Tag Archives: web-2.0

ShopSocially focuses on retailers with new offering “SocialConnect”

In Depth, Overviews, , , , ,

(Pune-based Startup ShopSocially, whose launch was covered on PuneTech last year has recently been in the news again for their launch of SocialConnect, a product for online retailers to easily add social shopping features to their existing e-commerce site. Suneetha talked to Samir Palnitkar and Sunil Arora of ShopSocially, and this article starts with an overview of ShopSocially (again), and then goes on to their latest offerings, and future plans.)

Buying a camera or a laptop and looking for some advice? Referrals seem to be taking over shopping decisions now more than ever, and the web is a key player in this activity. It’s this concept that ShopSocially has leveraged successfully by integrating the concepts of online shopping and facebook. Samir Palnitkar and Sunil Arora talk about how ShopSocially has come on the online social shopping map. Samir Palnitkar, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur, is the President of ShopSocially and Sunil Arora, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur is a Founding Member who now looks after the technology aspects of the company.

Sam says it all started with a thought about harnessing social networking. Jai Rawat (CEO of ShopSocially) had spent several years in the ecommerce and online shopping space. As social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter were becoming popular, Jai realized that social recommendations via Facebook and Twitter would become a key traffic and revenue driver for e-commerce. These thoughts were the foundation behind ShopSocially. In the offline space, we tend to consult friends before making a buying decision. Why not do the same in the online space? That led to the idea behind ShopSocially set up in 2009.

You just need to register a free account with ShopSocially and shoot your shopping questions or declare your impressions on the platform. Why waste countless hours researching stuff and reading anonymous reviews? Of course, this works best when you have lots of ShopSocially Friends. Your Facebook friends automatically become your ShopSocially Friends when they join in. You can also earn badges or become ‘Shopping Gods’ depending on the intensity and frequency of your activity.

And how does it work for a retailer?

“Retailers can integrate with ShopSocially’s social commerce platform to harness the tremendous power of social recommendations. ShopSocially helps turn every purchase into a conversation and a social endorsement driving significant ‘friend referred’ traffic back to the retailer site. Retailers can get 2% to 6.5% incremental sales by integrating with the ShopSocially platform.”

ShopSocially has evolved quite a lot its model. It started off as an end-user site. Then they realized that the ShopSocially platform was highly attractive for retailers who wanted to socially enable their websites. So they launched Social Connect, to allow retailers to easily plug in to the ShopSocially platform. SocialConnect allows the retailer to add social features into the existing e-commerce platforms. Specifically, after a customer has purchased something, they are encouraged to share this purchase with their facebook friends (i.e. recommend this item to their other friends).

In addition, ShopSocially also automatically creates a new “Shoppers” tab on the company’s facebook fan page, where website where prospective customers can check whether any of their existing facebook friends have bought anything from this merchant, and if yes, what they’ve been buying, and what the reviews are.

ShopSocially started working with retailers in a fixed fee model but soon realized that it was easier for retailers to work with a performance-based or a subscription-based model; so quickly changed their pricing to meet the needs of retailers. Samir quotes an experience here. “We were thrilled when one of our retailers saw an increase of nearly $1 million in revenues per year by integrating with the ShopSocially solution.”

By now, I was getting convinced that it was all limited to the web user, but no, ShopSocially is already seeing beyond that parameter. Samir tells me that ShopSocially is as relevant for a customer outside the web precincts. “Yes. Social recommendation is how we buy most of our products, whether online or offline. In the near future, ShopSocially plans to bring product sharing to mobile devices. That will allow shoppers to share offline purchases with friends.”

So what about India specific plans? Sunil Arora says “In the next few months, we will be rolling out our solution in India. We expect retailers to embrace ShopSocially really quickly. Currently, ShopSocially is the only company in the world that offers a comprehensive social commerce suite for retailers. There are other competitors, but no company offers a suite that integrates with the most common user touch points, order confirmation page, Facebook FAN page and order confirmation email. Check this out here http://shopsocially.com/partners

Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter create a convenient way for shoppers to share their purchases with friends. Social networks have made sharing simple. While ShopSocially uses other media such as Google and Email, Facebook and Twitter play an important part in the ShopSocially strategy. Technology wise, ShopSocially has an exceptionally talented team that has built a world class platform on some of the best technologies in the world, including MongoDB, Redis, Celeryd, Python, Ajax, Javascript and others.

So what is the future map?

“ShopSocially will continue to add other social components that benefit retailers. These components will increase sharing and drive incremental traffic to retailer sites. Another dimension is integration with popular shopping carts such as Magento, Shopify and osCommerce. ShopSocially will continue to make integration simpler by offering pre-integrated plug-ins for various shopping carts. We feel that ShopSocially has the opportunity to become a global billion dollar company. We do not need a large team (maybe < 100 people), but we will continue to handpick the brightest minds to work on the exciting problems that we are solving daily.”

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

In Depth, Interview, , , , ,

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.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Overview of HTML5: CSI Pune Lecture – May 31

Events, , , , ,

What: CSI Pune lecture on HTML5 by Swarraj Kulkarni, Principal Architect, Cognizant, Pune.
When: Monday May 31, 2010, 6pm-7:30pm
Where: 1st Floor Lecture Hall, I2IT (International Institute of Information Technology), Hinjewadi
Registration and Fees: Free for CSI members and students, Rs 100 for others. Register here and pay on the spot.

Click on the logo to see all PuneTech posts about CSI Pune
Click on the logo to see all PuneTech posts about CSI Pune

HTML5

HTML5 is the next generation of HTML, to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in based Rich Internet Application (RIA) development technologies such as Adobe Flash, Silverlight, JavaFx, etc. The new version will have capabilities of HTML v4.0 plus additional features like DOM management, offline storage database, document editing, drag-drop, etc. This talk will be focused on salient features of HTML5 and how it will influence the next generation RIA development process.

This lecture is useful for all IT professionals and students especially for those, who are seeking to have deep penetration in web and internet related activities in years to come. HTML 5 is probably going to be tomorrow’s mainstream platform for web development – so this lecture is surely going to be an eye opener!

About the Speaker – Swarraj Kulkarni

Swarraj has more than 17 years of experience in the IT industry. At Cognizant, he is working as a Principal Architect for BFS-Technology Consulting Group. BFS (Banking & Financial Services) is at the centre of any activity whether it is a commercial or manufacturing. BFS has a very vast array of direct activities and derived activities. Multiple technologies get involved in these services. Being an Enterprise Architect, he focuses on multiple technologies, architecture patterns and enterprise adoption of upcoming technologies including Web 2.0, SOA, etc.

He has been closely following Web 2.0 in general and its adoption in enterprises to solve business problems.

Event report: Mozilla for you Business

Event Report, Featured, , , , , ,

(Last weekend, Pune played host to Arun Ranganathan, Technology Evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation, Seth Bindernagel, Director of Localization, and Axel Hecht, who co-ordinates localization from a technical perspective, and Ragavan Srinivasan, from Mozilla Labs. We had a meeting of the Mozilla Folks and the Pune Open Coffee Club. POCC member Gurminder Singh, posted this “event report” on the Pune Startups mailing list. It is reproduced here with permission.)

The Mozilla Foundation logo
Image via Wikipedia

The whole session proved to be very interesting. Here is short summary about session on 21st/ Feb 2010 at SICSR Pune.

It Started with Arun’s presentation which covered

Open web platform

Open web platform does not mean open source, it means the standards on which web is based should be open. for e.g PHP is open standard and used by facebook to build million dollar business, Google supports and extensively uses open standards. Organizations should involve in defining and shaping open standards while keep in view the way web is evloving.

Using this open web platform million dollar businesses can be built.

The HTML5 standard has many revolutionary features to change the how people interact with web. One of them is Video

Future of Video on Web

Currently there is no standard format of video on web. We can see avi, mov, mp4, flv etc floating all over. People mistakenly assume flash to be standard because of its widespread use. Flash is a proprietary format from Adobe and lacks the open standard definition which makes it hard for Open standard browsers like Firefox to support it. Therefore HTML5 is coming up with new open format for video “Ogg Theora”. Recently  after a lot of community pressure YouTube announced support for Ogg theora format.

In HTML5 using elements like canvas, video and SVG a video can be treated as data and manipulated on runtime. for eg user can put a video inside a video on the fly. It can be used to make ajax calls on video and running it without any third party software.

Firefox capturing device orientation

With new hardware capabilities like accelerometer very common in devices, firefox has come up with new api to capture device orientation events. This capability can be used for better user experience detecting the motion.

Fonts for web

There was small discussion about a company name typekit.com . Typekit provides user with all the fancy fonts which till today were shaped in some image editing software and pasted as image on website.

GeoLocation

Firefox 3.6 is having support for geolocation api. Geolocation identifies the users location and points it on google maps. Under the hood it uses google gears service.

Web3GL

Future firefox versions (maybe 3.8 , 3.9) will have support for 3D graphics. This is based on web3gl component which interacts with OpenGL to render graphics on screen.

The Mozilla-based Business Idea competition

At the end of session Seth, Arun, Ragavan and Axel organized a small contest where in audience was divided in 10 teams of 3. Each team was given 5 minutes to come up with business idea and present it to audience. Presentation time was 1 min and after questioning about business model etc a winner was decided.

Out of the ten business ideas, these 4 were in finals:

  • Typekit.com for indian languages – typekit.in
  • e-learning classrooms for physically impaired – using video in video capabilities of HTML5
  • Making a video using Mashup – e.g Google maps,text to speech audio
  • Using Geolocation api from firefox – giving user local search results like restaurants

The winner was: e-learning classrooms for physically impaired.

It was great experience to interact with team. We are hungry for more such sessions. Thanks for coming and thanks for reading this through 🙂

About the Author – Gurminder Singh

By profession, Gurminder is a System programmer (C, Linux kernel,Wireless Networks) and has a hobbyist he is a Django, Firefox extensions, and web-2.0 developer. His interests are building useful products(Mashups) using web2.0 components

He is learning new technologies with his experiment http://www.tutit.net. It is a social tuting place, where a user can publicaly store tutorial bookmarks. It is hosted on Google App Engine using Django, Jquery and Dojo.

Gurminder is on twitter as @sgurminder, and can be reached at sgurminder@gmail.com

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Pune Google Technologies User Group (GTUG) meet: Seminar on Google Wave – Feb 6

Events, , ,

What: Pune Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents a seminar on Google Wave
When: Saturday, 6 February, 5pm to 8pm
Where: Synerzip Softech – L5 (Terrace), Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Opposite Vanadevi mandir, Karve Nagar
Registration and Fees: The event is free for all, no registration required.
Link: http://blog.punegtug.org/2010/01/seminar-on-google-wave-intro-gadgets.html

Pune Google Technologies User Group GTUG logo
Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the Pune GTUG

Google Wave

Pune GTUG presents a Seminar on Google Wave – The new communication and collaboration platform on the web. Seminar Topics:

  • Introduction to Google Wave
  • Building Extensions to Google Wave
  • Building Gadgets – Walk through of building a Gadget
  • Building Robots – Walk through of building a Java based Robot
  • Using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and EXT GWT to create polished Gadgets
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

“Drupalkar” – an initiative to disseminate Drupal Love to Pune colleges

Featured, Pune City, , , , ,

(This post gives an overview of a new initiative by the Pune Drupal Community to increase Drupal awareness amongst Pune college students. It was originally posted on drupal.org by Dipen Chaudhary and is reposted here for wider dissemination.)

Overview

drupal icon, svg version
Click on the logo to see all PuneTech posts about Drupal. Image via Wikipedia

In the last pune drupal user meetup ( 26th dec, 09) we all agreed to the need of more drupal awareness as a whole and one of the ways we discussed was to tap the interest early at the student level. To this effect project code named drupalkar (having both hindi and marathi connotations) was planned in which seasoned drupal developers will donate 1 hr to a student gathering in a college to spread drupal joy/way of web development. Approach here is simple, in that 1 hr drupal developer would demo how a website can be made from scratch in 1 hour in form a interactive demo and giving out more ideas and possibilities at the end of the demo. The same would be followed in many colleges with different developers donating time with different demo’s (or maybe same, if one works out to be exceptionally good to catch attention)

Approach

Approach to reach out to students is simple, show something they can make in an hour rather than a speech/talk on why drupal, how drupal? as the talks get incoherent ( its upto the drupal developer conducting the demo session to open up for Q/A which I strongly recommend) and over the time ineffective. We would pickup models from internet and show students how to make that site in drupal and how easy web development is with drupal.

Pilot

To pilot the drupalkar project we decided to pick 5 colleges (list pending and hopefully will be sorted in comments) and 5 drupal volunteers, after which we will map colleges to drupal volunteers and let the individual drupal developer run the show, with some syncing among developers over whats being demo’ed, what was the response etc. As the events would be linear we can adapt and evolve from the feedback of the initial events.

Drupal Volunteers (Drupalkar’s)

  • Dipen Chaudhary
  • Rajeev Karajgikar
  • Parsad Shirgaonkar
  • Nikhil Kale
  • Abhishek Nagar

Colleges

  • PICT (TBC)
  • COEP (TBC)
  • Wadia College (TBC)
  • Narangkar (not sure of the name; TBC)
  • Symbiosis ( Abhishek to confirm)

College Coordinators

  • Arun Nair
  • Amit Karpe
  • Vipul (PICT contact)

Timeline

Tentative timeline for the pilot to be executed is 5-6 weeks, which might be adapted and updated on this page for clarification.

Notes

Drupalkar currently is only for pune and maybe taken over to new cities in India by drupal evangelists else where. I am cross posting this to India group for feedback on the approach etc.

Any comments, feedback on the approach or volunteering is important for success of drupalkar, most importantly we need students and organizers to patch colleges in for the drupalkar pilot.

(Comments on this post are closed. Please comment at the original website)

Pune Drupal Developers / Users Meet – 26 Dec

Events, , , ,

What: Pune Drupal Developers Meet
When: Saturday, 26 December, 4:30pm-6:30pm
Where: Richmond Ventures, C-30, Liberty Society – Phase 2, Behind Baskin Robbins Icecream, Near Pizza Hut, North Main Road, Koregoan Park, Pune.
Registration and Fees: This is a free event. No registration necessary. Please call : 9822602183 (Nikhil) / 9850504668 ( Rajeev) for more information about the meeting and directions.

Drupal
Click on the image to see all PuneTech articles about Drupal. Image via Wikipedia

Details

The Agenda for the meeting is :
– Networking of Pune’s Drupal community
– Discussion on Drupal based Social Networking sites
– Discussion on Zen theme usage.

Anyone interested in knowing more about Drupal is also invited.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Pune Drupal Developers/Users meeting

Events, , , ,
Drupal
Image via Wikipedia

What: Get-together of Pune’s Drupal development/user community
When: Sunday, 30th August, 4pm
Where: Richmond Ventures, C-30, Liberty Society – Phase 2, Behind Baskin Robbins Icecream, Near Pizza Hut, North Main Road, Koregoan Park
Registration and Fees: This meeting is free for all to attend. No registration required.

Details:

The Agenda for the meeting is :

  • Networking of Pune’s Drupal community
  • Discussion on Drupal based Social Networking sites
  • Discussion on Zen theme usage.

This is organized by Nikhil Kala and Rajeev Karajgikar. Anyone interested in knowing more about Drupal is also invited.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Actionable Insights into the World of Indian Startups – Abinash Tripathy’s blog

Featured, People, , ,

Abinash Tripathy is credited with building the best web-2.0 team in India (for Zimbra which sold to Yahoo! for US$350million.)
Abinash Tripathy is credited with building the best web-2.0 team in India (for Zimbra which sold to Yahoo! for US$350million.)

Abinash Tripathy’s blog, “Insights into the World of Indian Startups,” is a must read for all Pune Technology professionals.

Abinash is a serial entrepreneur who is now on the loose in Pune. Most recently, he spent a few years building Zimbra from scratch in India, created one of the best web-2.0 teams in India, a team that build a product that was acquired by Yahoo! for US$350 million.  Abinash quit Yahoo! in February 2009, and is going down the path of entrepreneurship once again. He is an advisor for Enterux, the company whose English Seekho product was one of the highlights of proto.in Pune.

In his own words, Abinash represents:

the new generation of Global Indians who spent 10 years in the US in the High Tech Industry and decided to return to India to be close to family and to be a change agent who will help young Indians understand the power of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Having decided to spend the rest of my life in India, it is also in my interest to be a change agent (not just a voice) in the new, modern, developed India.

For the last few months, he has been writing a blog focused on the startup ecosystem in India. On the blog, he promises to be “highly opinionated (fair warning)  and a straight shooter who likes to base his theories on personal real world experience,” which should be very welcome insights for any entrepreneur.

Here are a few excerpts from his posts on the blog.

In “Building a Kickass Team Part II“, he writes:

4. Reward Performance  –  Anyone that has worked in tech and has a thorough understanding of this business knows that the output of one great engineer adds more value to the company than the output of one hundred average engineers.   Unlike the services industry which prides itself with the numbers of warm bodies it has on its rolls, the best tech startups pride themselves for being able to create huge value with the least number of people.   We all live in a capitalist society and the laws of capitalism are designed to reward the best.

In “What Ails the Startup Ecosystem in India,” among a host of other insightful things, he says:

If you are not a hacker, start today.   Stop wasting time on Drupal or other CMS platforms and start real programming.   ASP and .NET don’t count either. Learn real programming languages like Java, C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby.   Start by contributing to open source projects to measure yourself against the best in the world.  We need lots of this breed for the startup ecosystem to grow and thrive.   We absolutely cannot rely on the government or our esteemed institutions like the IIT to produce hackers.   Hackers are mostly self taught creative geniuses who code for pleasure.

Tech startup founders need to be people with very deep technology backgrounds as well.  There is a reason our industry is called Hi-Tech.   If founders lack this key ingredient, then they are going to hire duds who cannot deliver.

Read the whole post, it is quite interesting.

You should subscribe to the blog, and also follow Abinash on twitter (and unless you’ve been living in a cave, you should know why you should be on twitter.)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Can Orkut/Facebook kill Flickr?

Featured, Miscellaneous, , ,
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

(Vibhushan Waghmare co-founder of Pune-based marketing analytics startup, MQuotient, wrote this post, titled “Orkut – Facebook as Photo Sharing Sites” on his blog, and is reproduced here with permission.)

Orkut and Facebook are the most popular social networking sites in India. Photo sharing has been a prime feature for both these socio-nets. Often we find friends uploading albums with photos from their recent trip/vacation to some place or some events in their life. These updates are actively tracked among the friends’ network and commenting and tagging of photos is quite common.

Image representing Orkut as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Given this, I am surprised that neither of these two socio-nets has a feature of image search among the friends’ network and public photos on these sites.

Often when we are planning a trip or vacation to some place, we try to search online about the destination. I would always love to know if any of my connection on either Orkut or Facebook has been there and has put up any photos of the place. A friend’s word would always carry more credibility than the most authentic commercial profile page/wiki for the place. In fact, a few days back Orkut themselves had run an online ad campaign wherein they showed one animated user talking about the great trip/vacation he had and other asking him to upload photos from this trip/vacation on Orkut. So I am quite sure that photo sharing (especially of specific locations) is a big traffic booster for Orkut and Facebook.

Image representing Flickr as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

However right now there are no means to find out if there are any photos of interest available on these socio-nets to which I have access. I have to turn to proper photo-sharing networks like Flickr.com and try my luck with photos from some stranger with whom I might never be able to connect (Yahoo! sucks in all its social network efforts :) ). This one application can overnight convert Orkut and Facebook into a serious competitor for all photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

This image search facility should allow me to search for photos to which I have access on these socio-nets, i.e. photos from my friends or photos which have been made public purposefully by their owners. This search can be based on tags/album name or whichever image search technology is best suited. I am sure Google with its best search technologies will not have much of an issue in developing an image search for Orkut. Besides, Google maps/Google world should be integrated with Orkut and geo-tagging of photos should be allowed. It will only make image search more accurate when searching for photos of a specific location.

While privacy has always been a key concern for these socio-nets, and more so with photos, this search facility needs to be very particular in searching only among those photos to which the searcher’s account have access to. Facebook has the famous privacy bug still unresolved wherein if any of your friend comments on a photo from a Facebook user who is not your friend, you still get to see the entire album of photos of that person. Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor’s private photos from Facebook had leaked out once because of this bug, however still it remains unresolved. Wonder if it is now an intentional bug that Facebook wants to be alive to drive more page-views.

As a plain user of these socio-nets, I sense a need here for an application which can provide this image search facility. I hope some Product Manager from either Google of Facebook listens to this and evaluates the opportunity. But before that, what do you guys think of it? Is there an opportunity for building such an application for Orkut or Facebook?

About the author – Vibhushan Waghmare

Vibhushan is a co-founder of MQuotient, a Pune-based startup that uses cutting-edge quantitative analytics and mathematical modeling to build software products for marketing analytics, and in general deliver solutions for enterprise marketing challenges. Before co-founding MQuotient, Vibhushan was managing the Search product at Yahoo! India. He is an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and an Electrical Engineer from REC, Nagpur. He has also held positions with Amdocs & Cognizant Technology Solutions. Check out his blog, his linked-in page, or his twitter page for more about him.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]