I have been following MongoDB for over an year. The intention was to use MongoDB to store data related to logging, transmission, reporting etc at Contify, with document database / denormalized data it would be easier to do aggregation, custom views, reporting etc on top of it as compared to RDBMS like Postgres or MySql. Although I never got close to taking it to production … but did manage to get my hands dirty.

At that time I also looked at CouchDB, but preferred MongoDB for the following reasons:

• Simple queries
• Loved the shell
• Collection based (easy to replicate table structures)
• Storage / Performance – use of Binary JSON
• MongoEngine (Python) that could be easily plugged with Django (my preferred web framework)
• Ease of installation and use of JSON

More recently, I have been reading CouchDB and have been really impressed with the following features:

• Replication – synchronization of data across multiple CouchDB instances. Enabling offline access of your data
• Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) – Everything is versioned
• REST interface – CouchDB as the App layer – You can serve HTML pages right out of your CouchDB
• CouchApp – Custom applications to run on top of CouchDB (that are part of CouchDB)
• Cloud hosting available at http://www.couch.io/get (at no cost)

As I get my hands dirty with CouchDB, expect to see some apps around data syncing / storage with offline access. I would like to use Couch DB for all my excel related work – be it my issue tracker, task list, number crunching reports etc etc

More comparisons:

• How does Mongo DB compare to Couch DB?
• Mongo DB, Couch DB, MySQL compare Grid
• Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB

Great video on CouchDB

Recently picked up a new scanner that could scan my 35mm film negatives into full blown digital pics!!! I wanted to pick up Epson 300, but that was not available at Nehru Place, the next best option was HP G3110 – so far it has been pretty good, a bit slow, hangs couple of times … well there is so much you can get for less than $150

So here are some of my first pics that I had captured using my Canon Rebel 2000GS (some listed below), they were scanned from the original negatives!

If you like these pics you might enjoy my flickr pics too: my top flickr tags

During my discussions with various entrepreneurs / investors during last couple of weeks, one of the things that came out was this question – why do you want to do a startup?

When I did my first startup, I really did not have much idea of what I was getting into. But there was a rush, energy and feeling of being innovative and creative. At last I get to do what I really want to do … it did not last long, my aspirations / passion somewhere got squeezed between stakeholder requirements … be it the investor, developers, partners etc … I soon gave up

When I did my second startup, I wanted to run away from my then employer. I did get the freedom of picking up my technical stack, experimenting with the cloud etc but soon found myself constrained. If I just need to build a product to a certain spec then how is it different for working for any other IT company?

In both the situations, I think I found myself in a startup for the sake of being in a startup, which was wrong. What is most valuable to me is to be creative and innovative. I do wish to make usable products for a customer but do want to dictate my features and my way of doing things on it. The product needs to have my “flavor” to it …

Working (trying) as a single founder I learnt that if you are a technical guy, there is often an urge to build it and do it for yourself. I think one needs to have a lot of discipline – especially if you are a single founder – you don’t build for yourself, you always build for your customer. Your sales team are your ears on the ground and unless your product does not drive their effort, you might end up developing to your sales team specifications. You need to have the ability to filter out the meaningful features from customer’s feedback, add your flavor to it and update your product.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t be in a startup for the sake of being in a startup
• Figure out what you really wish to achieve and go for that higher goal
• Don’t get carried away by what I want or what I can do with xyz technology – build for your customer
• Build a product that drives your sales team not vice-versa

Related Posts:

• Startup Mistakes
• The Royal We: Single Founder Startups
• Business co-founders are dime a dozen
• Technical co-founders are a myth

On my quest to find the next thing to keep myself entertained and busy, I have been focusing on SaaS offerings for SMBs. I feel that this area has not received enough attention in India and lots can be done. Something I need to validate.

I am pretty confident that I will be able to pull out a decent product, scale it and take it to a level where it is meaningful to the end customer. The place where I have been struggling was how do I go about customer acquisition. Most of the answers seemed to point to Marketing channels, SEO / SEM etc etc, the problem of how to identify the customer, what steps need to be followed were still not clear. This is when I came across a post by Eric Ries on the book “Entrepreneurs guide to Customer Development”. This book is based on Steve Blank’s Four Steps to Epiphany. I highly recommend Steve’s blog, an excellent resource for entrepreneurs, there are lot of things that I have learned from his posts. Listed below is one of his presentations on Customer Development:

Some useful posts on this topic:

• Customer Development: How to develop your customers like you develop your product
• What is customer development?
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08 – excellent talk for startups … goes to the basics of making money – build an app, put a price, make profits!!

Here is the talk:

Alternative (slow), with slides: http://www.omnisio.com/v/ZW4WTUGdjhG/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08

Back when I was working as an Tech consultant I was faced with a very basic problem – we were running out of time, budget was fixed and scope could not be reduced (on the contrary, “enhancements” were being added). I was new to the industry and I was not sure how to handle this scenario.

Thats when my then manager pulled me in and gave me the “gyaan” of four wheels.

Four Wheels

If you turn any single wheel, say scope and don’t wish to change the budget or the timeline, the quality will suffer … I applied this to numerous projects, mostly to allow “customers” to increase the scope  and convincing them to pay extra for it. The objective was always to keep the customer happy, if the customer is willing to pay – hey lets add on the scope and deliver it by adding more people or extending the timeline if required. In reality, it was the “Quality” that used to suffer.

Last night, I was reading “Getting Real” – talks about the similar problem – but with a different approach - Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope

As a startup you are always constrained with time and money – so in a way they are already fixed, you can never never compromise on the quality and since you own the scope – cut it down – just keep only what is relevant – the core of your startup. Based on user feedback keep adding stuff later. So Less is More and Smaller Scope is the way to go

If you try to run your startup with the “job” mindset (More is More $$ and Smaller is Less $$) sooner or later you will end up in troubled waters!

This change in mindset is very critical to startup’s success.

There is enough material on the web that talks about why Django / Rails is better than the other, I liked this comparison the most.

For me the key differentiators were the following two:

1. Documentation – Django tutorial followed with the detailed documentation available at their site is simply amazing!!
2. Development Effort – The admin screens completely sold Django to me. It saved me lot of initial effort to design, develop and test screens for models!

The other things that I considered:

1. Learning Curve – Lots of tutorials available for both Python and Ruby, I personally feel if you have a good command on any programming language – picking either one of them is a piece of cake, at least to get started with
2. Support / Forum activity – Looked like Ruby fairs better on this one – both have a good presence
3. Performance – Although Python has an edge, but the difference was not that critical for my application (being a B2B)
4. Integration with third party apps – Python has the edge over Ruby on this one … although if you just compare the number of plugins available for each framework – Rails faired better

Clearly my objective was to pick up the framework that would do most of my work and had enough help / docs available to sail me through with little effort. As of now, with some bandwidth, I am thinking of picking up Rails and writing an application that would display the search results powered by Solr. Will do this development in parallel to Django and do a more thorough comparison!

Bought Canon  LBP2900 (low cost laser printer) and then realized it does not come with mac drivers … wtf? Did some googling around, found two sources: * http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6676306 * http://kokyun.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/how-to-print-from-canon-lbp-2900-on-mac-os-x-10-5-8/

The first one did not work, the latter worked … you need to ensure that you install the Japanese driver … here are the steps:

1. Turn off printer.
2. Remove CAPT folder from /Library/Printers/Canon/
3. Download and install file from bottom of page: http://cweb.canon.jp/drv-upd/lasershot/captu-intelmac.html ( http://pdisp01.c-wss.com/gdl/WWUFORedirectTarget.do?id=MDEwMDAwMTExMDAx&cmp=ACM&lang=JA ) size 14,514,138 byte.
4. Install this downloaded mxcapt170.dmg (japanese language).
5. Reboot.
6. Download http://www.elverils.com/downloads/LBP2900.gz from Dexter_HD solution.
7. Upack LBP2900 and plase it to /Library/Printers/Canon/CAPT/Profile/Device/
8. Turn on printer.
9. Print.

Listed below are some of the tools that I personally feel are very critical for small business / startups at least in the early stages. If you have used similar tools in the past, or are aware of better tools that can get the same job done – do drop me a line

Email / Collaboration tool – Google App: Almost all of us have some part of google in our daily online routine, Google App takes a step further where one can quickly get the google mail, google docs, google sites, google calendar and google chat configured for your own domain. They have a standard edition (free of cost) which pretty much fits in for the need of a startup or a small business.

Where I feel it really helped us:

• Email – hassle free, zero maintenance required from our side. There are bunch of clients available for desktops and now they even support integration with MS Outlook. You can take it on your blackberrys, other smart phones etc – works well! You can also define distribution lists / email groups and give them appropriate access – so you really don’t miss MS Exchange much. (Note: I do backup all my emails on my laptop via Apple Mail, for Windows once can use Thunderbird)
• Google Docs – with the addition of folders, bulk upload and ability to add any file – it is an online repository where we store our SOPs, Manuals, Guides, Trackers, Instructions, handouts etc for the team. Setting permissions on folders help keep restricted areas to certain groups / individuals … and with the offline access enabled, I don’t have to worry about network outages etc (Note: I avoid keeping confidential information on Google docs, one needs to define the boundaries)
• Sites – I am using this as our internal intranet, any new releases / updates to the application are published to the site and everybody gets notified. Common tasks / activities are also published to the sites or the Google Docs are linked via the site … very easy to keep everybody informed
• Chat – you can chat with people on your domain and aslo add other gamil folks outside of your domain to your friend list. Can be a security issue, but for a small business / startup – this is a good to have.

Invoicing – Zoho: Any services account need to have professional invoices, this is where Zoho comes in. They have a great collaboration tool that competes with Google, but I am sticking only to invoices for now. Their free plans gets me started very quickly and as I grow, will pick up their basic plan that is very reasonable and takes care of all my needs. I can track my invoices / payments, send reminders, turn them off, modify the templates etc etc – complete self control – never had any issue! They recently launched expense tracker, that will ease tracking expenses for me

RWW had done an article on Online invoicing resources, Zoho was not in the top 4. I am still sticking with Zoho, because of their support for multiple currencies, pricing and simple reporting / tracking options. I feel Zoho is more apt for an international / global client while the others were geared more towards North America

Payments – Paypal: For small payments, it works very well. Easy to setup and configure, can be easily integrated with Zoho. I just find their exchange rates / transaction fee on the higher side when compared to a direct wire transfer (but then it saves you the hassle of handling multiple wire transfer accounts). When compared to other online payments, Google Checkout or Amazon etc – they seem to be the most flexible and accepted

Conferencing – SabseBolo: Looking for telephone conference bridge in India- this is the place, they provide local numbers across all major cities in India, cross city chats can help you save money. Easy and simple to get started, works well. For free accounts they play an ad, bit irritating – don’t mind it for the cost!

They do have services like fax to mail, which are again very helpful. I wish their pricing was transaction based instead of a flat fee per month. For a small business / startup I do not expect many faxes and I had rather pay slightly extra price for one fax instead of flat fee

MockingBird – share mockups of the website, quick, easy and free!

My problem: Moving jobs, need to convert my personal nsf emails to a universally format (read free, open source) that can run on my mac / pc without me spending a single penny. If you do have extra dollars to spare there are bunch of software readily available … and you are reading the wrong post.

Solution: Tech[niques] has a bunch of articles on exporting your email from Lotus Notes to Outlook Express Email Messages and then finally import it to Thunderbird.

Things to keep in mind:

• You need to create some scripts, so some technical background is required. Mostly copy / paste but it is possible you might need to debug
• Emails with embedded images will throw an exception, I simply ignored such emails
• It took roughly ~15 mins to archive ~1500 emails, 150MB in size – not bad!

Recently bought Nokia 5800 Xpress aka the tube (India version)! I think there is enough already written about the phone, what works, what does not … In this post I am going to focus on the applications that I added to make this phone meet my messaging / communication needs.

Getting the latest firmware was the first thing that I did. Over the Air sync did not work, had to upgrade via NSU via on my PC. To get everything to work did a soft reset *#7370#. Keep following in mind:

• You lose all data – contacts, messages, configuration settings etc after the reset
• The 200 odd pre-loaded songs do not load anymore because the license files go missing – this is the sad part
• The upgrade is worth the effort – you can refer to this post to look at the additional features

Loading the applications! I intend to use my phone more for email / messaging, so time to get some useful stuff:

Apps that are part of the Nokia Download:
• Mail for exchange: I use mail2web for my contacts. I have been using Windows Mobile for a long time and all my contacts for the past 8 years have always been on some mail for exchange or the other. So this app was a must for me to get all my contacts
• WaveSecure: Neat app, enables the user to lock the phone remotely – pretty handy!
• QuickOffice: To open word, excel, ppt etc – a must
• Zip Manager: Most of the attachments in my email are zipped – must have!
• AccuWeather: No real utility – just adds to the “cool” factor … this turns out to be one of the most viewed apps when ppl like to get a “feel” of the phone
• Cricket Mobicast: very very critical! You can always tune in to 106.4FM for a live commentary – but this app is a must, live scores, stats etc – has it all

Other useful apps (you can check more here):
• Fring: recently launched a version for 5800, it works great – loaded all my skype, facebook and gtalk ids!
• Easy Reject: Block spam calls, messages. No more loan, credit card calls
• iSync: if you use a mac
• JoikuLight: Can convert your phone into a wifi hotspot. The free version is limited to http / https
• SymTorrent: how about downloading the torrent of the latest southpark episode in mp4 format and view it – all on your phone!
• Google Maps – The preloaded Nokia maps are good! … just so used to Google maps
• PhoneTorch – converts the flash into a torch. Delhi summer time … power cuts … you never know when you might need this
• The rotary dialer – nice interface for that nostalgic feeling … whoever has seen this app simply loved it … no real utility, since I typically use voice dialing to call people – works to show off the phone

This post lists down the high level steps and useful links to get started with EC2

Tools:

• Elasticfox- Firefox Add-On, to manage your instance via Firefox.
• S3Fox- Firefox Add-On, to manage your S3 buckets, ACL and files via Firefox. Only issue is that I cannot set the expire time using S3Fox … you can go for BucketExplorer, costs $30. I use S3Fox to upload / download files from my desktop
• s3sync- Ruby based command line utility to manage your buckets, files etc. I have it installed on my instance, to sync up my datafiles etc to S3 on a daily / weekly basis To Sync the entire folder – use s3sync ./s3sync.rb -r /directory/to/sync bucket-name:directory/path To Upload one file – use s3cmd ./s3cmd.rb put bucket-name:path/to/file/file-name /path/to/source/
• Putty – to ssh or scp to the instance, if on windows. Refer to the amazon for details on setup

Setup:

• Create the credentials for Amazon for EC2, S3, EBS, Cloudfront
• Create the security group in EC2
• Launch the instance with the preferred AMI
• Setup EBS of desired size
• Configure MySQL, Apache to run from EBS
• setup s3sync

Excellent post on this topic: “Tutorial: Running a php/mySQL server on EC2 with EBS”

I setup this script: automysqlbackup to backup my mysql databases on a daily basis. The script has pretty good instructions, just key in the details, add it to your cron and you are all set.

I sync up the backups with my S3 buckets using s3sync, go through the readme for details. In short you need to follow these steps:

• update the s3config.yml file, add your access key and secret key
• link the config file it to the etc folder ln -s /path/to/s3sync/s3config.yml /etc/s3conf/s3config.yml
• add the following command to the POSTBACKUP variable in automysqlbackup.sh script /path/to/s3sync/s3sync.rb -r /path/to/backups/ bucket-name:s3-folder-name

You will need to manually remove the old backups from your S3 account. An alternative is to update the bucket directly using s3cmd instead of storing your backups on EBS / EC2 instance

Once installed make sure the following steps have been covered:

For Apache:

Update http.conf

• Load module mod_rewrite, required by WordPress for url rewriting. Uncomment the following line:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

• Add index.php to DirectoryIndex, if you don’t do this – you will keep seeing directory listing or error pages

<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</IfModule>

• Setup Virtual hosts, uncomment the following line:

Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

• Update httpd-vhosts.conf, change the ServerName and the DocumentRoot to your specific settings. I am setting up Wordpress Mu on my windows machine, this is how it looks:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName wpmublogs.localhost
DocumentRoot "C:/wpmu"
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory "C:/wpmu">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>


For PHP:

• Get the mysql extension and save them to say “C:/ext”- mysql.dll for windows / mysql.so for unix

• Update php.ini, set the extension dir

extension_dir = "C:\ext\"
Add extensions, this is the name of the file
extension=php_mysql.dll

• Create an index.php page with phpinfo() and store it in documentroot, in this case “C:/wpmu” and point your browser to http://wpmublogs.localhost

<?php phpinfo() ?>

• If all went fine, you should see the dump of phpinfo(), check if mysql was loaded … (try rebooting your m/c once if mysql did not load) now you are ready to setup the wordpress blog …