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.