My last post of 2006

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007 FOLKS !!!

PAN IIT 2006

As promised, I am going to write a little about the PAN IIT conference in Mumbai from Dec 23-25.

It was a grand event, over 5000 attendees with well known personalities from all over India and US. The event was inaugurated by the President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. I missed this piece ... remember my flight had got delayed !!!

The first day was more general I'd say, wherein we had people from the Indian govt, UN ... speak about India, the IITs and the challenges that lie in way of progress of the IITs and the nation. Personally speaking I had a tough time networking because the attendees, although all IITians, were from from varied industries, e.g, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals etc. It was hard to find the people relevant to what we do at Wirkle. The second day was good, really good, with 7 parallel segments each with a different focus. The one that I went to was the 6th one ... entrepreneurship - from starting up, to scaling it and making it big. This time networking was great !!! The 3rd day was mostly wrapping up wherein there was a discussion around how IITians could play a role in nation building and a set of action items.

I was one of the volunteers in the first Pan IIT event that had happened in the bay area in 2003. This one was better ... the theme of this conference was more clear, the media coverage was much more and besides the objective was to kick start the effort of nation building which I think is a great cause. Hats off to the Pan IIT team !!!

The Startup FAQ - Post 1

Wrote this on Dec 23rd, posting it now. Here goes:

Here I am on the flight from Delhi to Mumbai, the flight time was 615am in the morning, its already 915am and the flight is still in Delhi. Yes you guessed it right, its the fog. The winter season is delhi is accompanied by fog, always ... which means early morning and late evening flights are almost guaranteed to be delayed.

Well, I have talked on the phone, solved a few Sudukos, ate some stuff ... so what next? I just realized my dear friend "blog".

I have been thinking on writing about my experience on startups for quite some time ... so what could be a better time than this. So if you are a first time entrepreneur and an engineer, then this is for you.

• Passion is Step 1
  So here's the deal, the road that you are embarking on is a tough one, you won't get the nice office that your employer might have provided to you in the past, you won't get those multi digit paychecks, you won't get all those benefits, you won't get the work-life balance ...
  



• Everything sounds so negative, so whats my motivation?
  Thats right, the road is tough ... but the end is rosy, provided you make it. Most people drop out early, others struggle for some time and then drop out ... only a very few make it.
  
  The only thing that will keep you going in these tough times is the passion that you have for what you are doing. Hence I say, make sure you are very very very passionate about whatever business you have chosen.
  



• Okie, what next?
  Revenue, revenue, revenue ... don't think investment, don't think technology, don't think anything else, just focus on who your customers are going to be, why will they pay and how you will reach them.
  
  I know this can be hard, I have been through this myself. Being an engineer the thing that really excites me most is cool technology. But see we're here trying to run a business, and a business must make profits and for that you need revenue ... so really there isn't a way out.



• But lots of companies, e.g., many Internet companies don't have a revenue model when they do their first launch?
  Yes thats true, and this exactly what the 2000-2001 dot com bubble was all about, a lot of people have already made this mistake, you can avoid it and you should.
  



• But the Internet companies of today have an automatic revenue model called google adsense.
  Yes thats true, but do you know how much revenue that will get you exactly? Before you rely on it too much make sure you have done the math. Even google gets most of its revenue from google adwords (the ads that show up on its search page) and NOT google adsense and there is a good reason for that. So make sure you have done your research before you rely on it too much.
  

... shall have more in my next POST, until then Happy Entrepreneuring.

Headed to Pan IIT 2006 tomorrow

Im flying to Mumbai for Pan IIT 2006 tomorrow, the agenda and the vision for the meet sounds really exciting and hoping to meet a lot of people. More updates on my blog shall follow.

10kms ... more to go

I should have posted this yesterday, anyway here goes -

Today morning was good, really good ... for the first time in my life I ran 10kms in one shot, really speaking it was 9.6kms, but saying 10kms just makes me feel good :-)

I run in Dwarka's Sports Complex, a lap is 0.8kms so I usually do "x" number of laps, I did 12 laps = 9.6 kms today. It took me exactly 1hr, which means on an average I ran at 9.6km/hr. Ideally I want to improve on 2 things

1. The distance that I can run
2. The speed at which I run

Currently I am focussing on more on 1., just want to increase the distance and I'll worry about the speed later. On an average I run 2-3 times a week, out of which 1-2 times I would run less say 5 or 6 kms and on one of the attempts I would run more than I have ever.

Next week Im thinking I won't go beyond the 10km, afterall my legs need a break too ;-)

TiE New Delhi (Dec 16) and the corporate ladder

I was there at TiE New Delhi this Saturday, the theme was "Effective CEOs" and Dr Prasad Kaipa was the key presenter.

There was one slide which I thought made a lot of sense. It talks about the 5 steps of the corporate ladder ...

Step1, Individual Contributor - Most of us start out like this in our careers, where we apply our knowledge and understanding to accomplish individual tasks that are assigned to us.

Step2, Team Contributor - At this point in our careers, we apply our knowledge and experience to the team as a whole resulting in success ... not as an individual but as a team.

Step3, Team Manager - At this stage an individual takes the responsibility of executing a task and organizes a team to get it done.

Step4, Team Leader - A leader is a person who has a vision, motivates and inspires people along the lines of the vision and drives the execution.

Step5, Executive - .... to tell you the fact I didn't really understand this much, or maybe it is just that I cannot relate to this, yet !!!

Anywayz ... so Prasad's theory is that, a successful CEO usually goes through all the steps and most CEOs are somewhere between level 4 and 5 ... anything below that, you're probably not ready.

Barcamp Delhi - Talk by the Opera guys and the mobile web

I was there at barcamp delhi this past weekend, it was great by the way, great job done by the organizers.

There was a talk by Sigbjorn Vik, Opera Software, which was really interesting ... he talked about the developments that are planned for the Opera browser, both on the PC and mobile. Some of the things that I found interesting -

- Calendar : On travel sites where travel dates are to be entered by user, usually these days you'd see a calendar pop-up allowing you to select the dates. This is common with almost all travel sites except that all have to make their custom implementations of the same. So Sigbjorn mentioned that they plan to put this functionality in the browser itself so that no custom implementations are required ... now that makes sense.

- xHTML + voice - Having speech to text conversion built into the browser allowing users to easily fill up information on web pages without too much work for the developers who make the website.

... and there were a bunch of other features as well. Now the key thing to notice here is that, at a high level they are trying to put that functionality in the browser which users are likely to use or are already using and simplify the job of the web developers or enable them to do things which they couldn't have done on a browser today.

Now lets look at the mobile side of the picture ... how should our mobile web look like, our mobile web should have constructs that users are likely to use or are already using today. For example,

- if you launch the menu of a phone today you'd see nice icons laid out in a matrix, when selecting one of them you have it blow up in size then you select what you want to do with that from your options menu.

- similarly your addressbook has a list of contacts, and you move up and down between them and use your options menu to perform actions on that contact.

... and so on. Now lets think about it, this is what users are doing ... so why aren't we trying to take mobile web in this direction and instead focussing on optimizing webpages with hyperlinks for phones. The day we look at the mobile web from a user standpoint instead of thinking about fitting HTML pages on phones, the mobile web would be much more successful.

Think about it ... HTML was designed keeping in mind the PC, instead if you had phones come first would HTML be the way it is today?

Mobile Social Networks, are we there yet?

Mobile is hot these days, with a lot of investment going into it and so are social networks (myspace, youtube ...). Now lets focus on the niche when we merge these 2 concepts, i.e., mobile social networks ... is the picture still as rosy?

We have been through some of that with our product LinknSurf, and there are a lot of observations that we have made ... my understanding is that it will still be sometime before mobile social networks are ready, the infrastructure is still not there yet.

For a social network to be successful, you need to get together people of similar interests and allow them to communicate over their common interests. Talking about communication on the mobile phone, lets see what we have today:

- Voice: A voice based social network, hmmm ... somehow that is hard to imagine, or is it just my imagination ;-)

- SMS: SMS based social networks would come with their own limitations - 160 chars, always alerting behavior, cost involved on a per SMS basis ...

- Mobile web: Now this could be close if mobile sites were more usable, there weren't latency issues with accessing those and if everyone with a mobile phone had GPRS. The reality is that mobile web is still not there yet.

- A mobile app like j2me, symbian: This is better than mobile sites because of the usability that it offers, however, there are still 2 factors that would prevent this - varied devices not all of them could support a feature rich app and most people with mobile phones don't have GPRS.

There are a bunch of mobile social networking apps like Rabble, fotochatter, litefeeds etc. but the userbase growth has been limited ... the key issue being ... if I as a user want to connect to a user with whom I share a common interest what is likelyhood of that person having
- GPRS access ?
- A supported handset ?

So the millon dollar question is, how could we make a social network on mobile phones successful, any answers?

About Wirkle and me

There is a lot to write ... a lot to talk about, however, before I delve into my thoughts let me give a little brief about Wirkle and myself.

I am Varun Khurana, a Comp. Sc. graduate from IIT Delhi . After college I worked for Network Appliance in Sunnyvale, CA for 5 years when I decided to return back to New Delhi, India. I joined Wirkle full-time here in Delhi.

You can learn more about Wirkle at http://wirkle.com but I could give a brief introduction. We're a startup company ... our objective is to mobilize the world, enable people to extract more from their phones than just voice, take the data that resides on the web and fit it onto the mobile phone such that it is still usable, if not more so.

There are over 2.4 billion mobile phone users in the world, and the number is only growing, mobile phone capabilities are continuously improving ...

.... there is a lot to be done, we just aim to do our bit.

My first post

"Hello World"