Starting a business

How long does it take to establish a new business?

2011-06-21T10:25:00.001-07:00

It takes a lot of time. I dont say it takes a long time. But quite a lot of time. It might take a few thousand hours at least. And to get it done quickly, you need to divide that time among many individuals.
It is not easy.

Back to basics

2011-06-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

Now I am contemplating getting into the SaaS market as a provider. Need to build an infrastructure, get a engineer or two, a designer, an SME who can sell, a marketing guy, lawyer, accountant, VC etc. Check out http://www.johnvarghese.com/ for the details.

Location Based Services with the Cloud behind it is the future

2011-05-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

I think in the very near future there is going to be an expansion of cloud based services and location based services. I have personally had such great experiences with location based services using my iPhone. The possiblities are endless.

There are many examples of situations where people are forced into a situation where they need to access information that is very related to their current location. And although most of the time the information proabably comes from google, there will me more players in the market who will provide this information. And more often that not, these service providers will just use Amazon's EC2 or S3 or Google's App Engine instead of building their own data centers and maintaining them.

With the advent of the cloud, entrepreneurs can focus on their core competencies and not worry about maintaining the infrastructure to support their core competency - that will be someone else's core competency.

Vertical industy integration will be a hot market where open standards will rule. That's my prediction for the day :)

How to get products manufactured in China

2011-03-28T00:23:00.001-07:00

The average person does not know anyone or any company in China where one would be able to buy products from to sell in other countries. The is a reliable marketplace, though. It is called Alibaba. http://www.alibaba.com/

Use your talents

2011-03-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

If only the birds who sang the best were to sing, the forest would be a quiet place. The forest is teeming with life and energy. All kinds of plants and animals coexist interdependently to make the forest a great place for them to all live.

So when it comes to using your talents, do the best you can. You don't have to be the best, just make sure you do what you are capable of. You will be rewarded.

Big difference between walking and talking

2011-03-23T22:42:00.001-07:00

I am trying to get a few people who are unfamiliar with typing in Malayalam to type in Malayalam. They say it is very difficult and time consuming. I gave it a try. I am not very familiar with reading the language itself. But _it is hard_. Takes time.

I'm optimistic though. :)

Scare when using Malayalam keyboard

2011-03-23T17:22:00.001-07:00

Yeserday I had installed a foreign language keyboard on my Windows Vista laptop. It was very exciting to see it work. I am so glad Microsoft has made it easy, and I congratulate all the people who have worked toward a Unicode format for the Malayalam and other languages.

This morning I had to urgently send an email to a client before a meeting. I took out my computer and tried to login, but the computer said I got the password wrong. It happend four times. Then I rebooted, and fortunately it worked.

I figured out what I was doing wrong. I had inadvertantly set the default keyboard to Malayalam. I don't know why the reboot helped, because the default is the default - rebooted or not! I am glad it got fixed automatically. I immediately changed the default keyboard back to English. I guess I need to make sure I always set it back to English before I lock the laptop.

iPhone iPad development

2011-03-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

A little over two years ago, I jumped on the iPhone app band wagon. Made just a little bit of money. Not much, but it was interesting. Later on I decided to outsource the work and try and sell the products. It is not too easy, but I am learning different things about entreprenuership.

It is really interesting. At times it is downright scary because inexpensive resources who are far away are not very reliable. Over the last two years, the number of people who are familiar with development have become more available and therefore more competitive.

Learned that (as all entrepreneurs before me have invariable done, and even expressed), good resources have better quality and therefore are in higher demand. They may just go away to the next interesting project. It is a delicate balance.

Valentines day is coming up

2010-02-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

Flowers and teddy bears sell a lot this week apparently. I wonder what the people in those industries do the rest of the year. Do they just stack up for this time of the year and go back to normal sales the rest of the year?

Or do they do other things during the year and just ramp up for a month or so for this time of the year? Perhaps I should look at the "About Us" page on the websites of some of the ads on this page.

No easy task

2010-02-05T23:00:00.000-08:00

Starting a business is no easy task. Let me take that back. Starting it is pretty straightforward. Getting it through to success is really another thing. Here is a company I helped start. http://www.rentalic.com. The amount of effort I put in is pretty minimal, and that was hard. The two founders toiled day and night to get it to where it is now - which is not far.

We have just now reached the stage where we were all given our stock certificates. Man, it is really hard for the owner to keep all of us together and focused without paying money. It is like herding cats.

CSS studies going well

2007-11-09T11:12:00.001-08:00

Halfway through a CSS book I picked up at the library, I now have a pretty good handle on cascading style sheets. I was able to pick up an old jsp page and create a css file for it. The page now looks much prettier.

When it became pretty, I went ahead and created some java script for it as well. The old page would show a date and time of when it was last displayed in the browser. It is important to the functionality of the page. But now I have a js file that will help show how old the page is. I am not calculating hours/days etc, because after an hour the page is useless anyway and the contents need to be refreshed.

Here is the code from the js file.
// elapsed time calculator. Calculates the elapsed time in minutes.
// note that in js, a declaration with var is for a local, no var is global. in this case starttime is global.
function startTimer() {
starttime = new Date();
}

function updateAge() {
var now = new Date();
var elapsedtime = Math.abs(Math.round((starttime-now)/60000))
document.getElementById("elapsedtime").firstChild.nodeValue = elapsedtime;
}

In the generated html, I included the js in the section like this
<script language="JavaScript" src="elapsedtimecalculator.js"></script>

Then I modified the <body> tag to
<body onload="startTimer(); setInterval('updateAge()', 1000 )">

At the position where the updated time should show, I created a span element as a place holder for the updateAge function to refresh every minute. Like so:
<div id="ageofpage">Updated <span id="elapsedtime">0</span> minutes ago. </div>

That's not bad for a start. I will continue to read the CSS book, then brush up on some JS, then dive into PHP. I noticed that google pages are using strict html and not transitional. I will use strict too.

Next steps. Learning the infrastructure.

2007-11-06T13:56:00.000-08:00

I have started to brush up on HTML, and learn more CSS. I will next look into JavaScript and PHP.

So far, figured out that I there is transitional and strict xhtml. I will try to use Strict (and validate it that way with a validator) but then specify the pages to be transitional xhtml.

I have learned that CSS has a selector, declaration and values if memory serves me right. I am trying to read two books at the same time.

Should I even try the temporary file storage website?

2007-11-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

Does it really make any sense? After all Google provides virtually unlimited shared documents access. Sure, it is limited to four or five formats, but that is what most people use anyway. Today I saw the Google Analyst day video which showcased many of their products. I don't stand a chance against them.

Of course, Google is not the only competition out there. Every month Google is buying companies who they could not compete against. I am scaling down my business to see if I can figure out how to use php successfully. I will still continue to use this business concept as the basis for my learning.

Some of the Google products I like are Trends and iGoogle (especially the feeling lucky part of "add new tab")

Follow your heart says Steve Jobs. Everything else is secondary.

2007-11-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

Today I stumbled on what I think is a fascinating speech by Steve Jobs, one of the greatest businessmen alive. He talks about his birth, his college days (after which he dropped out), his philosophy of "connecting the dots" which he says will give you the confidence to do what you want to do; his starting of Apple with Woz, his getting fired from Apple, his confidence and his love for what he does.

He shows why getting fired from apple was one of the best things that happened to him.

This led to the most creative period of his life when he met his wife, started pixar, and started NeXT. Apple later bought Next, bringing him back to apple. He says don't settle - keep looking.

He also talks about living each day as though it was his last day. He says follow your heart and intuition.

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Starting with minimal functionality and html

2007-10-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Since php is mostly embedded in the html, helping to structure the flow of the process, I have arrived at the conclusion that I should start off with some simple HTML and then build the functionality described in my earlier posts.

Later on I will add CSS and more HTML to make the site look neat. I still have not signed up with blue host. I have my own little webserver on which I can try out the basics. I tried to check out the free ad-free hosting at x10hosting. But there are too many ads whenever I try to do anything. And as soon as I install a simple CMS with fantastico, there is not enough space or memory for it to run. What a rip off!

Starting to learn php

2007-10-24T23:50:00.000-07:00

Now that I have a handle on what kind of web hosting service to use, and a rough idea of the page flow, I need to figure out how to code it. While stumbling I ran into an attractive form builder called MachForm. I am not sure if I will use that. It allows you to pretty quickly build forms and store info in mysql.

From there I found that they use shareit to manage their payments. I will probably use pay pal initially if needed and later switch to credit cards if the volume demands it. I also found that the bbpress software they use is amazing in the cleanliness of its interface. I downloaded bbpress and checked out the php code.

Essentially this is what I have concluded. Most web pages are just html. The PHP tags in the html can be used to generate html dynamically. The php program can be independently complete.

How the temporary storage web site will work

2007-10-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

For the sake of convenience let’s call my future website amujo.com. Amujo does not mean anything. It is just a name I have chosen for convenience.

Many web hosts provide the facility to have unlimited sub-domains on my domain. This prompted me to initially consider dynamically creating a sub-domain for each user who registers. So if the user fcr logged in and uploaded files, they would go to fcr.amujo.com. His family and friends could navigate to fcr.amujo.com and simply download the files. I later found that on Linux based web hosts, it is not possible to programmatically create a sub-domain. It is possible on Windows based web hosts, ironically. I would have to go through control panel. Obviously, I will be unable to do this for all users who login to my site.

In a way that saved me some time. I don’t have to worry about getting that working now at least. So basically if there is a public_html folder, I suppose each user’s files will be stored in www.amujo.com/public_html/storage/username. The storage directory will be aliased as upload.amujo.com as well as download.amujo.com. In order to upload files, the user will have to be registered and logged in. Once logged in, the user will be able to see

My upload history

Upload files now

Upgrade to premium account

etc.

Upon selecting the “Upload files now” option the user will be taken to a file upload page. Here the user will be asked to click on browse buttons to select files to upload. I think that I should have a file uploader program that will take care of uploading the files in the background. That leads me to ask, why doesn’t Firefox come up with a standards based background uploader that includes the ability to resume broken uploads?

Once the user has uploaded his files to his slice of my website, he can get a link to send to his friends. He can also get this link from his upload history in case he loses it. I am debating whether amujo will send email because of the limit my web host might have. On the one hand, it is a simple matter for the user to copy and paste a url to send an email. On the other hand, it is far more convenient to receive an email which he can simply forward. I guess I will go with the email option and see how it turns out.

Anyway, when the family gets the email, they will just click on the link that says download.amujo.com/username/file1. This begs the question, what if multiple files were uploaded. I could have the email have multiple links to file1, file2, file3 etc. Or I could have the link in the email be download.amujo.com/username/IALDJ33-AVJAER039, a key that will display only the files that were uploaded with one submit session.

What if the user who uploaded is a premium service member and wants his files organized in folders? This means I have to provide the ability to manage uploaded files in an explorer like interface (only for premium users, I would imagine, although I need to see if everyone should have this ability).

And if this premium user wants to distribute a specific subset of his files, then should the downloader be allowed to view and download all his files? Obviously that should not be allowed. So the interface should allow the uploading user to drag and drop a bunch of files into a sharing bucket. This bucket will provide visibility to the files in this bucket only. This bucket is what will be sent to the family and friends. When they click on their link they will see the bucket called “Google acquisition presentation” or “Trick or treat photos” with only the files that belong to that buck.

This bucket feature need not be restricted to premium users. All users should be able to create buckets of files, the link to which is what they will send to their friends. The downloader can then have access to the bucket he needs to access. Access to view the contents of the bucket will be via the complicated key in the link. I am yet to consider if the downloader needs to be a logged-in member. The advantage of having the downloader log in is that the uploader can choose who will see the contents of his shared bucket. Perhaps it can be a combination. You could either have the key in the link, or be authorized to view the bucket.

Factors in choosing my web site hosting service

2007-10-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

Basically the business is a website that provides temporary storage space for files. There are times when you want to quickly distribute files to your friends or colleagues. For example, you are about to go into a meeting and want to have all the participants see a spreadsheet, but you don’t want to email it to everyone. You could quickly upload it to my site and it will stay there for your friends and colleagues to download. You might want to send your photos to your family far away, but you don’t want to use a photo hosting site because they don’t allow you to download your photos at full resolution. You could upload the pictures to my site and have your family download it.

The deal. The files will basically remain there for only a few days. The default duration when you select an upload will be one or two days. The other choices would be one week, two weeks, and a month. To keep it there for longer than a month you would have to pay like 10 dollars a year.

Pricing. By default you will be allowed to store 1 GB of files for free. If you have a premium account you would get 1GB for $10 a year. Other choices of premium accounts would be 3GB for $20 a year, 5GB for $30 a year, 10GB for $50 a year. Of course this does not consider transfer rates. I don’t know what kind of limit to place on that if any. It may not be needed.

While my plan currently says I will have premium accounts, in reality I might not have premium accounts. I might leave everything to be free and have a 1 GB limit. I am undecided on that.

Limitations. I have been considering various website hosting companies. Many of them offer 300 GB space and 3000GB transfer per month for around $8 per month. While this may sound good enough I cannot know what the caveats are. For example, reading the forums of these sites I found that just about everyone limits emails to no more than 50 per hour. Upon special request it can be increased to 500 outgoing emails per hour. That’s the top limit. I don’t anticipate having to send that many emails. If I do reach that limit, it is probably a good time to upgrade to a more expensive dedicated server account anyway. But the fact that worries me is that they do not mention this “50 emails per hour” limitation in any of their feature lists or Terms and Policies. What else are they hiding that may harm my business?

Concerns. Another fact that causes concern is that if the website has a high CPU utilization then the host will turn off my website. That would be a very bad time to turn off the website. And there is apparently no way to know how much CPU my website is using. Based on the business model I have, I don’t anticipate the CPU load being too much either. Most of the load will be on the storage space.

Learning PHP. Since one of my main aims in having this web site is to learn PHP, I will be looking for a host that supports PHP 5. It looks like many web hosts still only support PHP 4. Apparently there have been great strides in performance improvements and security enhancements from PHP 4 to 5. PHP 6 is on the way and php.net is discontinuing support for PHP 4 at the end of this year.

So essentially if the site is good for the storage and transfer rates they promise, I should be good to go with one of these web hosts that provide plenty of storage for $8 per month. This is for linux based hosts only btw. I will probably go with bluehost.

Want to get into a web site business

2007-10-23T11:37:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking for some time to start a simple web based solution. I have had many different ideas over time. I recently decided to settle with a simple solution. I have been debating whether I should disclose this idea on a blog. This will probably allow someone else to steal the thunder.

It may not be such a bad idea for someone else to steal the thunder. I don't have a business plan yet, but I downloaded FreeMind and conjured up some mind mapping relations on how to deploy it and how to price it. It may be unlikely to earn much money with this without putting in much effort. But I want to learn how to use php to build complete web sites. So hopefully at the end of this I will have learned PHP.

I will soon disclose on this blog what the idea is and how I plan to implement it. And I will also share the methods I will and have been trying to use.