then they will leisurely come and claim their seat. Those people who took the pain to stand in the queue will not find a seat as ever seat is reserved.

These days things changed, people became more civilized and such things are not happening. But i see a much similar thing happening in the so called civilized world of patenting.

I am not against patents, but the fact that applying and processing a patent is quite expensive makes it easy for corporates to acquire patents. Obviously, these corporates will not try these patents until they see a business value of it. This makes a creative idea stay in the backyard of a great big company and doesn't help the users.

Even if a non corporate has to apply for a patent, he should ensure not to step on to any of the existing patents which is very difficult given the existing maze of patents.

I found this image very related to the context of my post.



Here is a link to the number of patents each corporate had by the end of year 2012.

Hope you agree with this.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

What is success ?

In my college days, i used to think that to be successful, you need to have good education. Later after joining Strand, my understanding of life changed and the desire to start a company of my own and provide employment to others increased.

As i had a Bachelors degree in Computer Sciences, an M.Tech from IIIT-H, and was very  passionate about writing code, i started thinking that an MBA from the IIM's  will make me complete and help me in spinning off a company.

Within 2 years or so, i realized that most of the people who study at IIM's join existing companies in high paying jobs but doesn't necessarily start new companies.

May be after studying so many courses on business management, it turns out that we start looking at every idea with a lens of bookish knowledge which doesn't allow us to dive into our passion and take the risk. One of my friend once quoted that What degree did Dheerubhai ambani had that he created such a huge empire?

Now, in the present situation. I see  many of friends, colleagues discuss things like how did gmail overcome Yahoo, or YouTube was successful inspite of the fact that Google videos was there, How DropBox was successful given that Google Dirve etc where already there? Every one has a reason to satisfy themselves.

The general tendency of us (Homo sapiens(Humans)) is that we try to find out a reason which satisfies us regarding the actual fact. That is why we read like minded news papers, watch like minded TV shows, just to reinforce the reason that we already have in our mind.

The crux of this blog post is that, I started to think that so called "SUCCESS" is a random event and as an entrepreneur, the more you try, more are the chances that you get it.
   

Friday, March 14, 2014

Google results display changes

I started wondering why Google did this. Google results display changes Though this article came up after we @ Bangalore, India detected this change almost  a week before, I didn't quite understand the directionality of this change.

From some time, if you noticed, which ever link you click in the Google search results page, it first goes to Google servers and then redirects to the actual url.

From my understanding, Google is trying to see which results are being viewed by the users and which links are not. The nearest equivalent to this is human curation of links for any give search topic.

Coming back to the changes, I felt good that the Ads are displayed in a visibly distinguishable manner. In the older versions of Google Ads, the chance that a user clicks on an Ad link assuming it to be a search result was more.

Showing the content in a bigger/bolder font is also giving us a hint that the users are not worried about the URL's but are more interested in the content.

If we observe closely, once the search results are displayed, we read through the text that is displayed beneath the result and then take a call to either click a link or not. If this is true in most cases, the fact that we can arrive at is that "URL's are not important any more."

If my above guess is correct, then i wont be surprised if Google just shows the page's search term relevant text directly instead of showing the URL's in the near future.

Any way whats there in the name?  and we all know that in the world of internet, content is the king.





Monday, February 24, 2014

NirmalaSeva coming up in google search

5th page ke email cheyyatam avasarama ani anoddu.
I am very happy that NS is showing up in the results at least. Earlier it wasn't there even in the 20th page.
Just sharing the joy NirmalaSeva's growth.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Bangalore Lions Blood donors like NirmalaSeva

Hello friends,
Just wanted to share an update about NirmalaSeva[www.nirmalaseva.org].
Today morning, LionsBloodLine[https://www.facebook.com/lions.bloodline ] Bangalore "liked"   our nirmalaseva page https://www.facebook.com/nirmalaseva .
We posted some blood donation camps conducted by them earlier but i never expected them to follow our NirmalaSeva page.

Now this means that the admin of LionsBloodLine will come to know of all the events that we post on NS and can take a call to post it on their page, which means that the count of our kind hearted audience has increased and this is big leap for us.

Thanks to one and all for all the "Likes" and  "Shares" that you did and the moral support that helped us take NirmalaSeva forward.
Best Regards,
Sarath Budam