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Personal Finance Startup , Perfios Raises Series A from Individual Investors [Interview]

sinha — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:33:03 PDT

Personal Finance startup, Perfios has raised Series A from individual investors and here is a QnA with the team on personal finance business, monetization plans and more.

The investors who have bet big on the Perfios proposition are all well known industry czars with a penchant for investing and entrepreneurship and include P.S Pai (Formerly of the Murugappa Group and Wipro), V.Chandrasekaran (formerly of Wipro, iGate and Aztecsoft), Dr. Ashish Gupta (Helion Venture Partners) and A.G Muralikrishnan (Ujwal Management Services) .

Qn: Personal Finance Market – Your competition is creating the market for you. But at the same time, cash is your #1 competition. How do you plan to penetrate the market?

Ans: You are right when you say cash being our biggest competitor as it becomes very difficult for any software to capture these transactions unless manually fed. To solve such difficulties we provide various options in which transactions can be captured along with auto fetch from financial institutions. For example – Mutual fund statements can be uploaded directly on to Perfios or it can even be emailed straight from the user’s personal Inbox! Along with this we also have also excel support for any past data upload, be it cash, Mutual Funds or equity transactions. Our idea is to give enough options to the users for any kind of activity, after all every user is not the same!

Qn: In general, the TAM [Total Addressable Mkt] for personal finance service over Internet is too small for India. DO you plan to reach out to other devices (like mobile) or grow the ARPU? Do share the details.

Ans – We do agree with your statement but with the entire personal finance market untapped it’s a good platform to start with. Having said that, we are also looking into expanding onto mobile platform. We already have a tie up with Samsung for their App store in India, would be looking into more such tie-ups. This clearly shows our intentions to grow beyond the traditional web and look at mobile as the additional growth engine!

Qn: Monetization plans – how do you plan to monetize the service?

Ans: Well, the service is free for end users and we have multiple ways of generating revenue. A few of them are –

‘MyClients’ (An application for Wealth Management firms, CA’s, Independent Financial Advisors etc) – we already have a few paying customers in this segment.
Freemium Model: we may take the route of a Freemium model where we may come out with more advanced features which would be paid (only for such advanced features and on a subscription basis). But be rest assured that the application as you see now would always be free. We may also come out with a few value added services where the end users will pay for utilizing those services. We are working on these models and will be deploying them soon.
Ad Model – Once the user traction picks up, we may also go with the traditional ad-model way (for free users)

Qn: What will you use the funding for?

Ans: The money will be used primarily for marketing and team expansion.

Qn: Perfios is 2 years old and is probably the first co. to start in personal finance space. Tell us about the challenge you have faced in convincing people to use a service like this, especially the concern over sharing one’s bank details with a third party svc.

Ans– You are so very right, it actually took a lot of effort to make the concept popular in the market, evangelization was the primary activity in the initial days! We faced the biggest challenge in convincing users as to how secure Perfios is and how providing security and privacy to our users has always been our top most priority. For example – all we need to know from a user to get his/her account created is an email id. That’s all.

Over and above this, we do NOT even store any user credentials (Financial Institutions id and passwords) on our servers;. While evangelization and constant reinforcement of security/privacy practices help to some extent, there is so substitute to great execution (of those concepts) and delighted customers – that is the phase we are in now and hope to leverage the happy customers experiences to grow further

Qn. Series A from Individual Investors – defines convention. Why did you choose this route?

Ans: For our second round of funding we were discussing with a few VC firms and individual investors. While there was sufficient interest from the VC firms as well, we decided to move forward with the individual investors, as the existing angel investors wanted to participate in the new round as well and we did not really have room for the participation of a VC firm.

How To Do A Successful Bargain (Learnings From A Rickshaw Driver).

naman — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:47:04 PDT

We are talking here about a pure price bargain and not negotiation of service terms etc.

“Bargaining or haggling is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a good or service dispute the price which will be paid and the exact nature of the transaction that will take place, and eventually come to an agreement. Bargaining is an alternative pricing strategy to fixed prices.” – Wikipedia

So, you have got them to the table and now it’s time to turn the table to your benefit. Here are some quick tips to keep in mind while bargaining.

1. Take the first call: While making a deal we are always aware that we need to bargain but we do not know the right price to start. So the the only strategy we rely on is to let the other party quote a price and then make a call 20-25% lower. Although it may seem that the bargain has just begun but the truth is that you have already lost most of it. By making the first call the other party has set a sort of anchor price and both the parties will move around that price only. Their is a psychological barrier that kicks in and not many people are confident enough to move drastically away from it.

2. Never be the first one to move: You have taken the first call and then the other party quoted lower. Wait, It’s not your turn to move as yet. Let the other party make one more call that is a little favorable to you and only then take a call. The first one to move from his initial quote will always end up moving more and loose more. By moving first you tend to show some sort of desperation.

3. Don’t take the last call but push for more: After going back and fourth few times the deal has now changed into a debate. Let the other party win this argument by agreeing to their last call. Add a friendly touch now and keep selling the quality of your product. You have to sell high and still make them believe that they got a good bargain.

Do not give up on rounding off figures. If the customer tried to round off Rs. 263 to Rs. 260, push for more. The idea is not to fetch the last Rs. 3 but to prove that there was no further scope. If you don’t say no, he would feel there was space for more (round off to Rs. 250?) and would have an unhappy after taste of the deal. See this toon tutorial.

Ideal Bargain (Click to see)

An Indian retailer, Koutons, has tried the anchor pricing strategy very aggressively to their benefit. They place an MRP of Rs.2500 and give 80% discount to sell at 500. This is a ridiculous anchor pricing but still works as the junta believes that the product is worth atleast more than Rs.500. The target audience perceives that they are buying a branded-priced product at an affordable price. What would have happened if there was no inflated MRP tag at all?

I wrote this piece after an insightful conversation with a rickshaw driver. An average rickshaw driver does as much bargain deals in a day as most of us do in a month and also wins almost all of them.

Do not expect miracles over night. Since this is more of an art, it can be mastered only through practice. Try practicing this with a Rickshaw-wala.

Fixed to Flexible is an awesome short book that highlights some formal research on anchor pricing. Must read.

Happy haggling!

Technology is Aware, or will be?

arvind — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:52:00 PDT

Ok. Yet another post which digresses from core style of Pluggd.in. But then that’s the fun part of it! For over decades now we are a part of a society which breathes on technology and even survives by it. Be it over the internet or mobile network or just about anything else. Awesome online bookstores, location-aware stuff, powerful social networks, multi-touch technology and what not. From terminal based access to Lynx browsers to IE/Netscape to emails to IM’s to Mozilla’s & Chrome’s and Facebooks & Twitters we have witnessed evolution of technology from a completely off-line distribution model to now almost a completely online one.

But all this is about past, and let’s not talk about it.

Talk of the town today is real time internet & social media. In fact social media is such a f**ked term over the internet these days that I really don’t feel like using it. But it’’s a living present that one could confirm with every Tom, Dick and Harry on Twitter who is busy selling the social media opportunity to the industry. Whatever, let’s not get into that either.

Let’s extrapolate into the future.

Step back and look at last 100 years in development of Computer Science, Electronics and other traditional Technology first. It all started with simple calculators (Wilhelm Schickard), Charles Babbage, Lady Ada Lovelace and then branched out in to specific fields of research which have been sought after & contributed upon by some of the best brains of our society. A branch of science driven by logic.

Through it came basic internet (disruptive in all respects, as we are witnessing it) which has now progressed into real-time internet where Twitters and other services around the world help humans gain insight, knowledge, trends and information in a ‘decisive fashion’ along the real-time-line of our existence.

So what is next?

Paradigm of Machine Intelligence:

Is it not the turn for Artificial intelligence, Genetic algorithms, and Neural networks to take over? Or it is. These fields of research too have been under continuous development by the best human brains across the world and numerous abstractions have already been successfully delivered by passing generations of computer scientists. For roughly fifty odd years or so. Now what if such an ensemble of layered knowledge of simulated intelligence goes out in the open over the internet for a prolong period of time? Does this sound like a tipping point where mass usage of simulated intelligence in technology would take over the regular solutions available?

Entrepreneurship is an indicator:

Rising entrepreneurship in the field of AI is a strong indication of where the subject is headed. Adapting different use-cases of machine intelligence, there are several quaint startups that offer great value already. For example we have Siri – the first intelligence based Mobile app, Gestures from SixthSense Technologies, Minority report act from Oblong Industries and even in Biotechnology there is Genetic 2.0 which talks about “beginning a parallel genetic code with 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids instead of the available 64 triplet combination that exists in our lifeforms today “. So new, stronger life forms it talks about.

Another awesome example of Genetic Algorithms is that of work by a brilliant musician-cum-emeritus professor from University of California – David Cope – who created EMMY (derived from Experiments in Musical Intelligence) a computer application which composes and plays operatic music. As good as original Mozart or Bach. Having developed an application which qualified the Turing test with indistinguishable musical ability, Prof. Cope confirms that any creative pursuit of man-kind is just a recombination of something “heard” or “lifted” from elsewhere. Call it plagiarism. He even reverse-engineered centuries of music to its roots & forebears to prove his finds. “Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

Let’s murder the Captcha now, for example.

The test of “humanness” on internet hangs by a thin thread of binary files. There is anti-circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States to prevent mass scale circumvention of Captcha and an exemplary case of injunction against a violating company too. All major commercial services such as Facebook, Google & Twitter rely on Captcha & Phonetic test for humans.

But technically speaking how unstoppable is it to programmatically parse the binaries that allows the bots to create bot accounts without any human intervention? If one looks at the pace of on-going research in Voice Recognition or Image recognition it seems pretty reasonable to assume that Captchas are soon gonna have to die and something more “undoable” by machines will have to be put in place. Evolution yet again, until the next wave of upgrade!

Well more than the defeat of Captchas or of Voice Binaries is a concern that of applying the Genetics Paradigm to human generated passwords which too are more-often-than-not simply composed. Passwords are easily predictable piece of data for all practical purposes and technically speaking I am not talking about social engineering. Composing passwords is not as much complex or original an activity as is composing music. And when music itself can be genetically attributed to cut-copy-paste syndrome to the aboriginal sounds of animals, birds and other objects how easy it’d be to work out cracks for passwords using genetic algorithms?

Genetics is more than Computer Science

Evolution applies to Nature. So does it apply to industry, businesses, technology, governance, communication and our children too. Let’s hypothesize a Neural Network and open it over the internet to simply tell us a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ before buying a particular scrip on the Tokyo’s stock exchange! And now if this neural network is trained with data-sets of masses (applying the social media paradigm here) and its corresponding result-sets – frequently called as intelligence of the crowd/market (one can compound training with real-time data inputs also) – then how powerful would such a neural network be? Will it give an answer with impeccable accuracy as to how the scrip’s gonna perform on the stock exchange? Theoretically yes, coz it will have infinite sample size of training over social nature of internet and time, right?

Code named ‘Awareness’

Human brain is claimed to be the only object in the world which is aware of itself. It is powerful, it can think, decide, learn, store, process, collaborate and get tired too. In fact most of evolutionary physical limitations of the human body (as compared to animals) can be attributed to the available alternative of using a powerful brain in our defense. Brain too evolves naturally and slowly over generations & generations of people. But for technology, the realm of evolution is much faster. Our society pulls out best brains competitively and puts them on projects of intelligence. These best brains contribute philosophy over philosophy over philosophy and build on the capabilities of the machines. Now when this process is opened to crowd-sourcing, developer community, open-source paradigm and other contributory concepts what we might eventually end-up with is “accelerated evolution”. Until one day we would have another object which is aware of itself. Or at least more intelligent than a single human brain.

Now the question is: how far is such day?

UnPluGGd – in Pictures

sinha — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:04:47 PDT

We will very soon upload the videos (and ppts) from UnpluGGd event and share the wisdom shared at the event with everybody.
Meanwhile enjoy the pics.

INQ Mobile Launched in India – More Tweets and Facebook your way

sinha — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:03:03 PDT

I have always believed that one’s mobile phone is the starting point of one’s social network and one’s contact book is the most authentic friend list to go after.

INQ Mobile, a UK based company that has created a niche for building social networking enabled mobile phone has launched its mobile phone in India, in partnership with Aircel.

Price of INQ Mobile in India

The Chat 3G is priced at mere Rs 7,599, while the Mini 3G is available for Rs 5,399. What’s interesting is the Aircel partnership – Aircel charges only Rs. 98/month for Internet access (unlimted)– so the combo makes perfect sense for those whose contact book is as dynamic as FB/Twitter follower list. Aircel also partnered with Nokia for the launch of latter’s cheapest 3G phone.

Again, existing operators owing to their tightly coupled business model will not be able to match up [read: Daily Plans from Tata DoCoMo – Airtels of the world, Take a Note] and that’s where new entrants are bringing in the change.

Daily Plans from Tata DoCoMo – Airtels of the world, Take a Note

manish — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:53:28 PDT

Tata DoCoMo has launched Daily plans enabling subscribers to choose their prepaid plans on a daily basis.

The Tata DOCOMO Daily Plans are based on the insight that the consumers who choose prepay as the means to go mobile, seek flexibility. Therefore they have the choice to choose a daily pack that suits their immediate calling need, on the fly without being locked into a longer term pack.

The ease of activation process ensures a smooth and satisfying experience for the consumer at minimal costs. The packs get activated within 2 hours of request receipt on the system. Also, consumers can activate multiple packs within the same day – details here.

Incumbents

In the past, Sunil Mittal has come out strongly against such tactics (rather, innovative pricing) used by new operators calling them unsustainable businesses. But decided to follow their footsteps after the momentary state of denial.

More so, new players do not have the IT/support limitation to create new packages, while Incumbents would need to upgrade infrastructure/support (and most mportantly, mindset) to cater to the same.

I believe we are witnessing the real telecom revolution in India where new rules are being laid out by new players and old players are resorting to the usual cheap way of false billing [read: Reliance NetConnect Review] to extract money.

Also, new players are taking the tougher route of creating new consumption points [Aircel’s bet on mobile Internet, social networking].

What’s your opinion? Is this revolution for real? Sustainable? Any insights?

8 million+ Views on YouTube’s IPL Channel – Video Killed the Text Star

sinha — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:43:26 PDT

Google is betting big on IPL [even started promoting the microsite from G’s homepage] and the bet has paid off.

As of writing this article, the total number of views for channel (link) has already crossed 8 million and the viewership (we have been tracking this) reached the peak between March 13th – 16th [from less than a million to almost 7 million].

This is a BIG milestone for all ye who believe that Internet is not happening in India. To throw certain perspective, IPL matches happen during non-office hours, so most of the viewers are either home viewer or viewers from outside India [essentially, the content is working for publishers/advertisers as they are able to get eyeballs].

IPL - Youtube channel traffic

Ofcourse, the channel has some historic data and one can discard some of that, but the deal is very simple – Text vs. Video.

Video vs. Text

Most of the content companies (Y! Cricket, Cricinfo) earlier took the texty score card route and played with page refresh rate to come out as ‘Highest PageView’ winner. YouTube’s IPL streaming will change all of that.

Its not that text will die, but videos have a higher monetization opportunity [i.e. higher CPM] and YouTube has upped the bar for everybody [especially for aggregators who will eventually have to define their video strategy]

What’s your opinion?

Also see: Indian Premier League (IPL) and Digital Media

Avoiding Disasters in an Outsourced Software Development

naman — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:33:12 PDT

An outsourced development work for a web/tech company is never recommended as that should be your core competency but still if you have made the mistake of doing so, the following points must be kept in mind.

One common mistake that companies make while outsourcing a development work is that they tend to believe that everything will be done by the development company including copy writing and color selection. They believe the development company would carry the same vision as you do. But you need to realise that you have put in months of research about the target audience to decide if the software is even needed, which the development company cannot carry in a days time. A regular involvement from your side must be there to track every progress of the project. The development company will only act as a nanny for your baby. She will dress your baby but you cannot rely on her to decide which dress.

1. Judging a bid: The lowest bid are in rare cases the best ones. More often than not the bidder has misjudged the project size and complexity. You will realise this only when they start delivering the first demo modules. Seeing the final product of past works is not a proof of capability as you don’t know if that was the real need or a compromised product and the time they took to finish it etc. (Recommended read: Confusion over cost of outsourced software services)

2. Milestones: Milestones should not be overlooked even by a days delay. Any delay due to third party issues should be compensated by progress on the future modules. Last minute rush would always result in inferior product as feel good features would be compromised.

3. Communication: Avoid letting 2 third parties communicate with each other. Say if development team and hosting company are in direct touch, they would report an issue which the other is responsible for, just to buy time. Only later will you realise that they have made a real fool of you. Your role is to act as a black box for all the parties involved.

4. Never leave for later: Anything that is left to be changed for later will never be done. There is a lot of friction in moving away from the set default. Say if the HTML guy has shown you the layout of the site with dummy colors, specifically mention to get it changed. Ideally you should tell him the colors before he sits to code. What happens is that after 3-4 views you tend to believe that this was your site color and forget about changing it. The logo would be designed with this in mind and that would define the personality of your brand.

5. Coordinating: Do not think twice before calling the development company. Acting professional and calling only on milestones would give you unpleasant surprises. You would realise that they were waiting for your milestone check to report a problem. Loosing temper with the developers in such case would only make the matter worse.

6. Motivation: For the time that they are working on your project you will have to treat them like your own employees, with lesser rights and more responsibility. You will need to pass on the same vision that you carry for the project to everyone in the team and make them feel as if its their own child. Although their rights are limted like a Nanny but they should feel responsible like a surrogate mother. (Recommended read on HR management)

7. Ask for More: Do not hesitate in asking for more. But do it in a phased manner. If blog installation was not part of SRS, you can still ask for it but don’t ask them to customize it as well. If you have motivated them enough then all you need to do is ask. ( Read: Ask and ye shall get it. ) A low bidding company may try and apply the same rule on you at a later stage.

Same rules apply when you are dealing with a different department within your own company.

Happy Outsourcing!

Ask and ye shall get – The Startup Approach to Crack Deals [Jugaad]

sinha — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:58:34 PDT

If you are a startup, jugaad is the key to get things done. The most important element of jugaad is the way to start conversation and pull the deal towards your way.

And to start conversation, the first thing you need to do is TALK. Very candidly [or articulate, if you can] ask what and why you want.

I recently had an interesting experience with one of the largest software company. I had to use one of their software for a specific purpose and while the trial version lasted only 30 days, I needed a few more days to finish off my task.

So out of shamelessness [inject this virtue in your blood cells, if you want to try out Jugaad], I wrote a mail to support team of this company saying I need an extension of the license.

As expected, they refused [am glad that they cared to reply], and before closing the chapter, I replied to the person

Dear ,

I appreciate your response and before you mark this service request/ticket as closed, I thought I will share my perspective on the same.

Please understand that instead of asking for license extension, I could have easily borrowed a pirated copy of your software.

I sent out my earlier email because I firmly believe in the effort that has gone behind creating an awesome software and wouldn’t like to take any other route to cheat that effort.

I hope you understand the perspective and speak to your seniors and work out something.

If not, it’s all right.

In good faith,

Ashish.

A bit of honesty, a bit of sense of purpose mixed with emotion and within 2 days, I had an extended license with a note requesting to not share this story with others [otherwise it becomes a norm ]; but the crux of the matter is that asking does lead to a conversation and stuff happens when people talk.

I have also experienced similar experience while organizing UnPluGGd and more deal one goes through, the more I realize that ‘asking’ is the key to get what you want.

And most of the times, geeks owing to their logical thought process tend to ask by rules.

And not to start a conversation.

AnalyzePal – Make Sense of Your Paypal Transactions

Ashish — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:02:43 PDT

Whole lot of businesses rely on Paypal for their survival [check out these 1000+ comments on the recent Paypal issue with Indian banks] and its quite imperative that one needs a better understanding of sales/performance and a simpler CRM tool to unleash the business behind one’s paypal transactions.

AnalyzePal, a product from Produle Systems [we covered the launch of their earlier products like MockFlow and Produle] is a BI product for all your Paypal data. AnalyzePal provides free analytics & reporting package for your PayPal’s data.

Analyze Paypal Transactions with AnalyzePal

AnalyzePal has been designed keeping in mind small businesses who rely heavily on Paypal – the product has useful features like sharing analytics with other users, CRM/Contact Manager & Performance Meter etc.

In order to get the product working, you need to import the downloaded transaction history in CSV format from your PayPal account. Once you import the data, you can visualize the business growth in terms of sales, customer etc – the product works for non-verified accounts also.

If you are a heavy user of Paypal, do give AnalyzePal a spin and share your opinion.

News Roundup : Voice Video Chat in Orkut, KPCB Sells InfoEdge Stake [and more]

Editorial — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:12:21 PDT

Orkut Brings Voice/Video Chat to Prominence

In a bid to ‘connect’ more people, Orkut has announced a new placement for voice/video chat – on top of the chat window.

If you already have a webcam and a microphone, you’ll just need to download a small plugin for video chat, available for free at www.google.com/chat/video
With the plugin installed and your camera enabled, your friends will see a small green camera icon next to your name in their chat lists. Then, to start a voice or video chat, simply click either the voice or video icon in the toolbar and talk away to your heart’s content – all for free via orkut. – source

Read: Facebook Beats Orkut in India [Search Trends]

Web18 sells its entire stake in Jobstreet.com India

Television Eighteen India has announced that Web18 has entered into an agreement to sell all its shares in Jobstreet.com India to Jobstreet.com, Singapore on the basis of the net tangible assets value of Jobstreet.com India.

Such sale will result in non-operating exceptional expense arising out of disposal of long term investment of approx. Rs 25 million in the financials of Web18 for quarter ending Mar. 31, 2010. – source

KPCB Exits from InfoEdge

Ram Shriram and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers have sold their entire 4.08 per cent stake in Info Edge (the owners of popular job site Naukri.com) for about Rs 86 crore via a open market transaction on Friday.

As per bulk deal data on the NSE, Sherpalo sold 5,57,913 shares for Rs 876.33 a share, while Murgan Capital had sold 4,22,410 for Rs 876.30 a share, thereby pocketing about Rs 86 crore.
After the sale, Murgan Capital’s stake comes down to less than 1 per cent. Going by the deal, Shriram and Kleiner have made a profit of Rs 61 crore on their investment.- source

RCOM reaches 100 million mark

Reliance Communications has announced that the company has crossed 100 million subscribers, making it the second company after Airtel to achieve the feat.

Interestingly, Bharti took 14 years to achieve 100 million mark, while Reliance took just 7 years.

» More @India News Channel

Asia is like New Zealand of Internet [Evaluation]

arvind — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:47:36 PDT

We all know about the ‘matured market’ of the west; they’d say – do your startup here – this is where all the action is – this where money is – scaling is an issue in Asia and bla bla bla. No doubt, all this is very true but then its kind of hard to buy a story that things will not change soon in favor of Asia. Picture this: “Very soon indeed, coz it’d take only few good investors from the Valley to look at opportunities in Asia and invest into them. The rest of the herd and the nerd will follow the trend suo moto”.

And for those who ignore a fact that whatever is off-shored to Asia today is also a peep-hole that’d grow into a challenge for the ‘creators in the valley’ itself, one can only recommend this: grow up. Asian entrepreneurship is slated to grow, despite the challenges that lie ahead. So is it really the immaturity of markets in Asia as they put it, or is it lack of will that one can only wait to fade away sometime soon? In my humble opinion, it is anything but immaturity of the market and for the least the lack of will at all. The charm of this market is on, else why would Zynga open office in Bangalore, Facebook in Hyderabad, Amazon Webservices in Singapore for example?

If one looks at some of recent articles that talk about ‘meritocracy and entrepreneurship’ in the valley, a concern can be ascertained through the eyes of the valley, who talk about withdrawing talent from America. Some of it can be attributed to recession of course. But at the same time there is enough proof of rising stars from Asia – taking India, China, Thailand, Singapore etc. – where entrepreneurship has been budding for last couple of years. A thorough research on China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Singapore and India reflects that each of these countries have evolved pretty much like the New Zealands of internet, each having its own set of online offerings, suitable and evolved as per social sub-structure of the respective country.

Like New Zealand, which was cut-off from rest of the world with its completely isolated position way down south, where the animals, birds, plants, insects and even the fruits evolved in an entirely different fashion is something that can be likened to how internet has evolved in China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia per se. And nothing that you see here compares with life or life-forms elsewhere in the world. India & Singapore being English oriented countries are somewhat closer to western online offerings, but are definitely unique owing to different culture & social situation as compared to west. In China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia where the spoken languages are obscure, religious beliefs are spectacular, and at times policies are radically closed (even coercively), the inherent lifestyle and the needs of people has adapted a way where nothing that’s happening in the Valley or the West matters to people at all.

Take China for example. The country is totally a control freak with all spears against any word spoken outside of its realm. But does that deter the rise of popular internet based services like Baidu, Bedo, Taobao, Renren etc.? You will be surprised to note that despite the alleged “control” over information as depicted by media outside, the Chinese Government (sometimes referred as super-ministry) does use social media to connect with its people too. In it is the first such service launched by a key state-owned news website in China, Chinese Premier Hu Jintao too set up his account for People’s Microbogging. And it seems not a fake one, as we found out that this account has been verified by the service operator! The sheer size of population in the country ensures twitter-like scenario for the Chinese microblog.

Similarly there is Mobage Town & Mixi in Japan, Kaskus, Koprol & Kulacak in Indonesia, Nurien, me2day, Naver in Korea, Nuffnang, Elevyn in Malaysia and the list can go forever! What has really kept the action from taking full steam in Asia is a lack of consolidated effort in making each other aware of the available offerings. Blame it to the language bug. There is maturity here, wealth here, there is a fine streak of intellect, there is abundant talent and that tiny little bug of entrepreneurship too that very often we Asians bury aside. I know a lot of really smart & intellectual people who earlier resigned to fate of day jobs to either lead a simple professional life or to seek solace within family & kids that are looking up to entrepreneurship this time again. How long can such a zeal be kept under the hood, after all?

Growth for startups in Asia is not very far. It will not only be powered by competitiveness of the Asian countries but also be added with some amount of chivalry that has been missing in the past few generations from this part of the world. The herd of venture capitalists from valley will surely have to move to greener pastures sometime soon.

What say?

Facebook Hyderabad Office – India’s BPO Story Wins over Technology

sinha — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:05:47 PDT

Much ado about nothing – Facebook is starting a support office in Hyd.and I do not understand why Indian blogosphere has taken that as a big news.

The support office will be the same as what Google Adwords team does in India – i.e. backend support [advertisers/sales] to US HQ.

While this may sound BIG News to a lot, this is just another BPO story [as good as saying BT starting support center in India, its just that BT isn’t as cool brand as Facebook].

Its sad that India’s BPO story still wins over the technology story [I’d anyday prefer Zynga outsourcing engineering to India than Facebook outsourcing support] and to top it all, people are actually taking this as a great piece of news.

For Facebook, its just another way to grab cheap labor in the times when economy is improving and they need to start at ‘cheaper’ locations.

Maybe Facebook will start its engineering office later – so if you are a startup, gear up for more hiring blues (Startup Hiring in the Face of Receding Recession). But till then, enjoy the BPO goodies [and support from Facebook India].

Want Blackberry Like Email Experience without GPRS? Go BlacMail

sinha — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:45:59 PDT

We have covered whole lot of push email services for your mobile in the past and the latest to join the run is a Bangalore based startup, BlacMail.

BlacMail lets you connect to the popular email clients – Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail as well as your company account.

The product is also integrated with social networks like Orkut, Twitter and Facebook and job alerts from Naukri and Monster.

Push Email Service Blacmail

BlacMail has been launched through the mobile retail channel by UniverCell and Sangeetha Mobiles. The pricing for BlacMail service starts at just Rs. 49, a fraction of the cost of alternatives such as the BlackBerry service available only for high-end “smart” phones with GPRS data plans.

Unlike several other push mail services, BlacMail has also worked on distribution channel – i.e. partnership with mobile retail outlets – makes it an interesting company to watch out for.

Do give the service a spin and share your feedback.

Few other push mail services: EmailAtMobile, SMSMyEmail (Receive emails w/o GPRS connection), MeOnGo, Mobee, Goolel

Reliance NetConnect – Simple Mistake Can Hurt

sinha — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:38:44 PDT

If you are on Reliance Netconnect USB data card, this post is for you and the billing mistakes that I encountered with my Reliance Netconnect data card.

To cut the long story short, my observation tells me that Reliance Netconnect deducts the about-to-be downloaded data the moment download begins.

For instance, I started download from openoffice.org and immediately noticed a deduction of ~200MB in my account. For some reason, the download failed and I restarted the download.

Again a deduction of ~200 MB!

Stupid as it may sound, it seems Reliance Netconnect deducts the file size worth of data transfer for heavy downloads – the moment download starts.

Right or Wrong? We all know the answer.

Has anybody experienced similar issues?

I strongly hope that all of such mistakes will change with BSNL’s USB datacard launch which is providing data transfer at a far lower price point.

But till then, keep an eye on your bill (telecom operators are known to inflate the bill, as well as subscription numbers).

PS: This post is slightly offtopic, but one can’t help writing about such issues when we all are talking about 3G, Connected world et al when operators haven’t even got the basic mathematics right.

SMS Long Code Finally Arrives – Thanks to Media

Guest Author — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:08:03 PDT

So finally IPL starts its third edition on a big note. IPL, in my opinion is not so much about cricket as much it is about the advertisement revolution that it has brought to this country. Zoo-Zoo’s were launched in the last season of IPL, and the advertising fraternity does realize that it has been THE most talked about advertisement in a long time. They made an entry again today and people were again fascinated by them.

But it was another advertisement that grabbed my attention. Abhishekh Bachchan, asking people to play a contest on their mobile phone by sending a sms to a regular 10 digit number. It can easily pass of as a regular advertisement asking people to vote over SMS. But NO it is not normal at all. Here’s why.

At the turn of this century, Realty shows made a huge impact on the Television industry and how viewers interact with it. Every realty show would ask their viewers to vote by sending a SMS to a short code. These short codes were extra VAS numbers (regular short code would cost Rs 3 and this one would cost Rs 6). Viewers did not realize but both the television shows and the mobile operators made loads of money when millions of viewers started sending their sms.

But now after almost 10 years, in my opinion number of people sending sms to a short code has started to decline. You will want to participate in a reality show and make your star a winner. But after some time the novelty of method dies down and your rising phone bill start to make you choosy about when to sms.

And so Abhishekh Bachchan asking you to vote by sending SMS to a long code, marks a huge shift in the way producers view this consumer market. They are ready to forgo the money they were making on the shortcode and really focus on consumers interacting with them over sms.

This option has been there for a long time. But people were just not aware that the kind of interaction that they do over a short code, by paying premium cost could be done on a regular 10 digit mobile number. This will now change. You will start to see more and more long codes coming in advertisement and TV contests now. And I am really excited to see this change coming in the market.

What do you think?

[Guest Article by Mayank Sharma. Reproduced from his blog.]

Best of the Week – UID, IPL 2010 [and more]

Editorial — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:33:25 PDT

This week, IPL has pretty much taken over the conversation and even Google India used the IPL wave to promote its IPL-YouTube partnership.

Startups/Funding Related Stories

Technology

Jobs

For Google, IPL 2010 is Damn Important [Starts Promoting from Homepage]

sinha — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:37:51 PDT

For Google, IPL’s YouTube partnership is so important that they have started promoting a specially created page for IPL.

Worldwide, Google has promoted a few products (like Droid) on the homepage, but I believe this is the first time, Google India is promoting a landing page from Google.co.in.

IPL Online - Google IPL Ad

The special landing page created for IPL 2010 is nothing but a major attempt to promote the IPL’s YouTube channel [read: Google India/Youtube Grabs 2 years Exclusive Web Rights to IPL].

Interestingly, the video (as of writing this post) is about SRK watching the IPL match – talks of Google making a tectonic shift from being a technology company to a ‘media’ company.

Also see: Watch IPL – III on Youtube for Free [Live Streaming]

eYantra Raises $7.8mn – To Acquire 3 Companies, Expand into Office Supplies

sinha — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:18:57 PST

Corporate Gifting and Brand Merchandising firm, eYantra has raised $7.8mn in second round, led by Argonaut Private Equity.

This Series B funding also saw Chennai-based Ventureeast Proactive maintaining its pro-rata investment, which was $2.1 million (Rs 9.5 crore) in March 2008 and $1 million (Rs 4.54 crore) in September 2008, into eYantra. [source]

The company plans three acquisitions in the coming days [Bangalore based Hourglass Essentials which is going to be an all-cash deal;Chennai-based online product customisation company and a New Delhi-based basic office supplier] and will expand into several other businesses like office supplies.

An interesting growth strategy – from corporate gifting to providing ‘staple’ solution like office supplies.

If you look at several companies that started in this business, only few have survived the recession. Infact, most of the online consumer service hasn’t taken off in a big way – and what has worked is tie-up with retail chains like Shoppers stop/Lifestyle etc.

Take IPL Polls with Missed Calls

sinha — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:48:49 PST

IPL 2010 has begun and here is your chance to participate in the polls (unofficial polls) by giving a missed calls.

The website, IndiPolls will throw a question, possible options and each option will have a phone number associated with it.

All you need to do is to just give a missed call and to the number [associated with a particular option] and bingo – your vote is recorded.

The Missed Call Platform

The platform short circuits the operators’ SMS route and the team is into something bigger. If the platform takes off, it could end up competing with operator’s one of the most significant money making business – voting/polling for reality shows.

Voting in reality TV shows is the most popular contest type urban Indians participate in by sending SMS to preserved short code. 45 million urban Indians mentioned voting in reality TV shows, the most popular SMS contest/vote type followed by voting in news polls (31.64 million).

[source: Mobile VAS subscribers in India – Insights/Prediction]

If the platform achieves traction, expect a sue-dom game from operators.

Do give IndiPolls a spin and share your take.

Also see: Indian Premier League (IPL) and Digital Media

Indian Premier League (IPL) and Digital Media

Kanupriya Sindhu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:40:25 PST

While earlier seasons of IPL have been hot favorite of traditional media (primarily television) but this time, it definitely seems to be attracting mega bucks for digital medium too. Google has announced the list of sponsors now for its first main sports event which will be streamed live on YouTube. Royal Challengers IPL Team, HSBC India & HP India will be the premium sponsors along with some other big names like Airtel, Coca Cola and Samsung who have also taken the key sponsorship slots. Sponsors’ ads will appear throughout the 60-match tournament, across several ad formats, including pre-roll and mid-roll ads, YouTube homepage ads and banner ads next to the Live player and on video watch pages. For final matches, Royal Challengers’ IPL team will take the main slot whereas HSBC India and HP India will cover the semi-finals. Ads from sponsors will appear in all countries where YouTube is available except the United Kingdom. Sponsors ads will also get featured on the IPL-branded Orkut community page, which will host team and player interviews, contests and match polls to engage fans and audiences. (via: campaigndia)

We had earlier written about IPL live streaming on Youtube though the commercial part of the deal was not clear then, but now with such big names in league for sponsorship of it, there is no second thought on the acceptance as well as commercial success of this new digital distribution initiative.

Not only YouTube, in fact other sports websites are also bullish on season 3 of IPL. As per the latest comScore report, traffic on sports sites have almost doubled in January this year to 10 million, from 5 million visitors in the same month last year. The IPL’s third season, which will start from today, is only expected to increase the traffic more.

India had an estimated 37 million active internet users in January 2010 – which is 15 per cent plus from 32.5 million last year. Yahoo! Cricket leads the pack among sports sites. With nearly 4 million visitors in a single month, it has become the most visited sports destination online. ESPN’s Cricinfo is at the second spot with 3.5 million visitors, followed by Sify Sports with more than a million visitors.

The report also revealed that the total time spent and number of pageviews in the sports category websites have doubled in the last one year. An average sports category visitor spent about 30 minutes at sports sites, viewed 41 pages of content and visited the sports sites nearly 6 times throughout the month (January 2010). In the same month in 2009, an average sports category user spent about 29 minutes, checked 39 pages and landed more than 4 times on sports category sites. Increased pageviews and time spent by visitors can be a positive indication for these sites in their monetization strategy during IPL fever.

With IPL starting from today, it would be interesting to observe the trend in traffic & engagement across different websites. Though there is already a buzz and eagerness amongst internet users to catch the live streaming of IPL matches on YouTube, but as we mentioned in our earlier post, will this affect the traffic of some other popular websites esp. in the lights of new restricted content distribution policy of IPL?

Hygiene in UID Project [Technical Analysis]

arvind — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:47:40 PST

In this piece on UID, Pratyush & I discuss on some Hygiene issues that would make or break the UID system. And we will definitely refer to the Technical Scope of the recent tenders as well. In our last post, we had someone from the UID team telling us about the sarcasm in the post against philosophy of two-bid tendering system. Not really, it is not sarcasm. But an effort to look through the direction, the technical inconsistencies and ‘hygienically worrying lack of attention’ to the details. For example, check page 18 of this document which mentions the eGovernance platform and we refer -

Quote:

The eGovernance Platform will consist mainly of 3 layers:

1. Back Office layer

2. Infrastructure layer

3. Operations layer

4. Persistent store (database) layer

Unquote

Hey didn’t you just say 3 layers? Thats what we are talking about! That’s just one of the ‘hygiene reason’ enough to be dissatisfied about. In case of UID there seems plenty of super-high-level talk where we believe that the ‘competition in prices’ would be as skewed as interpretation of the Technical Scope.

Picture this: “In December 2009, UIDAI had invited bids from companies to become its project management consultant. Seven companies that includes Booz & Allen, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, KPMG, Capgemini, PA Consulting and Ernst & Young responded to the tender. Only three made it to the final list — Ernst & Young, PA Consulting and Capgemini — as the other four companies were disqualified on technical grounds!” via

While the size of the contract awarded is not known (so much for transparency), Ernst & Young quoted Rs 7.05 crore to emerge the lowest bidder; Capgemini came next with Rs 8.6 crore, and PA Consulting quoted Rs 51 crore. Observe the range of skewness in this bidding from 7.05 crores to 51 crores in just three qualified bids! Funny competition we say.

Hygiene factors are defined clearly in Herzberg Two factor Hygiene – Motivation theory. In short these are design factors that dissatisfy a user (as opposed to satisfying him which Herzberg observed is independent). For example, in an office scenario this might be the cleanliness of bathrooms or availability of stationery or time taken to process payments etc. which might potentially rub people the wrong way and cause them to leave a job unfinished. Half-ass, in other words.

In the UID project we believe there are plenty such factors and we will try to note a few. A lot of it is ‘techie stuff’ – an easy escape statement for most wannabes & noobs out there - but hey this project is about technical stuff and so is the post on it. We will generally avoid demographic inequality or behavior of the census officials as a factor in the analysis.

Hygiene factors -

Issue no. 1: Non transferability – Numbers should be non transferable. This seems like a no-brainer. But like cellphone numbers, thinking 40 -50 years ahead, with two generations born (and some dead), there will be the issue of newer random numbers being generated and some numbers getting “free”. How does UID think of handling those situations? No mention anywhere at all. Microsoft faces a similar issue for its device keys with 4×4 numbers already (they have a lot of products). There has to be a very well thought out story on the “life-cycle” of such identifiers and associated numbers.

This is why the association of cellphone numbers (or as a rumor said – cellphone being the UID) should be thought through very carefully. There are several issues with having cellphone numbers as identifiers – although they still are the best way to have an “unique ID”. They have entity based identification listed in their document, which is a good idea. However UIDAI’s document dismisses outright the re-usability of numbers and quantum of numbers e.g. on page 9 of this document it says “That is 80 billion — is plenty of space”, which we believe is highly underestimating the task at hand (as we were reserving only 1 for entities).

Issue no. 2: Non identifiability of groups – No one should be able to say “My name is Khan – and my UID starts with xxx—-”. On a serious note, no ethnic or religious identifiability / regional identifiability should be possible – hence total randomness should be followed for number allocation. As we had briefly mentioned in our last post, this is a sure-shot game killer. There should be absolutely no way to identify “groups” of people based on their UIDs. This leaves the door very open to racial / regional profiling in a diverse country like ours. Hence number allocations should be almost totally random. Which is why we cannot follow a state based system like the US has for SSN. Imagine MNS activists looking at some ‘Northie UID’ and beat him up!

Issue no. 3: Easy rememberability or atleast retrievability for user – Apart from giving the user a card (with biometric inputs), they should explore alternate methods of rememberability of UIDs and retrievability. India still has a sizeable illiterate population and the physical manifestation of the UID (see we didn’t call it a card) has to incorporate these attributes for the user. Is biometric the only way out here? we do not think so – for the checks with biometric capabilities is costly – although one might argue scales coming into the game and making them viable.

Issue no. 4 Levels of access – (This one is a shocker) – In one of the documents shared by the UID team in the tenders, they refer to Government, private agencies and users in the same breath in terms of access to data. We hope this was an oversight and an exception. The levels of access should be crisply defined and according to the privileges of the different types of users or agencies. The read and write permissions will vary widely across the spectrum of government agencies, semi-public, private agencies (like Banks vs educational institutions). We will talk about updatability later.

Issue no. 5 Resident’s address – From pages 10-12 and again at page 20, the document talks about address as an essential parameter. However, as most of India becomes younger and is urbanized, the flux of people on-the-move is going to only increase and in such a situation, the efficacy of a ’single address’ is questionable. Therefore, permanent address (oh that funny Indian requirement – someone had once told me) is what should be the permanent entry in the DB table and there should be provision to update only the temporary addresses table. Following from the point above (Issue no.4), secondary access bodies should be able to pull and update temporary addresses (along with proof of verification) only. The fact that this doesn’t appear in the document again is slightly surprising (IMHO).

Issue no. 6 Secondary identification – As with all forms of primary identification, there should be secondary identification mechanisms. Let me give an example. If someone has your ICICI bank card, can he withdraw money from your account? The answer is NO – as he would need to know the PIN at the ATM. In case he is doing it online, he would need to know the grid behind your card as well as your online password. We strongly believe that for all “data pulling agencies” (for example verification-by-tax-authorities on the basis of UID) tomorrow such a secondary validation process should be compulsory. This is a huge issue in the US already and we shouldn’t ignore it for UID. But yeah, no mention at all.

Well, so much for Technical Analysis on UID. We do not want to digress beyond this point Do you?

ClipWeave -Video Analytics Solution To Help You Monetize Better

naman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:45:46 PST

ClipWeave.com is a Noida based video analytics startup that helps extract information from videos so that it can be used for better targeting and monetization. Clipweave claims to use proprietary technology to extract text (credits, ticker, subtitles etc), convert speech-to-text, detect a change of scene etc. from videos. Such information can be used for better Indexing and SEO of videos and also for inserting contextual ads.

Clipweave is targeted as a enterprise solution for Video Publishers and Video ad networks. Such technologies cannot be 100% percent accurate but even by partially automating the whole process of video tagging, cost and turn around time could be reduced. Youtube recently introduced captions for videos which is ultimately aimed to provide the same solution as Clipweave but Youtube is only concentrating on the audio part of the clip where as Clipweave’s solution needs to dig deep into the visuals, analysing every frame.

One challenge in acquiring clients, which the founding team is aware of, is the cheap work force available in developing countries like India where the whole process can be done manually at a very low cost. Already companies like Castingwords are outsourcing such tasks over Mturk at low price but surely with help of automation the prices can be brought down further.

If you are a video publishing platform or an ad network Clipweave’s technology can be of great help to you.

Startup Hiring in the Face of Receding Recession [Startups]

arvind — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:04:04 PST

Good hiring is always a tough task for any startup. And receding recession could mean even more challenge in the situation, when talent within starts looking at options outside. For greener pastures or simply for the sake of change. Operationally speaking, the cash pay-out of hiring goes way too higher than the recession days and it becomes increasingly challenging for business owners to buy dedication from their employees.

Another aspect of recovering economy is surge of multinationals (for example Zynga coming into India declaring hiring of about 100 odd gaming employees) into the local market and playing a spoil-sport. But that’s a bitter truth one has to live with, and honestly speaking its good to compete.

So how can startups retains talent or hire good guys who would dedicate oneself against the lure of money? Tough question that is but here are some ways which can help:

1. More often than not good developers work only for work satisfaction. Providing tasks which give thrill of execution will surely keep the steam going. (This works even without any extra money for that matter).

2. Do not generalize performance or qualification of individuals and cast them against reports or studies conducted by traditional media. For example: “…80% IITians leave IAS jobs when recession is gone – TOI”. Such reporting makes you lose the other 20% too.

3. Luring with equity might not help. This runs the risk of lowering the perceived value of your equity and will not give any clear objective to developers coming from this part of the world. Simply for the reason that business environment over here is not as matured as in the Valley.

4. Show your solidarity and positivity towards economic recovery. Ramp up your sales strategy coz only sales can fix (by and large) all other problems. Good hiring is only one of the problems, you’d agree.

What more can be adopted to keep the engine chugging. Any suggestions?

Short QnA with SMSGupshup Team on Appshup Revenue Share, Roadmap

Ashish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:00:11 PST

SMSGupshup recently announced the formal launch of its Appstore, Appshup and since we have been receiving a few queries from our readers, we just passed on the questions to SMSGupshup team.

Here is a short QnA with the team on Appshup:

Qn: What is the revenue share percentage between SMSGupshup and Developers?

70-30 (70% for the developers, 30% for SMS GupShup) of what the carrier pays (payments are held until it crosses a nominal threshold, for administrative convenience)

b. Please share the operators/circles where you have the partnerships.

Pan-India: all circles/operators

c. How are you planning to market the app directory?

On SMS GupShup’s community of 27 million users

d. Any plans to go premium SMS route?

The app platform runs on a premium short code (On a one-off basis, we can offer to run apps on longcodes too. In this case, there may be additional fees for the developer)

e. Please share the API roadmap

The current feature set is fairly rich. You will see a broad variety of new apps launching on the platform over the next few weeks – including many interactive, multi-user games, built on the current platform. We intend to offer more interactivity and better reporting in the next version. We are open to developer feedback on new additions.

Please send in your queries and we will have the SMSGupshup team respond to the same.

Google Launches Apps Marketplace – 80% Revenue Share with Developers

sinha — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:41 PST

Google has launched Apps Marketplace, an app store for Google apps users.

The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Installable apps are easy to use because they include single sign-on, Google’s universal navigation, and some even include features that integrate with your domain’s data.

Apps installation is easy – it takes 4 steps to install the app and there are apps across various categories – right from accounting/finance to productivity suite, project management etc.

This is a milestone for the online office space, as Google has the muscle power to bring all the existing competition [except MS] under its marketplace.

But what’s really lacking is the discovery of app. You do not go to app marketplace to look for apps – the whole experience has to be deeply embedded into the core product, i.e. Google Apps.

Few months back, Zoho too launched Zoho Apps marketplace [Zoho Launches Marketplace for Apps, Pokes Google] and this time, Google has upped the bar with its revenue sharing deal – Google will keep only 20% of the revenue.

Watch this intro video of Google Apps Marketplace

Dunnitt- Micro Collaboration Tool (Review)

naman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:41 PST

Dunnitt is a micro collaboration tool. It lets you create threads with a micro message (140 chars) and share it with a collaboration group. Each thread could be Text Only, YesNo, Question, Sign Up Sheet, Multiple Choice or Meet Up. And with proper input fields for each of them.

Dunnitt- Micro Collaboration Tool

Dunnit is aimed to be a device independent collaboration tool. The idea behind this as the team shares is:

Twitter is Many-to-Many Information Sharing in Real-time.

What if you had Many-to-Many Activity Sharing and Updates in Real-Time, from anywhere, any place and any device?

The tool is dead simple and the use cases are strong. But the problem i see with Dunnitt is that they are moving away from emails and SMS etc. whereas it would be better if we could use existing communication tools itself with Dunnitt working in the background. These once-in-a-while tools are generally lost when not used on a regular basis. For days if there is no update on Dunnitt then i would probably not check often and then completely forget about it. (The frequency of your checking emails depends on how regularly you receive emails.)

Issues with the current tool:

1. One serious issue is privacy related but is actually a feature. While creating a task you can collaborate with anyone on the Dunnitt platform. When you start typing the collaborators for a task, an auto suggest list is thrown revealing all the IDs and emails registered at Dunnitt. It hinders privacy and also has scalability issues on the technology front. It would be better if one could chose the list of collaborators from Gmail, Twitter, Linkedin etc. accounts.

2. The interface needs to be worked on. At times it seems some parts are totally disconnected from the others. The look and feel of the site is dull and they have already placed ads at all the places which is not a way to grow with a new product. Such attempts tend to prove that you are building a website and not a business.

3. The reporting system is very weak. Quantifying responses from other users is important.

Overall a nice idea but weak execution. Pebble Talk is a SaaS tool based on same idea but with stronger execution.

Do give Dunnitt a spin and share your experience.

Women’s Reservation Bill – Passed in Rajya Sabha

arvind — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:40:22 PST

Okhey, this post is a little off-beat. Women’s Reservation Bill giving 33 percent representation to women in parliament and state assemblies has been passed in the Rajya Sabha with 186 ayes & 1 noes about an hour ago! Yet another historic & welcome development in the Indian politics as women really need empowerment in modern day scenario. Besides if reservation is up on cards for the historically suppressed class of society, then women are the most deserving group for such an initiative.

Of course this bill @Rajya Sabha was not passed without drama & walk-outs. But what is more important is to visualize the impact of such a step on the woman-workforce in future. I will quote from one of my previous post last October on Gharkamai where the first paragraph read as following:

In our society, it is so acceptable and understandable to see a highly educated woman settling down as a home-maker raising kids, watching TV soaps, cooking great food etc. Scarcely does one (read men) understand what it feels like when a girl who was taught to become a professional since childhood is forced to become a housewife. Sshhh, and does anyone even know the loss that the country incurs by depriving such a large population of skilled manpower from work.

This is totally an awesome decision @ Parliament and Pluggd.in wishes all women for the new future.