Aayush's Blog

Puneet mentioned to me about Ideawicket yesterday (he probably read about it in BusinessToday). The portal does a great job in making the intent of the website clear in one line - "Provide ideas and innovations to corporations for new & improved products, processes & services."

Basically it is a place where an individual can post his ideas of something that can help companies expand their business or better their processes by introducing efficiencies. So in case you say the sentence "they just don't know how to do business" a lot...may be this is the right platform to suggest some ideas and who knows some corporation might like your idea!

Companies, on Ideawicket, can also initiate the discussions by holding innovation contests. Actually this idea is not a new one. As I had mentioned in my book review of Mavericks at Work, the book cites examples of 2 companies that have been formed to tap the R&D resources outside their research labs and they have been pretty successful in interfacing the researchers and the companies!

Ideawicket's interface is pretty good and it is probably a good idea too. But what I would like to see in such a portal (and I'm giving out an idea that I have been thinking for quite some time now :-)) - is how can people through interaction make a good idea into a great one. What I mean is - such a portal attracts people who have the quality of thinking "outside the box" quality in them...right? So why not tap into the collective intelligence of all such people into making an innovative idea into a killer one!

In such a forum the focus will not be how many news ideas we can come up rather the focus will be to harness the wisdom of crowds. So it is of immense importance that such a portal also has specific groups that users can form and work as a team to convert an innovative idea into a practical one. Thus it would be the power of communities that will drive the ideas rather than random individual contributions.

Read this good news on HindustanTimes. Actually I feel that students in India need this the most. The education system, mostly, is pretty obsolete and students, specially in the rural colleges, don't know how they can shape their career during college or more importantly what all different opportunities lie ahead of them.

When I was at school, we always used to talk about that we lack "exposure" to career options as they were only limited to engineering (if you were from Maths background) or doctors (if from biology background). We used to look up to the students in schools and colleges in metros in India with some sort of inferiority complex. And actually this feeling of lack of "exposure" was pretty valid too. There was surely a lot of information asymmetry.

Internet, I feel, has the capability to do both...divide this information gap as well as fill it too (and that too quite easily). Therefore it is important that right from the student days, one is able to understand the potential uses of internet and reap its benefits to the fullest extent.

I picked up this book at this book was authored by the editors of FastCompany magazine and I have been following FastCompany blog for quite some time now and have liked it a lot. And let me put it at the start itself - I loved this book!

The book his divided into 4 sections:

Rethinking Competition - Explains how it is extremely important for companies to have a cause for which they fight. As today it is very easy for other companies to copy what you are doing, it is this zeal to fight for a cause beneficial to the customers in your niche market that will matter the most.

Reinventing Innovation - This primarily focus on the "Wisdom of Crowds" concept that is gaining momentum ever since the success of Wikipedia. This book has some superb examples to prove how it is extremely important for every the large R&D powerhouses to constantly look for and leverage the huge intellectual pool outside their research labs. Actually after reading Mavericks at Work and Wisdom of Crowds, I am really looking forward to reading Starfish and the Spider (already bought) and Wikinomics (waiting for the Indian edition)

Reconnecting with Customers - This section starts off well with the all important question - for the part few decades business has seen a lot of great R&D products, great advertisements, skillful advertisements and marketing tactics as well as cheaper ways to build and market products. The only thing that has degraded is the all important customer service. The book has some great examples of companies that have tried to connect with their customers in a very personal ways.

Redesigning Work - Examples of great working environments where employees have transformed their workplaces into a learning university. How companies attract talent and respect their employees and pass on the companies' values to the employees in a way that the employees understand them and the customers are able to clearly view it in the way these employees work and interact with them.

Towards the end of the book is a long list of maverick material for readers to research more on the aforementioned topics and it is pretty useful.

I simply loved the examples from 32 maverick companies through which the authors have tried to put their ideas across and prove as to why constant innovation is required for today's businesses to be successful.

You can read an excerpt of book - here.

You can go through the list of maverick companies featured in this book - here.

My Rating: 5/5

Amazon Link: Here

Fabmall Link: Here

So there are communities and networking websites on any theme possible. Yesterday I found EducatorsLog.in and found it pretty useful. It is basically a platform for educators in India to "connect, share and grow". If it reaches out to the right audience (i.e. the teachers and educators), it can certainly aim to raise the bar of education in India. And that's a bit "if" as internet penetration is still low in India and I am not too sure about how many people in the educational circle use internet pretty regularly.

But the idea is a simple and useful and also there is some pretty nice content on the website right now. Any once the word spread around and people come to know that there exists a platform for them to learn more and spread what they have learnt, certainly EducatiorLog.in will grow and hopefully fulfil its aims.

Actually today through this website, I got to know that ISRO has started its own institute for providing undergraduate and post graduate courses - http://www.iist.ac.in. And more interestingly the admission process is through IIT-JEE!

So NDTVJobs seems to be first big job website in India to introduce referrals to help recruiters better search for candidates.

Actually referrals are not totally new to job websites in India...the first I heard was MohanChoti. But NDTVJobs is the first big portal to take this bold step which is quite different from what other big players in the Indian job market like Monster.com, TimesJobs.com and Naukri.com are doing -- which is basically selling resumes and paid posting for job openings (the former contributing to a major portion).

I have given thoughts to referrals quite a bit and I think this concept is pretty interesting and if implemented well by job portals, it can be very useful:

Job seekers:

Candidates will certainly be able to make themselves stand out based on exceptional hard work and commitment that they might have shown in previous projects compared to simply being lost in thousands of resumes and profiles of people with same/similar educational qualifications, certifications and job experience.

Employers:

Referrals can surely make companies search profiles of millions of job seekers much better. I don't know how NDTVJobs will implement referrals but the kind of way I look at referrals, and perhaps the way we would try to implement it for students registered on UniversityHiring, is less granular. So people can certainly post testimonials about their friends/colleagues, but they should also be able to rate them on their technical skills as well as soft skills. So for example for a software professional, one should be able to rate his/her colleague on C++Java skills and also qualities like leadership, communication skills etc.

So these will provide more search fields for the recruiters to filter the results to better fit the profile of the ideal candidate they are looking for.

The other superb thing that referrals will do is to make it more difficult for people to fake their profile. This is one of the biggest problems facing portals like Monster and Naukri. A couple of months back a leading newspaper (probably Times Of India) had a lengthy article on this menace. Actually this is one of the biggest reason, the way we have architected our UniversityHiring placement management portal for educational institutes. We haven't opened it to general public (though its free for all students/colleges). Instead a college as a whole can use it under the supervision of a placement coordinator (generally a faculty member). This tackles the problems of duplicate and fake resumes extremely well. Couple this with referrals and user corrected information and we should be able to catch even the minutest fraud soon enough.

Job Portals:

Makes the job portal more sticky as people will surely want to keep their profile updated as it would be helpful to them at a later stage when they would be looking for a job. Plus they would regularly be requested by other people for referrals/testimonials etc. So if I may use the term "social networking" again -- a social network will be evolved.

Nonetheless as with all user contributed content, the usefulness of referral network will depend a lot on the implementation and the way that it will prevent/correct fraud referrals etc.

So I have my fingers crossed on this one and also looking forward as to how Monster/TimesJobs/Naukri will respond in the future with a similar strategy.

I had read the phrase "crossing the chasm" at way too many blogs/books/articles. I had also come to know that the "chasm" actually means...the break in the bell curve depicting the type of market captured by a company. Perhaps I didn't expect "crossing the chasm" to have any greater or in depth meaning than what I had grasped through the ultra-simplified definition of it (as aforementioned).

That's why though this book was on my "To Read" list for a long time, I was postponing it. Recently I got the time to read through this book and found it a superb read. It is perhaps the best business book that I have read yet. Actually its a book on strategy for technology companies...as to how a company starts with some superb R&D innovation and somehow converting it into a product for customers to buy.

What Geoffrey Moore argues is that any amount of R&D put into a product, can only attract a small section of a potentially huge market. And from making the success story much much bigger, you need to cater to the needs of the bulk of the market and not just the early market (which primarily consists of technology enthusiasts). This is where a company needs to cross the chasm. Basically a company needs to transform from a single product company, to a company that makes a product that is well integrable with many other products such that the resultant product can be easily accepted by the bulk of the customers without a lot of resistance. This is what the author calls whole product.

The first 3 chapters try to explain why the chasm exists and the psychographics of various types of customers in any market. The remaining chapters focus on crossing the chasm. It was simply a splendid read...the material being presented in a very simple and smooth fashion. The flow of the contents in the book is absolutely great.

Specially after doing a lot of marketing for UniversityHiring, for the past 2-3 months, I was able to co-relate my experiences with the book very well. And I think that I was able to better understand the concepts before of this reason. I think it is a must read for every entrepreneur! Even if a geek reads it, this book can give a convincing argument as to a claim that we hear again and again - why only having a great technology product doesn't guarantee great profits.

The only problem with the book is that the examples are a bit dated...as this book was written in early 90's.

I am eagerly looking forward to reading Moore's 2nd book - Inside the Tornado.

My Rating: 5/5

Amazon Link: Here

Fabmall Link: Here

Every once in a while I come across some post by some geek, shouting off a seemingly impossible and somewhat stupid. Here's a latest example which is at the top of Techmeme since today morning - Microsoft is Dead (by Paul Graham).

Quite often these titles and the arguments to support such flashy "link baits" are similar in content to what I used to encounter in newsgroups at IIT Kanpur. Most of such newsgroup posts were specifically targeted at Microsoft (the easiest to bash!)...being a regular newsgroup follower and a huge Microsoft fan, my initial reaction was that of anger and many a times I used to reply in the same tone in which the original message was posted by the author. And more often than not a flame thread used to start with allegations and counter allegations and with no result...and as in most heated arguments after a while none of the participating people are interested in resolving/discussing the issue; rather they are more interesting in winning. And which means letting the other one feel small.

After a while, I realized that such discussions were generally futile as most of these posts were generally an outburst to a narrow minded thinking (narrow minded as in the scope of the possible variables that constitute the issue rather than the authors intent). And I think that's the reason why when geeks comment out on this technology being dead or that that technology being dead, they don't necessarily look at the problem at the business angle at all.

Also, geeks are generally very eager to jump technology platforms and hence I feel that they don't generally have the patience to look beyond the circle of the other technology zealots with whom they mostly interact.

With Paul Graham's aforementioned post and with many other similar ones, I have seen the couple of commonalities that I have just mentioned. Actually looking back a couple of years of my sporadic blogging, I have also committed the similar "mistakes" in over excitement. But after getting involved with my new startup, I have got the time to read some business books too...and hence now I analyze a situation not sheerly on the basis of how "cool" or "boring" a technology is. Its not simply what I or someone else things about a cool new technology to make it revolutionize the world...its much much more complex than that.

Now, whenever I read an article that  contains "This would change the world..." or "XYZ is dead...", I take more care while analyzing the arguments put forward in support of the claim. I am particularly impressed by Don Dodge who seems to correct his previous articles in view of more data available. A recent example being how he stands corrected on his previous article in which he fears that newspapers and magazines are dead.

About an year back I started reading more and more about entrepreneurship and internet marketing. Because that I used to read a lot online but mostly on hard core technical stuff.

As the number of blogs on internet marketing, buzz marketing etc. that I regularly followed started to increase, I heard the name of Seth Godin and his books in the aforementioned domains even more and more. I was pretty eager to get hold of some of his books. I actually grabbed a couple of them - Permission Marketing and The Big Red Fez.

Permission Marketing was the first that I could read through. And to put it simply - I didn't enjoy it a lot. Rather I didn't find much to learn out of it. I know that this statement is pretty contradictory to most of the reviews on Amazon.com. It was after reading these reviews that I planned to order this book but somehow I feel almost the opposite of such reviews.

The book starts with a bold note wherein Seth tries to explain how the traditional ways of advertising no longer work. How such advertisements are increasingly becoming a waste of money and how we, the targets of these ads, are becoming more and more immune to such obtrusive, ways of advertisements. As the effect of such ads is becoming less and because there is competition in almost every product domain to gain the potential customer's attention, people start spending more or ads. Seth gives lots and lots of examples to support his point. Though his point is pretty relevant today and also valid, but the examples he sites are way too cluttered and arranged randomly. The same argument of the diluting effect of conventional advertising methods is being raised by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their superb book Positioning. And in their book they put in a lot better examples to prove their claim and the examples are put in a proper sequence for the readers to understand.

Seth, while trying to prove the same point, constantly reminds the readers that Permission Marketing is the key and the solution. The build up to know exactly is permission marketing is pretty good. The author engages the reader to read through the whole book. But then as soon as he introduces us to the concept of Permission Marketing he drops a biggie - the first step of permission marketing is to somehow get the attention of a potential customer. And how do you attract the attention....through conventional advertisements! A real blooper! The whole while I was being lead to Permission Marketing and how it would solve my problems as a marketer. A superb effort had been made to arouse a genuine curiosity within me and. I somehow read through the rest of the book to find out if there was anything else to it and I could perhaps summarize the rest of it quite quickly:

• Cost of roping in a new customer is almost always greater than retaining an existing customer and then slowly pushing more and more of your services/products to him.
• Personalize your experience. Never treat a customer as a database entry. Treat him to make him feel that he is being individually addressed.
• Through great customer service, build up the level of confidence that the customers have on you. Use (and guard) their faith in you for a mutual beneficial relationship.
• As in almost all of his books, Seth Godin, puts in a lot of examples from the real world. This is actually good...just that sometimes they become quite overwhelming and try to distract the reader from the original proposition made by the author.

I don't think that these points/facts mentioned by Seth are not something that has been established by sort of research...actually these are pretty well known in the field of advertising. And you can gather these points by only reading some blogs and articles online. So in the end, I am sorry to say but I was pretty disappointed with this book. Atleast it didn't deliver on the expectations I had after reading its reviews.

My Rating: 2/5

Amazon Link: Here

Fabmall Link: Here

According to this article on Content Sutra, BSNL is planning to upgrade all subscribers of 256kbps to 2Mbps with no extra cost!!! Now this is huge as if this does take place all the other service providers like Airtel, TATA Indicom, Reliance, Sify will be kind of forced to do the same. The same is the case in mobile phone service too...BSNL is the leader in slashing prices and then the others follow.

Anyway if there is any probability that this is true it is great news! Even after having the 256kbps broadband, it is very difficult to view streaming videos without hiccups.

Just today I learnt that Zudeo.com has become online. Zudeo is a torrent based peer-to-peer sharing platform for sharing audio/video. Recently a lot of talk has been going around as to how the major content providers will need to move ahead of TV to some kind of peer-to-peer technology to distribute their content (TV shows, movies etc.). This is not only keep a check on the piracy of such TV shows and movies but also help reach a larger audience and at the same time be profitable by keeping intact the tried and tested model of ads between movies/serials.

Zudeo is perhaps the first major step towards it. And with its recent collaboration with BBC for providing content into its website this should turn out to be really big. I believe AOL is also working on similar lines but I have no idea when their service will be out in the public.

Zudeo is also encouraging people to upload and share their own videos etc...kind of leveraging the momentum and buzz generated by YouTube for people contributed videos. One thing that is a bit different here is that Zudeo is encouraging people to upload high quality videos.

The interface of Zudeo is very very neat...I really commend the designers of the website. From my initial search on Zudeo I could find out some cool stuff - the trailer of Spiderman 3, Veer Zaara (Hindi Movie), Jaan-e-Mann(Hindi movie) and a lot of rock videos. As the press release [PDF] with BBC read, I think there are a lot of other goodies coming up:

Under the terms of the agreement, BBC Worldwide will license international hit television series to U.S. users of the service, including Red Dwarf, Strange and Invasion Earth, debuting via broadband for the first time in the U.S. Other titles include International Emmy® award-winning, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers (starring John Cleese of Monty Python), Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal among others. Additional content partnerships are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

I think one should check this out!

[As posted on UniversityHiring blog]

So when the 4 of us decided that we are going to build such a placement office management software, the design discussions started to take place over GTalk :-) Initially we were pretty ambitious of the functionalities that we would be putting into the system. And you can't blame us...estimation is still a difficult problem in software engineering!
Apart from having design discussions we were thinking on the lines of how are we going to coordinate among ourselves while actually programming the functionalities. The best option seemed to be buying some hosting space and a domain name. After a long email thread of the possible names which included relevant names like placementhelper.com, placementholder.com as well as geeks names (and now seemingly stupid names) like technomaniacs.com and geekyfreaky.com, we selected eatbits.com to be a good enough website domain. We were yet to decide a name of our product...first let there be any product and then we would think of names!
The next 4-5 months (Dec 2005 - April 2006) were kind of event less considering the development of the software that we had conceived:

• Coordinating over GTalk every alternate day.
• No weekends. My Counter Strike practice had certainly taken a beating :-)
• Coding, debugging...coding, debugging

• Many a times under pressure of time and exhaustion after office, we started coding even before having a rough design in our mind. A typical code like helldesign is important. scenario talked about in many software engineering books. Almost always turned out to be extremely bad! So
• After coding like hell for days together, we later found out that there was a functionality that we had missed. And now to correct this required another brave programming effort. Not only it re-iterated the previous point, but also emphasized that changes at design level are the ones that require the most effort to implement.
• Very early we realized that we should put some customization into our system so if this software gets developed we can make it easily adaptable to many placement offices. And while putting in such generalizations another software engineering principle struck our minds - you almost always sacrifice performance when implementing generalizations.
• As we missed our self proposed deadlines one after another, we realized that surely estimation even in terms of time is not that easy.
• Initially we had taken up features and functionalities which didn't quite overlap so that the cost of integration was the least. But till a month back the only way we used to integrate the overlapping code was through taking a diff of the code files. And surely many a times we overwrote code, introduced new bugs and kept us wondering why is this not working now! So here comes another good old advice - always use a code management system like a CVS.

• Proper 3-tiered architecture (which later on allowed us to make our software with MySQL)
• Using some design patterns efficiently
• Using good coding principles - so that we can easily understand our own code many months down the line (in this effort I read through many books like Code Complete and Writing Solid Code).

I had read a lot of praise about this book but unfortunately it is not available in a low priced edition. So I had to ask one of my friends who was visiting US to buy it from Amazon. And I think it was worth the pain and the extra money. The book is basically about how we, humans, think about using things. How do we conceive the working of a device/object even before reading the manual. The author is an eminent professor in psychology and actually the book was previously sold under the name of The Psychology of Everyday Things.

The author, Prof. Donald Norman, does a great job in relating how our brain works and how can a designer utilize this to create products that are much more usable without even looking at some README type documents. Though most of times he tries to give example of doors, taps and phones to illustrate the difference between a bad design and a good one but the inferences he draws are globally applicable. Surely if you get to have an insight how the potential users of your product think it is certainly a great advantage. One other important topic that the author discusses in how do we think when we commit a mistake while using a device...do we think that we are dumb or do we blame the device for it.

I think its a pretty good read! The only minus point that I could think of is that the book is not updated lately and hence many of the example specially about phones and computers are not so much applicable as of today.

My Rating: 4/5

Amazon Link: Here

I will be very honest...till last year when I moved to Bangalore after graduation, I hadn't completed a single book other than those in my educational curriculum. Somehow I didn't get the enthusiasm to complete it. There were certainly bursts of frustration after which I would take up a novel but lost motivation to reach the end of it pretty quickly.

Looking at the present I am pretty happy with how the situation is. Though I still don't have the patience and the energy to read a novel but I have a pretty ardent reader of business, marketing and of course technical books. Surely part of the motivation is because I wanted to create something that is useful, innovative and also have some business value. In this particular year, I read about 15 books which is pretty books looking at my previous records :-P

So soon I will posting about some of the interesting books that I went through and my reviews about them!

Farhan forwarded a cool ad for Microsoft Office 2007. And there are a bunch of others on the same website -  here. Any others that you may know of and which are not in the banned ads category :-P

A friend of mine is starting off with an interesting idea in India which is totally based on SMS. I will post the details about his offering after a while. When he mentioned his idea to me, I was pretty sure that it can be a biggie but what I was worried about was whether, in India atleast, there is some kind of permission that you need to take from service providers before using SMS for business. Anyone aware of this? What about in places other than India?