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.