I hope, some day I can do a sane article about LxiDD but for now, let’s be content with the fact that this is my latest work. I started LxiDD this January (2013) and we ‘released’ our first version in February.

By March, we got our first three customers and we sorta became ramen profitable by April. We’re hard at work to have a gradual curve to our revenue trajectory and we’re very confident that by end of this year, 2013, LxiDD will be a profitable company.

We have a very small and nimble team, working for the good of our ever growing network of designers and developers.

LxiDD is a curated network of the best indie designers, developers, and creatives on the web, with exclusive access to top shelf clients looking for the best talent.

We’re Hiring

We’re looking for good web developers with 2+ years of professional web development experience. Developers willing to experiment, not afraid to make mistakes and learn from it. Developers who have in-depth experience with one or more of the following programming languages – Python, Ruby, Clojure, Scala, etc.

Of course, we are looking for developers who do not need to be ‘managed’ or hand-hold on what needs to be done, not afraid to voice their concerns with the team, willing to give advice when needed and listen to suggestions for the right cause.

For more details, benefits and how to apply, visit our Jobs page.

Why not tell your friends that LxiDD is hiring.

Otherwise, you should register today, fill in all your details and be part of the LxiDD Network and work on interesting projects from invite-only premium clients.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

Yes, as expected Iron Man 3 was an awesome movie. The movie opens as a narrative by Tony Stark to Dr. Bruce Banner, a story that started way before Tony Stark became Iron Man. I won’t be talking about the movie, I’ll let you enjoy that at a theatre near you.

So, after the Avengers event in New York, Tony became obsessive and began prototyping lots of Iron Man suits. He moves on to another model and never have ‘the one’ perfect Iron Man suit.

Through-out the movie, you’ll see that lots of Iron Man suits were used, almost all disposable and another one always ready. None of the suits were the perfect one. Even his latest best, the Mark 42 had to be done away with, serving its purpose in the finale fight.

As a Startup Entrepreneur, be ready to build lots of prototypes, never get stuck to a single idea, move on to the next until you can get better and better with your product. Be obsess about your product, build it, re-build it, break it and then build it again. Once you have something, bring them to the battle to fight – open them to public in the real world.

Enjoy the Movie.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

As technology advances, examples being cloud technology, an increase in viewers of online television and online gaming follows, and an apparent need was identified by the FCC for significant enhancements in the infrastructure of internet providers to support such advancements.

How Does the Initiative Affect You

Although the advantages are easy to identify, the cons of the operation are minimal but they do affect most consumers. Internet providers are now going to have to make further enhancements that may not have been deemed necessary to sustain, or promote, their business for at least a few more years to come. However, this initiative launched by the FCC requires them to fast track these enhancements, which are unplanned, and rather significant investments for a majority of the internet service providers.

The bottom line is that this investment, although it is one that would very probably be lucrative and beneficial for these organizations in the long run, would most probably have to be incurred by you, the consumer. Most organizations would incur a massive cut on their short term profits. This hit couldn’t have come at a worse time, especially because some of these organizations, who didn’t have much to show their shareholders during the recession, were finally looking to show profits and make up for lost revenue.

But now, with the FCC initiative in effect, these organizations are anticipating at least a couple more quarters, if not more, of slim profits. To increase their margin of profits, these organizations are most likely going to revise their pricing strategy, even if it means the loss of a few customers here and there.

Not Every Thing is Gloomy

Although this initiative might mean higher costs for us, it also comes with several benefits. For one, faster internet! Picture a doorknob on your door and imagine it to be the internet speed you have access to right now. With the proposed initiative, the speeds you’d be able to access would be the size of the entire door. Imagine what you can achieve with such enhanced services. Such is the transformation that would take place globally.

Sharing files, accessing information and communication would be streamlined across the board. Although in the US, we already have access to high speed internet thanks to fiber optic technology, it’s still hard for us to share information on a global level because most countries are not up to par with the services our ISPs provide.

Even though various countries, especially the Scandinavians, Norway and Sweden in particular, are investing in the latest technology in an attempt to gain level, huge parts of the globe are still lagging far behind. The FCC’s latest initiative gives the rest of the world an opportunity to catch up with the United States and the handful of other countries which set the bar high when it comes to high-speed internet services.

The Speed Bump on the Way

The FCC initiative might be rosy for some, gloomy for others but one thing is certain. Internet service providers do not appreciate being regulated at the best of times, and the fifth principle, which prevents them from controlling content and applications on the Internet, that is being proposed definitely won’t sit well with them.

Conclusion

The raging debate about the Internet’s future and how it should be regulated, if it needs to be or should be regulated at all, looks set to rage on for quite a while yet. Although a resolution in favor of either scenario seems doubtful at best, the most likely outcome is a drawn-out compromise where certain aspects of the World Wide Web will be regulated in the future while others will continue to operate much in the way they have always done.

Image Courtesy: Pixel Perfect Digital.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

I was a voracious consumer of RSS feeds. It all started during the early days of the blogging revolution (the early 2000′s). I started with FeedDemon (Windows) then continued to NetNewsWire (Mac) and finally landed on Google Reader. I even wrote an article on – How to squeeze the best out of NetNewsWire.

For quite a while I’ve been simplifying my life a lot. My digital life is one that I’ve been experimenting a lot with – reducing my time spent on apps, emails, and ignoring a lot of stuffs. One such exercise is to stop actively seeking information via RSS feeds and I have been successful in reducing my interaction with Google Reader a lot.

The news that Google is shutting down one of its ‘popular service’ – Google Reader was kind of a good news for me. I had mixed feelings and I did searched for other alternatives, even tried digging up my purchased app to see which Desktop App I should use.

However, Today I finally decided to stop seeking information by subscription. With the death of Google Reader, I’m retiring my usage of RSS feeds. Let’s see how this goes. If a news is news-worthy, it will pop-up somewhere and I’ll definitely know about it.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

Like any other established institutions in India, the Schools follow a rather bureaucratic and pain-in-the-rear approach to new admissions. Admission time is also the time, when everyone involved with the schools are at their bossy-best, willing to dust off all their ranks and files to show-off “who they are and what they can do.”

Anyway, without going into the details of the discrepancies in the schools in India, let me tell you the story of how I used technology to streamline my daughter’s admission. I wanted to involved relatives, friends and family without overwhelming them, so I needed a solution that is easy, simple and no-learning-needed approach to keep track of the progress.

Let’s get my daughter admitted to a decent school in Bangalore, India.

Yes, I went to lots of ‘Education Fair’, stood in lines for hours in the hot Indian Summer, visited a hell lot of schools to check them out, met with teachers, roam around the campus, even talked to few students. Besides that, I tracked, labeled and measured my actions and outcomes with Trello and mapped the locations with Google Maps. The mobile version of Trello (iOS and Android) is an awesome app and everyone involved really liked it.

My daughter outgrew her playgroup.

My daughter, Laaija, celebrated her 4th birthday on Dec 11, 2012. She is now ready for a ‘real’ school. She has already outlined the kind of school she would like to go to. It is a list of strange, funny and cute (at-least to us) criteria and we know what she meant. No, you won’t want to know that list.

Last October, I had initialized the quest for her school. We wanted a good established one and not necessarily some fancy ‘international’ school (without explicitly excluding them), should not be very far from our residence. I should be able to get there within 30 minutes in the typical Bangalore Traffic. It should also not be next-door so she can learn to be independent, travel and enjoy her school.

Trello, Trello & Trello

I treated it like a Project – steps, processes, labels, issues – a flow borrowed from the Kanban Method, which Trello is very good at.

I created 6 core boards:

1. Inbox – Everything is dropped here first – school names, location on Google maps, notes on people’s review, facilites and amenities available etc.
2. Considered – All schools which we considered applying were dragged into the “Considered” Board. We try to add as many details as possible here.
3. Applied – This is the board for all schools where we applied for our daughter’s admission.
4. Accepted – Schools which have accepted us. It’s now our decision to pick the school, to get admitted or not.
5. Rejected by Us – The schools rejected by us irrespective of the selection of the schools. The Cards in this List can come from “Inbox”, “Applied” or “Accepted”. It’s not surprising that this List holds the most number of Cards.
6. Rejected by School – Of course, quite a few of the schools rejected our application. This List holds all those cards.

Labels

I used few simple labels to help with the choices. A card can have one or many of these labels. The labels were

1. Transport (yes)
2. CBSE
3. ICSE
4. IGCSE
5. Girls
6. Co-Ed

Collaboration

I invited few of our relatives, friends and family members to this Board. They were told to install the Trello Smartphone apps, so they can do it easily on their phones and not worry about being totally involved.

The idea is to take notes and just write-down details while visiting a School or just seeing one while I travel around Bangalore, made it easy to sort them, work on them later. Writing down help me free up my brain to concentrate on my work and not worry about my daughter’s admission all the time. Same goes for my wife, relatives, friends and other family members to help us, without the need to indulge in useless talks, gossips and lousy phone calls.

Yes, I finally got my daughter admitted few days back and she is excited about her new school. We hope she will like it and have fun with her new school.

I created a Public Template of the Trello Board if you wish to use it – Pick a New School. You should change the List Names, Labels to cater to your requirements.

Besides the activities that I cannot ignore, Trello really helped me get our daughter admitted and freed up quite a bit of my effort, time and I was able to continue my work while I stay engaged with the Admission Process.

Update:

It will be incomplete for this article if I do not include the story of the ‘interview’ which got my daughter selected. We were invited to meet the Head of Department (HOD) aka Principal of the School. She talked and got my daughter comfortable, after which she asked her questions including the likes of the Apple’s color, the monkey’s favorite fruit. She was a bit concerned about my daughters inability to count numbers. The last question she asked my daughter was to use the crayons and draw a circle. That’s easy as Laaija is very good at drawing. She drew a circle. The Principal told her, it was awesome and finally asked her if she can draw a Balloon.

At that moment, I thought my daughter was doing pretty well and we’re pretty close to finishing this event. My wife told me later that, Laaija will now draw a balloon easily. The cool part was, instead of drawing a separate balloon, she just added the thread to the previously drawn circle and made it into a balloon. Me and wife were surprised and I’m pretty sure, if anything, that was the one that sealed the deal.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

India is on a 48 hour stand-still with the ‘India Bandh’ called by the All Trade Union. They are protesting against privatization, outsourcing, violation of labour laws, price rise and several other burning issues of the country, trade unions of banking, insurance, public sector undertakings, transporters and unorganized sectors.

Nope, I’m going to write about the India Bandh (general strike) but more of a personal experience with Olacabs – an Indian Startup with over $8M in Series A fund.

With our new office setup in Indiranagar, Bangalore, everyday is an excitement being in the office – working, playing and being with the team. Yesterday, with the Bandh announced, I was looking for alternatives to my usual travel medium, the Auto rickshaw aka the Tuk-Tuk.

As luck would have it, Twitter was abuzz with tweets that Olacabs will take special measure to have their cabs available to help the general public, with an added advantage of slashing their fares to that of the auto-rickshaw. All the problem solved! Moreover, I’ve been looking forward to trying their iOS app, use it and write a nice review about them (what an irony). I was hoping that Olacabs will be the Uber of India.

Today Morning, with all hopes and enthusiasm, I got up and was ready for office. I even confirmed a candidate for an Interview for one of our job openings. I fired up the Ola App, and ‘booked’ a cab. Olacabs confirmed by Booking and was assigned a ‘CRN’ Number – 1765782 and the cab will pick me at 10am.

Got dressed, bags shouldered but by 10:10am, with no sign of Olacabs, I called up their Customer Support. The voice on the other end wailed “Ola” multiple times and I even got to know that Ola means ‘Hello’ in Spanish. A ‘Subhalakshmi’ picked up the phone after about 3 minutes and she was pretty blunt, wasn’t really listening to me or she could not understand what I was asking. I had to ask her if she really speaks English. I asked for something and she blurted out something else. Of course, I got the fact that my cab was cancelled and they were ‘no longer servicing in my area.’

I will say don’t get too excited by @olacabs offer. Today I booked an ola cab,got the booking id,called the driver who said he can’t come!

— rati chaudhary (@ratichaudhary) February 19, 2013

disappointed with @olacabs for committing yesterday for cab and getting #olacabs trending and now cancelling out! shame on u guys!

— Hrish Thota (@dhempe) February 20, 2013

@olacabs what went wrong with the fares? Disappointment from a good promising company I must say…

— Sai Sandesh Makam (@SaiSandeshMakam) February 20, 2013

Well, looks like Olacabs did something without proper planning and their PR Stunt is just that – a PR Stunt. Yes, I’ll try them again, give them another chance but today was such a bad User Experience that I won’t expect much from them. They are just another service company with a Spanish name and like every other taxi company, will not try to provide a good user experience and differentiate from the lot.

UPDATE:

Feb 22, 2013

I said, I’ll try them again. I did and they screwed up yet again. Cab delayed and they have no clue what’s happening. The assigned driver had no clue and a destination was never assigned to him. Suggestion – avoid Olacabs like the plague. I just deleted their stupid iOS app too.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

Not a To-Do list. Not an agenda for your life’s routine.

Something, which you usually have in your mind, the list of things you would love to do in your life. Be it – learning to sky-dive, go on that dream vacation, visit that exotic island, spend few undisturbed weeks in a less-trodden place – would it not be nice to be able do them before you kick the bucket.

Go ahead, start your OneBucketList and list what you want to do in your life. OneBucketList will help you maintain that list and get out of the way for you to act on them.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

We totally understand about the annoyances of spam emails and newsletters. We will not send more than two newsletters in a week. You can unsubscribe very promptly and instantly. We will not send you anything not related to building a startup, a business and being an entrepreneur.

So, if you think it’s OK for another addition to your Startup resources, go ahead and sign-up for the newsletter from Startup Baba.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

Humanity Explored Opening Film 2013.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.

I recently had the opportunity to meet him in person when he brought In50Hrs to Bangalore for the first time. In50hrs is The Idea-To-Prototype Event. Entrepreneurs, Developers, and Product Designers come together to work on audacious ideas and build working prototypes (MVP) over a Weekend.

Vijay’s been organizing In50Hrs in Chennai for quite a while and he is taking his idea to other cities in India – Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. I asked him few quick questions and he have some thoughtful answers, which I’m sure will be useful to budding entrepreneurs and startups in India.

Q. Your name is synonymous with the Startup Scene in India. How did you started and how deep do you want to go in?

It started off by having a Startup in Canada (which was finding its exit), coming to India realizing that the ecosystem was still very nascent and with a long list of things to be done, meeting folks here and talking to them about it. Realized nobody else was going to do anything, and if you care, you are going to have to spearhead change. Better that, than a cribbing NRI right?

Q. Why did you started In50Hrs? Why not spearhead the existing StartupWeekend in India under your leadership? How are you differentiating In50Hrs from other initiatives?

When we came up with the concept of wanting to build a platform for folks to come together and build prototypes of Ideas, SW was the first on the list. Unfortunately at that time (perhaps still) the pricing is rather high – for folks to participate and its a complicated structure with everything being managed from the US. We would have opted for it, if it was like a Barcamp format where you could take and run with it, and adapt a bit, rather being too restrictive by rules and a brand.

The difference between a Barcamp Model vs a TEDx Model I suppose. But at the end of the day, we are in a way solving similar problems, and I’d recommend either platform for folks looking to build a prototype over a weekend.

India has its own set of challenges in the early ecosystem and anything that is not built from the ground up to solve the problem accordingly, is a forced-fit. Didn’t want to end up with that dilemma.

Q. What is your immediate expectation from In50Hrs and what are your long-term goals?

The short term expectation is for participants to be able to differentiate between a hack and a prototype. We have been constantly asking the question to ourselves as to how do we get folks to leverage this platform to being a starting point towards a venture – so the long term goal would be to enable more and more of the participating teams to launch products and startups.

Q. Do the role of In50Hrs ends within those 50 hours or do you want to follow-up with them and guide them forward? If you follow-up, how many such MVPs have become actual Startups? Do you have a number?

Not at all. So thats one reason why having an event where we can tweak every aspect of it makes sense, because we can also manage how to do the hand-off and the follow up support. We look at the stages a tech startup as Idea to Prototype; Prototype to Product; and Product to Startup. As part of The Startup Centre we run a six month hands on program called The Resident Program which would be a logical progression for teams that want further support.

We have spotted a bit over 20+ startups emerge out of In50hrs.

Q. Do you judge the ideas or do you want In50Hrs to be a free-flowing event? (I see that there were no ratings or votes on the final day.)

One of the briefs we give the Jury is not to Judge the ideas, but evaluate the teams on two aspects – is the prototype a good enough representation of the idea and the problem that is being solved and secondly, what are the next steps for the teams.

We made a conscious effort not to do winners because that gives them closure, and the code dies in their laptops and never ships – let alone take next steps. The event has been engineered from the ground up to try to build startups, not a competition platform.

Q. Anything important that I missed, that you want to add?

Since we launched to multiple cities, the support that we have been receiving has been phenomenal. Its an amazing experience seeing the startup ecosystem from a national perspective and its interesting to see how each of these hubs are all evolving with a personality of their own. Whether it be an In50hrs event or Startup Weekend, the fact remains that an entrepreneur no longer has an excuse to be sitting on an “Idea”.

Follow @Brajeshwar for tweets on Startups, Entrepreneurship, Technology and everything in between.