Ravi’s Blog

The cricket world cup made news all over the world. Too bad it’s for the wrong reasons. Cricketing nations India & Pakistan were eliminated in the first round and Pakistan’ coach - Bob Woolmer - was tragically murdered.

I want to get back to what this world cup is about though. CRICKET! Now that we have the super 8s, i think it’s clear who the top 4 teams are. Australia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, & New Zealand are playing cricket at a high level. I wish indian team was competitive with these teams. Watching the Aus/SA game the other day, it was quite obvious that there’s a big gap between those top teams and India. The 2nd tier teams in the super eights are England & West Indies and the minnows Bangladesh & ireland round out the 8.

Anyway, of those top 4 Australia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand have all carried through 2 points to winning their first round. Only South Africa is coming through with 0 carry forward points. Barring any surprises, Australia, Sri Lanka and New Zealand are well positioned to go to semis. The key games for these teams are matches against england & west indies. Who ever loses against these teams are putting themselves in a position to be eliminated. For the top 3, i am sure they’d like to win every match, but if they beat, england, west indies and stay awake against bangladesh and ireland. They’ll be in good shape. Their carry forward points will ensure that they will go through.
South Africa on the other hand, will have to beat one of the big 3 and beat england + west indies.
All in all, England and west indies can be spoilers here. West Indies really has an outside chance to make it to semis, because of the carry forward points. But it does seem like the semi final berths are set.

This article on ibnlive talks about how india is losing it’s shine as an outsourcing partner. There are several reasons highlighted by the report.

This doesn’t come as a surprise for people familiar close to the outsourcing business. Since early last year, a lot of the entrepreneurs i met made comments about how working with india was becoming un-economical. Friends in cisco, yahoo, hp all talk about how the companies are finding the hiring difficult, costs escalating and quality diminishing.

This is to be expected. Internet is a great equalizer. There is no reason why talented indian engineers should expect less pay than talented american engineers.

If you are running an outsourcing organization and want to stay competitive - here are few tips for you. All three of these are interrelated and you have to be really good at all the three.

• Quality.Focus on producing high quality implementations. Spend a good bit of time doing design, identify potential issues, discuss the specs and provide alternatives. One complaint i heard over and over from different people, is that developers don’t ask questions. They just develop it, and the thing invariably looks bad or fails. This includes situations where specs/mocks don’t address all cases. simple example, they may have designed a mock for a situation when user has rated an item, but no situation when user hasn’t rated yet etc.
• Communicate.Communicate status in a detailed fashion. Over communication is not a bad thing. It helps a lot especially when people can’t see face to face. People expect that as you develop, build a product things come up. It’s great if you can find a solution, but more often than not, you might have refer back to a ui designer, product manager and/or engineering manager. Take 10-15 mins at the end of every day (or when you finish a task) to write up what you did, any open issues, any help you need. Nothing irks a product/eng person more to receive a email saying ‘it’s done’ and then go look at the product to see that’s clearly not good enough to call “done”. “done” to you might mean that you did what was asked of you. Put yourself in the user’s seat to see if this is really ready.
• Timezone.All of us would like to have normal lives. Work during the day, catch a tv show in the evening, spend time with family. Working all nights is not healthy over longer periods of time and even though you make more money, it’s poorer quality of life. That said, make sure you can give atleast few overlapping hours a day with your product team that’s giving you the project. Especially, when you send the status, questions etc, wait till that person gets online and see if they can catch you. You can be available to get online late night to connect if they call you on phone. This will save time and avoid having to wait 12 hours to get a response and helps make the whole development move faster. People leading the project will immensely appreciate this.

To do these effectively, you need to have people working for your company for good periods of time (2 years atleast). It’s hard to do the above 3 cost-effectively, if your development team is churning over every 6 months. All companies are in a competitive, fast growing industry that is growing fast and they are all working hard to grow quickly, gain more business, meet needs of their customers.

Remember, if you expand by dropping your quality, you’ll damage your reputation and loose customers. Instead, if you miss couple of growth opportunities but keep the quality, you’ll retain your customers, grow more modestly, build a stronger company and have the opportunity to charge appropriately for your quality. Set a high bar for people to make it into your company, reward them well and hold them to high expectations.

Last night i noticed AT&T + Yahoo story on WSJ. The gist of the story is covered well in this article.

When i initially saw this article, I thought AT&T would be paying more to be partnering with y!. In the past 5 years y! has delivered pretty much on the promise. Y! was in a large way responsible in adoption of SBC broadband through free/discounted promotions on the yahoo network. SBC’s internet offering stood out and literally killed all the 2nd tier players like earthlink etc. Prior to yahoo!, SBC/Pacbell was viewed as old world company, with poor customer service and somewhat behind the times in technology. While SBC/pacbell customer service still comes under fire, Y! was able to give a great image for SBC. SBC/Yahoo DSL positioned SBC as just the pipe provider, which went a long way (in my opinion) in making SBC more acceptable to user. This alliance blunted the advantage competitors like Earthlink or other might have had.

Strangely though, AT&T feels that they are now overpaying. The main reason for this. Google. Yes. A familiar nemisis for yahoo!. Google is offering to pay for the privilege of being the partner to AT&T. Google can do this, by sharing revenue from search generated by AT&T users. Google not only gains search users, they gain a new set of users to push their applications to. Despite rave reviews, gmail market share is minimal. There is no reason to think that google apps will have faster growth and adoption than gmail.

What is in it for AT&T? Cash-Money. Cash-Money. Cha-Ching. $$$. Short-term Dollars. AT&T will effectively become same as earthlink or any other internet provider when they sign this deal. It might be ok for DSL (because DSL is the new dialup). It has become a commodity business, with every provider being more or less the same. Any new user who comes in, has to wonder why they have to choose AT&T with poor customer service over Earthlink (or other smaller provider) who will offer similar service with same gmail/gapps package. Price? well sounds like the dial-up story.

How does y! counter this? With innovation. Here’s my proposal for y! has to do. DSL is the new dial up. Find the next generation in internet access. The good news is the next generation in internet access has a more level playing field than DSL generation. DSL generation of providers depended on the ‘last mile’ access - giving clear advantage to phone companies. Now, the next generation in internet access is wi-max/wi-fi.

Here is my suggestion to yahoo! - Create a Program targeted at Wi-fi & Wi-max service providers What’s in this program?

1. Outline infrastructure requirements - Financial requirements, company size, cash etc & Technical requirements - coverage area, number of wi-fi points, connection speed to internet ec.
2. Self-serve or close to self serve. I want to be able to apply online, go through a verification process if i meet requirements and get added to the program. Once i am in, I should be able to get stats, view how many accounts i got etc through websites
3. Divide up the US world in geo-regions. Allow only 2-3 y! providers per area. Charge a Franchise Fee equivalent
4. Y! manages billing to the customer and sets the final price to customer
5. Pay these wi-fi providers a fixed cost for wi-fi access (determined y!) and a share of ad revenue
6. every 2-3 years the cost of providing these services to end user goes down. Y! renegotiates the fixed cost with the providers

I think what i have is an excellent solution. I wonder if y! will listen to this idea.

I came across this blog post on business 2.0 (beta?) titled “Why Valley VCs are like the mob“. The catchy title hooked me in and i went on to read it. Basically, the blog’s premise is that startups in the valley don’t need to raise money but they raise it anyway, in order to win the “Mob” support.

It’s a good article, it kinda captures what is happening here in the valley. However, it’s a bit glammed up

First of all, the power of google’s adsense is overstated. I don’t think there are any startups that base all their revenue on google ads and turn solid, sustainable profit enough to expand the business. Google adsense is more about getting some cash flow and getting some basic idea about CTRs on your web pages etc. Also, most of these start ups are really focused on building users and adsense allows them to make some money without losing any focus from the product. I don’t think there haven been any non-seo sites being greatly profitable based on ad-sense alone.

It’s true that you can create these startups out of much lower cost than before, and monthly burn rates other salary are very low. Consequently, small startups which don’t overhire don’t need a lot of money (> 500-600K$) to get to market. However, these amounts are way to small for VC companies to invest in. Successful consumer internet startups (sites with >1M users) that have been bootstrapped, don’t really need a lot of money to keep operations going and expand from there. But, they do need money and these companies are not really generating a lot of extra cash flow.

Entrepreneurs do have a need to take cash to expand their business. They need smaller amounts than before and they don’t like to give out stock. But if you are an investor, you are going to negotiate for lower valuation and higher investment. I guess the entrepreneurs taking “too much” money now, won’t regret it if the market has a downturn and they can sustain their company for 2 years more with the “Extra” money.

Don’t click on this link. Don’t follow it. Please don’t.

Why? because it’s impossible to remember and it’s written by nobody.

p.s. all the characters on that page are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Some of the characters may have certain traits and/or mannerisms that may seem to suggest actual persons but no claim is made that these traits exist at all or in this combination in any person, living or dead

atleast, that’s what i think.

Every few years, this seems to be something that all the movie fans across india go through. One more movie - beloved to the nation of a billion people or atleast has succeeded in engaging their attention - gets proposed for the best foreign film award in academy awards. Of course, more often than not, it does not even win a final nomination.

Since 1929 (when academy awards started) only 3 indian movies were nominated to Best Foreign Film. They are Mother India (1957), Salaam Bombay (1988) and Lagaan (2002). I wasn’t around when Mother India was made. Salaam Bombay was not a mainstream movie in india. It’s a really good movie, but i doubt if majority of movie-goers in india watched it. Lagaan is one movie that captured nation’s attention and won their hearts over.

Except those 3, none of the 1000s of other movies that were made in india even qualified for a nomination. To me personally, that is quite shocking. Ok, some of the popular movies are plagiarised. A lot of them are no more than formulaic movies filling in the neccessary ‘masala’ and keeping the movie entertaining updated to newer times. However, there are quite few gems, which engage the viewers and a lot of the movie viewers connect with them on several levels.

Even with my limited knowledge of indian cinema, I can think of quite a few hindi & telugu movies that should be strong contenders for best foreign film. SwatiMutyam (telugu), Parinda (hindi), Paheli (hindi), Sankarabharanam (telugu), Nayagan (Tamil), Rudaali (Hindi), Hey Ram (Hindi), Devdas (hindi). If you know any more movies or can think of some, post them in comments.

In 2006, there are atleast 2 films which have engaged in indians. Rang De Basanti connected with the nation’s idealistic youth, while Lage Raho MunnaBhai beautifully combined comedy with core message from the father of the nation. Lage Raho Munnabhai has revived social activism based on true gandhian idealogy. “Gandhigiri” is in vogue. Perhaps more young people learned about some core gandhian principles from this movie than through their text books which provide statistics and deify Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Rang De Basanti connected with nation’s youth, glorified violent action as a solution to decayed, corrupt political & governmental structure. In this it is a polar opposite to Lage Raho Munnabhai. It glorifies freedom fighters who chose to kill instead of love their enemy.

Surprisingly, both these movies were probably the biggest grossers in 2006. As to what a cinema can hope to do -at the boxoffice & socially- they have done all those and beyond.

Sadly, both of them did not make the cut. A nation perplexed - and somewhat offended - started wondering if oscars are even relavant to them. I was in hyderabad, listening to the radio stations when the final nominees were announced. This seemed to be a sensitive issue to be discussed everywhere. Of course, most of the people on the calls said that it’s not important to be nominated for academy award and we shouldn’t care. Newspaper experts wrote about this and said the same. “who needs the oscars?”, “we don’t care”

Yet, We Do.

I suppose the academy will never ‘get’ the indian culture, indian cinema and india. They look at foreign films through the lens of american issues. Which makes me wonder about the 5 nominated films for best foreign film. Do the people in their home nation like those movies?

It’s been more than 5 months since the last blog entry. There isn’t a real reason for not blogging. For a while i wanted to blog about all the brouhaha related to yahoo! competitive position. But, i really didn’t like the negative tone about what was being said and didn’t feel like contributing to the irrational pessimism about yahoo. I was heads down into getting my startup going. I really needed to focus my energy and efforts internally.

One of my new years resolution is to blog more often. Mainly because, reading blogs keeps my perspectives fresh. Writing my blog helps me think about issues, form opinions, and express myself. It’s something i definitely enjoy doing and i want to do more often.

Anyway, this is my attempt to get back into blogging..

I have been 6 months into this start up adventure. I started with a brilliant idea and kept working on the product. This has been a great learning experience about startup life, starting a company, working with folks across the oceans and a whole lot of other stuff.
The great news is that the company’s idea is refined, we are focused, and pushing forward towards the new vision. We could use more hands in building this great product.
I could try some hyperbole about how our product will do everything that you ever wanted but the reality, is that we are very focused. It’s a fun product, great set of ideas. We are working in an area that hasn’t seen real innovation for a while.
So, if you are an engineer who

wants to work where your ideas get to product as soon as you code them

give me a shout - ravi at azooba.net. Send me your resume.
I’ll explain the idea to you and we can chat. If we connect, may be we can work together.

Things to note:

I have been working on my startup and making some progress. I don’t have a product ready to launch, but i am no where near giving up and searching for a job either. However, a lot of recruiters contact me and try to talk me into considering some job or the other.

As a startup guy, i know recruiting talent is hard for small companies. Having a recognizable brand name like yahoo! or google makes it much easier for hiring managers. I mean half their job is done, in terms of attracting talent to their company. I have seen several startups resorting to some kind of hyperbole about themselves in order to attract talent. Some make claims about imminent funding, unique idea, patent or something else. I know it, i have done the dance and i am still doing it. My point is we start ups tend to exaggerate things a little bit to make ourselves more attractive.

I recently received a company profile as they tried to hire me. I’ll just put the actual text here and try not to comment on it

This platform, the source of the company’s competitive distinction, provides a collaborative, persistent, contextually integrated, always available (on any device), completely actionable (with any service), private and secure environment. The platform supports a matrix of mutually supporting business models, and is strategically designed for sustainable competitive advantage based on significant network effects.

Wow! What a platform!
They are looking for a VP of development to build this platform. Are you up for it?

Yet another real estate mega deal. This one is on the outer ring road for bangalore. It seems like RG Villas, are being marketed mainly towards NRIs. The pricing on the site is all in USD ranging from ~70K to the top end of $430K. Althought most of the single family homes seem to be between 200-280K. While this venture seems quite far from the new airport (14 Miles = 20 KM), the marketing package seems to tout that as a positive.