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.