Happy New Year

Happy New Year and Best Wishes to all !
Hope this new year brings happiness, joy and fulfill all your dreams.

As I write this first post of my blog for the year 2006, I do wish everyone especially in the Wirkle team for the hard effort they had been putting up in the last year. From long hard days to sleepless nights that each one of my buddies had in 2005; 2006 should be the year of action.

Startup has been a very different kind of experience for me, but one thing that it taught me more is more patience and more persistence. You need to carry on along with your vision and you will enjoy the path no matter whatever big problem you face.

I hope that 2006 would be more exciting and more challenging than its predecessor!

Always keep moving ahead in Life!

Best Wishes

The Future of Media - RSS Ecosystem

The future of media by aVC blog.

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it. Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

I am not sure weather the above sequence would be a killer combination but one thing that he wrote about the RSS medium, makes perfect sense:

RSS is a new medium. It's not like the web any more than the web was like print. Remember back in the late 90s when the media execs tried to use the web to sell more papers? It doesn't work. Content wants to be consumed in the media its delivered in.

So RSS content is not going to be used to send people to the web. It's going to be consumed in the RSS medium, whatever that turns out to be.

RSS has a lot of potential to be used in multiple ways - may be be via blogreaders, aggregators, on mobile devices etc. Unlike web content, RSS is structured and it can be intelligently used to club together multiple pieces together so that an ecosystem can be built around each individual content item.

Tags, Tags Everywhere

See The Year in Tags
by Gene Smith

From Technorati introducing tags in January, Flickr Tags, Yahoo introducing integrated search, social networks and tags in its My Web 2.0 product and now even Amazon Tags.

And if you think tagging is simple, see even a simple thing like tagging can have too many problems. It's the standards !!

Tag Formats

India Startup Scenario

VCs Feed India’s Startups
RedHerring has an interesting article giving an overview of tech startups in India.

... the IITs, IIMs, and other Indian universities are trying to incubate brilliant ideas within their own campuses and turn them into successful commercial ventures.
...
The institutes already have a number of success stories to showcase: among them fledgling companies Midas Communications, AirTight Networks, Herald Logic, and Powai Labs. But these companies remain exceptions, not the rule. Like their counterparts in China early-stage companies in India are being drip-fed or starved altogether of cash.

Now read these stats:

In all of India—a country with lots of buzz around tech, the scope to absorb new technologies domestically, and a large talent pool of engineers—the report notes that only six startup-stage and 13 early-stage companies received any venture capital at all in 2004—and that totaled just $126 million. And nearly one in three of those investments went to Indo-U.S. companies like July Systems, inSilica, and Nevis Networks.

I think creating an Ecosystem is the most important part - an ecosystem that guides young lads take the path of entrepreneurship and simultaneously build valuable companies.

Google Base and RSS

Bill Burnham has an interesting perspective over Google Base , the way Google is employing simple technologies like RSS for data integration on the web.

As for RSS, Google Base represents a kind of Confirmation. With Google's endorsement, RSS has now graduated from a rather obscure content syndication standard to the exautled status of the web's default standard for data integration. Google's endorsement should in turn push other competitors to adopt RSS as their data transport format and process of choice. This adoption will in turn force many of the infrastructure software vendors to enhance their products so that they can easily consume and produce RSS-based messages which in turn will further cement the standard.

RSS 2.0 spec by Google http://base.google.com/base/rss_specs.html

XML Spec by Google http://base.google.com/base/base.xsd

Seeing the Google Base RSS specs, to me it looks like it wants to control the whole data integration stuff on the web. But it's taking a different route from existing web companies. Most people when they want to launch a better classified service, they launch a new classified's website or a new job website. The key focus is a single service for the user. But Google Base I don't think is mean't for an individual user here (User will ultimately consume data but google is here focussed on integration rather than creation of data). Its perhaps mean't for companies and by integrating data from multiple web providers in a single shot, google can turn around the game.

Or perhaps the second approach would be to integrate Google Desktop with all such services. Create and Recieve data right from your desktop... But isn't then Windows Longhorn playing a similar game using a core RSS engine built within the OS!

Google Mania

Google has been one of the most admired company in recent times. I myself admire Google a lot for the kind of stuff they have established in such a short span. But one fact that I have started hating about Blogosphere is, it looks like as if there is just one Google and nothing else around. People just keep anticipating about what Google would do next (even I did in some of my earlier blogs) as if Google is the sole powerhouse of all innovation on the internet.

Google is in a unique position to do very interesting stuff but I think its being overdone at the moment. There are a lot smart people doing lot interesting stuff. Rather than focussing on just one big company, lot of exciting stuff should come out from within the blogosphere.

Or is it that the world is more and more centralized? 90% of the people care about the big news and the small stuff - does any one need to care about?

Social Media

An excellent article of how social media is impacting Yahoo and the internet as a whole.

The Flickrization of Yahoo
How the founders of a hot young photo-sharing site are helping to change the focus of the search engine giant -- and turning its fight with Google into a battle of man vs. machine.

Read here.

Blogger Dinner

Yesterday evening was great. My fellow colleague from IIT (running a software company called Tekriti) invited me to a blogger dinner. Thanks to Gaurav for the same. I enjoyed the presence of Marc Canter, its always good to be in the company of great people and you tend learn a lot even being a part of their surroundings.

Discussions were great, varying from Micro-content to blogging, fight of the Big Three (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), E-bay Skype deal etc. Moreover, the ambience and the food at Pind Baluchi, Gurgaon was simply superb.

Marc discussed a lot about the importance of micro-content - for instance reviews, ratings, events, venues - the importance of structured blogging. I personally believe that this is going to be the next big thing that's gonna happen to the WWW. But sometimes seeing RSS, I do also ponder, is it just about getting updates (even this is a big social change in behaviour) or we gonna see a lot more in future (Web 3.0 :-))?

There was also a discussion about various social networks - the big korean cyworld, myspace etc. Social networks are meant to be closely related to the way humans define their life network but how much of this can occur in an online world! Alok (from jobsahead) mentioned perhaps the biggest two social events one does online is either jobs or dating, so how big as an influence are the other online social networks?

Overall the meet went on pretty well. Kudos to the Tekriti team for organising it. Looking forward to more such events.

More Links here and here.

RSS Space as it exists

Via Richard MacManus

Categorization of RSS Vendors:

Publisher Services
Sub-categories: Content; Analytics; Feed Mgmt; Advertising
Examples: Feedburner; Nooked; Pheedo; SimpleFeed; Syndicate IQ

Reader Services (including RSS Aggregators and Consumer services/tools)
Sub-categories: Web-based; Desktop; Mobile; Enterprise; White Label
Examples: Bloglines; Del.icio.us; Moreover; Newsgator; PubSub

CMS/Blogging
Sub-categories: Hosted; Standalone; Enterprise
Examples: Blogger; MSN Spaces; Six Apart; Wordpress; Yahoo 360

Content (including Podcasting, blog networks, news directories)
Sub-categories: Proprietary; User-Generated
Examples: Gawker; iPodder; Odeo; Topix.net; Weblogsinc

Search
Sub-categories: Index; White Label / Microsites (e.g. Technorati Live8 promotion); Embedded (e.g. Google network and Technorati partnership with Newsweek); Market Research
Examples: Bloglines; Feedster; Google; Ice Rocket; Technorati
..
Microsoft and Google have both developed prototype RSS Aggregator products - start.com and Google Personalized Homepage respectively...
The Big 3 also have CMS/Blogging, Content and Search ...
... Which leads me to believe that the great opportunity of The RSS Space is in the 'Publisher Services' category

A public wiki tries to categorize RSS vendors here.

The Big 3, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google do have products in almost every category? So what does it hold for startups related to RSS? I think RSS in one way or the other is going to penetrate every part of computing infrastructure. Microsoft has taken a strong lead by making it an explicit part of Longhorn. Time will tell what's the next google that comes out from RSS. I believe its still in infancy.

India's Craigslist?

India's Craigslist?

Shouldn't have that happened long before, but even today there is no good site for accessing local listings except the newspaper Or you are left to the mercy of agents charging huge money atleast for property rents!

From last one year I have been tired going to property dealers looking for both office spaces, residential places in and around Delhi. I have changed places five times (3 times office and 2 times residence) and a year has not yet completed!

And next week, I need to make a move again and I am in no mood to go to a property dealer. Charging one month rent as a fees is I guess too high for rent. And then the agent's services are of no use. They just try to lure you and get you to sign up a deal. If not online listings, I would rather prefer corporatization of Property Dealing and would like to see a company that sets up propery dealing offices all over India and provides a direct service to the consumer just like banks do. You walk in, the company takes a fixed fees, they have their margins, provide a service and keeps everyone happy.

Any takers!!

Mobile Usability

From MocoNews

"More than one third of mobile owners are not using data services due to a combination of product complexity and perceived high cost…The good news is that if these problems are addressed, 70 per cent of users said they would use apps such as news, weather and sports scores at least two-to-five times a week, with subscription the preferred method of payment.”
The survey found that off-portal delivery mechanisms were the most popular (despite carrier assurance the walled gardens are there to ‘protect’ their customers) and that “that 85 per cent of respondents wanted more personalisation from the apps they used and that 76 per cent would tolerate no more than two trips to the network while using an app

If an app is good, no matter whatever the mechanisms, it will spread. Walled gardens generally don't solve any problem.
Problems are two fold:
- GPRS Cost
- Terminology/Problems in getting GPRS enabled.

Network costs on mobile phones are still high for common users. GSM providers in India, charge around Rs 500/month for unlimited GPRS access (Airtel, Idea). The WAP access is much cheaper(Rs 100/month) but at most times its of no use, for instance Airtel WAP access doesn't allow access to any WAP site except their own portal although Hutch and Idea do allow general WAP access. Most network applications on mobile phones require an Internet APN and WAP APN just doesn't work.

Its hard for a normal user to understand the difference between WAP and Internet for mobiles. And add to the woes, the way customer care informs people. And then getting your service GPRS enabled at times can take 4-5 days.

If configuring SMS on mobiles had been that tough, SMS alone wouldn't be a billion dollar industry. Data access has to get cheaper, its the services that will be the revenue earner. Just Wait and Watch!

Next Google, Yahoo, Microsoft from India?

Next Google, Yahoo, Microsoft from India?
This is a question that lot of Indian entrepreneurs ask themselves. Everyone wants to see a global product company coming from India, but the dream hasn't yet materialized.

I have myself stumbled across this question many times. I saw again these things at the Emergic post.

Just summarizing from the above post, looking into the reasons for not many technology startups from India:
- Salaries of MNC's make joining startup unattractive
- Newer startups focused on services than products
- OEMing product creation to market leader
- Lack of Vision to think big and global
- Lack of angel and early-stage funding

The first three reasons are in one way or the other related with taking risks. Indians (especially young people) are culturally less bolder to take drastic steps. But nevertheless its mainly due to the fact that there aren't many successful tech stories from within India. People like Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail fame) continue to inspire young lads. My belief is once the journey of continued success starts right here in India, there will be no looking back.

In IIT, we used to call a certain group of people "Fighters". And there's no dearth of fighters in India. But to build an environment that could lead to explosive growth of startups as in Silicon valley, I believe lot of initiative needs to be taken both by the government and the existing entrepreneurs.

Taking the quote from Emergic, "Indian companies lack vision to think big and global." Yahoo, Google, Microsoft - all were started by very young and bright people. On the contrary, young and bright people studing in indian universities (including IIT's) do lack the vision to build on the next innovative idea. Not many people at undergraduate level can think about the next big problem that's gonna hit the world and India doesn't produce enough PHD's. It's not about being not enthusiastic enough or hard working, I have encountered the most brilliant people here in IIT. It's mainly because students don't have a proper direction. We still work on projects, BTP's MTP's which don't hold any relevance. The next innovative research is just missing.

Focussing on tomorrow, the creations that will change both today's and tomorrow's world for the better is very important. And that I think would be the key for building not just one but a multitude of successful companies from within India. In order to leap ahead, we need to build the next Stanford's and MIT's right here in India.

Angel investments, Early stage funding all are needed but to have a real success story, India needs to move ahead in terms of its university education. Even a five pointer in IIT on moving to US does pioneering work! We need to look back and see what all we have missed and fix up things.

Zoominfo - people search

Today I came across ZoomInfo.
Its a pretty good service, I think one of the first good steps to integrate information about people at one place.

Yeah, I was able to find some info about me atleast :-)

As different social networks get merged and integrated, this will become a lot powerful service. So next time when you want to know more about anyone, may be email address, contact address or friends, something like zoominfo might be at the rescue.

Indeed.com secures funding

Via TJ's weblog
indeed.com joins the ranks of VC-backed kayak.com and mobissimo.com with an investment from New York Times, Union Square Ventures and Allen & Co.

Profile of the company is here.

Every vertical domain is being covered by the RSS pehnomenon...
Photo Albums, Jobs, Community sites, Search, ....

Fellow Wirklites

Recently we changed lot of things in Wirkle, from setting up an office in Gurgaon to hiring people. With every new stuff that gets added, things get more buzy. I hope to now blog more frequently!

These are young lads new to the world of Blogging. It's not just important to just learn and write software but also develop mentally to know what's going on all around you!. So as a policy, we made every Wirklite to blog. So enjoy blogging as people discover new things on the web!

Sunil Kumar http://guantana.blogspot.com/
Arpita Dhundia http://gajj.blogspot.com
Santosh Gangadhar http://xyzblogs.blogspot.com/
Adeesh Jain http://www.bloglines.com/blog/jain

Update your Aggregators

Hi all,

I am moving my blog from

http://enventure.blogspot.com
to
http://www.wirkle.com/blogs/sunil/

Please update your aggregators accordingly.

Thanks

Regards
Sunil

Is Joining Startup really a RISK?

The single biggest factor that comes into being when you ask people to join a startup is - RISK! In my last one year I have faced this question both from people around me and from people whom I talked while trying to set up a team for my venture.

Weather its fresh graduates from IIT's, NIT's or people working in big corporates - people are a lot worried about their career. I myself failed to understand what people actually meant by a career? Is it the renumeration, is it that you can say to someone that I am working for a big corporate like IBM or Microsoft or what else do they mean by career?

I believe people don't themselves understand by the term "career". They look from a short term perspective and haven't ever thought what they want to do in long term. A person makes his own destiny and its the journey, the path that should be more exiciting then the end result.

When I am faced with this question, what made you jump into this? Why did you take such a big risk? My answer is I think there is NO risk at all. And if any to the minimum. My perspective to this question is "What's the worst situation I can be in ?" May be I loose out on money, spent months on something which didn't work, may be at the end I don't have a job. I can't think of a more worse situation, if you can please do let me know..

On the other hand, any one who joins a startup will have steep learning curves both in technology and management, see how small startups need to work, how product has to be conceptualized, developed, deployed. Everyone in the team works for that. One enjoys the journey which might be bitter at times. Experience and the work that one learns, I think a corporate environment lacks that dynamism. So you can learn in 6 months what you will do in an year or even two within a big company.

So Where's the loss?
If startup worked, you would reach a prominent position. Will gain all the attention. Even if it didn't work, you will be more bold than before, will have more experience than others, will rise ahead from your peers. And getting job is never a problem, atleast the way current job market is moving in India.

So where's the Risk? I think its just no risk at all, spending a part of your life doing interesting stuff.

I remember once I was talking to this American lady in front of me, standing at the luggage check in queue at the IGI Airport. She was I guess a teacher and a painter by profession. She said you Indians are a lot lucky, you have such a strong family background especially financial stability provided by family networks. There in america, once you are 18 you are independent and you have to think all by yourself. She told me about an indian guy in america whose mother had come to US and used to prepare all meals, bedding etc. for the guy, while the guy studied hard for his exams. Americans, she said are a lot insecure.

My response was, although Indians have strong family traditions but the same traditions make them less matured and mentally weaker. My personal belief is people in US or Europe are mentally more stronger than Indians and take more risks. On the contrary, the strong family background should have made Indians taking more risks! It might be I am just looking at a small spectrum of people, but that's what I got when talking to engineers in my last 1 year.

I would just like to give this message, do innovative work wherever you go. Even if its not your own startup, join a startup so that when you do your own startup, you don't make the same mistakes. So its everything to gain and nothing to loose.

Google Will Eat Itself

Via John Battelle's Blog

Check out GWEI

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end we will own it!

So who else wanna do it???

Understanding Semantic Web (Part -4)

In this last post of the "Understanding Semantic Web" series (1 2 3)I will mainly talk about the current scenarios where Semantic Web techniques are being applied and what holds there in the future.

Semantic Web technologies are trying to penetrate every existing corner of software development, the way we build software from databases, middleware, applications to even designing UI for a portal. A number of databases (Kowari, rdfDB etc.), semantic middleware platforms (Intellidimension), multimedia systems are being built by the research community. In this post I will mainly concentrate on applications, which is where I believe the action lies!

In the previous posts I mentioned about ontologies which provide definition and are an important part of the application domain. Most of the applications that have become widespread are mainly with smaller ontologies that an individual can understand. The list below is not exhaustive and is provided to just give the readers (newbies) an initial impression.

User Applications

RSS - RSS is a widespread technology. Its commonly referred to as the "low hanging fruit" of the semantic web. RSS enables anyone to package content and metadata and provide updates. Mainly used for news and blogs updates.

FOAF - Friend of a Friend - FOAF provides vocabulary where friends can define semantic descriptions about each other. Simple GUI Applications exist for creating and visualizing FOAF data. People are trying to define a trust of web based on FOAF data. Perhaps this can revolutionize the way social networking works today or build smarter systems who know your friends and perhaps enemies too!!

Creative Commons - Creative Commons provides a very simple vocabulary to define licensing schemes for any kind of original/derived works (content, blog,website, pictures, audio , video ). An author can via simple form choose what kind of license he wants. A semantic description is generated at the back that an author can put on his website. Any search engine aggregates these descriptions and provides a semantic search. So I can now search for images which I as an author can use freely without paying a royalty. Yahoo recently incorporared creative commons in its search engine.

EventSherpa (SemaView) - Tool and service for creating and sharing events, schedules and calendar information over the Internet. (www.semaview.com or www.eventsherpa.com) I used their tool around a year back but apparently the site is down at the moment.


Enterprise Systems

Adobe XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) - Adobe XMP Platform enables embedding of semantic descriptions as binary format within the multimedia (JPEG, GIF, TIFF images etc.) itself. So any image when once tagged via semantics using an Adobe Tool retains its semantics forever, for instance if image is copy pasted, the semantic descriptions get carried along. The platform is open to anyone to build or query semantic descriptions.


There are a number of other companies providing enterprise level solutions using Semantic Web Technologies e.g. Mondecca, Empolis, Ontoprise, Cerebra, Profium and others.

Application of semantic web technologies in the enterpise world is more in the sense of supporting a particular standard. The systems or platforms here offer a particular solution (Intranet or Internet portal which can be more dynamically configured or provide a better search using semantic metadata or as information integrators) for their clients. There isn't a standard software semantic web stack that is used (and is being built).


Research Applications

Haystack - information client as part of the Information Management Project at MIT. It aggregates RDF from multiple arbitrary locations and presents it to the user in a human-readable fashion.

TAP - A Project at stanford enabling Activity Based Search. Check out this.

Annotation Tools: Tools enabling rich annotations of HTML/multimedia documents. A number of such tools exist (MnM, Cultos,GATE, KIM, SWAN) enabling manual/ semi-automatic/ automatic generation of semantic descriptions.

AKTive Space Visualisations: Prototype showing geographically, research being conducted at different locations in UK. http://www.aktors.org/technologies/geography/


Research Themes: There are number of interesting projects going on in the research community.

- Languages - RDF, RDFS, OWL, RULEML (etc..)
- Semantic Databases - store and query RDF descriptions via SQL like query languages.
- Inference Engines - (inferencing RDF/OWL semantic descriptions and do reasoning/inferencing)
- Visualization Tools
- Ontology Core Research + Tools (Ontology creation, editing, merging, maintenance etc.)
- Buiding Domain Specific and Domain Independent Ontologies (Human effort for building ontologies by Ontologists)
- Semantic Search (Latent Semantic Indexing - how does one define PageRank in Semantic metadata ?)
- Semantic Middleware (standard J2EE/dot net, P2P , Asynchronous Messaging Services)
- Semantic Web Services (Service creation, discovery, query, integration)
- Semantic User Interfaces
- NLP (Natural Language Processing)
....
and the list is endless.


So what's the killer app of Semantic Web?

I think Semantic Web is much like the Web of today. Infrastructure is being built as of today but there isn't a single application like EMAIL which one could call a killer app. For an application to be killer, there has to be a widespread adoption. Semantic Web Techniques as of today are much heavy for a common man to comprehend and even for a software engineer to build. The revolution is more likely to occur in the middleware space which will act as an integration platform. For users, it could be an information dashboard, or a single service criss crossing multiple platforms -- the interface would likely remain the same or get simpler. What's going to change is the richness!

One important part within semantic web lies in the creation of semantics. With content creation moving from web onto mobiles, semantic web technologies can be clevery applied to bring in richer semantics. So if carefully harnessed next semantic web killer app might lie in the mobile world than on the web.

Semantic Web Technologies are not just about generating RDF/OWL encoded data, its also about being making systems more open. XML/Web Services have already started that trend. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay (more recent ones like Flickr) provide a platform to query their data. And this has resulted in number of small startups and innovative services (Clubbing Craigslist classifieds with Google Maps).

In future one could envision every major service provider to start providing data and services as XML/Web services/RDF etc.

Monster providing Jobs data.
Social networks like LinkedIn, Orkut.
Match.com
Travel Sites

As each of the above services start opening up, one would see a greater ease in information integration and newer services propping up. A killer application might be the one which helps one manage himself/herself better. RSS removed the pain that one doesn't need to go and visit every website even though one is essentially viewing the same content. The semantic web would remove the pain more or less in the same way as RSS did with content. One thing it might fuel more is more innovative services and more Innovation!

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is an extension of Firefox that allows users to alter the content and behavior of any website through user scripts which work inside the browser.

I did hear the buzz around Greasemonkey from quite some time back. I thought of checking the Greasemonkey site and found quite many scripts. One can find scripts for altering webpages of CNN, BBC, Amazon, craigslist, eBay, ESPN, Friendster, GMAIL and even an indian website Indiatimes.com.
Current list of user scripts is available here.

Yahoo Netrospective

Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/

Blogging As a Career

Gawker is trying to set up a model for advertising-supported weblogs. Gawker Media blogs include the popular gossip sites Gawker, Wonkette and Defamer, gadget blog like Gizmodo and others. Bloggers are paid $2500 a month and the blog aims to earn 75K $ per annum. And yes, you can be an intern too. IWantMedia has a story published on Gawker.

Mobile Search

Got this interesting piece from Mobile Technology Weblog about Mobile Search getting hotter.

Firstly, 30% of searches are currently to look for mobile content (ringtones etc). Since about 2/3 of mobile content is currently sold via operator portals, this is a clear and present danger for operator revenues. In other words, while they may make money from the advertisers paying for their ads to be presented to users, many of these ads will be for competitors of the operators.

Complete article here.

Understanding Semantic Web (Part -3)

In the previous two posts (part1 and part2)about Semantic Web, I mainly talked about the problems and approaches people follow towards making data and services more seamless. From databases, to service oriented middleware; issues of integration and challenges that lie ahead are huge.

What's semantic web going to change? Will this make the whole system work automatically? Rather than predicting the answer, let's try to walk into approaches that the Semantic Web community is trying to apply.

At the core of Semantic Web techniques, there exists a data model (like Relational DB Model, Object Oriented Model, XML) called RDF (Resource Description Framework). RDF is based on XML from a syntactical point of view, but semantically there are huge differences between the two. RDF is mainly a graph oriented model and XML is a hierarchical model. RDF enables one to make statements about resources. So if one wants to say "John has age 35", the RDF data model enables one to represent this statement.

Consider the above statement as a tuple ( John, hasAge, 35) where John is the Subject, hasAge is predicate (property) and the value 35 is an Object (Literal).

RDF enables one to make statements and also statements about statements. Extending the above example:
John owns Ferrari. The color of Ferrari is red.

Equivalent tuples:
(John, owns, Ferrari) (Ferrari, hasColor, Red)

So RDF allows one to represent statements in form of triples and then aggregate such triples (subject, predicate and object) pairs.

One thing that makes RDF interesting is the use of URI's. URI's are Unique Resource Identifiers via which one can identify a resource uniquely. e.g. URL is a particular type of URI. So how do URI's help?

Let's consider a scenario where I represent certain information about myself on my website in RDF. (Sunil, hasAge, 26) (Sunil livesIn, New Delhi)
Lets say I identify Sunil using the URI http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#sunil
This URI is unique for Sunil and anyone using the above URI anywhere refers to the same resource.
I identify the property hasAge by URI http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#hasAge
and livesIn by http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#livesIn

So triples can be represented via
(http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#Sunil , http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#hasAge, 26)

(http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#Sunil, http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#livesIn, New Delhi)

And now lets say my friend Lomesh wants to talk about himself on his website.

(http://lomesh.blogspot.com/person#Lomesh , http://lomesh.blogspot.com/person#hasAge, 26)
(http://lomesh.blogspot.com/person#Lomesh, http://lomesh.blogspot.com/person#livesIn, Sacramento)

And now say Lomesh wants to refer Sunil and say Lomesh is a friend of Sunil or want to enrich some more information about Sunil, he just adds the equivalent triples to his website.

(http://lomesh.blogspot.com/person#Lomesh , http://lomesh.blogspot.com/person#friendOf, http://enventure.blogspot.com/person#Sunil)

RDF is flexible enough to allow anyone to add any kind of triples identified by URI's. Any RDF aggregator, can aggregarte all such triples together and then do reasoning on top of it. In Object Oriented Models, every class has two main components : the data or properties it identifies (e.g name, age for Class Person) and the methods (getName(), getAge() ) which operate on data. In RDF model, data lies outside the class definition enabling anyone to add any data or property at will.

So if a future search engine, aggregates triples that exist on both Lomesh's and Sunil's website, the search engine will be able to integrate the enriched information together (URI's enable to do the corresponding matching) and present a more coherent picture.

But for this to happen, one key thing that needs to be solved is standardizing vocabularies! If everyone defines his own vocabularies of hasAge, livesIn, friendOf by his own independent URI's, search engines will still be confused as they will not be able to do any interpretation and we would still be in the syntactical world.

Vocabularies/Ontologies bring semantics to the RDF world. In essence any kind of structred data varying from a dictionary, thesaurus, categories can be considered to be an ontology, variation being the richness. Ontologies differ from vocabularies as they try to map the human or world knowledge into structure and other being its a shared knowledge, so it has to be AGREED UPON. Defining your own ontology isn't actually an ontology, its just another vocabulary.

So lets say if we want to define person via an ontology. We can define an ontology such as:
(Person hasName String)
Person is a class or a concept. It has a property "hasName" whose value is a String.

Similary other properties can be attatched or new concepts can be defined.
(Person hasAge Numeric)
(Person livesIn City)
(City isPartof State)
(State isPartof Country)
(Country isPart of World)
(India isInstanceOf Country)

The above relationships when combined together form a graph like structure where entities(subjects or objects) are related by certain properties. Ontologies can vary from being very simple to being very complex. There are ontologies for cultural domain, education, beer and wine, Persons, Address Books etc. Then there are ontologies which link multiple ontologies or act as upper level ontologies. A good resource for ontologies is http://www.schemaweb.info

Another data schema model provided by Semantic Web community is RDFS (RDF-Schema) and newer ones like OWL (Web Ontology Language extension of RDF-S). RDF-S and OWL provide constructs to build ontologies. e.g. There are constructs like (instanceof, subClass, subProperty). These constructs enable one to reason about things.

Example:
(City subClassOf Country)
(NewDelhi instanceof City)
(India instanceOf Country)

From the above three constructs, one can deduce NewDelhi is a part of India.
Languages like OWL provide more richer constructs where one can say do cardinality constraints.
e.g. One can represent the following two sentences using OWL.
Person owns a Car. Person can own 0 or more cars.


RDF-S and OWL being based on RDF use URI's to distinguish concepts and properties. So anyone can establish an ontology and anyone else can make extensions to it.

Taking the previous example of Sunil and Lomesh, there exists now two things to make data semantically rich:
An RDF-S based ontology for defining people and friends.
And particular instances Sunil and Lomesh who use that ontology to make particular statements. Any third person can use or refer to the ontology or triples written by Lomesh or Sunil.

An intelligent search engine should be able to aggregate all such triples, combine ontologies, combine the instances and then do intelligent reasoning based on that.

RDF-S, OWL, RDF all such technologies come from Artifical Intelligence background. There have been expert systems around which did most of all the stuff and much more than what RDF or OWL does. The key thing that has changed between the past and now is the WEB. The previous systems were closed systems that were intended to solve a particular AI problem, but the current ones are being designed keeping in the view the ubiquotous nature of the web.

But the problems that previous AI systems faced, semantic web community will still need to overcome them. Most of the problems revolve around ontology building, ontology maintenance, ontology merging , ontology mapping and weather do we need any complex ontologies? Most of the ontologies have grown out to be complex, sometimes far from an average individual's comprehension. What one needs is the application of software engineering practices to semantic web technologies. In the next sections, I will go through some particular challenges and use case scenarios where Semantic Web Techniques are being applied.

Journey Back From Home

Last 3 days I was at home, relaxing. Days at home make you feel relaxed from all the fast life of Delhi. When I am in Delhi, it looks like hundreds of things are running here and there and your life passes just trying to be in pace with the world around you. But at home its completely opposite. There's just peace and calmness all around you. May be its because I belong to a small town and people care more, less pollution, and there's a sense of belongingness which one doesn't find in bigger cities.

Coming back from home on train, seeing the world around me, made me think again - what will be the face of India - 20 or 30 or even 50 years from now? There is huge disparity between Delhi and the smaller towns and villages. You just need to watch and see the real India from that small open window of your seat and you start realizing the reality. People still living in open, no water, no electricity, and no sanitation! Though I have seen these things much closer in my native village around 15 years back but there are lot many places where life is still the same or may be worse. You just need one train journey in a general compartment to realize where we are.

We the technologists, the software engineers, are just so much overwehlmed by IT, that we don't realize the other face of the coin. Having seen so many things in europe and in india, will we ever see a modern india (where people atleast get all the basic necessities of life) in our life span? I once asked my uncles and aunts the same question, and their answer was a strong NO. I hope this NO changes into Yes, even though I myself am a bit reluctant in making that statement. But I still hope ...

Change the World

Tim Draper from DFJ gave a presentation at Stanford as part of the ETL series. The video is here.
Most interesting bit is the the song for Entrepreneurs (Risk Master):-).

The best part of an entrepreneur is to go against the odds and change the world. So just follow what you believe in and just do it.

Structured Blogging and Prospective Search

Via Bob Wyman from PubSub:

With Structured Blogging, we'll be able to post structured items in any of millions of blogs or web sites and have those items recognized, indexed, and searched on any number of search sites -- just like HTML pages are today. No longer will we need to rely on going to a small number of centralized, walled-garden, closed sites like MeetUp, eBay, Monster, or EVDB to publish or search for the kind of information that requires structure. Common search engines like Google, Yahoo! and PubSub will be able to usefully index this data. In the future, as search engines come to better support structured data, we will all benefit as the Gray Web grows smaller and the visible web grows larger.

Understanding Semantic Web (Part -2)

Understanding Semantic Web (Part-2)

As discussed in the previous part, main challenges today lies in Integration - from databases to systems to services, companies spend billions for systems to work together. Some one might ask why don't have a standard in the first place? It takes time to come up with a standard and even standards alone don't help - things move too dynamically in the the world of the PC and the Internet.

Integration is not just about integrating existing systems, but every integration kinds of breaks the previous barrier and helps build new innovative services.

Let's look towards some of the approaches on a very basic note, of the kind of problems that arise in integration.

Database Integration
--------------------
Let's assume company A has a database of Products kept in a Relational Database
Product Table A (Product ID, Name, Price (USD), Category)

And now there's another company B, who also a database of Products but with a similar structure (also within a relational database).
Product Table B (Product ID, Name,Price (Euro), Category)

The key difference in the Table A and Table B are the semantics in the Price variable. The Price in table A is in USD and Price in table B is in Euro. What's the best way to integrate two systems which have different or similar schemas of tables and more importantly, can it be "automated"? The databases don't have any notion of Price and currency, makes it harder for them to interpret.

There are mainly two key differences in data integration: Syntactic and Semantic Differences. Syntactic differences (involving syntax changes such as difference in names) are easier to resolve but semantic differences involving structural changes are much harder to resolve (for example, a particular field called Address in one table is related to multiple fields in different tables).

Then there are cases where one has to integrate a (RDBMS) relational database with an ODBMS object oriented database or any other propreitary database format. This can be automated to a large extent.

Data Integration on Internet
----------------------------
With the advent of the Internet, sharing of data became a more ubiquitous need. Plain HTML was nice, people could make excellent home pages but made it difficult for machines to share and process data. XML came as an excellent tool providing a standard for sharing structured data.

But saying having data in XML solves everything is a myth. XML at a structural level is at the same level at which any RDBMS or ODBMS or any other storage layer is with certain differences existing between each of these different systems.

RDBMS, ODBMS provide an excellent form for storage of data, providing transactional capabilites, efficient query retrieval - but they are bad when one wants to share data. One needs to have an explicit import export process depending on application needs.

XML on the other provides an excellent format for sharing structured data. Certain vendors like Tamino provide an XML database.

But otherwise weather its XML DB, RDBMS, ODBMS - essentially one has a particular schema (table structure in RDMS, XML Schema in XML) and then one populates data according to the schema.

Having data in XML solves syntactic problems to some extent but semantically it suffers from the same problems that any other database suffers from. If two companies (two publishing houses) want to share data, both of them will have their own XML formats for their respective data in XML. Integrating these two XML formats is similar to the integration problem of an RDMS discussed above.

So if there a N different formats, to have true interoperability one has NXN possibilites, which doesn't scale. The common approach is to have a common schema, and interoperate the N formats to a common schema. This reduces the number of possibilities to N. Any new format addition just has to provide a mapping to the common schema.

That's where standards come in, providing a common schema format. There are standards for every small and big stuff : VCard for Address Books, Dublin Core metadata properties for content, RosettaNet (supply chain transactions), ebXML (electronic business processes).

If everyone adheres to a common standard, looks like the Integration problem gets solved! Bingo! If every address book tool follows VCard, "I" can move my data very easily from my mobile phone, to my PDA to any tool existing on the PC or the Internet. But the world is not that simple, needs and requirements do change very frequently. And more importantly, now my address book is not a stand alone tool, I want my address books to be integrated with my email tools, with calendar tools or even my Word processors or Excel.

So how do I interoperate data between multiple domains? Should I make one big standard which covers everything? Having a common standard helps a standard way to import or export data, but there is no standard way to access data. I can do import/export of my address book but if I want my agent to do it automatically for me, its not possible. This is where the service oriented world is playing its part. In the next part, we will look into semantic web technologies (ontologies, RDF) and the role they are playing to solve the integration problem.

RSS Filters

Today morning while reading this blog, from Piers Young, I started thinking about a possible solution to the information overload problem in RSS. People do subscribe lot of RSS feeds but its very hard to read each and every bit of information.

RSS Feeds especially blogs written by personal friends or people are just as personal like Emails. Even in case of public blogs, one might need to skim certain entries, but its hard to keep track of 100 or more feeds within an aggregator. One possible approach is to develop email like spam filters for filtering in RSS tools. In case there is there is excessive information from one particular feed, it can be filtered very easily.

So within my RSS Tool, I should be able to specify:
- Remove similar entries that have been read. (Dump them separately, so I can see if I want)
- Filter entries via keywords (Should be able to read unfiltered ones, if I want)
- Views based on Filters - Have a views like capability, where a tag view is created from entries that exist from within all subscribed RSS feeds.
- Person based view - All discussions and comments given by a person appear in a person view.
- View based Clustering of RSS feeds.

This might be one possible approach to solve the information overload within RSS atleast in the short run.

Understanding Semantic Web (Part -1)

Some of my friends were interested in knowing more about Semantic Web. I thought to write some blog entries dedicating to Semantic Web, as it was my research theme in Austria. The thoughts I am pinning down are my own thoughts, the way I understand what Semantic Web implies to do, some people may agree or disagree with that.

Understanding Semantic Web (Part-1)

On a simple note, Semantic Web wants to foster machine to machine communication to make more smart services available on the internet. Today's web is meant primarily for humans. Any content or service provider on the internet provides an HTML web page to his/her service. Any user comes to the website, looks at the particular information and is done. HTML web pages can be as simple as a home page, a blog, news web site to an email service and as complex as an enterprise level ERP service.

So what does Semantic Web do to the Internet of today? Before answering this question, it might be relevant to look into what all we do on internet today. What is the problem that we are facing today?

Internet provides a level playing field where each individual can play its part. This has resulted in huge overload of information. Everyone wants to have an online presence.

Search Engines
--------------
Search engines like Google, Yahoo act as an entry point to the Internet. They need to make relevant information available to the users. Google and Yahoo are able to very effectively search for "specific" information. But how do I search for multimedia images related to Taj Mahal which I can make use of without violating any copyright. Today's search engines are mainly keyword based or some have context associated with keywords e.g. Distinguishing Jaguar as an animal from Jaguar as a vehicle.


Specialized search engines like priceline takes information about products from multiple web sites and then on their end makes them available as a single service. These websites need to always maintain consistency as they have to extract data (such as price, product, features etc.) from HTML from original content provder. Adding new content providers is a headache and moving between domains and integrating multiple domains is quite hard. A common vocabulary would solve the problem of sharing information.


Application Services
--------------------
Application Services e.g. emails, calendar tools, messengers, social networking websites. A service provider like yahoo, google and others provide application services to the user via the web. Big content providers provide even an integration platform between multiple such services. The most common approach for integration is to build a specific protocol. So there is IMAP for emails, iCal for calendar tools, WEB-DAV for distributed authoring on internet etc. But now the next question comes, if I want to integrate data from multiple sources, integrating gmail with a yahoo calendar service, We face a classic integration problem.

Most of the times a content provider provides such an integrable service e.g. yahoo already has an email, so why will it enable gamil on its messenger? Or alternatively, a new startup or a team finds a particular need and comes with a solution.

Enterprise Services
-------------------
Enterprises face this integration problem from every bunch of work they do - from merging data at the database level to integrating an enterprise level service. How do I combine multiple databases and have a common unified view? How do I integrate services once I move into middleware services? Can integration work be minimized or automated? Enterprises spend billions of dollars just on Integration Efforts.

Future Services
---------------
Then there are questions of some other things which don't exist on the Internet, but people have from long hoped they will arrive one day, Smart Agents. A personal agent that handles everything for you. Smart Services also belong to the same category. So if I am doing anything repeatedly, why can't a smart service just handle it. Copy-paste on the desktop works still at the syntactic level, why can't I have a semantic copy-paste available ? Why can't I use my data on mobile, PC, and internet as a single service.

As an individual user needs increase much more dynamically, how do we provide dynamic services catered to a specific user? If a content provider does not provide a service, can someone else provide it or perhaps just "Integrate" from existing building blocks.

Internet Advertising - its HOT

Via Emergic.

The Economist writes that "Google's new advertising service could make the internet an even more valuable marketing medium."

This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, predicts Advertising Age. It will, says the trade magazine, represent a "watershed moment" in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium.

What would happen if there are more people accessing content and services from their personal devices, can an internet giant revolutionize wireless advertising?

Breaking the Monopoly

Via Emergic

Mary Hodder writes: "I had an idea the other night, at the 106 miles meeting, that we should develop applications for cell phones that creatively route around the carriers. And we most definitely should not use their framing of the customer situation: 'consumers' and 'enterprise', to describe the possible user markets. I think what's key to breaking the cellular provider stranglehold is developing cool apps that can sit on phones, but that only require users to download these apps in simple ways (not through carriers but through web access and SMS messages sending them the link to the web download). That way carriers will lose the monopoly they have on users access to applications. Because the phone IS the platform, not PC's."

That's also what we are trying to do at Wirkle by building an environment which delivers content to users without going through the carrier. Carrier strong hold will decrease as we move forward, but I think just having cool applications will not affect the carriers. There needs to strong effective services and an equivalent business model proposition for everyone (content providers, users, platform providers) etc. Certain services like push based services are initiated by the carrier and are hard to tackle without carrier's support. Innovative business models can help solve such problems.

Why Indians kill themselves?

Recently there have been two incidents dealing with services provided by indian companies which caused unnecessary frusturation. Two sectors: banking and mobile services have said to cause a revolution in India. But at the ground level if one sees how they operate, a common man still feels frusturated.

Today morning, I went to ICICI bank branch in South Delhi for opening a savings account. I thought it should have been pretty simple, but that's what added to my woes. I was shocked to know that ICICI doesn't open a bank account unless one doesn't have account in another bank in the same city. They need a cheque from one of my another bank account in New Delhi. But since I don't belong to Delhi and am only living there from last 6 months, I cannot open a bank account unless I first open a bank account in another bank. They won't take cash, won't take an outstation cheque and don't have any other mechanism in place. I was ready to give any kind of authentication proof, but no solution.

And when I asked the concerned person, "Isn't it ridiculous?" And he just gave a meeky smile and said "Yeah".

This is the state of indian services and we boast even of that. I remember opening a bank account in Austria, took 5 minutes and they didn't even take a single penny, not even a photograph!

Last Week, I had this another unique experience of taking a mobile connection from one of India's famous mobile providers - Airtel. The connection is an Instant Postpaid connection enabling both prepaid and postpaid facilities. I made 6-7 calls during the week ahead to enquire the status of activation of my postpaid connection. But the customer care over there is as bad as it can be. Sometimes I feel they have been just made to sit over there without any knowledge. They just want to bang the call down as fast as possible. My dual prepaid+postpaid connection resulted in double woes. Now the Airtel customer care has been divided into two parts - where one number is only for prepaid customers and another number is for postpaid customers. Companies are trying to have a single window and they already fragmented their stuff. And the two different customer care's won't even answer any query which is mean't for the other customer care.

And with Instant Postpaid, I had an experience where the postpaid customer care asked me to contact prepaid one and when I dialled the prepaid customer care, they asked me to contact postpaid one. That's the height!!!

And kind of responses I got from customer care, when I enquired about the status of activation on the 8th day (activation is done within 5 days) were totally amusing. One person said, it takes 7 days to activate, there were 3-4 holidays, so "wait another week". I mean why are you trying to fool the customer! I asked him, isn't it 5 days? And then he said yeah, but holidays. And there weren't those many holidays, just a weekend. I asked him to number the holidays.

And getting GPRS activation over it was another headache, my first call's reponse was: activation after 4 hours, second call: said 1 hour, third call said another 4 hours - try tomorrow. And even next day they had their problems. Finally got it working by lunch time.

We people boast a lot but ground realities are quite different. We provide lot of 24X7 services to US consumers but why can't we provide efficient services for indian consumers!

Skypecasting

By Samuel Rose on Smart Mobs and the Power of the Mobile Many

New Scientist reports (subscription) on the phenomenon of "Skypecasting".
From the NS article:
...Skype was designed to allow users to make free telephone calls over the internet. But the sound quality is excellent and the software also allows callers to exchange files and play music while they are talking. Radio buffs are now exploiting the new technology to become both interviewer and DJ on a shoestring budget. In doing so, they may be starting a broadcasting revolution, one that democratises the industry and makes the amateur broadcaster king.

Skypecasting, as it is called, is possible because of another trend dubbed podcasting. Podcasts are MP3 files that are automatically delivered to subscribers' MP3 players when posted online...Now with Skype, podcasters can do more than just post an album by their favourite band or record a monologue on current events. They can interview a band on the other side of the world before playing its latest set, or bring together overseas experts to discuss a topic. With a little know-how, Skype allows these conversations and music clips to be saved as MP3 files, posted online and then automatically downloaded by listeners.

What's more, it's cheap. With Skype, people can be added to a conference call at no extra cost.

Success & Failure

Definition of success and failure is different for different people. For some failure means the ultimate death and for some its a learning step for the next big thing.

Rajesh Jain articulated very well on his post about Why Failure Happens:
- Too much Vision
- Wrong Idea
- Wrong Product
- Inability to Sell
- People Mistakes
- Flawed Execution

But a true entrepreneur has a never die attitude. Great entrepreneurs want to solve hard problems. They want to cause fundamental shift in businesses. But what causes this fundamental shift in businesses ?

Do fundamental shifts occur by having a great vision or is it one builds a vision as one is following a particular path. I myself yet don't know the answer. There might be both category of people but I am getting more biased towards people while pursuing their interest reach a point where they can validate their stuff which later on leads to building up of a company with great vision. Google, Yahoo are great examples. I don't think the founders would have thought the scale that they are at today while they were at stanford.

Loss of focus and following the right strategy is very important at every stage in a startup. Trying to follow two strategies together often results in a big loss of resources, time, money and doesn't give in the returns. This is what I experienced it personally. But getting to know what's the right strategy is a very tough job. And when one reaches a conclusion point, corrections need to be made and hard decisions need to be taken.

Moving from a job to starting your own venture is a lot different. One of the biggest thing it teaches you is Reality. How to deal not with software but with People!

Kwickee

From Kwickee's website:

Kwickee™, The Mobile Information Exchange™, is a platform that allows anyone or any company to share information, knowledge and experiences. Using mobile phones we deliver Kwickee™ directly to the end user whenever and wherever they are in the UK!

A Kwickee™ can be as much as 5,000 characters (about a page and a half of text) and is therefore over 30 times larger than a 160 character SMS text message.

Kwickee enables content providers money for their content. See this.
Kwickee on WirelessDevNet.
Kwickee figures in mobile perals of the year Mobile Technology Blog.

Changing Face of Content

For any website, to keep up, having a live community around it is very important. This is what makes them lively, increases page views and affects revenues. My belief is as we move into the future, people would like to access content not in the way content providers provide, but the way users want it. Already aggregation services like bloglines, RSS etc. are showing this up. But this is just a small part of the whole big shift that's occuring slowly.

People use different tools like Yahoo Mail, some different calendar tools, native address books etc. But getting and combining information is still a lot difficult. When I want to email someone using Yahoo, I need to find contact information from a different address book tool. Or I cannot club up all different emails in one place. Current solution is to choose a provider which provides a package of all such services. But this is equivalent to NO solution.

Semantic Web wants to solve this problem via building complex ontologies. I think that makes it more than complex. My view is content providers need to publish interfaces to any thing that they publish. So no just pure HTML, publish REST style interfaces, publish SOAP interfaces or just pure XML structured content. Any application that exists today, calendar tools, email, e-groups, messaging - everything needs to have an external interface.

There are lot more smarter people/companies on internet who can combine information in interesting ways to give smarter solutions. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay are already doing interesting stuff. RSS is just a beginning, other mature things will follow soon.

Where do content providers stand in this? Will they not loose revenue in this ? Why will they do it?

They will need to do it, because users want such services. User need will drive such a change. May be in short term they loose revenue, but I think solutions will appear which will give revenue to content provider and at the same time make things more usable for the users.

One can make use of the application/ content interfaces for delivering simple, powerful and effective services to the user on mobile devices. Wireless which provides an easy model for doing micropayments will enable a much bigger revenue model for the content provider.

Americans - Top Mobile Spenders

Via MocoNews:

“In the United States, 50 million cell phone owners are younger than 25 and will collectively spend $20 billion this year on their cell phones. American young people spend more on cell phone downloads - such as ringtones, music, games or the latest handsets - than any other country in the world, the research finds…According to the mobileYouth 2005 report released in late March, $1 in every $10 that children and young people now spend is related to their cell phone.” Which is pretty funny, considering that Asia and Europe are so far ahead of the US in terms of rolling out mobile content…

Complete link here.

100 million and Growing

Today morning, I opened newspaper and found an interesting piece of information.

I knew the the mobile market in India is growing at a much rapid pace. Phone connections in India have just crossed the 100-million mark! I remember the days when everyone including my parents had to wait for months to get a phone connection. And if you want instant connection (instant meant delay of a month or two months), you had to pay huge sum of money.

The tally at the 100-million mark is expected to be 54 million mobile phones and 46 million landlines. India is expected to have 200 million phone connections by 2007. The number of mobile connections have already overtaken number of landlines. I think indian people are a lot talkitive :-)

Sparring bouts with VC's and their associates

Via Venchar:
Jason Calcanis has a terrific post on his "sparring" bouts with VC's and their associates. A must read post.

1. Hustle
2. Passion
3. Resiliency

You have those things it really doesn’t matter what the idea is… you can change your ideas all day long, in fact evolving is what you’re supposed to do in business. However, you can’t substitute hustle, passion, or resiliency.

WSP's Vs ISP's and Data Services

WSP's (Wireless Service Providers) or better known as Wireless Carriers.
ISP's or Internet Service Providers.

ISP's provide bandwidth to access internet on PC's and Wireless Carriers are providing voice over wireless networks. Things are slowly changing on both ends. VOIP is emerging as a big force in the ISP business. Companies like Vonage and Skype are changing the ISP's key role. And simultaneously data services are beginning to have a stronger impact on the mobile consumer.

Though some form of seemless convergence is beginning to appear, but for the consumer both these services are a lot different not just in terms of what they provide but also in terms how they are provided. On one hand accessing internet on PC's is becoming cheaper via ISP's and on the other hand cost for data for a consumer is increasing in the wireless world. The world of internet is more of free but on mobile devices, its the carrier who has a stronghold.

The business differs not just for the cosumer but on other businesses who make use of the network. Wireless carriers today charge anything between 30% to 70% for deploying an application on their platform. Sending multiple SMSes on a mobile device can cost you same as your cost of the monthly ISP connection.

Technologies like WIFI, WiMAX, 3G might increase bandwidth, decrease heterogenity but will the wireless network enjoy the freedom of the internet or the ISP business gets more tightened like the carrier?

I believe that future of data and bandwidth will be more open and cheaper in both these businesses. Though today the carriers control the content but in next 5 years, I think it might be someone else (not a carrier).

What needs to be provided?
Value proposition to a customer in a simpler cost effective way!

Mobile Deployment Blues

Developing J2ME applications for mobile phones looks like a breeze but it can really be a pain. The pain is not the development but the deployment of such applications on multiple devices.

Recently I have witnessed a lot of such issues and majority of them have to do with just either inconsistency amongst different device manufacturers or perhaps not being able to come up with a standard or just bugs in firmware implementations.

J2ME applications don't have a standard way to get network connectivity from the underlying device OS. So your WAP connection works but not your J2ME application?

And to make matters worse, the carriers have no standard way to set GPRS settings for wide range of devices. More often your device is not supported by the carrier. I sometimes wonder how complex would it be for a non-techy person like my father to get and make those settings manually.

And then connectivity issues. In India I have tried Idea, Hutch and Airtel GPRS network. I have found Idea GPRS (WAP connection) to be worst. Its just too slow to do anything meaningful.

So be sure to resolve these differences, before your customer bangs on the door!!

Rabble

Rabble - a newly launched mobile blogging, newsreader and networking tool.
From Rabble's website:

Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create. Create your channel and post location-based media - your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It's like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you. Then connect with your world. Tell Rabble where you are and it will show you who is around you and the media they have created. Through bits of location-tagged media, find and interact with other people and get information you won't find in the yellow pages. Part blogging, part location-based personal networking, Rabble connects you with the world in a unique and intuitive way by turning "users" into "producers" and creating a marketplace for mobile user-generated content.

Yahoo says:

The application, called ``Rabble,'' streamlines the now-cumbersome process for publishing text or images from a cell phone to a Weblog. It also creates a way to search mobile blogs for items of interest -- from homes for sale in a particular neighborhood to updated tour information for a favorite band.
...
It combines the social-networking aspects of a Friendster with the enhanced search capabilities of a Google.

TiE Business Delegation From US

Today I attended a business delegation from US arranged by TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). It was my first such networking conference in India.

The day went on quite well and I met quite many people on a single day. Was quite different from my usual day doing and writing software code.

The day started with various panel discussions. All the panel discussions were quite good, led by extremely talented people.

First panel discussion: Where is the Indian IT Industry headed moderated by Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom with panelists Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman &CEO, HCL Infosystems, Dan Sandhu, CEO, India & Head of Offshore Business, Vertex, India, Atul Dhawan, Deloitte Haskins & Sells.

One important thing that was part of the overall discussion was "scale". Companies in India growing at a massive rate and that was important to make India a global hub. People talked about statistics comparing India and China and talked about growth potential of Indian domestic market in hardware, internet (creating broadband content) and software (SME, health services and education). Dan Sandhu had an interesting perspective where he said indian operations should have "scale, scope and depth" in order to succeed.

The panel discussion and Q&A mainly dealt with India offshore operations, IT, BPO. I was happy to see the rising numbers but it made me ask my first question of the day! So in Q&A I asked:
What holds for technology startups in India? How can agencies like Nasscom and others help young entrepreneurs? When will we see the next google, amazon or ebay coming from India?

The answer to my question was mixed. And I think people know that there are lot many problems that still need to be solved. Some of them which they already talked about in the panel discussion. But this fact pinches me personally at times, we have such a big software industry, why isn't google, amazon, ebay really happening in India. Perhaps this is because of the fact that I am running my own startup, trying to establish my own small niche.

The second panel discussion:
Q&A with companies with investments from US based VCs on their experiences and expectations moderated by Bimal Sareen, Founder & CEO, Avaana and panelists Sushil Gupta, Vice President & MD, Atrenta India & Chirag Jain, VP & Head-India Operations, firstRain Software Centre Pvt.Ltd.

The discussion focussed around the issues of an Indian company getting funding from US VCs. The most important tip is: Get funding from where your customer is. If a company has customers in US, try to raise funding from US VCs as they will provide you with much needed contacts, networking and valuable information of the market. Both Avaana and First Rain raised good amount of money from the venture funds and performing good. Chirag provided another insight that a company should focus on the core product rather than trying to do short term gains for the numbers and this is what they learn't from their US VC.

In both these cases, the initial company formation was in US. So weather those are indian companies or US companies with india operations, its hard to draw the line. This was what even Kiran Karnik said in the first panel discussion. What is meant by an Indian company? Is it a company incorporated in India with global operations; a global company with 90% of its workforce in India or a company focused in Indian domestic market? Its hard to draw the line.

Third Panel Discussion:
Learnings recap : Moderated discussion with 3 members of the VC representatives, Frederick Bolander, Jorge Del Calvo & Ann Ralston on their experiences and learnings in India moderated by Vivek Agarwal, CEO, Liqvid eLearning Services Pvt.Ltd.

Some of the US venture funds are now trying to look into early stage ventures in India. Their experience about India has been very positive. But on the other hand they haven't got any breakthough or disruptive ideas from the people. Most of the people are pitching for low R&D cost which they say doesn't succeed in the long run. Secondly the idea has to be big enough in order to appeal.

This part of the talk was interesting and also led to my second question of the day! Apart from venture money, the key thing that young entrepreneurs need is mentorship. I am myself an IIT Delhi graduate, running a startup, know other 5-6 startups incubated in IIT Delhi, but in India there doesn't exist an ecosystem for startups. How are venture firms or other firms helping startups in that? There are no forums or not at the scale of what exists in silicon valley.

For that, some person from the TiE association told me that TiE has a mentorship programme for young entrepreneurs.

I was happy to know about it and I thank him. But I think that was not an answer to my question. so I raised a follow up question:
If people want to get together and discuss technology or want to mature their idea, where should they go? If I am in a university or a young entrepreneur, I want to do something, my efforts might not lead to a successful company at the moment - there is no platform or not at the scale what exists in silicon valley to discuss.

I didn't get an answer except that TiE provides mentorship activities. I appreciate what TiE does and its a brilliant forum. But I think we need not one TiE but perhaps 100 more TiE's. These have to be accessible to general people. Like easy access to capital, "Easy Access to Mentoring" is very crucial. Along with some business meetings in Taj, some workshops need to be conducted in campuses, lecture theatres, hostels.

Last Panel discussion was about Opportunities in Chandigarh. Being myself from around Chandigarh, I wanted to see it develop as an IT hub. I think government policies in the past have screwed it in a big way. Let's hope things change for a better in the future. Good to know there is an incubation center in PEC(Punjab Engineering College) which is incubating 8 companies.

Last but not the least it was a wonderful day, met some many nice people. Had some discussions about my own venture, Wirkle. Thanks to TiE and all the other people for arranging such a nice event. Hope such activities are arranged much more often.

Stock Charts via Google

Via Google Blog

Searches for things like AAPL now bring up stock charts and high/low information at the top of the results.

See Google Stock

Event Space heating Up

Via Ross Mayfield

EVDB took their beta live tonight. Below is a sample published calendar, here is a sample event page. Go poke around.

See that little green button? I'll lay odds you will see it more often over the next year than you imagine.

Yesterday EVDB announced a $2.1 million raise from Draper Fisher Jurveston, Omidyar Network, Esther Dyson, Ev Williams, Mark Pincus and others great angels.

Some people really like it. The event space is heating up, with Upcoming.org and Whizspark with their own approach.

Web Event DB

EVDB is a startup company focusing on providing event information.

From ZDNet

Event information is all over the map in terms of formats, and standards don't exist for event-based services, so EVDB is aggregating and normalizing the content, and exposing it through Web services APIs. Dear views EVDB as being events-obsessed, but doesn't plan to invest in build an events portal. Instead, the startup company is focusing on helping users discover and share (community) events, and provide the tools necessary to integrate events into other applications and services.

Thanks to Jon Udell for the link.

Web events will make a lot of relevance for mobile devices. So next time you are in a new city, you can automatically get information about all personal events that you are interested in.

Booting iPod

Want to boot up iPod with your own kernel? check out this.


Checkout more screenshots over here.

Thanks to Thoughtblogs for the link.

RSS, Podcasting, and Next

HindustanTimes has an article on Podcasting. Interesting to see how fast its growing and indian newspapers catching on the phenomenon. People are still getting used to RSS and blogs. There is a major shift coming in the future of content distribution. Video casting will be the next step, some things already might be there.

A public directory for podcast feeds is available at: see http://www.podcast.net

And yes there are hindi podcast feeds too. http://www.podcast.net/tag/hindi

The biggest value addition to the RSS, podcast or videocast world would be the interface to such technologies. Right now people need to know what RSS is, what podcast is or what a videocast might be. If one thinks why RSS or podcast is hit, its not they are revolutionary technologies, its just there is a demand and supply chain. People are creative and want to publish and share things. And the same people have different interests and want to consume things which they like.

Media Companies, TV channels, can serve specific interests but they won't be able to target interests at individual level. This is where simple technologies like RSS make a difference.

But there is still one technical challenge to be solved. The interface to such technologies is still complex. People need to understand what RSS is. Weblogs, media companies everyone is trying to make people understand what RSS is. I think once this interface changes, where people can have access to such technologies without understanding the technical part, this is when it will be as pervasive as the Internet. We are just witnessing early adopters of technology, the masses have yet to adopt!

How to Start a Startup?

Paul Graham – founder of Viaweb (bought by Yahoo! in the late 1990s) and author of Hackers & Painters wrote an essay on "How to Start a Startup?"

He lists some very interesting points for startups started by geeks. He focuses on three key things:
- Good People

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

- Make stuff people want, and

If you can't understand users, however, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. That is the single most important issue for technology startups, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.

- Spend as little money as possible.

When and if you get an infusion of real money from investors, what should you do with it? Not spend it, that's what. In nearly every startup that fails, the proximate cause is running out of money.

In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling.

Thanks to Brad Feld for the link .

College Entrepreneurs

Two weeks back, I had an experience talking to young people in their final year of engineering study and a belief to do something. These brought back memories of my own days 3 years back.

One important thing for all young entrepreneurs is:
- MENTORSHIP: Lot of bright students in indian universities are willing to put risk and do things but they lack serious mentorship. Teachers whom I think should be perfect mentors, they more often take a negative approach. Many times they de-motivate people rather than motivating them.

My personal view for all college entrepreneurs :
- Getting your first Idea! : Even if you don't have an "idea" of what you want to do, start something in which you believe in. If you believe in nanotechnology, mobile-communication, any field - put all your passion in that field. Start working and you will get lot of ideas.

- Working on your Idea : Analyze, study market and the most important part is talk to people. Internet is a vast resource, make best use of it. Just Idea's don't matter so make a plan.

- From Idea to a Plan : Analyze what all you need. No one will come and help you out. You have to learn the hard bits yourself. Most of the plans will fail, but keep carry ing on, refine your thoughts and plans.

- From Plan to a Company : Start working and build up your idea into a product.

There are lot of hard things, one needs people, investment and lot of nitty gritty things. But the overall idea of this article is, ACT - and just don't pass time thinking. Your ACT might or might not lead to a successful company right now but it will give you the experience which will help you build a successful company.

Saral Mobile Sandesh (SMS)

Saral Mobile Sandesh (Hindi name for SMS) or SMS as people popularly call it. Just few days back at home, I had another experience with a simple technology like SMS. My father who is just a common man, non-techy and has never used a PC was using SMS to place his bid for an auction.

I was spell bound for a moment. I just said to myself, this is where the power lies in mobility. I believe strongly the next billion transactions will occur from these small mobile devices and not from the PC. It might take time but the volume coming from mobile devices will surpass the PC volume. But one has to take care, keep things simple (saral as we say in hindi). The moment one makes it hard, the engima dies.

When Life Stops for a Moment

Its been lot of work recently. But when it looks everything will be fine, life just takes a turn. After 3 months I just went home for a break, thinking that I will be back with fresh energy. But then an incident just shocked me.

One of my cousin sister (younger than me) lost her husband in a car accident and its been just around one and a half month of marriage. Yesterday my mother woke me up at 7 am from bed to give this shocking news. It looks just yesterday I attended her marriage. It was so fun and then at another instance life just turns around.

We humans run around for so many things, clock always keeps ticking but moments like this make you realize the importance of life.

Life ..... is just life, nothing more nothing less.

Right now everyone is just spell-bound. No one knows what to do. I know my uncle, aunt, sister, brother - its just hard to digest it. I hope and I pray god gives them enough strength.

Wireless Data Services - Part 2

In this session and some further sessions, I am trying to evaluate some of the content companies already making their mark in the Wireless Sector. The idea is to look into both successfull and unsuccessful wireless content companies - which can act as case study for evaluating the wireless content services sector.



In case any one of you know of any innovative companies, you can post them in the comments section. I will follow through them in my next sections.



One of the first companies, that I came to know about very recently is Nooper.com. Japanese because of their love of technology are far ahead in the wireless market. This company has made a successful business out of SMS Alerts or "Noopies".



So you want to remain updated about Weather, News, Rumors, Hot Topics, want to set up a mailing list, Earthquakes, Pill Reminder - daily, monthly - just any kind of reminder - you can just set and get Noopies.



English Readers can get information on http://www.nooper.com/index?l=EN



One of the biggest strengths of SMS is, its simple and intutive from a 10 year old to a 50 year old person. You just type and its done. SMS started as a personal medium of communication but now has been leveraged for providing any kind of content.



The second strength that I find in the SMS medium is its "strong contact" with both the online and the offline world. One can find keywords for downloading ringtones in newspapers, magazine, sending comments to news channels, participating in TV shows - all just via keying in a short message to a specific number displayed there and then.

This is the power which mobility gives which I think WAP or XHTML haven't been able to leverage.



The SMS medium has clearly shown that given a simple and effective medium despite its disadvantages (typing in keys), can still have a powerful impact. People want to participate and by providing services from PC via internet to directly on their mobile phones can have a significant impact.

Scalability of Feeds & Aggregators

Via Emergic.com



The Shifted Librarian (Jenny) points to a post by Werner Vogel: "The increase in the number of feeds will leave many users frustrated, as there is a limit to the number feeds one can scan and read. Current numbers suggest that readers can handle 150-200 feeds without too much stress. But users will want to read more and more as new interesting feeds become available and they run into the limitations of the metaphor of current aggregator applications. The current central abstract of aggregators is that of a feed, and there is a limit to how many individual feeds one can actually handle. Aggregators will need to find ways in which the users can be subscribed to a select set of feeds because they want to read everything that comes from these feeds, but also subscribe to a much larger set of publishers for which the feed abstraction may not be the right metaphor. Aggregation, fusion and selection at the information item level instead of at the feed level seems to be a first abstractions to investigation."



My Feedlist shows me, I am at 105. Even I have started feeling the pinch. I think some innovation needs to occur at this level. Today's Feed Aggregators are aimed at entering and subscribing particular URL's of information.



I am just thinking, there may be a day when I have 1000 or may be 10,000 sources. Today's aggregators cannot definitely manage that information with a two or three pan interface. What is needed is a more intutive way to handle such information.



Even a user himself/herself cannot read 10,000 feeds of information. So what's the solution?



This idea just tinkered down my brain, while just writing this blog entry. So enjoy it :-)



Personalized Newspaper Interface

Rather than reading a daily e-newspaper from Times of India, what is needed is a newspaper made up from my daily sources. It automatically categorizes information in different sections, puts messages (even advertisements) just like a normal newspaper.

It can mark certain sections as BOLD, or put more important sections in front and others in back. The UI needs to get more intelligent, it can definitely keep track of my reading habits, do an analysis and present me things more like a true personalized newspaper. I as a user can read more important sections and skip others at will.



I think this might work till 10,000, I hope there's isn't a news addict hoping to digest 1 million feeds daily.:-)

Google - Ad Giant

Content on internet has been mostly free for consumer, with content publishers making money via advertising. The advertising model on internet has been changed from banner clicks to a strong contextual advertising model pioneered by companies like Google and Overture. Google is adding another feature which I guess will increase its stronghold by a mammoth in the online advertising world. Google is releasing an API for advertisers to configure their advertising on various content publishers channels.

For the first time, the search giant will provide its advertisers with an application programming interface (API), which will enable them to link their computer systems with Google and control parts of the mammoth Google ad delivery system. The API will allow advertisers to self-administer the delivery, the timing and the price they will pay for their text ads.



This raises the bar in the online advertising market as Google turns to technology to try and outwit and pull ahead of media savvy competitors such as Kanoodle and others. Kanoodle says its average click-through revenue is twice as much as that of Google's because it gives online publishers greater control over what types of advertising is displayed, at which times, and is better matched to page content or search terms.

The complete story is available at this link.

Wireless Data Services - Part 1

Internet gave birth to content in new and innovative ways. One can today find any kind of information weather its news (international or local), weather information, bank account or travel information etc. There was a growing trend in late 90's to put everything online including humans (soft identity).



Wireless brought with it the trend to have access to communication anytime anywhere. The WAP sites, the sms based content, the mobile carrier portals all tried to follow the same principle and make available content in wireless world, but in their own individual fashion. Each of these created their own individual different small worlds where the homogeneity of internet just died away. Though these small worlds have led to small and big successes of their own, but accessing content on mobiles is still a lot harder for an individual. Not many even want to try it. The problems can be grouped as:

- Look & Feel Factor (Graphics, Visualization)

- Accessibility (Bandwidth, time, hard to surf)

- Not enough Good Content (Not much content available)

- Not relevant to me (Content not specific to an individual's interest)

- Ignorance (User doesn't know how to access and get content specific to his interest)



People might know of google's, yahoo's or msn's web portal but majority of the people just even don't know the WAP URL of these content providers. Business power houses are trying to create a separate domain .MOBI to solve that problem. But in my view it will create a far complex fragmentation. Industry has the money to spend to create the same content multiple times and duplicate it. But individuals who write blogs, make personal websites even want their content to be made available on the mobile.

My personal view is that the .MOBI may solve the brand problem of the big businesses but it will still not bring the benefits of internet onto the mobile world.



There exist a large number of WAP sites, but not many people know about it. A lot of companies did sprung up who provided personalized menus, favourites of WAP URL's which tried to reduce the number of clicks and improve accessibility to the wireless content. The WAP pages even suffered from the Look and Feel factor. With XHTML, the visualization has improved a lot and one can view web like pages on the mobile, but accessibility is still poor. Finding content relevant to an individual is still a lot harder.



SMS based content has been a lot popular even with a bad look and feel factor but a very good accessibility factor. Both the online world and offline world together have played a significant factor in popularising SMS based content and removing even the Ignorance factor to some extent. Everything has been SMS enabled from emails to bank accounts. But SMS has its own problems, the biggest being spam.



Mobile Portals deployed at the wireless carrier solve the accessibility problem by making available specifically targetted content to the general user. One can find richer content varying from news, live sports updates, weather etc. But still the homogenity and wide variety of content that's available on the internet is missing in the mobile world. If one is reading a CNN breaking story update and is interested to know more, he is just helpless. The full story is not just available or he needs to search for that full story. There exists this fragmentation where the mobile world is not homogeneously integrated with the wired internet.



One can argue that with advanced networks like 3G and advanced smart phones - look and feel and accessibility factor will just fade away. And the same content as available on the web will be browsable with desktop experience directly on the phone. But does this guarantee that users will still browse content on mobile phones? Companies in the past have made available internet on Television and other such devices. Media gateways already have access to internet. But all such devices are not used for browsing content. Each of these devices serve a well defined purpose.



Mobile phones are personal communication devices, and just mimicking and making available internet content on such devices will not solve the purpose. What is needed is a way where specific content which interests a user can be delivered to the user with the best experience without breaking the homogenity of the internet.