Ravi’s Blog

I made it to india safe and tired friday night local time. The weather was quite unusual for hyderabad in late may. The temperature was right around 30 celcius ( and it was somewht humid. I learnt that it had just rained the day before and the temperatures cooled down from a day high scorching 43 celcius (110F) to a day high of 33 celcius(86F) in about 48 hours. Wow! lucky me As much as i hate the humidity, i really appreciate the lower temperatures. Years in bayarea’s perfect weather spoiled me and i find that the days still feel hot at these temperatures.

Yesterday (sunday), i went to begumpet to meet my interior decorator. Ofcourse, things run by “Indian Stretchable Time” here and i forgot to bring my keys to the apartment, so we had about 30 mins to kill. We jumped into a Coffee day (starbucks equivalent) and sat down to order some coffee. The clouds have been threatening since saturday, but it hasn’t rained till then. Suddenly, it started pouring and i mean pouring. This is the first monsoon rain i experienced in fifteen years, and i really wanted to jump in the rain. In few minutes the streets were filling up with water, motorcyclists were stopping on the sides and taking shelter in near by stores. The rain didn’t let up for 15 mins and we had to walk out to get to our car. Needless to mention, we got completely wet before we got to our car.

What was very pleasantly surprising was how warm the water was. It was like taking a shower with lukewarm water and I slowed down to enjoy the rain. I really remembered al the fun times in rain we had as kids. Getting wet in these rains and playing outside in them were some of the best memories of childhood I love these monsoons. I missed these rains for so long now, and i am glad to be back in them. I guess, i haven’t experienced the downside of monsoons yet - the flooded streets, potholes in roads etc. But i am going to enjoy the rains while they are here.

I stopped reading news in the newspaper about 7-8 years ago and the only reason i pay for the merc is the ads. Specifically, I am one of those people who pay for the SJ mercury news to find out what’s on sale at frys. It’s not that i feel like i am the gadget guy, but my week invariably includes multiple visits to Frys. I am quite sure i am not unusual in the valley.
I wished for the longest time that the news paper ads were available online and now they are! Kudos to SJ mercury news for doing this. Here is the Frys Ad. Mouse over a section of the ad and the relavant subsection pops up in a small sub window!! This rocks!!

I dare say, this is perhaps the most useful web2.0 innovation i have seen in the last 3 months or may be google calendar. It may not be the sexiest, technically most challenging, but definitely very cool and very useful! Now, why would I buy SJ merc? Do they care about me buying SJ merc as long as advertisers continue to pay for the ads?

Yahoo! released a new home page recently. I suppose most/any of you who read this blog already know this great piece of news. It’s been well covered all over the press including techcrunch, business week. You can find Scott Gatz’s (Director of PM in personalization @ yahoo) blog talking about some of the finer thinking that went into the design.

Since i left yahoo!, I tried not to comment about yahoo!’s products, whether good or bad. I guess i couldn’t resist myself in posting about the new home page though.
When i started at yahoo, the top brass always compared yahoo against AOL and measured themselves. I guess a bulk of the content strategy also arose out of replicating aol out on the web. I am not sure who said it and when it was said, but people repeatedly noticed a key contrast between AOL & Yahoo. AOL is about the network, it’s closed and confined (I guess the original walled garden). In contrast, Yahoo is about being a guide to web. We have a directory and we always point to the best content on the web. I heard Tim koogle, David filo espouse very similar idealogy to above. The web directory was a very important part of yahoo! not because of revenue, but because it’s yahoo!’s way of pointing to the best of the web. So Once upon a time, Yahoo! sports had links to ESPN.com and CBS sportsline, and yahoo! autos had links to useful automotive sites on the web as well.

Slowly, yahoo! started changed from being about the web, to being about yahoo! properties. This change has been happening over several years. I don’t have the insight to determine why this change happened, if it’s a conscious choice of the founders etc. But, somewhere along the way, linking to useful sites on the web became a bad thing :(. Links became commercial, and our own ability to identify the best on the web never kept up and consequently, product teams dropped web links non-yahoo sites one after the other. Instead, these links were taken up by links to other parts of yahoo! network, whether they are relevant or not.

This homepage dropped the concept of website directory completely. I guess the transformation is complete. Yahoo! is now more about showing people in and around yahoo! network and not about showing people what’s most useful on the web. Yahoo! is the new AOL of the web…

So bidding finally closed on the small software tool i advertised in rentacoder.com. I got a total of 12 replies, with quite a few people rated close to 10 on a scale of ten. Of these 4 people submitted a formal bid. Several people seemed to have built software very similar to what I wanted. Overall great people i think.
However, for this project, I found someone local on craigslist who’s just slightly more expensive than rent a coder. He seemed very experienced and had prior long term work experience at Microsoft. He had solid insights about ensuring the app works with various versions of IE. so i went with the local choice over rent a coder.

I am at tiecon today. Tiecon is a conference for “indus entrepreneurs”. Indus referring to a river in northern india and meant to associate all entrpreneus from the indian subcontinet. Out here at tiecon though, there’s clearly a lot of indians, but a good bit of folks from everywhere it seems. I guess they need to change the acronym of tie to mean something else - The Innovative Entrepreneur.

Listening to shashi tharoor now…

Things going well with the rent a coder project that i posted. Since it’s relatively simple windows client project, I received 6 bids in 12 hours. 2 of them replied with actual bids and good overview of their prior experience. One of the 2 actual bidders asked enough questions to force me to refine my requirements a lot more. The other bidder put together a quick demo of the app i wanted and sent it over.
Of the remaining 4, one of them proposed to send me a demo in 24 hours and the other 3 just posted their resume.

The bidding is still open, all the upto friday. Let’s see what more comes up. So far, it’s been really good experience

Following the advice of Mark Fletcher from startup school day, I carved out a piece of software that i want to build and posted it on RentACoder.com Let’s see how things turn out. So far, I registered and posted my job. Their UI is definitely not web 2.0 and I got about 3-4 emails from them. But seems like they are active and have enough human intervention to ensure quality of the employers.

Startup school speaker notes are on it’s wiki. Best place to get the complete notes.