I just finished reading “Subject To Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world”. This book is written by Adaptive Path, the same guys who invented the words “blog” and “ajax”, as well as creators of the Aurora browser concept.

It has been a revelatory book for me, a developer who considers himself to be the last person to know about “design.” The book mainly focuses on the lessons learned from their experiences in working with clients to design and create products and services.

Design

They define design as an activity, as opposed to a look and feel that is added later on. The activity incorporates:

• Empathy – Design must serve a human purpose, and so design requires an understanding of how people will interact with whatever you’re designing.
• Problem Solving – Design really shines when it’s used to address complex problems where the outcome is clear, many stakeholders are involved, and the boundaries are fuzzy.
• Ideation and prototyping – Design produces things, whether they’re abstract (schematics, blueprints, wireframes, conceptual models) or concrete (prototypes, physical models). Design is a creative activity and thus requires actually creating something.
• Finding alternatives – Design is less about the analysis of existing options than the creation of new options. Sometimes that means looking at existing options in new ways, and at other times that means creating from scratch. An effective design process typically offers many solutions to a problem.

They repeatedly explain that the experience is what matters to the end-user and that’s the real product rather than how it is delivered.

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Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.

– Steve Jobs on the design lesson of the iPod in Newsweek, 2006-10-14

Every startup needs to do some market research while working on their next big idea. And part of this market research is looking at demographic and economic data to find out the size of your target audience.

For most of those who are reading this, the audience probably is people who use computers. Now, how do we find out such numbers? That’s where the Internet and Mobile Association of India steps in with their “Internet in India 2007″ report (PDF).

Some of the high-level overviews from that report:

• The numbers are based on a survey across 30 cities and 65000 individuals.
• The breakdown of the urban population is explained nicely in this funnel graphic:

• 70% of people who know how to use computers have accessed the Internet at least once.
• 70% of these at-least-once users become regular users.
• Claimed internet users have risen from 32.2 million in 2006 to 46 million in 2007.
• 38% are from the Top 8 urban cities, 12% from 5-10 lakh population cities, and 29% from 2-5 lakh population cities!
• Young Men and College Students are the major chunk of the growing Internet user base.
• There has been a decrease in usage by older men and non-working women.
• PC ownership increased by 48% last year! Thanks to slashed PC prices.
• With Government of India declaring 2007 as the Broadband Year, Internet ownership has increased by 32% last year!
• The difference in increase of PC ownership (48%) vs. increase in Internet ownership (32%) is probably because of broadband penetration and availability
• 36% use a cyber-café, 30% from home, 25% from office, 7% from school/college and 2% others.
  • The cyber-café is still the most prominent point of Internet access.
  • This is a valuable data point to consider regarding security when designing applications – people are NOT necessariliy using their own desktops all the time.
  • Usage from home and cyber-café has decreased vs. Usage from office and schools/colleges has increased. Note that these are percentages, the absolute numbers might paint a different picture, but I couldn’t find them in this report.
• Usage can be classified into three broad categories:
  1. Communication – Email, chat
  2. Infotainer – Gaming, news, blogs, encyclopedia
  3. Sticky applications – Online banking, online ticketing, online shopping
• 61% state communication as the main reason they access the Internet. 25% for information and e-commerce. And 13% for entertainment.
  • What’s interesting is that percentage of people with information as the main reason has decreased from 32% in 2006 to 20% in 2007.
  • I’m guessing that percentage of entertainment will increase with better broadband access.
• 2/3rd of users access Internet 2-3 times a week.
  • 25% access daily, 19% 4-6 times a week, 23% 2-3 times a week, 18% once a week, and rest 15% about a few times a month
  • (It should be strange for us always-on people to see 75% of people not use it on a daily basis!)

These are very interesting numbers. I wonder how they compare with the growth graphs of Internet-advanced countries such as USA or Japan.

The IAMAI have many more interesting reports on topics such as Online Banner Advertising Market in India, Consumer E-commerce Market in India, Online Gaming in India, Mobile Value Added Services in India, and so on.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

When I meet people and have a conversation, they eventually ask the question “So, what do you guys do?”

I like to say “We make stuff” but that’s hardly understandable. The best example I like to give is the Swinxs (found via Springwise).

The Swinxs games console is designed for active games both inside and outdoors. The Swinxs console can talk, can recognize, encourages and explains games. It even acts as referee. The console is light, compact and due to its sustainable battery, is easy to take with you to the park, playground or the beach.

My favorite part is that the children get RFID-tagged colorful bracelets to wear. The tags serve multiple purposes from identifying each participant to keeping track of their scores. For example, if there’s a running race, the child can just bring their hand close to the game console at the finish line, and it’ll immediately recognize you and tell how much time you took.

And there are a lot more games to play:

The downloadable games are divided into age and category. The games possibilities are endless and vary from traditional hide and seek to educational quizzes and adventurous games. The games can be downloaded FREE from this website. Stories and music can also be downloaded on the Swinxs, as well as games.

The video demo showcases the product really well:

Kids these days are addicted to gadgets like Gameboys, mobile phones, etc. The Swinxs is in the same category but it actually encourages them to be more physically active as well as more social with other kids.

There are many other salient features that appeal to us:

• It is useful. Especially in terms of providing functionality that is not normally available through any other means.
• The device connects you with the real world. It’s not a world onto its own.
• It is fun.

This is the kind of stuff that we dream of, the kind of stuff that we like to work on.

What’s interesting is such products bridge the offline world and the computer/online worlds. After all, shouldn’t technology be helping you to live a better offline life, than making you spend more time with the technology itself?

Note: Cross-posted to our company blog.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

It’s been nearly 5 months since I last quit my job. Five months. Wow. It’s weird because it doesn’t feel that long.

I spent most of the first few months whiling away, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did have some plans though. For one, I was hoping to go for an M.S. in the USuAl places but the American universities didn’t think well enough of me and asked me to stay back, heh.

I wasn’t disappointed though. I thought I’ll spend some time in gaining some skills and get back to another job in the computer science areas that I wanted to explore.

But as John Lennon would say “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Vikram and I were working on reviving our iPod Charger business and since I didn’t have anything in particular to do, I did some of the running around. However, we still didn’t have a big picture in mind, just that we wanted it to continue.

Suddenly one day, Vikram called from USA and said that he had a brainwave to improve one of our ideas. We had last discussed it nearly six months earlier and shelved it because we didn’t think it would work. It suddenly dawned on us that the improved idea passes all our viable business criteria, especially the parameter that it is actually useful to people, it is doable, and it belongs more in the must-have category as opposed to the nice-to-have category.

After that conversation, everything changed.

Vikram quit a nice cushy job in USA, ditched his H1 visa and is back in Bangalore. He was so sure about this that his colleague Varun also got convinced about the idea and moved back to India.

Here we are, three people who have quit their jobs and working to create a new product. I hate using the latest buzzwords, so I’ll just say, yes we have our own company now. We don’t have any salary and we have lot of work.

A domain name I had registered long ago suddenly came into use. It was going to be the name of our company – IONLAB:

The ion was our first product we created, manufactured and marketed during weekends. Excited by its success, we are now working full-time on making our own products. Hence the “ion” in our name.

We are focused on designs and ideas, and match them to our capabilities. Hence the “lab” in our name, which emphasizes that we are about taking ideas to execution.

We have been having a ball of a time working on our own ideas full-time and gaining experience in expanding our ion business.

Regarding our specific idea, there’s no point in talking about it this early but we’ve described it a bit on our products page.

FWIW, I have no idea how far we will go and what will happen in the future. You may never even hear about us or our product. But one thing’s for sure, we’re going to give this our best shot and we’ll work to make it happen.

As we wrote in our company weblog’s first entry:

We love putting in effort. After all, it’s our dreams and ideas. What can be more exciting than that? As Mark Cuban once said, “The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t.”

IONLAB is our dream, our destination.

The next experiment has begun!

When making a website, there are simply so many aspects to consider. I’ve been gathering some useful links and information on the same, right from How to Evaluate a new Product Idea to choosing color schemes.

I’ve put all of these links together into a Website Making Howto on my wiki.

Discussions and contributions are welcome.

I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time.

Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.

The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.

The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.

The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”

The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”

Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:

1. Gather the right players
2. Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.

He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:

1. Teach the Game
   • When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game – the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
2. Share the macrovision
   • What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
3. Near-term targets.
   • A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
4. Keep score
   • Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
   • In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
   • Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
   • Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
   • Keep changing critical numbers.
   • Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
   • Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
   • Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk – 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
5. Line of sight
   • Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
   • This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
6. Celebrate your victories
   • Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
   • Have a Victory Party
   • The act of recognizing > how you recognize
7. Align everyone’s interests
   • To the victor(s), belong the spoils
   • In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
   • Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
   • How direct is the co-relation?
   • Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
   • American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.

• When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.

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Working from home full-time is a different experience than we are used to. You make or break things, there’s no one asking about your progress and there are no deadlines. It’s all up to you.

My productivity has varied a lot during this time and I was wondering how to make more days productive than they are as of now.

So I polled some of my friends who also work out of a home-office on how they they maintain productivity / motivation / focus, and I got some interesting replies:

• Manish Jethani says:

  • Make a separate “office room” in your home. You could convert your old study room into your office. You go into this room only for work — fully dressed for work (not in pyjamas!). When you get out of this room, you leave your work behind. In other words, you have a proper office located inside your home.
  • Cut out the distractions. Make your family know that this is your office. No visitors, no phone calls (except work-related), etc.
  • Follow proper timings. Work fixed hours.
  • To stay motivated while working out of your home, I think you basically have to enjoy what you do.
  • Self-discipline is the key.
  • The concept of an office, as we know it, is relatively new in our history. Throughout the ages humans have worked out of their homes. Think about it. It’s the more natural way of things. Thanks to the internet, working from home is likely to become the norm in the 21st century (also because commuting might become prohibitively expensive).

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Long ago, a wise friend I used to know once told me that humans have many kinds of needs – physiological, emotional, etc. Along with these, there is also the need to fight.

I’ve been thinking over and over on how true this is. Or whether it is just baloney.

The need to fight. And I’m not talking physically. There is something that you’re always fighting against – whether your focus is challenges at work, or road rage, or even fighting with your loved ones.

A basic human need is to fight. That’s why we have wars and battles all the time. Especially in the mind. I know many people who coded best when they were angry. Maybe our genes and body are built for action, for the rush of the battle.

Maybe that’s why the milestones in a startup feels more “earned” than when working in a big company where the same situations are so shielded.

Maybe that’s why you get things done only when you have a deadline.

Maybe that’s why people do sports, trekking, adventures, long distance biking, etc.

Maybe that’s why people with rags-to-riches stories are more happier than kids of rich people.

Maybe that’s why people feel fired up after a debate or a race, irrespective of whether they win or lose.

Because you’re trying to fight the odds.

And if people don’t have the fight in them, or don’t fight for anything, that’s when they seem so boring, so bored and so lifeless.

Maybe that was part of the message in the Fight Club.

P.S. Has there been any organized pillow fights in India?

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

Last week, we quietly relaunched ion, our USB charger. The very next day, we shipped ions to customers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. And an hour ago, I shipped one to Bhubaneswar. It’s good to be back!

First of all, thanks to all those 96 people who wrote to us in the past few months who kept asking us when we’ll be back in stock. The fact that there are people really interested kept us going. And we really needed that boost.

I’m sure there are a lot more people who would have also visited the website, saw the ‘Out of stock’ sign but not written to us. We felt bad in having to turn away so many people for so long. But we are very conscious of delivering the best goods, hence we ended up taking a lot of time to do it right.

<shameless plug>

The good news is that the next generation of ion, unimaginatively called “ion2″ is here and now available.

Not only does ion really solve a pain point, what sets it apart from other USB chargers are:

1. Is the smallest USB charger available in the Indian market.
2. Of very high quality. It is CE certified.
3. Works anywhere in the world. No more voltage conversions.
4. Works with almost any device that can be charged via USB, including all kinds of mp3 players (the entire iPod family, Zune, iRiver, etc.), mobile phones, and so on.
5. Advantage of ion working with so many devices is that you no longer need to say “Do you have an iPod charger” or “Do you have a Nokia 6300 charger?”… Just ask “Do you have an ion?”

</shameless plug>