Long time, no see ... Again !!!

Well, well, well ... looking back at my blog, I see that my last post was on Nov 4, 2007. One thing I can tell you, maintaining a blog and running a business at the same time is not easy ... do-able, but not easy.

A lot has happened over the past couple of months - Wirkle has moved a bigger office ... very colorful (it took quite some effort to select the right layout of the office, the color combination ... see pictures below). As a company, it continues to grow ... over 30 people now, hiring is one of our biggest focus at this time.

Scaling to the next level is the next challenge ahead of the company, forming the right processes that ensure satisfied clients and employees is what we're trying to figure out right now.

The journey this far has been very eventful, a lot of hard work and a lot of learning. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to post about my experiences ... hoping that the readers of this blog will be able to gain something out of it.

A growing company

I was going through some of the pictures we had taken at Wirkle over the past 2-3 months ... it feels great to back at how things have changed over the past couple of weeks where we have been hiring like crazy and have more than doubled in size.

As you can see from the pictures the Wirkle family has grown quite a bit (17 now) ... and continues to grow !!!

Wirkle.com ... new, improved and much better than before

This is a follow up on my previous post "The importance of the Web". As promised, we have been working on changing the look and feel of Wirkle.com ... check out the newer, much improved version here.

I think this version is better than the previous one, however, still there are 2 things that can be improved further

1. The front page I think is a little cluttered, we need to work on fixing some of that.
2. The animation at the top ... Im wondering if it can get annoying because it kind of shows up on every page.

Plz comment on this post if you folks out there have any feedback for us.

Where the CEO gets beaten up !!!

Im sure the title of this post will attract your attention. Well, the fact is ... this really IS true. On my birthday (28th Feb), as per college traditions the Wirkle team picked me up and kicked me ... the more well known terminology for this is "birthday bumps".

Nonetheless, I want the readers of this blog learn about the culture we have at Wirkle ... very similar to what you would see on a college campus, where work and fun go hand in hand and corporate hierarchy does not come in way.

So if you are a smart engineer and are looking for a fun place to do some cutting edge mobile technology work send us an email at jobs@wirkle.com, we are hiring !!!

Wirkle goes Global

Wirkle was selected among the finalists of the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards 2007. Stay tuned to hear us at the Global Peer Awards in Barcelona on Feb 12. We'll have Harsh Dhundia, our director of business development, representing us.

The one bad part was that the finalists were announced a week and a half before the event. Now for us in India, getting a visa for Spain takes time approximately 2 weeks. Even for Harsh who's in the US we got the visa on Friday and he had to fly on Saturday.

We owe this to our COO, Lomesh Dutta, who nominated us for the awards from the Mobile Monday Delhi chapter, prepared our pitch for the event, made sure that we get selected and even coordinated the visa/travel for Barcelona ... thanks Lomesh.

Wirkle at Mobile Monday Delhi on Jan 20, 2007

The second Mobile Monday of the Delhi chapter was organized in Noida on Jan 20. Wirkle was one of the proud organizers of the event and I had the opportunity to talk about what we do at Wirkle and our vision ... yup, thats me.

My presentation was centered around whats going on in the mobile web and what does the future hold for us. Today, the mobile web is a happening space with lots of stuff happening all over the globe. Lets discuss some of those.

• The conventional web - i.e., viewing existing websites on the phone ... opera mini is by far the leader in this space. I think the opera mini is one of the best mobile browsers around, however, given that the web as it stands today was designed for the PC, the experience that you would get on the phone can never be as good.
• The mobile web - i.e., all your wml, chtml, xhtml websites that are specifically designed for the phone. The user experience therein is definitely better than conventional websites but there is still room for improvement. The reason I say that is ... people often have to resort to mobile apps to provide that level of usability, e.g., despite there being a mobile portal to access gmail ... they had to come up with a mobile app for gmail. If we analyze that in a little more detail ... I think this comes up from that fact that the mobile markup languages have their roots in html and html was never designed for the phone.
  
• Mobile Applications - Mobile applications provide a highly usable interface to access content, however, they don't give you the capability to access any content. Those are specifically designed for a particular type of content and one can only access that.

We at Wirkle have our own vision / technology for the mobile world and all of our products are centered around that. Take a look at my slides below ... and see if they make sense to you.

Wirkle at Comsware 2007

Yeah, yeah ... I know you folks have already read this on Sunil's Blog and Harsh's Blog. You think this old news now ... well, yes and no. The news is old but what I am writing here will be new information, so read on.

Im writing this on my way from Bangalore to Delhi ... on the way back from Comsware. We are also presenting at Proto.in the coming weekend, Sunil is flying down to Chennai for that. You are also going to hear us speak at Mobile Monday Delhi ... and guess what, we are one of the proud organizers of that event.

You can tell we're upto something here, but the reality is ... we're experimenting. For the most part till now we have been an inwards focused organization. Sometime back we realized how important is the external face to any company, because thats where the business comes from. Again this is something which Im hoping other entrepreneurs realize earlier that we did.

Now lets talk about the external face, every company has multiple avenues via which they publicize themselves to the external world, conferences, the web, articles in magazines ... and the list goes on and on. Now if you have "x" dollars how do you decide which one of these is best for you.

I don't really have an answer to the above and I think it varies from company to company. For Wirkle, we're trying to get business more than anything else, so in our case we publicize ourselves where we think most of our customers will be.

Coming back to comsware, this was our first exhibit ever ... overall I think it went good, we met lots of people. At the same time, I think it could have gone better. Actually, comsware is combination of research/acad and business, comsbiz was the business segment of the conference and thats where our target audience was. Now the bad part was that, comsbiz was on 9th and 10th, while the exhibits were on the 10th and 11th ... I think the exhibits should have been aligned with comsbiz, that would have made more business sense for the companies exhibiting at the conference.

Also, the exhibits should be where the people are, in case of comsware, the exhibit hall was a little off from the mainstream where the segments were taking place. Later on they did address some of that by having the tea/coffee breaks right where the exhibits were, so thanks to them for taking care of that.

The importance of the Web

The other day I was having coffee with Nikhil who's the founder and CTO of a 40-50 people company. I won't disclose other details here but Im sure if he is reading this he'd know. His company is a provider of specific enterprise solutions. They employ sales people who target these enterprises, reach to them and sell them their solution. Some time back they tried out google adwords ... and this will surprise you - today, majority of their business comes via google.

Another friend of mine, Gaurav, who's also the founder of a 40-50 people company and is doing very well indicated how sitting in India they get business from the US and most of their customers find them via the web.

This forced me to re-think some of our strategy, now on one side you would have a sales strategy where you reach out to potential customers, e.g., you send emails to a 100, 5-7 might reply back and you might close a deal with 1 if you are lucky. The other side of this is that you'd publicize yourself at a place on the web where your customers are most likely to come and once you have done that your customers come and find you. Now for a startup with limited funding where you don't have all the sales people you'd need, your web presence might prove to be handy.

So what does this mean, well ... expect lots more about Wirkle on the web in the coming days!!!

Where is Wirkle ...

The other day I was just staring at my blog, I looked at the title of my blog "the inception of wirkle" and then I looked at my posts. Hmmm ... Im writing about mobile, Im writing about the conferences Im going to ... but where the heck is Wirkle?

Well, better sooner than later ... at least I realized this. Not that I am not going to write about mobile or conferences ... just that I am going to also write more about Wirkle and our experiences as we move along.

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.