PuneTech

Idea Camp Pune, 2008. Photo courtesy InsideSocialWeb.com

The next couple of months are going to rather active in Pune, with a host of really good conferences and events coming up. Some of these are free events, while others have a fee associated with them. We have written about some of them on PuneTech before, while some you’ll be hearing about for the first time. Some of them are for hardcore techies, while others are more tangential. In any case, there is something for everyone in here. Take this opportunity to improve your skills, or improve your business network.Except for power cuts, it is a great time to be a techie in Pune.

And there are some great events in January too.

Did we miss any? Please add them to the common tech events calendar of Pune. Or, send us a mail with details of the event, and we’ll add it.

This is a round-up of some recent intersting blog posts written by Pune’s techies. These blogs don’t necessarily fall within the narrow charter of PuneTech, but introducing PuneTech readers to these blogs and bloggers does.

At the top of everyone’s mind is of course the financial meltdown. Arun Prabhudesai (who is CEO of hover.in) details the serious effects it is beginning to have on Indian industry, and on the jobs of regular people:

L&T Infotech is trimming its work force by 5%. That would mean a job loss for 10000 people. Goldman Sachs has fired 100 employees in Mumbai and 30 in Bangalore.  Satyam has fired 30 employees over fudged bills. Corus steel (part of Tata Steel now) has cut 400 jobs in UK because of poor business conditions. Tata Steel has ruled out any jobs cuts in India. Airlines are fearing that they have to lay off 8000 ground staff. Kingfisher has announced a 90% cut in the salaries of trainee pilots. Jet Airways has sacked 25+ expat pilots.

See the full article for even more scary figures. His blog (trak.in) is focused on Indian Business. Amit Paranjape also has a series of posts about the financial crisis (one, two, three) that you might find interesting. He also writes about Pune’s history, restaurant reviews, and cricket. (While on the subject of the financial crisis, you should also check out Sequoia Capital’s 56-slide presentation of doom. That is really scary.)

So what is to be done in these bad times? Manas Garg points out that before any success, whether it is in good times or bad, there is a dip.  And you need to persist and make it through the dip before you succeed. (see also Seth Godin’s thoughts on this.) Another thing that can be done, technologically, is to cut costs by shifting from real servers to virtual servers in the cloud. Mukul Kumar of Pubmatic often writes detailed posts about this on his blog, but in his most recent post, he cautions you to take into account the cost of data transfers in your calculations, as that is likely to be more expensive in some cases, than the cost of compution time on the servers.

Switching gears to security, the ClubHack blog warns us about “Free Public WiFi” - why it is bad, and how it works:

If an unsuspecting healthy laptop is searching for wireless networks in vicinity, it will see the advertised viral SSID in its list. If the laptop is configured to “Connect to any wireless network” as it comes in range, it will attach itself to the respective network. The connection can also be made when an unsuspecting user manually connects to an advertised viral SSID. As soon as this connection is made, the viral SSID appears in the PNL of the healthy laptop and thus gets infected.

Read the full article. And if you’ve been following the PuneTech calendar, you’ll know that ClubHack is organizing a security awareness conference in Pune in early December.

Just because of scary financials and scary security warnings, doesn’t mean that we need to go around feeling depressed. In fact, this is probably the best time to start something new, get involved in the community. PuneTech gave you an idea of upcoming tech community activities that you can get involved in. (By the way, the Pune Mirror agrees with us, and reprinted that article on Saturday.) Anthony Hsiao of entrip.com got together with other tech entrepreneurs in Pune to start Startup Cinema. Read about it on his blog. Also, don’t forget to check out his older post on why he prefers the chaos of Pune to the perfection of Singapore/Germany.

Pune is different, of course, and being away really helped appreciate the warmth of the people, the beauty of apparent chaos and disorder (having lived in Singapore and Zurich, I can honestly say that happiness is not derived from perfection…), the very decent lifestyle I can afford as an expat here (despite being constantly broke!), and just the interesting stuff that goes on all the time (it has to, there are so many people here, something has to be going on all the time).

In many ways, I think Pune (or many parts of India in general) are quite the opposite to places like Singapore - which is clean, orderly, safe, modern, connected, etc.

Know of any interesting techies in Pune who should be featured here? Let us know.

The next few months are going to be a thrilling time to be a techie in Pune. On the one hand, the financial meltdown is suddenly making its presense felt uncomfortably close to home - multiple companies are firing 5% of their employees, and ASSOCHAM promises more (retracted under pressure); bonuses are being cancelled; salaries are being reduced (yup! negative increments). The word “thrilling” goes both ways.

On the other hand, there are some really great tech events that are coming up and what better to do during a downturn than network with a bunch of people who are passionate about technology that you are interested in! (I know that a lot of you techies really dislike networking - I was like that once. One of these days, I am going to write an article for engineers on how to do networking without feeling like a cheap salesman.)

This is your chance to get involved with the tech community. It means increased exposure to interesting work that is going on elsewhere in Pune. It means improving your tech skills by becoming aware of latest trends and techniques. It means making friends with some really passionate people who share your interests. It means greatly increasing your chances of getting lucky.

With that in mind, I am listing the major tech events that are coming up soon. Many of them (but not all of them) are volunteer driven, so they need your help. Please get involved. Help the community, help Pune, and help yourself all in one shot.

Barcamp Pune 5 aka BCP5. The big daddy of volunteer-driven tech events in Pune. This will be the fifth installment. A must visit, if you want to see energy and enthusiasm. And it is in a bit of trouble as the date keeps getting postponed due to lack of a venue. Get involved, make it happen and become famous, and earn the gratitude of the community who are keenly looking forward to the barcamp. Date not yet fixed - tentatively November 15th (but almost certain to be postponed now).

The IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies. Not a volunteer driven event, but a big event for all Java lovers. If you work in Java, it would be difficult to justify why you are not attending, and Java people from all over India will be attending. Dates: 25 to 27 November.

ClubHack, a group of volunteers interested in educating the public on security issues, is organizing the ClubHack 2008 conference which will feature presentations and workshops on security issues that you must worry about in this big bad world of viruses, trojans, phishing, and all sorts of dangerous threats that are lurking around the corner waiting to pounce upon your computer and your bank account as soon as you let down your guard. Better to be prepared than to be sorry. Dates: 6 & 7 December.

The OpenSocial Developer Garage. A volunteer-driven get-together of OpenSocial developers from all over India. They are looking for a venue, for sponsors, for speakers, and for volunteers. Check out the OSD mailing list. Date: 20 December.

The TCS Excellence in Computer Science Week will feature lectures by experts from all over the world on the topic of de-centralized and co-operative computing. The last day to apply is today, so hurry. A world-class event is happening in your backyard, and is free - why wouldn’t you go? Date: 5 to 9 January.

Other, smaller, but more regular events:

The Pune GNU/Linux Users Group meets on the first Saturday of every month, but this time they postponed it by a day due to Diwali vacations. They are meeting tomorrow (Saturday, 8th November) at 4pm. Getting involved with the open source community is a great way to sharpen your skills, improve your resume and get to know some of the most passionate techies. They also have a Code Camp coming up on November 21st.

The Pune OpenCoffee Club, a group of Pune-based entrepreneurs and expectant entrepreneurs meets regularly and informally. Just yesterday they got together for a movie courtesy Entrip.com. The POCC monthly meeting, normally on the third Saturday of every month, might happen on the 4th Saturday (22 November) this month so as to not clash with the barcamp. Keep checking the PuneTech calendar - the event will be announced there soon.

The Pune Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI-Pune), is a very active organization, and their regular monthly meetings happen on the second Saturday every month. That luckily happens to be tomorrow, and this time will feature three talks, one on “Six Sigma for organizational excellence”, another talk giving information on the “Right to Information” (and you have a right to have that information), and finally one on “Trends in Project Management”.

So get out there, and start networking, start volunteering. Please.

Pune-based startup Lipikaar, creator of software that allows typing of 15+ Indian languages using a standard English keyboard, and which was one of the companies selected for in this July’s proto.in, is once again in the news - for winning the Manthan award.

The Manthan Award is a first of its kind initiative to recognize the best practices in e-Content. It was launched on 2004, by Digital Empowerment Foundation in partnership with World Summit Award and American India Foundation. The Manthan Award South Asia 2008 had received 284 nominations from 8 countries across 13 categories. Participating countries were India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. The award cites Lipikaar for its coverage (15+ languages), its ease of use, and it applicability to the masses.

Here is a profile of Lipikaar from the PuneTech wiki:

Lipikaar sells software tools that allow a simple method for typing in Hindi (and 15 other Indic languages) on an ordinary keyboard. It requires no learning, and within a few seconds you will be able to type in Hindi any word that you can imagine.

Lipikaar aims to be different from all other transliteration competitors due to its use of patented technology which allows anybody to enter text without requiring any knowledge of English, which is a requirement for most other method

[edit] Features

[edit] Desktop Software

The Lipikaar technology is available as downloadable desktop software for Windows. It works as a keyboard overlay, which means that once installed, it allows you to input Indic language text into any application - Microsoft Office (i.e. Word, Excel), all websites, chat and e-mail.

[edit] Firefox Addon

Lipikaar is also available as a Firefox add-on that allows the user to enter Indic text to create emails, blogs, scraps, comments, chats and search in your favourite language on any website. Unlike the desktop software, this add-on is free.

[edit] Web publisher services

Webmasters wishing to allow local language text input on their website can avail of Lipikaar’s services, and they will work with the webmasters to integrate their technology in the website.

[edit] Languages Supported

Lipikaar supports 15 languages - Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Konkani, Sindhi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.

[edit] Links

• Website: http://lipikaar.com/
• Blog: http://www.lipikaar.com/blog
• FAQ: http://www.lipikaar.com/help

[edit] Awards

• Lipikaar wins Manthan Award
• Featured at proto.in July 2008 edition

[edit] Articles

• pluggd.in coverage

[edit] People

• Jugal Gupta
• Santosh Dawara
• Anjali Gupta

I’m liveblogging the Pune OpenCoffee Club’s “Startup Speed Date” meetup. This is a meeting to get to know a bunch of Pune startups in a short amount of time. Here is a list of the startups here, with a short introduction.

Pringoo - personalized products. Go to their website, create your own T-shirt, using your own images or text. Or a mug, or mousepad, or keychain. Print it and have it delivered to your home. You can order even a single T-shirt, at reasonable rates.

Sokrati - a product for search engine marketing and optimization. Targeted towards SMBs. $1million revenues so far this year. Moved to Pune from Seattle last month.

Kaboodle - Social network for shopping. Each person can upload information about things they’ve bought, or want to buy. Can check the same info for friends and others. If you can’t decide what to buy, you can create a poll that your friends vote in. You can create a style statement by putting together an interesting assortment of products that would go well together. Clientele is mostly young women. One of the top sites in the US.

VirtuaResearch - SaaS for equity research. A web-based platform for getting equity research. The provide the website, they also provide the actual equity analysis. In addition, they allow free-lancers to add their own research, which others can use. Sort of a social network for equity analysis.

Lipikaar - Be able to input text in 17 Indian languages, anywhere - website, desktop software. Blog, gmail, etc. Unique, patented, key entry method, different from all other competitors, especially easy-to-use for people who do not know any English.

Hover.in - in-text, customized, content and ad-delivery platform. Widgets to insert in your blog which can automatically add content from various websites (e.g. wikipedia) or third-party ad network.

ThinkingSpace - ActiveCiti.com a service for managing events, invites. EventAZoo.com a service for creating webpages for college festivals.

Chroma Systems - Image analysis software as well as hardware.

Alabot - Wants your computer / mobile phone to understand you when you talk to it. Natural language processing. For example, be able to send an sms for buying some train tickets without having to learn any specific command formats.

Markonix - Help startups with marketing their products in the US and elsewhere.

IndicTrans - A non-commercial group aim at building ’social capital’ through making the communication and networking feasible and affordable among the people knowing indian languages. This we believe is a primary requirement for a democratic regeneration of our society as also a condition for harmonious globalisation.

laxmiroad.in - Provides you with an ability to shop online at Laxmi Road shops (for example Chitale!) and get delivery within 24 hours.

startupforstartups - Helping a wannabe entrepreneur build the first prototype of their startup without having to spend a lot, or build a team, or even quit your current job. See PuneTech interview with the founder.

Wissen Technologies Hukum Mere Aka is a learning program sitting in a instant messenger window that can talk to you and understand your commands, and get you data from its database based on your queries.

I am liveblogging CSI Pune’s lecture on Applications of Business Intelligence by Narender C.V. of SAS R&D India. These are quick and dirty notes of the lecture - not intended to be a well organized article, but hopefully it gives you enough of a flavor for the area to get you interested and excited enough to check it out on google and wikipedia.

The amount of data is doubling every 11 months. And we have easier and easier access to all this data from all over the world. The problem is making sense of all this data. The amount of time at our disposal remains the same. So we have to use sophisticated software and algorithms to figure out how to use this data to improve business and efficiency. That is Business Intelligence (BI).

This talk is the second in a series of talks on BI. PuneTech covered the first talk which gave an overview of BI and data warehousing. This lecture focuses on who uses BI and why. A major portion of this talk will be a bunch of examples of use of BI in real companies. So on to the examples:

Example 1: Getting a better grip on Reality (i.e. Seeing problems earlier)

First case study will focus on using BI to simply get a good picture of the situation as it exists. Seeing Reality. Last year, US based companies paid $28 billion in servicing warranties or recalls. This is money you don’t really want to spend. Biggest problem in this is identifying these problems as early as possible. Seeing reality early. Typically, an issue first appears. A little while later, the issue becomes visible to the company, and it is prioritized. Later it is “defined” and decisions taken by the decision makers. Finally the issue is resolved, and money paid out. A study by SAS shows that the “detect” part of this cycle takes about 90 days, the prioritize part takes 20 days, and the define part takes 75 days. That’s a total of 185 days to fix the problem.

A business intelligence system helps to reduce each phase of that sequence because of better data gathering and statistical analysis. This results in 27 days detection, 5 days, prioritization and 46 days to prioritize, for a total of 78 days. This is a huge improvement, and each day saved results in money saved.

How is this done? First simple reports: defects per thousand, per product. Dashboard with easy to see defect reports. Then a library of reports that various people in the company can use easily to see and analyze defects and warranty claims. Then a statistical analysis engine to detect “emerging issues”. Use algorithms that can detect, from early trends, issues that are likely to become “big” later on. Text mining and analysis to read unstructured reports of service technicians and being able to determine, simply by looking at the keywords, which product or part or defect was the cause of that particular incident. And there are other analytics, like forecasting and trend analysis that are used. Bottomline? Shanghai GM was able to reduce detection and definition time by 70%, resulting in reduction of costs by 34%. Which is pretty cool for simply running a bunch of mathematical algorithms.

Example 2: Manage and Align Resources to Strategy

Everybody agrees that it is important for a company to have a strategy. And that everyone should understand and execute according to that strategy. Obvious?

This is a reality based on a survey: Only 5% of the workforce of a large company understand the company strategy. Only 25% of the managers were incentivized based on the strategy. 60% of organizations do not link budgets to the strategy. 86% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy.

How can BI help in this case?

It is possible to define objectives for each person/team in the company. Then it is possible to define how this objective can/should be measured. Then BI software can be used to capture and analyze this data, and figure out how everybody is contributing to the end objectives of the business.

Example 3: Retail Optimization

The problem to be solved. Need to stock the exact quantity that people are going to buy. Stock too much and you lose money on unsold items. Order too little and you get out-of-stock situations and lose potential profits. Need to be able to forecast demand. Optimize which sizes/assortments to stock. All of you must have an experience of going to a shop, liking an item, and not having that available in your size. Sale lost. Profit lost. Can this loss be reduced?

Use BI for this. In case study, a department store sent the same mix of different sizes to all stores. SAS did clustering of stores, to create 7 different sub-groups that have different size mixes for each sub-group of stores.

Example 4: Personalized, real-time marketing

Take the example of marketing. Consider a traditional marketing mail sent from a company. Customers hate that and the success rate is a pathetic 3% or so. That’s just stupid, but exists when there is no alternative. Better is event based marketing. When you do something, it triggers a marketing push from the company. This is often convenient for the customer, and has a 20% success rate. But the best is customer initiated interaction which has a 40% success rate.

Note that as you go down that list, it gets more difficult to quickly, in real time, determine what marketing message exactly to push to the customer. If you call a pizza delivery place and they point out that that they have a buy-one-get-one-free offer, it might or might not be interesting for you. Better would be an offer focused specifically on your needs. Use BI to analyze individual customers and forecast their needs and then tailor the offer for you. An offer you cannot refuse.

Another example. Customer puts digital camera in online shopping cart. The online shopping software contacts the BI system for offers to push to customer. It looks at customer history. Figures out that customer is non-tech savvy customer who buys high-end products. Also, customer’s demographic information is consulted, and finally some accessories are suggested. Since this is very specific recommendation, this can result in a high chance of being accepted. This significantly increases profit on this transaction.

Example 5: Understanding Customers

Mobile company, simplistic view: Customer is leaving. Offer them a lower value plan. The might or might not leave. BI gives you better tools. Cost is not the only thing to play with. Understand why people are leaving, and also understand the effect of them leaving on your business. (Sometimes it might be best to let them leave.) And based on this, determine the best course of action - what / how much to offer them.

First, use predictive analysis to get an estimate of how much profit you are going to make from a customer over the course of next N years based on the data you have gathered about them so far. Use this figure, the “customer value”, to drive decisions on how much effort to expend on trying to get this customer to stay. Forget the low value customers, and focus on the high value ones!

Another possibility. If you have marketing money to spend on giving offers to some customers. Let us say there are 3 different kinds of offers. Use BI analysis to figure out which offers to send to which customers, based on customer value, and also chances of customer accepting that offer. This optimizes the use of the “offer” dollars.

Monish Darda, Director of Product Development at BMC BladeLogic and co-founder of WebSym, wrote an article on the next wave of entrepreneurship in India for CSI Pune’s quarterly newsletter Desktalk. Parts of that article have been reproduced here with permission. You should be able to download the the newsletter (contain the full article) from CSI Pune website’s download section. (It’s the July-Aug-Sept 2008 newsletter.)

So let us take a look at tomorrow’s entrepreneur - I tend to see him (or her - the masculine is just convenience) in two colors - Mr E the risk taker, and Mr E, the man with the plan. Tomorrow’s risk taker is a person fresh out of college, with a few like-minded close friends and a couple of mentors, who want to do the next cool thing. The man with the plan is a youngish guy, probably back from the USofA, his future secured, with a plan that will leverage India for his next successful startup. Is anyone building up a services company? Well, yes and no. What I see in the future is services sold as a product. One in three entrepreneurs are going to be thinking about leveraging the labor cost differential at the low end of the value chain along with innovation that takes the returns to the high end of the value chain.

I see social networking sites that will spawn with better ideas in India, quickly gaining eyeballs, cheaper and faster than anywhere else except China perhaps. I see quicker and richer integration of media, with infotainment at the core. Indian entrepreneurs will be driving mid range technology applications with a larger audience and higher success rates. You saw youtube and facebook become the rage and build value worth billions in a short span of time - hold your breath for the Indian versions; they are not too far away in the future.

I see mobile middle-ware and products - if every other Indian is going to have a mobile phone soon, the apps are not far away. Indian apps, in Indian languages, closer to the Indian psyche, driven by Indian technology entrepreneurs. And it is not far in the future that we will have our own Nokias and Sonys and Ericssons - hardware is sure to follow.

I am not a betting person, but if I were, I would be betting on small, consumer shareware coming out of India in the near future - apps for the phone, the iPhone and the PC, that makes practical use of the now ubiquitous personal computer. I see enterprise software being developed in India, owned in India, but still managed and sold principally outside India. The entrepreneurs are going to be eyeing the small, high volume software for cash market, where services coupled with technology vying to increase the quality of life.

How will Technology Entrepreneurship benefit India?

My bet on the man with the plan is that he will drive the “real” technology - high tech technology creation and adaptation for grand socio-economic experiments, for logistics and the growing manufacturing industry; selling to corporates, multi-nationals and governments. He will be the guy attracting large investments and innovation dependent on infrastructure.

We are culturally a very adaptable, and very tolerant, people - the technology infusion of the future is going to bring about sweeping social change; most of which has already started. Look at what we did with the mobile phone - with SMS and the “missed calls” syndrome. We adapted the technology to suit our way of working, and kept driving costs to the ground. We will keep doing that with automobiles, phones, software, nuclear power and any other technology that we adapt as our own. We are very good at converting luxuries to needs, and that to me is key - the future of the Indian entrepreneur is dependent on this one factor. And I think this mass market has the potential to make billionaires out of ordinary people, with the spark to adapt and profit. And I believe with all its perceived ineptness, corruption and mismanagement, the government is somehow going to be the catalyst to make this happen, believe it or not. Perhaps all the impossible traffic and the constant load-shedding is already starting an entrepreneur somewhere on the road to his empire …

About the Author - Monish Darda

Monish is Director, Product Development at BMC BladeLogic. He set up the India operations of Storability Software, an East coast storage startup and was heading the group at Sun Microsystems when Storability underwent two acquisitions.

Monish is also the cofounder and Director of Websym Technologies.

He did his Master’s at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. He has architected large systems in the areas of customer acquisition, manufacturing and finance on J2EE and Microsoft platforms. He has also shared his experience in leading technologies in implementation and design through mentoring programs for senior developers and designers in top national and international software houses. He has implemented innovative processes and tools for distributed design and development across the US and Europe

This is a product-pitch for Colama, a product built by Pune-based startup Coriolis. For the basics of server virtualization, see our earlier guest posts: Introduction to Server Virtualization, and Why do we need server virtualization. Virtualization is fast emerging as a game-changing technology in the enterprise computing space, and Colama is trying to address an interesting new pain-point that making its presence felt. 

Virtualization is fast becoming an accepted standard for the IT infrastructure. While it comes as a boon to the development and QA communities, the IT practitioners are dealing with the pressing issue of virtual machine sprawl that surfaces due to adhoc and hence uncontrolled adoption of virtualization. While describing the problem and its effects, this paper outlines a solution called Colama, as offered by Coriolis Technologies.

Virtual machines have been slipping in under the covers everywhere in the IT industry. Software developers like virtual machines because they can easily mimic a target environment. QA engineers prefer virtual machines because they can simultaneously test the software on different configurations. Support engineers can ensure reproducibility of an issue by pointing to an entire machine rather than detailing on the individual steps and/or configuration requirement on a physical host. In many cases, adoption of virtual machines has been primarily driven by users’ choice rather than any coherent corporate strategy. The ad-hoc and uncontrolled use of virtual machines across the organization has resulted in to a problem called Virtual Machine sprawl, which has become critical for today’s IT administrators.

Virtual machine sprawl is an unpleasant side effect of server virtualization and its near exponential growth over the years. Here are the symptoms:

There are many players in the industry who address this problem. Most of the virtual lab management products are tied to one specific virtualization technology. For example, the VMWare Lab Manager works for only VMWare virtualization technology. In a heterogeneous virtualization environment that is filled with Xen, VMWare, VirtualBox and Microsoft virtual machines, such an approach falls short.

Colama is Coriolis Technologies solution to address this problem. Colama manages the life cycle of virtual machines across an organization. While tracking and virtual machines, Colama is agnostic to the virtualization technology.

Here are some of the features of Colama:

Please note: This product-pitch, by Barnali Ganesh, co-founder of Coriolis, is featured on PuneTech because the editors found the technology interesting (or more accurately, the pain-point which it is addressing). PuneTech is a purely non-commercial website and does not take any considerations (monetary or otherwise) for any of the content on the site. If you would like your product to be featured on the front page, send us an article and we’ll publish it if we fell it’s interesting to our readers. You can always add a page to the PuneTech wiki by yourself, as long as you follow the “No PR” guidelines.

Gireendra Kasmalkar (Giri), whose testing startup VeriSoft was recently acquired by SQS, was interviewed for CSI Pune’s quarterly newsletter Desktalk. Some quotes from that interview that should be especially inspirational are reproduced here with permission. You should be able to download the the newsletter (containing the full article) from CSI Pune website’s download section. (It’s the July-Aug-Sept 2008 newsletter.)

About how your attitude towards something makes all the difference:

Initially, testing was a new area and it was a tough to convince people about it. Even today testing is sometimes looked down upon. My response: “I am glad you think of testing that way. That is what creates the opportunities for us!”.

About how to deal with commoditization in your domain:

But the testing industry was maturing. Every company now had an ‘independent’ testing practice. To maintain our leadership, we had to specialize further. We did that horizontally in such specialized areas as automation, load / performance, security and usability testing, even publishing papers in international conferences.

But we also realized we had to develop a vertical. It had to be a vertical right for our size and where we could have a shot at global leadership. After due consideration, we decided that Games was that vertical. It was not at all easy to enter this vertical. But today we test for top 10 publishers in the video games industry and have authorization with all 3 major console manufacturers - Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. In the on-line games industry, we not only test for game developers / publishers, but also for regulatory bodies for their compliance.

On how a small startup can make an impact:

For an entrepreneur, focusing on a niche is crucially important. One can hope to compete and beat the bigger, already established players only in a niche of your strength. More often than not, this niche would be a new area, and the entrepreneur only has his / her own data and analysis to see the hidden potential in the new area.

On the importance of networking for success:

This is where networking plays a very important role. Networking in the industry can bring you data about the trends in the industry. And you can even get your analysis of that data, and your ideas validated using your network. I was lucky to have the IIT network, the Jnana Prabodhini network, the TCS network because of my earlier background. But I also actively worked to build new networks through forums such as SPIN, CSI and MCCIA. In fact, there was a group of 8-10 successful industry seniors, whom I met once a year, by formal appointment, specifically for discussing my activities and seeking their suggestions. To their credit, none of these people ever refused my request. I definitely became a better entrepreneur as a result of these meetings.

From my own experience, I strongly recommend active participation in forums such as CSI.

I particularly like the suggestion about meeting 8 to 10 successful industry seniors on an yearly basis. I had started doing this with about 2, and based on Giri’s suggestion, I plan on increasing that to 8 to 10.

And I certainly agree with active participation in forums. Giri suggests CSI-Pune. I would strongly suggest getting involved in the Pune OpenCoffee Club. There are a whole bunch of other groups and organizations where you could get involved. Check out the Groups and Organizations Page from the PuneTech wiki.

Final word from Giri:

To me, entrepreneurship is less about making money and more about making a difference. (There must be easier ways of making money .) An entrepreneur provides a viable solution to a problem (need). On the flip side, the entrepreneur’s capabilities are stretched to the maximum extent possible, which I find very satisfying.

About the Interviewee - Gireendra Kasmalkar

Gireendra Kasmalkar (Giri) is the Founder Director of Prabodhan and Verisoft InfoSystems, and after the recent acquisition of Verisoft, is the MD and CEO of SQS India InfoSystems Pvt. Ltd. Giri has been the Chairman of CSIPune chapter for 2007-2008 and is also actively associated with other relevant industry forums like SPIN and MCCIA.

Despite having his hands full, professionals working with Giri will vouch for the energy, responsiveness and maturity that he brings forth to any activity.

For a full profile and links, see Giri’s profile on the PuneTech wiki.

Earlier, we published a list of free web services that a company can use to better run their business. However, tools do not really make or break a company. Having the right attitude, and making the right decisions at the right time is much more important. If you are a startup founder, it is not necessary that you learn everything from your mistakes at the school of hard knocks. You can try to benefit from the experiences of countless others who have learnt from their own successes and failures, and have survived to write blog posts about them. 

To educate you, Sukshma.net (the blog of Santosh and Anjali, founders of Bookeazy and Lipikaar) have put together this list of articles and books that they found useful in their own journey. Here is a full list, shamelessly plagiarized from there, (to save my lazy readers from one extra click, I hope they don’t mind):

Think Big!

• The pmarca guide to startups Part 1 and Part 2.
• What is your Primary Motivator?
• Failing Cheaper - Redeye VC.

1st Month: Bullet-proof your idea.

• Build a bullet proof Startup - Business 2.0.
• What’s in a name? - Found + Read
• Naming your startup.
• Evaluate a Product Idea - Evan William (Blogger, Twitter Founder).
• Clarify your Story (Internet Businesses).

2nd Month: Raise Money, or scrape some together.

• How to fund a Startup - Paul Graham.
• The art of Bootstrapping (an excellent article) - “Bootstrapping by Definition”, Vijay Anand.
• The art of Bootstrapping - Guy Kawasaki.
• 101 Unconventional Ways to Raise Money.

3rd Month: Define your value proposition.

• Marketing Myopia - Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business Review Classics. (pdf)
• The Fundamentals of Customer Value.
• Getting customers to pay - The Penny Gap, Redeye VC.
• Pmarca Guide to startups - The only thing that matters (is the market).
• You need a strategy map.
• The Consumer Technology 3 Act Play (Distribution, Product, Branding).
• Positioning Products and Services Accurately - Edward M. Gurowitz Ph.D.

4th Month: Iterative Innovation.

• (Customer) Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue(find the slides here).
• The application of Social Media to Web Strategy.
• The cluetrain manifesto.

5th Month: Advertising.

• Public Relations Secrets (TechCrunch).

7th Month: Momentum

• 7 months in to my 2nd stint as Startup CEO - Jason Goldberg.

9th Month: Profit for sustainability.

• The Ugly Adolescent Stage (when you consume more than you produce).
• More on Cash at this stage.
• The Margin Manifesto, part 1 and part 2.
• Media Business Models - Chris Anderson (The Long Tail).

Raising serious money from Professional Investors/Venture Capitalists.

• Build your own Cap Table.
• Term Sheet Hacks - Get a Great Deal.
• What does a Series A term sheet look like?
• Should I use debt or equity?
• How much equity can I give away (Paul Graham)?
• What does a convertible note look like?
• How much funding is too much (or too little)? - pmarca.
• When the VC’s say no - pmarca.
• But I don’t know any VC’s - pmarca.
• What value do VC’s add (or take away) - StartupBoy?
• What is liquidation preference? (get a spreadsheet on computing scenarios here).
• More on VC Term Sheets and Liquidation Preference.
• Term Sheet Glossary - GigaOm.
• Strategic Corporate Investments.
• Are convertible notes valid in India?
• Is Google’s YouTube worth $4.9B? - A nice analysis justifying the current YouTube Valuation.
• Financial Models for Startups. Where projections meet reality.

Master your disruptive contribution.

• The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Managing up and down.

• The best business books of all time.
• The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker.
• Effective Leaders Follow these Eight Practices - Peter Drucker.

Other books worth reading.

• The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story.
• Founders at work: Stories of startup’s Early Days.
• Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap …and others don’t.
• What the CEO wants you to know - Ram Charan.
• Innovator’s Dilemma - Clayton M. Christensen.

The Economics of Media and E-Commerce businesses.

• 3 ways to build an E-Commerce business with $500M in revenue - Jeremy Liew of LightSpeed Ventures.
• 3 ways to build an online Media business to $50M in revenue - Jeremy Liew of LightSpeed Ventures.
• More on building an online Media business - Jeremy Liew of LightSpeed Ventures.
• USA! USA! USA! We’re number one (in online advertising markets) - Jeremy Liew.

I need inspiration. I need to know this has happened to others. It’s never too late to start over.

Read Founders@Work. Just turn to any story, any page and start reading. This is not to be read in one go, it’s most useful when you think you’re a complete idiot. Also, don’t forget to read Guy Kawasaki’s list of best pages from the book. Make your own list. We both have our list that we’ll put on the blog someday.

Startup Resources from around the web.

• Purdue Entrepreneurship Certificate Program Wiki.
• The Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner - eCorner.
• Garage Technology Ventures - Reference Library for Small Business’.
• The Startup Kit - I; Proto.in blog.
• Free Advice for Software Startups - Dharmesh Shah.
• Technology and Business Discussions.

Remember to check the source, as they are promising to keep updating that list based on your suggestions (leave a comment).