The blog is moving...

It has been quite a while since I've posted here. There really is no excuse -- I had all but forgotten about this blog! I was blogging at Wordpress.com and have now moved from there as well. If you haven't been reading my other blog, well something important has happened -- I'm currently busy starting up my own venture!

While I design and build a data center to host this blog (and run my startup!), I've temporarily moved this blog to my machine at home. Setting up something on home DSL connection with a dynamic DNS has been an interesting exercise!

I had a cheap old box lying around which is serving as the web server. It has all of 384MB of memory, an AMD 750MHz processor and is running Ubuntu server.

Since I have no traffic on this blog to speak of, the machine should do just fine. Please don't go and link any of these posts on digg, reddit, slashdot and other such places known to bring down even the heftiest of servers!

The new blog address is somewhat simpler and is:

http://www.gautamsworld.com/

Indian "Indie Rock" rocks!

Infinity Radio is an Internet Radio station dedicated to playing original music by Indian Rock bands. Most of these artists do not have record labels behind them so you can't easily buy this stuff from a store. That's why an Internet Radio channel for this music is such a great idea and Infinity Radio is doing a pretty decent job of it. The quality isn't that great with their high quality stream at only 64 kbps (24kHz) but considering you might not hear this music anywhere else, its not bad! You can use most media players to listen to this station including Windows Media Player, Winamp and iTunes. So tune in!

Links

• Infinity Radio - Listen Now!
• Infinity Radio - Blog

Reduce your mobile bills! (or try atleast)

I just came across YourBillBuddy.com which aims at reducing your mobile phone bills by analyzing your existing bills and figuring out which bill plans from which provider suit you the best. The website only works with Indian cell phone providers but seems like a concept that could be used pretty much anywhere. What is does is analyze your call patterns (more long distance calls, more calls to hutch phones, more SMS than calls etc) and matches that against its database of bill plans from most mobile operators in India. The site then recommends a bill plan that will give you the lowest average bill per month based on your usage pattern. The site claims to cover the following operators Airtel, Hutch, Idea, Reliance, MTNL, Spice, BSNL and Tata Indicom. YourBillBuddy currently does not support corporate plans as the information about these plans is not publicly available. The only catch obviously is that you need to upload the bills to the website! There are some privacy issues here and if you're feeling concerned then you should read their privacy policy before signing up. Getting electronic bills should be fairly easy, as it was for me with my Airtel connection. Airtel lets your download your bills in a PDF file from their website which you can directly upload to YourBillBuddy. I'm currently in the process of trying it out and I'm glad to say, I'm already in a pretty decent bill plan :-). The reality however is that, in India, there are just too many service providers with too many bill plans. Its practically impossible to keep track of all of them and figure out the best one, especially since they keep changing the plans regularly! YourBillBuddy seems like a decent idea that if executed well could benefit a lot of people here in India.

Links

• YourBillBuddy.com
• YourBillBuddy Website Tour
• YourBillBuddy F.A.Q.

Opening Pandora's Box

Pandora.com is an amazing music service that gives a Web 2.0 touch to internet radio. It's powered by the Music Genome Project and it can create music stations which play songs "musically similar" to tracks or artists that you suggest. The best thing I suppose is that - it really works well!

The Music Genome Project provides controlled tagging and categorization to music out there. The selections can then be refined by users while they listen to the songs. They can indicate whether they liked or disliked the track and whether they think the songs aren't musically alike! By giving everyone this ability, Pandora harnesses the wisdom of crowds and along with the opinions of the experts, can give you a really unique musical experience.

I've discovered more new artists that I liked in the last week, than I did all of last year! It taps into the long tail very well by slipping in great songs by lesser known artists. The closest experience I've had to this was when AudioGalaxy was at it's peak around 2002.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Links

• Pandora.com

The Top Entrepreneurs Lies

Guy Kawasaki has a blog entry with some of the top entrepreneur lies. A lot of these will be true for intrapreneurs as well. Here goes:

1. "Our projections are conservative."
2. “Gartner says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.”
3. “Boeing is going to sign our purchase order next week.”
4. “Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded.”
5. “No one is doing what we're doing.”
6. “No one can do what we're doing.”
7. “Hurry because several other venture capital firms are interested.”
8. “Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.”
9. “We have a proven management team.”
10. “Patents make our product defensible.”
11. “All we have to do is get 1% of the market.”
12. Robert Scoble adds one, "We don’t need a blog, we’re working on a Superbowl commercial".

Number #2 is my favorite! Whats yours?

Links

• The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

There is no killer app

An increasing culture of customization and large variations in our sense of style, performance and value seem to limiting the birth of killer applications. Wikipedia defines a killer app as:

A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular piece of computer hardware, gaming console, and/or an operating system simply to run that program.

Seems like a reasonable enough goal for any new application. :-)

Killer apps were essential in the rise of personal computers and the Internet with things like VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe PostScript and E-mail. However it has to be said that most applications don't start out by being killer applications. They would mostly start small and be useful to a few users or in a lot of cases, just be useful to the author! If the application was well designed and implemented then they might end up being useful to a lot more people and thus achieve killer app status.

It seems the approach to take is to solve as many user problems as you can, and solve them well. If we keep sitting around for that big idea then it might never come - or so argues Ramit Sethi in his blog post, The Myth of the Great Idea. He says,

Success almost never comes from a mind-blowing idea, so sitting around trying to find one is a waste of time. Success comes from a basic idea executed amazingly well. Ideas are rarely found by thinking. They're found by doing.

So get those smaller ideas out again and start working on them! Now where did I put that darn paper napkin?

Links

• The Myth of the Great Idea

Learning from the Web

Adam Bosworth (Google's VP Engineering), has an interesting article on ACM Queue on unintuitive lessons that the web taught us. Here are the main points:

1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones.
2. It is worth making things simple enough that one can harness Moore’s law in parallel.
3. It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
4. The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.
5. People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs).
6. Pay attention to physics.
7. Be as loosely coupled as possible.
8. KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid.

Compare this with Tim O'Reilly's core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, as mentioned in his article "What is Web 2.0":

1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
3. Trusting users as co-developers
4. Harnessing collective intelligence
5. Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
6. Software above the level of a single device
7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

You can see that a lot of the "lessons" that Adam Bosworth pointed out, have been learnt and are being applied by Web 2.0 companies.

Links

• Learning from THE WEB on ACM Queue
• What is Web 2.0 - Tim O'Reilly