Category Archives: In Depth

ShopSocial.ly – A Pune-based startup that marries Facebook to shopping

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ShopSocial.ly is a Pune-based startup that launched a couple of weeks back and immediately got coverage from both TechCrunch and GigaOm – which is a major achievement for any startup.

To give PuneTech readers some insights into what it takes to build and launch a startup like this out of Pune, we talked to a bunch of people associated with ShopSocial.ly.

ShopSocial.ly is a Pune-based social shopping startup. We talk to a number of Pune-based companies that worked on the product.
ShopSocial.ly is a Pune-based social shopping startup. We talk to a number of Pune-based companies that worked on the product.

First, here is a short interview with Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocial.ly:

Congratulations on the launch of ShopSocial.ly and the coverage from . Can you give a brief overview of ShopSocial.ly from your point of view?

We all trust our friends advice much more than what the advertisers tell us. Yet, currently most of our shopping is influenced by the ads. ShopSocially is built on the vision that the influence needs to shift from ads to our circle of trust – i.e. friends.

ShopSocially allows you tap into the collective wisdom of friends to get trusted recommendations. Friends can not only ask questions, they can also share their purchases to get comments and feedback.

The idea of social shopping is not new. In fact, many people in the Pune startup ecosystem will be familiar with the success of Kaboodle which launched in 2005. So how is ShopSocial.ly different?

First a disclosure – Kaboodle CEO happens to be a very good friend and fellow IIT Kanpur Alumnus.

While the original premise behind Kaboodle was similar to ShopSocially, they have really focused more on shopping search rather than creating a network for friends. Recall that at the time Kaboodle started, social networking had not taken roots.

On the ShopSocial.ly about page, I notice that you appear to have used a lot of small Pune companies/freelancers in building your product. I recognize Shashank Deshpande (of Clarice Technologies) who usually does usability, Prakash Thombre (of widemediaguy) who does graphic design, Rohan Dighe (of SocialWebFactory) who does social-media/facebook apps, Mangesh Yadav (of Joomlian) who builds websites, and I’m sure there are others that I do not recognize. As someone interested in the Pune “startup ecosystem”, I’m thrilled at this level of collaboration amongst Pune’s small companies. Would you comment upon how you approached this aspect of building your product, and whether you see this as a continuing/sustainable approach in the future?

There is certainly no dearth of great talent in India – even for the cutting edge web 2.0 technologies. My previous startup, AirTight Networks is also based in Pune and was one of the first product companies born out of India. Just like AirTight, ShopSocially product development has happened completely in Pune. The team has done a phenomenal job. In fact when people visit the site, one of the first question they ask me is who built the site and where did I find these people. They are quite incredulous that we were able to find such talent in India.

So yes, I very much see this as a continuing /sustainable approach going forward.

What do you see as the primary challenge for ShopSocial.ly to tackle now?

The immediate priority is to really understand and analyze user behavior and make necessary changes. If we can delight our users, they will feel compelled to invite their friends and it will go viral.

Your previous company, Airtight Networks, was an enterprise software company, and this one is a consumer web service. Can you talk about the difference in approach required for these two different kinds of companies? What extra efforts does a Pune-based startup need to take to be able to succeed in these two markets?

Enterprise software and consumer web service are two very very different animals. Enterprise products sell on functionality. Usability is important but it is more of a race to build the most number of features. The product comes with a thick user manual and is used by a few people who get special training to use that product.

Consumer web service on the other hand needs to be very intuitive and simple. It is very tempting to add a lot of features and the hard part is to maintain the discipline of keeping it simple.

I would say that building an enterprise product is a little harder especially if your customers are abroad. Unless developers understand the customer mindset, it is hard for them to build the right product. For consumer facing products, it is a bit easier because you can think like a consumer yourself. However, at the same time, consumer facing products require a lot of iterations on the user interface which can be very frustrating.

What are the most common mistakes you see amongst the young entrepreneurs these days?

I think one of the biggest mistake I see is that often they are more focused on perfecting their VC pitch rather than their idea. Their goal is to somehow convince a VC to put some money into the company. This is exactly the wrong approach. First and foremost you need to convince yourself that it is worth spending the next few years underpaid and overworked chasing this idea. Your energy should be focused on researching and refining the idea until you can honestly sell it to yourself. Once you are fully convinced, even if you don’t get VC funding, you may still find the passion and energy to pursue it anyways.

I always tell them to ask a simple question to themselves – is the idea worth failing at? The odds are stacked up against you. 9 out of 10 companies fail. However, even if you fail, you should be able to look back and say it was still worth it.

As indicated in one of the questions to Jai, we at PuneTech absolutely loved the fact that so many different Pune companies have been used by ShopSocial.ly in building their product. We tried to talk to some of them to get a feel for the interesting aspects of working on ShopSocial.ly.

Rohan Dighe, Pune-based founder of SocialWebFactory, who did the tight integration of ShopSocial.ly with facebook, points out that this exercise had some interesting challenges:

We noticed that people end up with two different networks of friends – one on ShopSocial.ly, which is smaller and more focused, and another on Facebook, which is larger and more diffuse. The conversations + comments that happen around any post are very different in these two settings. To ensure a seamless experience, what we now do is pull the entire Facebook discussion around any ShopSocial.ly post, and display it on ShopSocial.ly along with the native comments.

Another great thing about the Facebook integration is that ShopSocial.ly does not have a user registration or user login mechanims. We fully leverage Facebook for this, and thus we are able to get a full profile of any user (from Facebook) without them having to provide any data, and without them having to remember yet another username and password.

Shashank Deshpande of Clarice Technologies who helped ShopSocial.ly on user interaction design & product branding, points out that one of the most difficult things to do in a product like this is to keep it simple:

Shopping and socializing are two activities that we all have been doing for years, and hence we know a lot about them. Due to this, the first instinct would have been to add lots of features related to shopping and lots of features related to socializing to the product. However, doing that results in a product that non-techy consumers find a little confusing and overwhelming. We had to work really hard to reduce the functionality of the product and bring it down to a very small number of actions that are intuitive, and yet powerful enough that encompass the most important aspects of the product. The “Shout” and “Share” actions that you see on ShopSocial.ly are the result of that process.

Visual designers at Clarice Technologies had a challenging task to create product brand that would appeal to the international audience. Choice of product logo, colors & overall visual treatment was critical to make the product stand out from the plethora of consumer portals.

At the end of all these conversations, doubts still remain about what potential is there in this area, and we decided to get an expert opinion.

Basically, Social shopping is not a new concept, and there have been a number of startups in this space, including successful ones. For example, was started 5 years ago, and sold to Hearst corporation in 2007. Luckily for us, one of the co-founders of Kaboodle, Chetan Pungaliya, is now based in Pune. Although Chetan is not connected to ShopSocial.ly in any way, we caught up with Chetan to get his views on this market. Specifically, if social shopping is more than 5 years old, is there still scope for new startups to do interesting things in this space? Chetan thinks there is still a lot of potential:

The existing batch of social shopping startups, of which Kaboodle is one of the most successful, happened in the pre-Facebook era. They have their own social network, and users went there specifically. However, if social shopping can happen in the context of a user’s other social activity, for example, while doing other things on facebook, that can significantly improve the reach. New social shopping sites that nail this can do well. Also, as the internet becomes more entrenched and people start buying more categories online (which were not being bought online before – for example, art), new models of social shopping will emerge. I think, this remains an exciting space to watch.

There you have it – a broad multi-person view of ShopSocial.ly. This is an experimental format for PuneTech, so please let us know what you think of the format in comparison to a more conventional overview/interview.

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Research Institutions in Pune

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(This article by Amit was first published on his blog and is being reproduced here with permission.)
Pune is well-known in India and internationally for being a hub of education and research. It has a wide range of academic & research institutions spanning various domains in science, technology, medicine, agriculture, arts, humanities, law, finance, etc. This blog article is an attempt to list out these various institutions. If you find any missing, please add a comment.

Science & Technology

The University of Pune (photo credit: Shreesh Kawthekar, via Wikipedia)

Arts, Humanities, Management & Law

Defense Related

Comments on this article are closed. Please comment at the original article.

“World-class software products can come out of India” – Interview with CEO of Druva

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We now have in our midst a startup success story that will hopefully inspire a 100 new software product startups in Pune.

PuneTech and the Pune Open Coffee Club both started about 2 years ago, and the steadily increasing memberships and vitality of these communities points to a very strong startup community in Pune. However, throughout those two years, one question always cast a doubt on the long-term potential of this startup ecosystem. And that question was: Where are the success stories?

Druva Software is a Pune-based backup software product startup. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about backup software (mostly about Druva)
Druva Software is a Pune-based backup software product startup. Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about backup software (mostly about Druva)

Druva software (previously known as Druvaa) which just closed a $5 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital answers that question. Of course, getting a round of VC funding is not as good an indicator of success as an IPO or an acquisition. And of course, there have been other successes in the past. But still this news is great, for the following reasons:

  • Druva is a purely homegrown startup. This is not a company started by someone in the US setting up a development center in India.
  • Druva is a product startup. It is not a services company. Hence, it has a potential for exponential growth and returns.
  • Druva is not done by serial entrepreneurs. The co-founders are all first-time entrepreneurs who quit their big-company jobs to start Druva. This should give hope to all the first-time entrepreneurs in Pune.
  • There haven’t been many high-profile successes in recent times, and this one comes as a breath of fresh air.

Druva has been one of PuneTech’s favorite startups. With 5 different PuneTech articles, this is probably the company that has received maximum coverage from us. And a quick look at the articles gives hints as to why:

  • It is a product company, which is always more interesting than a services company; it’s especially interesting to watch the product evolve over time.
  • It requires some very complex technology, not something that any company could easily build. Plus, they are happy to write detailed technical articles about the technology that underlies their products.
  • It has repeatedly featured in high profile startup events in India, from proto.in to the NASSCOM summit

PuneTech spoke to Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva, over the phone, and here are some quick notes based on this conversation. There are a number of unique features here that other Pune entrepreneurs would do well to take note of.

On the current state of the company

Druva has $2.5 million revenue run rate, coming from about 400+ customer deployments. Most of this is from their flagship product, the inSync remote laptop disk-to-disk backup solution. Recently they also introduced Phoenix a remote server disk-to-disk backup solution. They have about 23 employees, most of them in Pune, with a few sales people elsewhere. The product is developed entirely in Pune.

How do they manage enterprise support for 400 customers with such a small employee base?

Although supporting their customers is a very high priority for Druva, one of the things they focus on very hard is to make the product very easy to use and very easy to support – so that to a large extent, most of their customers don’t really require any support. They have a “release often” philosophy which ensures that customers always have the latest, bug-fixed, version of the software.

Another area that they put a lot of effort in, is in ensuring that the product is easy to install. A lot of their customer testimonials speak of how easy it was to self-install the software. By contrast, the comparable software from the more established players in the market requires professional services help for installation.

How do they manage sales without a strong US/Europe presence?

Instead of the tradition of hand-holding that is a common feature of enterprise sales in this domain, Druva decided to go a different route. They made their software freely downloadable from the web, and made it easy to install and try. As a result, most of their customers approach them after having first tried the product out via the website. And many of their sales, even large ones, have happened over skype/email, with no in-person customer visits.

How do they compete with the large MNCs, the established players in this market?

We were very surprised to learn that Druva does not try to compete with the incumbents on cost. Jaspreet told us that in fact the average Druva sale tends to be 3x more expensive than the comparative offering from the established players. Druva scores on ease of use, simplicity, and most imporantly, the technology.

Jaspreet points out that one of Druva’s strong points is the easy-to-use source-level de-duplication. Which means that when backing up a laptop, they can ignore duplicate content even before the data is sent to the remote backup server. Specifically consider the gigabytes of windows operating system files on your laptop. Most of these files are likely to be identical across all laptops of a company. Druva’s software would know beforehand that there is a copy of those files on the backup server, and would never send it across. Such optimizations ensure that backing up 15 TeraBytes of data from a number of different laptops just results in about 2 or 3 TeraBytes being send across the network. This results in an increase in speed, reduction in network bandwidth consumed, and in disk-space consumed.

By contrast, traditional backup systems do de-duplication at the destination. Which means that all the data is sent to the server over the network, and only then is the server able to remove duplicate content. This means that the speed and network bandwidth improvements are lost.

Also, claims Jaspreet, Druva’s backups are fully searchable – a feature that is not available with most competitors.

What is their primary challenge currently?

Jaspreet says that they want to build a high-quality, world-class product, and for that he needs lots of high-quality, world-class people. While they’ve obviously managed to build a team like that which got them so far, they need many more such people in the coming days, and that’s a significant challenge. He says that it is difficult, if not impossible to find “readymade” world-class talent here (even when “world-class” salary and/or equity is offered!). Instead, he feels that the only approach that works is to find individuals (whether freshers or industry veterans) who have the right attitude and potential and then nurture them into the required shape.

(As an aside, we’d like to point out that is a pattern. Pretty much every startup we talk to mentions hiring of high-quality people as one of their primary challenges. This is a problem that needs a solution, and I’m hoping that some entrepreneur in Pune is looking at this as an opportunity.)

Parting thoughts: In the Druva co-founders, we have people who have been through the entire process, from zero to VC-funding, in Pune, recently. And they are nice guys. Pune entrepreneurs should take advantage of this, and flock to them for guidance, advice and mentorship.

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Answers to PuneTech’s “Do you understand copyrights and patents?” quiz

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Last year, we had run a quiz on copyrights and patents, consisting of a number of day-to-day examples where copyright or patent issues were involved. These were examples of the kind that an average PuneTech reader might run into. Interestingly, a very large fraction of those who took the quiz, got lots of answers wrong. The quiz was a big hit amongst our readers.

Unfortunately, we overlooked posting the results of the quiz.

Better late than never.

Here are the results. Before reading the answers, you might want to refresh your memory of the questions. Note: the questions and answers for part 1 have been composed by me (that is, Navin Kabra). The questions in part 2 were composed by Hemant Chaskar,

Answers to Part 1: Copyrights

Take a closer look at copyright and patent issues. Take the quiz and then see these answers. (Image credit: Control copyright icon by Xander, via mediawiki commons)
Take a closer look at copyright and patent issues. Take the quiz and then see these answers. (Image credit: Control copyright icon by Xander, via wikimedia commons)

Question: Unmesh has a great idea for an online flash game where the user is supposed to identify and shoot traffic violators. He describes the idea in great detail in an email to Navin. The email includes overall architecture, algorithms and data-structures etc. Navin loves the idea, and next day, implements the idea in python+django and puts it up on http://ShootTheTrafficViolators.com. Surprisingly, the game is a huge hit. One year later, Zapak buys the game from Navin for a large sum of money (one khoka). Navin has no intention of sharing his khoka with Unmesh. There was no agreement, neither explicit nor implicit, between Navin & Unmesh regarding the intellectual property. Legally, which of these are true? (Assume that the email between Unmesh and Navin is enough to legally prove that Navin got the idea from Unmesh.)

Answer: There’s nothing Unmesh can do. Ideas cannot be copyrighted. Zapak bought the copyrights, and those are owned by Navin since he wrote the code. (Unmesh would have a case if he had patented any idea in that game, but really, there is nothing patentable about shooting traffic violators 🙂

56% of respondents got this wrong and felt that Unmesh can claim some money from either Navin or Zapak.

Question: Unmesh has another great idea – a map-based online dating service. He describes his idea in a blog post, and also attaches a zip file with the php code for the game. An year later, Navin notices this blog post, downloads the software, makes some changes, and puts it up on http://AatiKyaKhandala.com. Needless to say, BharatMatrimony is interested and pays Navin 1 khoka for the game. Which of the following is true. (As before, no agreement between Navin & Unmesh. Also, Unmesh did not attach a copyright notice in the code; nor did he register a copyright.)

Answer: Making code public does not change the fact that Unmesh owns the copyright to the code. The fact that Unmesh neither attached a copyright notice, nor did he register the copyright is irrelevant. Copyright notices and registrations are not necessary. Unmesh is legally the owner. Note also, that Navin can rewrite the program to do the same thing but using different code wrote and Unmesh would have no intellectual property claims on the new program Navin wrote.

Lot of ignorance here. A whopping 45% of the respondents felt that Unmesh had no claim on the code because he did not attach a copyright notice, and 34% felt that he had no claim because he made the code public.

Question: Navin is now a very successful and rich entrepreneur, based on the previous two exits. He now pays Unmesh to develop a new website for him – http://PhirangiMaal.com – to identify the best foreign goods available in Pune. Unmesh writes the code and in the process develops a very innovative new algorithm for automatically identifying good phirangi maal. Needless to say, this algorithm and site is a great success. eBay.in is interested. Which of the following are true. This time there was an agreement between Navin and Unmesh saying that Unmesh is developing PhirangiMaal.com for Navin for a given sum of money. Unfortunately, the agreement doesn’t say who owns the intellectual property.

Answer: In the absence of an explicit agreement, Navin owns the intellectual property because this was work done for hire. Interestingly, most people got this one right.

Question: Unmesh wrote a great program – a mobile application that can cause a mobile phone to self-destruct when it is taken outside the borders of Maharashtra. Unfortunately, he did not show the program to anybody, he did not register a copyright on it, and he did not make it public. One day, Navin happened to get access to Unmesh’s laptop, copied the program and later sold it to Raj Thakarey. Does Unmesh own the copyright on this program?

Answer: Yes, Unmesh owns the copyright. Copyright registration, copyright notice, and making public have no effect on copyright ownership. As soon as a creative work is created, the author gets the copyright. While Unmesh might have a tough time proving that Navin stole the code from him (and that is the reason why copyright registration has value), legally the ownership is clearly with Unmesh.

57% of respondents got this one wrong (most of them thinking that copyright registration is necessary).

Question: To increase traffic to his site Unmesh wants to put up a collage of beautiful/handsome people at the top of his homepage. He downloads a bunch of images from images.google.com, crops them appropriately, and creates a collage, and puts it up. Unfortunately, one of the images belongs to Reuters, who sues Unmesh for $2000 (for just that one image).

Answer: Most people got this correct. Downloading images off the web and using them on your website is a copyright violation, and the above has actually happened to a Pune startup (no, not Unmesh!!). It is worthwhile to note that you are legally liable even if you outsourced the website development to some other small company, and their designer was the one who downloaded the image and used it without checking the copyright notice.

Question: Rohit11 decides to manufacture a home security system, which is a hardware box that can be installed on people’s doors. The device runs software that is derived from the Linux OS. Since he has a large heart, Rohit11 gives this device away for free for everyone in Pune. Is he required to release the software (since Linux is GPLed)?

Answer: The correct answer is that the software must be released. It can be put up on a website – shipping with the device is not a requirement. However, shipping a 400-page book is not good enough. The software must be in machine readable form.

Question: Unmesh decides to open-source the code that runs SadakMap.com (under GPL). Navin takes that code, makes extensive changes to it to allow people to interact with the maps using SMS. He then uses the code to create http://SMSMaps.in. Now Unmesh wants to add the same facilities to sadakmap. Can Unmesh force Navin to open-source SMSMaps.in?

Answer: No! Since Navin has not “distributed” the code to anybody else, he is not forced to give out his source code by the GPL. The new Affero GPL covers this case, but a regular GPL does not. 51% got this wrong.

Question: Navin keeps taking content from Unmesh’s blog (http://sadakmap.com/blog) and republishing it on PuneTech – sometimes excerpts, sometimes full – sometimes with attribution, sometimes without. All of this is done without Unmesh’s permission. Which of the following are copyright violations:

Question: Publishing excerpts (e.g. a few lines from first paragraph), with a link to the original post

Answer: This is not a copyright violation. This is allowed under fair use (also known as fair dealing). Most people got this right.

Question: Publishing excerpts, with attribution to SadakMap, but not a link

Answer: This is legally not a violation of copyright law. But is a bad practice and is frowned upon, so you should avoid it.

Question: Publishing full article, with full attribution of source and a link to original

Answer: This is a copyright violation. Publishing a full article is not legal, irrespective of whether you link/attribute the source. 50% of respondents got this wrong.

Question: Re-use of just one image from a post, with attribution + link

Answer: This is a copyright violation. Unlike short excerpts of text (which are OK to copy), copying images, or even short excerpts of music are usually violations. Only 40% of respondents got this correct.

Question: Reuse of 20 seconds of a sound-clip from a post, with attribution+link

Answer: This is a copyright violation. You’re not allowed to copy even short clips of music. Only 29% got this right.

Question: Copying the SadakMap Logo

Answer: Thankfully, most people got this right. Copying the logo is a copyright violation except for a few exceptions (like satire, or new reporting, etc.)

Answers to Part 2: Patents

Question: Unmesh has a great idea for an online flash game where the user is supposed to identify and shoot traffic violators. He describes the idea in great detail in an email to Navin. The email includes overall architecture, algorithms and data-structures etc. But before that Unmesh files a patent on it. Navin loves the idea, and next day, implements the idea in python+django and puts it up on http://ShootTheTrafficViolators.com. Surprisingly, the game is a huge hit. One year later, Zapak buys the game from Navin for a large sum of money (one khoka). At this point, Unmesh’s patent is granted. There was no agreement, neither explicit nor implicit, between Navin & Unmesh regarding the intellectual property. Legally, which of these are true? (Note: this question is slightly different from the first question in the copyright section)

Answer: Unmesh owns the patent and hence he can legally stop Zapak from selling the game, he can legally claim money and/or royalties from Zapak or Navin. Most people got this one right.

Question: Navin works for reputed IT firm as high performance database architect. While on a trekking trip with his friends on Sunday, he conceives an idea of a new trekking shoe. Next Sunday he takes help of his friend Hemant who has knowhow of patents to file a patent on his new shoe. Later Navin leaves the IT job and toils to finally productize his shoe. Around the same time Navin’s patent on the shoe also gets granted. Few days after that the IT firm where Navin worked before becomes aware of popularity of the new trekking shoe and Navin’s patent on it. The IT firm asks Navin to transfer his patent rights on the shoe design to the IT firm.

Answer: The real answer is that it depends upon the employment contract that Navin has with the IT firm. In most of the large companies that I know of (also known as reputed IT companies), the employment contract states that all ideas that the employees get while they are employed belong to the company.

People often feel that work done in personal time, work unrelated to company business etc. are exempt, but it is not. Often entrepreneurs develop ideas while being employed before breaking up, but do not realize that they are at risk of assertion of employment agreement.

Startup founders get into trouble like this very often.

Question: Navin is settled in U.S. He comes up with an idea for software module which runs on standard PCs to increase the speed of execution. Navin files a patent on it in U.S. and gets the patent. Hemant lives in India and gets to read Navin’s patent as patent documents are publicly available on the Internet. Hemant assembles a team of programmers in India to build the software module described in Navin’s patent. Hemant then sells it to Indian PC distributors who then install it on PCs sold in India.

Answer: There is nothing Navin can do. US patents do not afford any protection against companies copying and selling the product in India. Many people got this wrong – 37% felt that Navin can take legal help in India to stop Hemant, and 33% felt that Navin can take legal help in the US to stop Hemant. Both answers are incorrect.

Question: Unmesh decides to open-source the code that runs SadakMap.com. Navin uses that code to create http://SMSMaps.in. While looking at the SadakMap code, and searching the online patent database, Navin realizes that Unmesh has a patent on a unique new algorithm of allowing users to add content to a online map – and this algorithm is at the heart of the SadakMap code. Navin realizes a unique new way to design a wrapper around the SadakMap code to allow users to add content via SMS. Navin files a patent on this idea, and the patent is granted.

Answer: Unmesh can still stop Navin from running SMSMaps.in because it is still infringing on Unmesh’s patent. The fact that Navin has his own patent doesn’t change the fact that SMSMaps.in uses Unmesh’s invention too. (Note: Navin would be granted this patent, but neither Navin nor anyone else would be able to use Navin’s invention without also getting permission from Unmesh to use his invention.)

Question: Hemant has worked for several years to build a software application that he now wants to sell on his website. Unfortunately, a friend points out that his software uses an algorithm that is patented by DadaGiri Software Pvt. Ltd. DadaGiri Software is known to be litigious and is likely to sue Hemant for infringement. What can Hemant do?

  • Investigate the possibility of getting that patent declared invalid by the courts
  • Analyze the patent claims, and check if it’s possible to re-design the application so that it doesn’t infringe the patent
  • Hemant is in ruins, since the patents granted are ‘brahmastras’
  • Explore the possibility of licensing the patent

Answer: All of the above are possibilities. It is quite possible that a patent that has been granted is not really valid, for any number of reasons, including existing prior art (i.e. this ‘invention’ had been publicly known before the patent was filed). Also, most of the time, it is possible to re-design a product so that it does not infringe existing patents.

Was yesterday’s PuneTech article inappropriate?

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Yesterday, on the occasion of Persistent Systems‘ IPO, we ran an unabashedly positive post about Persistent and Anand Deshpande’s contributions to the Pune technology community. This resulted in some eyebrows raised about the appropriateness of the article. There were two concerns:

  • The timing of the article, while an IPO is in progress, could be inappropriate
  • Writing such a positive article about an important/influential personality (especially when we don’t have a history of writing similar articles about other people) might result in a perception that we were trying to suck up.

After asking a few of our friends, we realized that enough people had similar concerns, and we decided that the issue needs to be discussed openly in the interest of transparency.

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This is a PuneTech article about PuneTech itself. Click on the logo to get all such PuneTech articles about PuneTech

At the outset, we’d like to make clear that nobody connected to PuneTech has any direct or indirect financial interest, nor any other kind of vested interest in Persistent or its IPO. None of us has any shares/stocks of Persistent, nor do we have any financial dealings of any kind with Persistent. In line with our stated editorial policy, PuneTech never takes any compensation, monetary or otherwise, for any content on PuneTech.

Still, in discussion with our friends, a number of issues of credibility, objectivity, neutrality, and perception management were raised. (Regular PuneTech readers will remember a similar discussion that happened in response to another such positive post from us.) We have listed below some of the issues that were pointed out to us, followed by our current thinking on each.

  • “Is PuneTech more like a newspaper or is it more like a blog? Deciding that will drive some of these decisions.” Our view: We don’t necessarily want to label PuneTech as one or the other. It is what it is. But, as is clearly stated in the PuneTech editorial policy, we are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. PuneTech articles will reflect the opinions of the authors, and the selection of what topics and articles to publish reflects our editorial judgement.
  • “PuneTech is a blog. It will have opinions. It is not possible to be objective. Why do you care what other people think?” Our view: Although we feel that we are entitled to our opinions, and our opinions have value, we would like to ensure that our readers do not question our motives. We will lose a lot of credibility and readership if people feel that some of our posts are motivated by vested interests. The fact that we publish our editorial policy, our comments policy, posts like these, and we welcome comments that disagree with our views are attempts at bringing some transparency to this process.
  • “PuneTech should reflect the true opinions of the authors – that is in fact one of the reasons why readers read PuneTech. Once you start censoring your opinions by worrying about ‘What will others think’, PuneTech will become bland, and lose a lot of its value.” Our view: we completelly agree with this.
  • “Since PuneTech comes across as largely neutral in most articles, the occasional article that is highly opinionated does result in some raised eyebrows.” Our view: Agreed. At this stage, we think we would rather risk a few raised eyebrows once in a while, than to ‘neutralize’ all our articles.
  • “The timing is suspect. With an IPO in progress, such a one-dimensionally postitive article might be seen as an attempt to curry favor with Persistent or Anand by offering a positive public opinion when it was really needed.” Our view: We stand by the opinions expressed in the article, but we concede that our timing could have been inappropriate. But since this kind of a situation is not likely to recur anytime soon, we are not going to worry too much about trying to formulate a PuneTech policy to govern such things. But we’ll try to be careful in the future.
  • “Why only Anand Deshpande? Would have been much better to have a series of articles on all the people who’ve benefitted the tech community in Pune.” Our view: We think this is a great idea, and we’ll try to do that. However, please note that we’re severely limited in the amount of time we can spend on writing PuneTech articles. PuneTech is neither the primary, nor the secondary activity for any of us, so it might be a while before these articles appear. Please bear with us. Anybody willing to help us out by writing any such article please get in touch with us.

In conclusion, we will continue to write opinionated articles, and every once in a while we will have an article where we are being very positive about some person, or initiative, or company. We ask of our readers that if you ever feel unsure of our motives, please let us know either publicly in the comments, or privately via email (punetech@punetech.com). We’ll start worrying when this happens to often.

If you have strong opinions about this topic, please let us and other PuneTech readers know in the comments. Thanks.

Conference report: The 4th IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies

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(The IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies was held in Pune last weekend. This conference report by Dhananjay Nene was published on his must-read blog and is re-published here with permission. The slides used during the presentations can be downloaded from the conference website here and are also linked to in context in Dhananjay’s report below. In general, PuneTech is interested in publishing reports of tech events and conferences that happen in Pune, as long as they go into sufficient technical depth, and especially if links to slides are available. So please do get in touch with us if you have such a report to share.)

indicthreads logo smallThe annual indicthreads.com java technology conference is Pune’s best conference on matters related to Java technologies. I looked forward to attending the same and was not disappointed a bit. The last one was held about 3 days ago on Dec 11th and 12th, and this post reviews my experiences at the same.

As with any other conference usually something or the other isn’t quite working well in the morning, so I soon discovered we had a difficulty with the wireless network being swamped by the usage. There were some important downloads that needed to be completed, so my early morning was spent attempting to get these done .. which meant I missed most of Harshad Oak’s opening session on Java Today.

The next one i attended was Groovy & Grails as a modern scripting language for Web applications by Rohit Nayak. However I soon discovered that it (at least initially) seemed to be a small demo on how to build applications using grails. Since that was something I was familiar with, I moved to the alternative track in progress.

The one I switched to even as it was in progress was Java EE 6: Paving the path for the future by Arun Gupta. Arun had come down from Santa Clara to talk about the new Java EE6 spec and its implementation by Glassfish. Arun talked about a number of additional or changed features in Java EE6 in sufficient detail for anyone who got excited by them to go explore these in further detail. These included web fragments, web profile, EJB 3.1 lite, increased usage of annotations leading to web.xml now being optional, and a number of points on specific JSRs now a part of Java EE6. Some of the things that excited me more about Glassfish were, (a) OSGi modularisation and programmatic control of specific containers (eg Servlet, JRuby/Rails etc.), embeddability, lightweight monitoring. However the one that excited me the most was the support for hot deployment of web apps for development mode by allowing the IDEs to automatically notify the running web app which in turn automatically reloaded the modified classes (even as the sessions continued to be valid). The web app restart cycle in addition to the compile cycle was alway one of my biggest gripes with Java (second only to its verbosity) and that seemed to be going away.

I subsequently attended Getting started with Scala by Mushtaq Ahmed from Thoughtworks. Mushtaq is a business analyst and not a professional programmer, but has been keenly following the developments in Scala for a couple of years (and as I later learnt a bit with Clojure as well). Unlike a typical language capability survey, he talked only about using the language for specific use cases, a decision which I thought made the presentation extremely useful and interesting. The topics he picked up were (a) Functional Programming, (b) DSL building and (c) OOP only if time permitted. He started with an example of programming/modeling the Mars Rover movements and using functions and higher order functions to do the same. Looking back I think he spent lesser time on transitioning from the requirements into the code constructs and in terms of what he was specifically setting out to do in terms of higher order functions. However the demonstrated code was nevertheless interesting and showed some of the power of Scala when used to write primarily function oriented code. The next example he picked up was a Parking Lot attendant problem where he started with a Java code which was a typical implementation of the strategy pattern. He later took it through 7-8 alternative increasingly functional implementations using Scala. This one was much easier to understand and yet again demonstrated the power of Scala quite well in terms of functional programming. Onto DSLs, Mushtaq wrote a simple implementation of a “mywhile” which was a classical “while” loop as an example of using Scala for writing internal DSLs. Finally he demonstrated the awesome power of using the built in support for parser combinators for writing an external DSL, and also showed how a particular google code of summer problem could be solved using Scala (again for writing an external DSL). A very useful and thoroughly enjoyable talk. (Here is a link to the code used in this presentation. -PuneTech)

The brave speaker for the post lunch session was Rajeev Palanki who dealt both with overall IBM directions on Java and a little about MyDeveloperworks site. In his opinion he thought Java was now (post JDK 1.4) on the plateau of productivity after all the early hype and IBM now focused on Scaling up, Scaling down (making it easier to use at the lower end), Open Innovation (allow for more community driven innovation) and Real Time Java. He emphasised IBMs support to make Java more predictable for real time apps and stated that Java was now usable for Mission Critical applications referring to the fact that Java was now used in a USS Destroyer. He referred to IBMs focus on investing in Java Tooling that worked across different JRE implementations. Tools such as GCMV, MAT, and Java Diagnostic Collector. Finally he talked about the IBM MyDeveloperWorks site at one stage referring to it as the Facebook for Geeks.

The next session was Overview of Scala Based Lift Web Framework by Vikas Hazarati, Director, Technology at Xebia. Another thoroughly enjoyable session. Vikas dealt with a lot of aspects related to the Lift web framework including various aspects related to the mapper, the snippets, usage of actors for comet support etc. I was especially intrigued by Snippets which act as a bridge between the UI and the business logic have a separate abstraction for themselves in the framework and how the construct and functionality in that layer is treated so differently from other frameworks.

I subsequently attended Concurrency: Best Practices by Pramod Nagaraja who works on the IBM JRE and owns the java.nio packages (I think I heard him say owns). He talked about various aspects and best practices related to concurrency and one of the better aspects of the talk was how seemingly safe code can also end up being unsafe. However he finished his session well in time for me to quickly run over and attend the latter half of the next presentation.

Arun Gupta conducted the session Dynamic Languages & Web Frameworks in GlassFish which referred to the support for various non java environments in Glassfish including those for Grails/Groovy, Rails/JRuby, Django/Python et. al. The impression I got was Glassfish is being extremely serious about support for the non java applications as well and is dedicating substantial efforts to make Glassfish the preferred platform for such applications as well. Arun’s blog Miles to go … is most informative for a variety of topics related to Glassfish for both Java and non Java related aspects.

The last talk I attended during the day was Experiences of Fully Distributed Scrum between San Francisco and Gurgaon by Narinder Kumar, again from Xebia. Since a few in the audience were still not aware of agile methodologies (Gasp!), Narinder gave a high level overview of the same before proceeding down the specific set of challenges his team had faced in implementing scrum in a scenario where one team was based in Gurgaon, India and another in San Fransciso, US. To be explicit, he wasn’t describing the typical scrum of scrum approaches but was instead describing a mechanism wherein the entire set of distributed teams would be treated as a single team with a single backlog and common ownership. This required some adjustments such as a meeting where only one person from one of the locations and all from another would take part in a scrum meeting in situations where there were no overlapping working hours. There were a few other such adjustments to the process also described. The presentation ended with some strong metrics which represented how productivity was maintained even as the activities moved from a single location to a distributed model. Both during the presentation and subsequently Narinder described some impressive associations with senior Scrum visionaries and also some serious interest in their modified approach from some important companies. However one limitation I could think of the model was, that it was probably better geared to work where you had developers only in one of the two locations (offshoring). I perceived the model as a little difficult to work if developers were located across all locations (though that could end up being just my view).

The second day started with a Panel Discussion on the topic Turning the Corner between Arun Gupta, Rohit Nayak, Dhananjay Nene (thats yours truly) and moderated by Harshad Oak. It was essentially a discussion about how we saw some of the java and even many non java related technologies evolving over the next few years. I think suffice to say one of the strong agreements clearly was the arrival of Java the polyglot platform as compared to Java the language.

The next session was Developing, deploying and monitoring Java applications using Google App Engine by Narinder Kumar. A very useful session describing the characteristics, opportunities and challenges with using Google App Engine as the deployment platform for Java based applications. One of the take away from the sessions was that subject to specific constraints, it was possible to use GAE as the deployment platform without creating substantial lockins since many of the Java APIs were supported by GAE. However there are a few gotchas along the way in terms of specific constraints eg. using Joins etc.

I must confess at having been a little disappointed with Automating the JEE deployment process by Vikas Hazrati. He went to great depths in terms of what all considerations a typical J2EE deployment monitoring tool should take care of, and clearly demonstrated having spent a lot of time in thinking through many of the issues. However the complexities he started addressing started to get into realms which only a professional J2EE deployment tool writer would get into. That made the talk a little less interesting for me. Besides there was another interesting talk going on simultaneously which I was keen on attending as well.

The other talk I switched to half way was Create Appealing Cross-device Applications for Mobile Devices with Java ME and LWUIT by Biswajit Sarkar (who’s also written a book on the same topic). While keeping things simple, Biswajit explained the capabilities of Java ME. He also described LWUIT which allowed creation of largely similar UI across different mobile platforms. He explained that while the default Java ME used native rendering leading to differing look and feel across mobile handsets just like Java AWT, using LWUIT allowed for a Java Swing like approach where the rendering was performed by the LWUIT library (did he say around 300kb??) thus allowing for a more uniform look and feel. He also showed sample programs and how they worked using LWUIT.

Allahbaksh Asadullah then conducted the session on Implementing Search Functionality With Lucene & Solr, where he talked about the characteristics and usage of Lucene and Solr. It was very explicitly addressed at the very beginners to the topic (an audience I could readily identify myself with) and walked us through the various characteristics of search, the different abstractions, how these abstractions are modeled through the API and how some of these could be overridden to implement custom logic.

How Android is different from other systems – An exploration of the design decisions in Android by Navin Kabra was a session I skipped. However I had attended a similar session by him earlier so hopefully I did not miss much.

However Navin did contribute occasionally into the next session Java For Mobile Devices – Building a client application for the Android platform by Rohit Nayak. Rohit demonstrated an application he is working on along with a lot of the code that forms the application using Eclipse and the Android plugin. A useful insight into how an Android application is constructed.

As the event drew to a close, the prizes were announced including those for the Indicthreads Go Green initiative. A thoroughly enjoyable event, leaving me even more convinced to make sure to attend the next years session making it a third in a row.

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ASIC Verification: Trends and Challenges

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(This is a guest post for PuneTech by Arati Halbe, who has close to 9 years experience in ASIC front end design and verification. Post silicon validation and FPGA prototyping is her recent area of interest and expertise. Arati has worked with Wipro Technologies and Conexant Systems. Arati did her B.E. from University of Pune and M.Tech from CEDT, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. See Arati’s linked-in profile for more details.)

As the complexity of Integrated Circuits (specifically ASIC and SoC) increases, and as their sizes keep reducing, the task of testing the chip gets more and more challenging. Engineers need to come up with better and different methodologies to ensure what goes to the factory for manufacturing is actually what they intended to deliver. Verification occurs at various stages in the ASIC development cycle. How much is enough at each stage is a problem that needs to be addressed on a case to case basis. A sound knowledge of various techniques and awareness of capabilities and limitations of each technique goes a long way in making decisions about when, where and what.

The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8...
Click on the image to see all PuneChips articles on PuneTech. Image via Wikipedia

Keeping this in mind, PuneChips had verification expert Jagdish Doma talk about “ASIC verification: Trends and Challenges” on 20th August 2009. Though impacted by the H1N1 scare we had a small but diverse audience. Jagdish discussed in detail the strengths and limitations of the various techniques, viz: ESL, Formal verification, Dynamic simulation, FPGA prototyping and Emulation.

ESL or Electronic System Level testing is the newest trend. Supporters of ESL claim that it is a highly powerful system level modeling tool. It enables fast software bring-up if combined with an emulation/FPGA prototyping platform. ESL has been used successfully to validate systems for mobile applications where only one peripheral/application is active on the processor bus. ESL does not seem suitable for systems where multiple processes and interfaces are active simultaneously, like for example in a networking system.

Formal verification, a static verification technique which is mainly assertion based, is useful to check control paths. It cannot be used to verify datapaths. Dynamic simulation is a very effective way of verifying functionality of every block in the ASIC including the datapath. Gate level simulations performed after the back annotated placement and routing data is available are used to identify timing related issues or omissions/errors in stating multi-cycle paths.

The need to find hardware bugs as early as possible in the ASIC lifecycle drives the emulation and/or FPGA prototyping effort. Both these techniques enable the testing of scenarios which are generally not possible to test in dynamic functional verification, well before the actual silicon comes back from the fab. Emulation or prototyping also accelerate fast software ramp up and the software team can get a development platform ready well before the actual chip is available. Emulation involves running test cases on hardware accelerated platforms like Palladium from Cadence and Veloce from Mentor. For FPGA prototyping, Single or multiple FPGAs are used to build a PCB system targeted for the testing of the ASIC/SoC. The ASIC code is then fully or partially programmed on the FPGA/s and functionality can thus be tested.

Scenarios with much longer simulation times than what normal functional simulation allows can be run on the emulation platforms. All the internal signals are available for viewing and debug, just like in functional simulation. The FPGA prototype platform does enable longer test time, but the debugging available is limited. The hardware accelerators are costly, and investing in them makes sense if a company has lot of ASIC programs running simultaneously. For companies which have similar chips planned back to back, investing in a home grown FPGA based emulation/prototyping platform makes sense. Another advantage FPGA prototyping is that the RTL goes through a complete synthesis and place and route cycle and testing is done on a circuit which is as close to the real ASIC as possible.

To ensure that a bug free product reaches the customer is a complex activity and poses multiple challenges. Coverage, legacy code, repeatability are issues that need to be tackled. Ensuring that the coverage is at an acceptable level is important. Code coverage is run to find out if all the possibilities of a written code are exercised in a test suite. Simulators from cadence (ius), synopsys(vcs) and mentor (modelsim) have their own code coverage analyzers. Functional coverage means to find out if each feature listed in the specification for an ASIC/SoC is verified. It is essential that the functional specification document has an individual numbered paragraph for each feature so that traceability is easier. Functional coverage is an activity that needs planning, reviews and careful test case designing. Methodologies like eRM (e reuse methodology – Specman based) and OVM (open verification methodology – System verilog based) do assist checking functional coverage, but the inputs provided need careful specification and reviews.

Reviews, not just for coverage, but at every stage in the ASIC cycle are extremely important. One of the challenges encountered while designing an ASIC is that the hardware team interprets a certain behavior from software and the software expects that certain things are taken care of in hardware. It is very important to involve members from design team, verification team, architecture team, software & firmware team for verification review.

It takes a good amount of effort to come up with a verification environment, and it is very common for a team to use what has worked before when schedules are demanding. Legacy environment saves lot of time, but it also handicaps the team. Talking about saving time, efficiency goes a long way in shrinking the schedules. The initial time and effort investment in automation of repetitive tasks save lot of time in future. Use of re-usable methodologies will definitely save time and effort.

Finally, while choosing the verification flow for a certain ASIC, team needs to look at what is available in terms of resources as well as time, understand the end user requirement, and make a decision on which technique to employ at what stage.

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Musings on why Cloud Computing will prevail…

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suhas kelkar headshot

Today’s post is a guest post by Suhas Kelkar. Suhas leads the Innovation & Incubation Lab at BMC Software India. Prior to BMC he was the Vice President of Product Management at Digite, an enterprise software company in the field of Project Portfolio Management. See his linked-in profile for details.

In the recent Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2009 special report by Gartner, technologies at the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ include Cloud Computing! (For description of five phases of Hype Cycle look here) This means that Cloud Computing is on the verge of entering the “Trough of Disillusionment” phase. Many technologies have been unable to come out of this dreaded trough where they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Articles such as “Could the cloud lead to an even bigger 9/11” clearly indicate that Gartner’s analysis is right and that cloud computing indeed has reached the peak of hype!

This article has my musings on why cloud computing will eventually come out of this phase and would reshape the way we run business.

Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2009
Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2009

I had an opportunity to attend VmWorld 2009 conference. During the course of this conference, VmWare announced its latest initiative, vCloud. vCloud is essentially using VmWare’s virtualization technology to create an ecosystem of cloud service providers. With this initiative VmWare joins already crowded space of public cloud providers such as Amazon, Rackspace Cloud and Savvis. Out of all the exhibitors at the VmWorld conference, almost everyone was trying to get on the bandwagon of Cloud Computing. And this was not even a Cloud Computing focused conference! The more you look into Cloud Computing the more you feel like it is indeed the next big thing after the internet gold rush of 90s.

All this hype for Cloud Computing feels like a déjà vu. Turn the dial few years ago and the area of Software As A Service (SaaS) went through very similar transition. After SaaS reached the trough of disillusionment skeptics were raising doubts. Many argued that they would never consider putting their competitive data (CRM) in a software system outside of their corporate networks. Salesforce had to fight an uphill battle as it tried to establish its SaaS products. However the value proposition of SaaS, in terms of zero install and pay-as-you-go was too attractive to ignore. Today SaaS is the architecture of choice for many enterprise software products and last time I checked Salesforce is sitting pretty at a massive market cap of 7.13 billion dollars!

Let’s look at the benefits of Cloud Computing,

  • Lower Costs – OPEX not CAPEX: Cloud Computing avoids capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software and services by renting it from a third party provider (such as Amazon). Consumption is usually billed on a utility (resource based like electricity) or subscription (time based, like a monthly cable subscription) basis with little or no upfront cost. You pay as you go and pay for what you need. This seemingly straight forward benefit has deep impact on business models and strategy.
  • Self service and Agility: Provisioning a server used to take days if not weeks. With Amazon you can procure a server on their public cloud in minutes! Users can generally terminate the contract at any time (improving ROI and eliminating financial risks), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.
  • Focus on your business: Cloud computing abstracts away underlying resources (server, network and storage) and management of it so that you can focus on your core business. Win-win for Providers and Consumers.

    • Cloud Infrastructure and services are by default multi-tenant enabled, with multiple customers sharing resources and the costs associated with these. Providers run centralized infrastructure at low cost locations and make use of expertise of providers in terms of utilization and efficiency of infrastructure. Providers benefit with increased efficiency due to economies of scale and are able to provide the same service at lesser costs to happy consumers.

  • Elastic Scalability: Hosting your applications on Cloud Infrastructure enable dynamic (“on-demand”) provisioning of resources that can be done at near real time, without having to waste server resources engineered for peak loads. This enables small business to start offering their services on the web with low entry barriers and then scale as and when their load demands are higher.

    • Consider for example that you want to start a small web based business selling toys. Your business plan calls for exponential growth with number of customers ramping from few hundred in the first year to thousands in 2-3 years to million plus in 5-7 years. Ofcourse this plan does not even include wild fluctuations during peak holiday seasons. Until today, planning for this type of scenario involved lot of upfront costs that created huge barriers of entry for start ups. Now with cloud computing and public cloud infrastructure, such small companies can dream of doing exactly what they want to do and provides them with unlimited elasticity!

Similar to SaaS success story, it will be the benefits of the “cloud” that will eventually win over the skeptics due to underlying benefits. Of course an important factor would also be for an eco system to evolve in a timely fashion. One of the reasons why SaaS was successful was the fact that an entire ecosystem made itself available that rendered well to the SaaS Model including Web Standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) and architectures such as AJAX.

Similar to the platform wars of the eighties (followed by browser wars of nineties), Cloud Computing is currently going through a war with each player trying to establish itself as the destination. Some efforts have started to promote interoperability and openness of cloud. Open Cloud Initiative is one such example. However it remains to be seen how the industry as a whole matures and adopts such efforts…

Cloud computing is here to stay and will succeed as a concept eventually. It has the power to establish new business models and change existing processes. More will have to be written about what does it mean for enterprises of tomorrow to manage their businesses in cloud. Do provide feedback via your comments if you would like to hear about it more…

See also: Suhas’ previous PuneTech article: The Changing Landscape of Data Centers.

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38 organizations where a tech startup can apply for funds

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The Venture Center is a not-for-profit technology startup incubator hosted in the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune. One of the services they provide their incubatee startups is a guide to the various government funds and schemes that a technology startup can avail of at different stages of their development, depending upon meeting certain criteria.

This is information that most entrepreneurs are not aware of. With this in mind, Venture Center has put out this guide to the Financing Landscape in India for Technology Ventures. This guide is a must read for all startups interested in funding.

You can simply browse this information, and read the rules and regulations of each of these 38 funds/organizations. Or, if you want to be handheld your way through the maze, you can avail of Venture Center’s advisory services.

For more information about Venture Center, you can see PuneTech’s interview of Kaushik Gala, the business development manager for Venture Center.

Interview with Arun Prabhudesai of trak.in and hover.in (via BlogAdda)

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“India Business Blog”, trak.in, with 7000+ rss/email subscribers from all over the world, and many more visitors coming directly to the website, is easily one of the top blogs emanating from Pune. Just last week, trak.in celebrated its 1000th post.

Arun Prabhudesai, the creator of trak.in, is also the CEO of Pune-based startup hover.in, and is very active in the tech/startup community in Pune.

A few weeks back, Indian blog aggregation site BlogAdda.com interviewed Arun Prabhudesai. We are reproducing the interview here, with permission. You should also check out the other interviews at BlogAdda – there are a bunch of interesting ones, including Vijayanand, of proto.in fame, Om Malik, of GigaOM, and Pune bloggers Preeti Shenoy of Just a mother of two, and meetu of wogma.com

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

A: My first post was written in the last week of April 2007, however, officially Trak.in celebrates its anniversary on May 1st.

There were couple of reasons why I started blogging. Firstly, I was in US since 2002 and wanted to come back to India and start something of my own. I also needed to keep abreast with the latest happenings, to understand the opportunities that were cropping up here.

Thats when I started blogging to share my point of view on knowledge I had gathered.

Also, at that time, there was no other Indian blog catering to this space. so I jumped in 🙂

Q: What topics do you generally blog about?

A: Trak.in started as a business blog that presented my point of views on latest buzz in India that was purely analytical in nature. However, over a period of time it has evolved to become much broader than that.

Trak.in has lot of subscribers who are Indians living abroad and want to come back. I receive so many emails asking for help and information on how to get (business) started in India. So a lot of my posts are also informative reports that give them purview of current situation in India.

Q: Do you ever get stuck when writing an entry? What do you do then?

A: Ohh…that happens far too often with me. I dont know whether it can be called a writer’s block, but many times I am just not in the frame to write – and I don’t.

The good thing is that trak.in has good community – when I am unable to write, I request one of our regular visitors or guest bloggers to write a post, and more often than not they are happy to do so.

I ensure that I do not post something just for the sake of it – Only if I am happy with what is written does it get published on the blog

Q: What promotional techniques work best for you and why?

A: I am sure you must have heard this often – Content, content and more quality content. That is the best way you can popularize your blog. Yes, you also need to take care of other things like SEO, but all that comes later. If you have quality content, traffic will come.

Thats exactly what I try to do with trak.in – Write good content – I don’t use any other specific promotional techniques.

Yes, In last 6-12 months Social Media applications like Twitter and Facebook have started sending in good amount of traffic as well – so presence in social Media space does help.

Q: How important is it for the blogger to interact with their readers? Do you respond to all the comments that you receive?

A: It is extremely important to interact with your readers – that’s how you build a loyal readership. I don’t (or can’t) respond to all the comments, as there are far too many. But yes, any comment that is thoughtful and brings in a different perspective than what I have written gets my attention and I do make it a point to respond. Generally I respond to 3-4 comments on average daily.

Q: How, in general, would you rate the quality of Indian blogs? Share your favourite five blogs.

As of today, India does not have any blog that is followed internationally except Labnol. Indian Blog Ecosystem is still evolving. The idea that one can blog for living is still not there in India.

When I started blogging, I used to follow lot of blogs, but in last year or so, the number has come down drastically. My feed reader has less 15 blogs in it.

Some of the blogs that I follow which are written by Indians (but may not be an India centric blog) are:

Q: What do you find to be the most gratifying aspect of blogging?

A: They are the “Thank You” mails from people who tell me that the posts that I have published have helped them a lot. It makes all the effort worthwhile.

Other aspect is the exposure that a bloggers get, especially if you are a popular.

Q: Do you earn revenue through your blog? How does one go about it?

A: Yes, I do earn revenue from my blog. Its simple, if you have good traffic, revenue will come. And for good traffic you need good content.

Q: hover.in was born out of constant frustration that most bloggers and web publishers face regarding their content presentation and monetization. How does hover.in help the bloggers and publishers?

A: Yes, that’s right. When I started getting traffic on trak.in, I wanted to have a monetization channel other than Google Adsense. One aspect about adsense is, it sometimes turns off visitors from your blog.

hover.in, being an in-text customized content and Ad delivery platform, helps bloggers to add revenue to their blog by showing in-text content & ads, without taking any real estate on the blog. hover.in automatically hyper-links keywords chosen by the publisher and shows relevant content & Ads when visitor hovers over that keyword.

Q: Not many know that you a photography enthusiast as well. There are many photo walks happening and you take an active part in most of them. India with its beauty all over, which are the best places and the best photos which you have captured. Can you share your experiences and a few photos with our readers?

A: Actually my love for photography started when I went to U.S and over years it has become kind of a creative outlet for me. Unfortunately, after coming to India I am unable to spare as much time as I would have liked. My startup and my blog keep me amply busy. 🙂

(See photowalk.trak.in for Arun’s photos)

Q: Many Indian companies were not affected by recession and a few of them posted profits. How does a startup survive in such times and what goes into making a startup a success in the long run?

A: You know for a startup it does not really make a difference unless you are out in the market looking for funding.

Startup Entrepreneurs are by nature frugal (they don’t have an option), and that’s what keeps a company afloat during tough times – Conserve cash as much as possible, cut expenses wherever you can and offer equity to employees. Recession is actually a good time when a startup can get talented people on board.

It would not be prudent for me to write on how to “make a startup a success in the long run“, because there are 100s of element that go in a startup success. Good Product, Investment, Market size & need, competition etc. etc. All these ingredients have to come together in right proportion for a startup to be successful.

Having said that, for me the most important aspect for a startup success is PEOPLE. If you have right people with right knowledge & attitude, you have already won half the battle.

Q: ‘India in 2020 – A Report’ was one of the posts that caught our eye. What’s your vision about India and which startups do you think will be a name to reckon in 2020?

A: It will be very unfair for me to talk about certain startups only, but if I’ve to name a couple of startups that have some real potential are LearnNext, Tringme and off-course my own startup hover.in . All these startups have a differentiating product in their own domain area . Having said that it is difficult to give a long term perspective on any startup, as market conditions (aka need/requirements) are changing very fast. The startups that will continuously evaluate will be the ones who will have a great chance to be successful in future.

One other Indian company (not a startup) that I think of is Zoho. That is the name to reckon with even now and 10 years down the line might be as well.

Talking about Vision for India in 2020. The current and the most important thing for us now is the Internet (read Broadband) Penetration which is extremely low. We have 10 different posts at Trak.in talking about Internet Penetration. We are moving ahead albeit slowly. Government is trying to push ahead. TRAI has recently declared that 2 Mbps is the minimum speed to be called as broadband. This is where government needs to start.

About Startups: Like I mentioned earlier, innovation will be the key. The Startups need to evolve themselves continuously with the changing market conditions.

Q: Trak.in is one of the top business blogs in India. You were having a successful career in the East Coast. What made you think that you need to return in your homeland and start Hover apart from managing Trak?

A: 2 reasons: There are abundant opportunities in India currently and my love specifically for Pune. I have been born and bought up here. I am a social person by nature and all my family & friends are here. I will always prefer my children growing up here in India and have the same values that I grew up with (although, things are changing, India is getting too westernized too fast).

Q: Do you earn revenue through your blog? How does one go about it?

A: Don’t start a blog just because everyone else around you is starting. If you are unsure, start micro-blogging on twitter/Facebook etc instead. That is far more gratifying than blogging.

90% people tend to quite blogging in a month or two, primary reason being no traffic. If you want to start a blog, be patient, write consistently and passionately.

Most importantly, dont compare yourselves with other bloggers and worse never try and copy what other bloggers are doing. That will not take you anywhere.

Q: Let’s conclude off with a few favorites.

Color: Black

Movie: The Last Samurai, Godfather, Finding Nemo

TV Show: Prison Break, Simpsons

Book: The Power of Now (Eckharte Tolle),

Time of Day: Aha…its Night time 🙂

Thanks a lot Arun for taking out time for this wonderful interview. Budding entrepeneurs and bloggers would have got a lot of insights from this wonderful interview. Do drop in your questions and feedback. We would love to have them.

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