Indian Barbie goes Mobile!

Came to know from Mobile Weblog, about barbies with REAL mobiles!

Mattel in India have launched a Barbie doll, impeccably dressed as always, but also with her own must-have accessory - a mobile phone.



But this is no toy - the mobile works. Barbie's owners can Instant Message Barbie and friends who have a Barbie too. Plus the look of the phone can be changed to match her clothes. It's priced at R 1199 (USD 26), according to The Statesman.



Whatever next - a phone for dogs? Ahh, we had that last week.



Caveat - I can't find any collaboration of this, but if it isn't true now, it will be shortly.



My best idea for Barbie was producing clothes for kids, so that they could dress like her. Mattel didn't think kids would like this - they were joking, right? Now as a parent, I'm glad it never happened. Don't tell her I wrote this, but Barbie is a bit errr...tarty in her dress sense and I wouldn't like my kids copying her in quite that way.

Whats next on the line ?

Amazon wishlist Tracker

WatchCow provides a service for monitoring Amazon.com wishlists and alerts when a watched item's price changes or the inventory becomes available. Thanks to Topix.net for the link.



Watchcow Steps:

1. While browsing Amazon, you find a wishlist (your own or a friends) or a particular product you want to keep track of.

2. You click the MOOO! bookmarklet in your browser OR you copy the URL and paste it to the Watchcow Feed Builder form.

3. The Watchcow will allow you to finetune your new feed and import it into your favorite newsreader.

4. Next time a price change is happening for one of your watched items, be it new price or used price or both (you decide), your newsreader will tell you about it.

Indiatimes RSS feeds

Times of India has finally released RSS feeds for its website. They are not one or two in number but more than 70 feeds consisting of topics from Times of India and Economic Times.



You can find them here http://info.indiatimes.com/rss/

Tracing India's Incubation Centres

In the coming days, I will try to prepare a list of India's Technology Incubation Centres. My belief is they are still quite low in number and the ones that are there they don't provide sufficient mentoring to young entrepreneurs.



I remember from my days at IIT, even the sound of the word 'entrepreneur' made some of my colleagues/friends excited and enthusiastic! And I think all across India, there are quite many young people who want to try their hand on it. But I think there aren't much opportunities. Moreover I feel even the young people who want to do it, they aren't matured enough. Even the environment at IIT's don't provide mentoring for developing entrepreneurship.



But some start has already been made. And with the small effort, atleast some companies have started springing up. I hope within the next 10 years, we will not see just few but atleast hundreds of technology companies springing up.



Technology Incubation Centres

1) TBIU (Technology Business Incubation Unit) IIT Delhi:

TBIU is run by Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), IIT Delhi.

http://www.fitt-iitd.org



2) Business Incubator, IIT Mumbai:

Its run by KReSIT (Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology) at IIT Mumbai.

http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/bi/



3)SIDBI Innovation and Incubation center, IIT Kanpur

http://www.iitk.ac.in/siic/index.html



4)IIM Ahmedabad

Indian Incubator for Innovation based Enterprises (I3E)

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/ciie/i3e.htm



5)IIM Bangalore

NSRCEL - Global Internet Venture Incubation Centre

http://www.iimb.ernet.in/html/m-frames.jsp?ilink=112&pname=faculty.jsp&areaid=5



6)Indiaco

http://www.indiaco.com

Private incubator



7)ITBI (Information Technology Busienss Incubator) STEP, Noida

http://www.jssstepnoida.org/index.asp

Not much information available on the website.



8)STEP TREC, Tiruchirappalli

http://www.trecstep.com/

There are lot many projects mentioned but doesn't have any details on incubation.



9)National Design Business Incubator by National Institute of Design, NID, Ahmedabad.

http://www.nidindia.com/



10) Nirma Labs - Technology Incubation Unit.

http://www.nirmalabs.org





Venture Capital links

http://www.nasscom.org/vc_list.asp

http://www.indiavca.org/memberprofiles.htm



Resources

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/ciie/resources.htm





Any other links, please do post on. I will include them in the list!

VC PITCH

NWVentureVoice blog writes about tips for a VC Pitch.

VC Pitch Tips



The most important thing in having a successful pitch to a VC is to have a great business and a great team, but even if you have both it doesn't hurt to have a super crisp, logical, compelling pitch. Here are 5 basic tips that I have seen really work.



1. Outline

First, have an outline. Be organized. The best top level outline I have heard it from one of the super masters of presentations, Jerry Weissman. Before you focus on all the snazzy charts, make sure you do the following:

• Tell them what you are going to tell them: Show them where you are going to take them, on the title slide.

• Tell them how you are going to tell them: Have an agenda slide and stick to it.

• Tell them: make sure the body of your presentation always reinforces your opening point.

• Tell them what you told them: wrap up, recap and go for the close.



2. In a nutshell

One great tool for making this organzation stick is what I call the "in a nutshell" slide. This is using your agenda slide to tell the skeleton of your whole arguement. When presenting to Steve Ballmer it often happened that you never got off the first slide after the title, so make sure it really works for you.



Normally, I like to see In A Nutshell slides that act as a template. On one side they highlight, even number the key elements of your story/pitch/arguement and in parallel on the other side they give the top support points in summary. As you then move through the deck you keep the left hand template to reinforce the whole arguement and help people remember where you are in it.



3. Clear, simple case

Show why your company/investment should exist in the first place. Do the simple case using what we call your ABCs or situation/gap analysis. Where:

• A = Today: the current situation in the market/big growing

• B = Tommorrow: the place the market should be/juicy opportunity

• C = Gap: what's missing to get to B/the special play you are poised to make to fill it and win



4. Simple positioning and proposal

Then tell why your way of filling this gap is better than everyone else's. One simple outline for this is what we call the XYZs - "We are the only X company/product that solves Y customer problem in Z unique way," where

• X = your category: critical for VCs, we need to put you in some box, to make comparisons; never invent a category, improve one.

• Y = the target: the buyer, the person who actually writes the check, great if you actually have some.

• Z = your differentiation: your advantage, or the key positive distinction you have over your competition.



It also helps if you can back all this up with real support, like your team's track record, customer traction, a real competitive analysis (thier ABCs), etc. A demo is not enough. Proof is better than claims.



5. Best foot forward first and strongest

Tune the organization of your story to the stage of your company. And always put the strongest stuff upfront.

• An EIR: It's all about YOU and the market opportunity/competitive gap.

• A seed: It's all about initial market validation (quotes from friends with important job titles in your target customer's industry), then about the product spec, the team and the above.

• A round: It's all about initial customer traction and economics - some demonstrated willingness to try and pay - show the best real numbers you have, then about the product itself relative to others, then the above/

• B round: It's about momentum - show the sales numbers, the trends and the economics, then all the above.

RSS Traffic too heavy for MSDN!

Scoble reports that MSDN had to remove text from within its RSS feeds and make them lighter in order to cope with traffic generated via RSS.

RSS is broken, is what happened. It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes (default aggregator behavior is to pull down a feed every hour).



Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth were being used up by RSS.



So, they are trying to attack the problem by making the feeds lighter weight. I don't like the solution (I've unsubscribed from almost all weblogs.asp.net feeds because they no longer provide full text) but I understand the issues.



I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds because of this issue too. We need smarter aggregators and better defaults.



I only pull down RSS feeds once per day -- right before I start reading my feeds.



But, clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds. I can't fight this one alone.

Business Baazigar

Business Baazigar! Its a name of the Zee reality show that will pick India's best entrepreneur. Zee will air a 36-episode series with entries for the competiton from people from all walks of life from across the company.



Business Standard has a complete story on the competition.

In this real life drama, executives, students, housewives and even the retired, from cities as well as small towns and villages, will compete for the title of "India's best entrepreneur" and obtain funding to implement their idea. The show, being produced by 25 FPS Media, goes on air from January 2005.



The process will start by a call for entries, followed by a panel shortlisting the thousands of preliminary entries down to a manageable number of around 100.



These will then be further shortlisted to 20 who will compete with one another. According to the company, auditors of repute will supervise the entire shortlisting process to ensure completely transparency.



"The judging criteria would be the contestants' intelligence, strategic skills and their ability to think on their feet when time and money are at a premium. At the conclusion of each task, the winning team will be granted a lavish reward that will consist of money as well unforgettable experiences with the biggest and the best," the spokesperson said. The final two survivors will find their big dream funded by the big jury, he added.

Competitions like these are quite helpful to motivate young entrepreneurs. But having competitions alone is just not sufficient. The number of technology incubation centres in India is just meagre. Indian insitutions are beginning to learn the path to foster entrepreneurship but they still have a long way to go. IIT's have been able to make a start by setting up technology incubation centres. But we need not just 5 or 10 but on the scale of 500 - 1000 such centres!

1.5 GB in a phone!

Samsung has released called the SPH-V5400, phone with a 1.5GB hardrive. My first PC at home Pentium 1, 166Mhz, 7 years back just had around 1 GB hard drive :-)







Now you can put all your songs, pictures on the phone for a price tag of around $800!



Thanks to Russell from Mobile Technology Weblog for the link.

Creating Options!

Rajesh Jain in his tech talk writes about the importance of Creating Options:

TECH TALK: Creating Options: Personal Examples

I was in the twelfth standard (junior college). Even as I was preparing for the IIT entrance examination, my father insisted that I apply to the best universities abroad. His viewpoint was that there should be no compromise in getting the best education, and if I did not get into IIT, it would at least give me options to consider. As it turns out, I did get admission into both IIT and Carnegie-Mellon. I chose IIT because I get the discipline of my choice (Electrical Engineering) and the location of my choice (Mumbai). As I think about this, I realise that what my father did was to create an option for me for a decision that would be critical in shaping my career.

Many years later, as I looked for a partner for IndiaWorld, this same lesson of creating options hit home again. I had a choice – between selling to Sify, and doing a joint venture with an international company in the Internet business, with the possibility of listing the JV on Nasdaq at a future point of time. The availability options helped me (and my investment bankers) negotiate from a position of strength, and get the best possible valuation for IndiaWorld. If there is just one company with whom we are talking, there would have little question of significant discussion on the terms. We would have ended up accepting what they put on the table. But because there was a choice that we had, we could do much better. It is something I tell other entrepreneurs also – always have options available when it comes to raising capital, else there is no point discussing since you only have to decide if you want to take the offer that is there on the table or not.

In fact, we ended up in the situation where we could consider various offers for IndiaWorld because of some choices we had made right at the beginning. Portals were what we wanted to do, but we also had to ensure that we created revenues to ensure that we lived through long enough till the portals future took off. So, we started developing websites for various organisations in India, even as we created a suite of portals for Indians on the Internet abroad and in India. The websites ensured a steady revenue flow which kept us profitable, and allowed us to wait till the best offer came along. Since we were not losing money and had no external investors, we could take our time in making the decision – there was no pressure on meeting payroll at the end of the month which would force us into decisions which may not have been the smartest ones. Creating options is about ensuring that we can manage both the short-term and the long-term.

Creating options is a must for every entrepreneur. One never knows when the best of the options cease to exist. Its the back up plan that takes the lead then. So think through all your options.

MSN Music supports RSS

Microsoft’s new music service supports RSS feeds with top 100 songs, albums and artists. The feed also contains a link to a 30 sec clip of the song. It defines a tag called "enclosure" for inserting the link to the song within RSS.



<enclosure url="mms://a992.v11451c.c11451.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/992/11451/v0001/msnent.download.akamai.com/12336/BFHJ23HZ/Prod/wma/v9/Audio/07/75/55/557507.wma?WMCache=1&WMBitrate=200000&WMThinning=1&ibcd1=songid11493990" type="audio/wma" />



But one needs to use IE and the song can be played in MSN Media Player.



Thanks to Danny Ayers for the link.

Values!

Values play an important role weather its you being an individual, a team player or a leader. In each of the these roles, values is what binds people together, it creates like-mindedness and drives people, teams and organizations. Its the key driving force to excell.



Values create brand!



MarketingPlaybook writes:

But we believe that values are critical. Who you really are and what you believe in should embue everything you do and everything you say. This is especially true in your marketing and in developing a real brand. No matter how slick and well produced your ads and sales pitches, if you don't walk the talk in the long run people will stop believing and those ads and pitches will be shoved back in your face.

So what are your values? Really? Think about it.