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

The past couple of weeks has been a rollercoaster ride for us and for ion.

Sales has been very good so far, but our observation is that people in India are still hesitant to buy online from reasons such as credit card security concerns (understandably so) to recently Paypal changing their UI making it more difficult for the average person to understand what to do. So, we started accepting offline payments and that has worked out well.

What’s the response to ion? Simply amazing. I mean if you think about it, it’s just a charger (<marketing-pitch>and works really really well</marketing-pitch>), and yet people are so appreciative and supportive of what we are trying to do. The clincher is that it solves a real problem. I’ve often heard the phrase “I just needed something like this.”

As we say in our about page:

Moral of the story : “See a need, fill a need” — ‘Robots’ movie.

The three biggest points about “ion” (both the company and the product) that people like are:

1. We took the idea to execution. This alone amazes people. I still remember what Jace once said: “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”

2. The statement we make : “Made in India. Available only in India.” and “We are just Indians who want to make products for India.” Nothing much to be said here, except that we mean it and it’s not something we say lightly or say it for the sake of it. And no, we’re not going to rephrase it as “I’m just an Indian who wants to develop products in India for everyone in the World” as someone suggested.

3. We have a very good finishing – the ion itself and the packaging looks very good and has a professional presentation. At the right price point.

Another aspect is how word-of-mouth has helped ion and we were banking on that because we do not have a marketing budget other than the posters we are giving to our friends to put up in their company notice boards. Most people came to know about ion through emails, and it’s surprising how effective email forwards are – the chain just keeps going on and on, and many times my friends had come to know even before I sent it to them because someone had already forwarded it!

Processing all the ion emails is both a chore and fun…

The worst mail we’ve got is:

first time in india single click orkut programs launching a product,website,service etc. but dont have enough money to market your product,service,website etc.

there are more than 3 crore registered resident indian on orkut out of 8 crore indian internet user.noboby can question the potentional of orkut.

orkut single click tools can help u to reach 3 crore indians at cheapest price possible.

the features of orkut single click program are as follows:

1)Single click to scrap all your friends. 2)A Single click can directly take u to a user’s scrap book or album 3)A single click directly creates a topic in all the groups u have joined 4)A Single click helps u to join a community. 5)IDEAL for people who frequently use ORKUT,people who want to market their product.

Free stuff included : 1)orkut FAN FLOODing 2)DATABASE of 8 crore email address 3)FREE orkut tweaks

i m gonna give this full package in a cd for 500 rs and shipping 50 Rs extra

plz call 098________(Editor’s Note: Full number not reproduced to protect the guilty)

Some of the best mails we have received are:

I would like to congratulate all three of you for your New product – “ion | power your music”. I wish you three develop more and more usable products for all of us. I would like to buy it even though i don’t have any of the product which needs usb charging.

and

If you are devising a marketing strategy for your company and this product, I will be glad to offer any assistance. I have worked in pre-Sales Europe for quite some time and my experience, given the remarkable nature of your product may prove helpful.

and

I am a B.Tech-III Electronics student. Came to know about you through some forward. I actually have few such ideas (related to electronics), but don’t know how to commercialize them. Can you help me out? Though I can get placed in some MNC easily, I am more interested in implementing my ideas.

I think this last mail was the best we’ve ever got. I’m starting to believe what Vikram says that more and more of this generation are thinking like this, and “want to do things for India”, and he/we mean that in a non-political non-hyper-patriotic manner. It’s just that simple “ness” in us.

And finally, some of the blogs that have written about us are:

• Amit Agarwal
• Aarthi Ramamurthy
• Shashidhar Desai

All in all, there’s more work to be done, but so far so good. There’s more to it behind the scenes, and perhaps I’ll write about it in another post.

My friend Abishek Nair and myself were recently having a conversation over email where I kept prodding him about what he’s going to do next. You see, being a Bangalorean, he’s not a software engineer! He’s a vfx whiz. In normal English, that means he’s one of those guys who creates the visual effects in ads or movies that you might have seen. A couple of days after that email exchange, Abishek calls me and says that he’s got a contract with a Singapore company (with whom he had just finished a project) and was going there to work on even more cooler stuff.

I was happy to hear that because I’ve seen some of his work and I think he really is talented, all he needs is a platform to showcase his skills, and this new gig should be a very good opportunity for him.

We met up a couple of days before he took off, just to catch up. He showed me some of his latest work and I was just blown away. You must have seen the latest Limca ad on TV featuring Riya Sen…

He went on to explain the software that he uses and how “node-based” software has shaked the vfx industry literally, thanks to the popularity of Apple Shake, and so on. I was surprised at how much painstaking effort is required to create these visual effects – we take movies like King Kong for granted but the amount of work behind the scenes is mind-boggling.

Coincidentally, Dad had recently bought a new Sony DCR-DVD 708E handycam and I had brought it over to show it to Abishek… I got a brainwave – why not make an interview? It need not be anything professional, just something that happened. I think Kiruba’s enthusiasm, while encouraging podcasters in a session at BarCampBangalore3, had rubbed off on me.

And here I present to you – the first ever video that I’ve ever shot! The best parts are the demos of Abishek’s works and his description of how it was created.

Note 1: You can also download the video for offline viewing.

Note 2: The audio quality is a little faint in the beginning, but much better after we switched off the fan

If you are interested to know more, you can write to Abishek – his email address is abisheknair (at) gmail.com.

A couple of weeks ago (on July 7th), we had a YEFI Day at work. YEFI stands for Yahoo! Employee Foundation India. As part of the celebrations, we got the Parikrma kids to come and visit our Yahoo! offices.

The Jayanagar children (who see me every Saturday) visited the M G Road office, and as part of Kalpana’s (one of the founders of Parikrma) plan, another colleague and myself would host the Sahakarnagar children at Aztec / EGL premises.

The kids came at around 1 o’ clock and we took them straight for lunch first. The girls came first and they sat down. The boys came in an another vehicle after a while. The Aztec cafeteria was filled with kids with green color shirts, and everyone was wondering what was going on.

First off, I asked who was the naughtiest of them all, and all of them pointed to a single girl, and I got her to explain what all naughty things she does, hehe. Apparently, she’s the only one who confidently slaps any of the naughty boys! Then, I asked their nicknames, and got to know all the names from ‘mosquito’ to ‘kogile’.

Somewhere in between, I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up – 3 said nurse, 1 said teacher, 1 said computer scientist (whatever that is), 1 said astronaut (!), and so on. I was so happy to hear that only one of them wanted to become a “software engineer”. Maybe I’m being cynical but I think we have enough drones in Bangalore as it is. These kids can do so much more, and their motivation is very different from ours. When I asked why that paticular girl wanted to become a teacher? She said she liked kids and she wanted to help other kids just like Parikrma helped her. I was asking the wannabe-nurses on whether they have put an injection to somebody else … then I asked the ‘kogile’ to sing, and she sang a beautiful kannada song.

A month ago. Saturday evening. Calls at 7.30 pm. 5 friends arrive at 9 pm. We take out the Karnataka map and decide where to go.

I suggested that we plan such that we can go to Shivagange for the sunrise and that we should take the shortest route out of Bangalore so that we can avoid the traffic as much as possible, and left the rest to the others. Since we were close to Mysore road, we reached a consensus within 2 minutes to take Mysore road → Srirangapatanam → Pandavapura → Nagamangala → Yediyur → Kunigal → Nelamangala → Shivagange → Back home. Roads : Mysore Road, Road connecting Mysore road to NH-48 , NH-48, NH-4.

On the way on Mysore Road, I suggested we skip “kaaDu mane” restaurant because we’ve been there often, and one of us was insisting on a dhaba. We kept saying we’ll stop for the next one, and kept skipping dhabas. Discussion topics varied from pulling legs to politics to amazing lecturers like for example, an Electronics lecturer said that high-strength signals are sent towards a satellite and low-strength signals come towards earth. Why? Because of gravity! True story. We finally went to Kamat Lokaruchi and had amazing joLada roti oota.

I was singing “Hit the road, Jack” and we were back on the highway.

I’m writing this a few days after coming back to Bangalore, because I had to get over my holiday hangover. It seems unfair to gain so much, make so many new friends and have so much fun, and suddenly let it go, and that too, back to the daily routine life.

The trip was centred around attending the YHAI National Himalayan Winter Trekking Expedition, although it turned out to be the Dalhousie picnic because the trek was easy, but that little dampener didn’t stop us from having a great time.

It all started a couple of months ago when Niara and myself wanted to go to the Himalayan trek organized by YHAI in December, and we started planning.

Then, I remembered that I had inquired about the same trek last year and had got my friend Abishek (who is into making movies and graphics) interested but he got an offer to do a Nokia ad and he said he didn’t want to miss the opportunity. So, I had to shelve my plans that year. So, I soon started reading up the official YHAI website and was glad to be planning for it this year. We did plan a lot, and WriteBoard came in handy so that we could coordinate ourselves, from booking train tickets to getting medical certificates.

The trip started on the evening of Christmas Day of 2005, when we boarded the Rajdhani train to Delhi. It was going to be a 36 hours journey.

ShreeKumar’s at it again:

It’s december, and I am bitten by the travel bug again. This time, I intend to cover the areas on the western coast of India on my cycle. The trip would cover 2000+ kms of gruelling terrain and span 21 days !

From Mangalore, I am cycling to Goa. From there, I will go to Hubli and then to Pune over Aihole, Badami, Pattadakal, Gokak and Mahabaleshwar. After Pune, it will be Mumbai. After Mumbai, I will be off to see Shirdi(?), Ajanta, Ellora, and Lonar (yes, you haven’t heard of it yet). From there, I hope to end triumphantly in Ahmedabad.

He’s back! I want to watch this new CNN-IBN channel soon. Rajdeep was is one of my favorite journalists, it’s good to see him back in action.

(via DesiPundit)

Watch the Linux Can! video (I took yesterday night) now!

I just can’t get that tune out of my head …

Update : The video is now available on Google Video.

Yesterday was such a long and awesome day.

The day started with me missing Taj’s talk on Entropy and I’m still kicking myself for that one. I attended Gora’s talk on IndLinux efforts and I got to know about the various efforts in localization and translations going on.

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Then, Alan Cox spoke on Modern Linux Device Drivers. There was so much information that he was doling out that I didn’t quite follow, but I did get the gist and understood that kernel stuff ain’t that much of a voodoo as I thought it would be. It simply requires a lot more discipline and awareness of how design impacts performance.

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Then, it was Welte’s turn to talk how he reverse-engineered Motorola’s EZX linux phones to allow a full free software stack to be used on the phone. It was interesting to note the various steps he takes, including using an oscilloscope to find out which probes and points actually work! I didn’t stay for the whole talk because the amount of jargon involved was simply beyond me.

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Next, I was listening to Volker on the Munich City’s transition to free software. Interestingly, in the city’s evaluation, they found the proprietary solutions to be cheaper than the free software contract quotes (we are talking a difference of 10 million or more!) but they took many more considerations such as long-term costs, support, localization, etc. and finally OpenOffice+Linux got lot more points and was finally chosen by the Munich city. The last-minute offers by MS which include cuts of 7 million dollars, etc. were not considered by Munich.

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After that, we were in an Advanced Python BoF with Taj, Siddharth, and many others. With Sid being present, the talk veered off in various directions and that’s a good thing. Sid was talking about how to have some feedback values put in generators and Taj gave an example of how such a problem is faced in producer-consumer setup when they are using python generators. Taj said there’s a relevant PEP that’s out there but with no consensus yet on what’s going to be done about it. There was much more discussed including decorators, metaclasses, and Ruby too (no, we didn’t bash it).

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Today, the keynote address was by Andrew Cowie on Inside|Outside, and it was a brilliant talk. Cowie is a very animated and fun person. The talk was about how people are on the inside or outside of the community and what it takes to cross over. He gave various examples, including himself on how he had to step in to take care of java-gnome because the original author vanished from the scene. He also explained we need to be pragmatic and show a united front. For example, he was particularly appreciative of Hari Krishnan’s posters and why it shouldn’t matter whether he used a proprietary software such as Corel Draw. Actually, Hari needed some vector drawing ability which was not available in any of the open source tools. The people who bitched about using a non-open source software would better have spent their time fixing the actual problem. Similarly, he slammed the “GNU/” thingy issue raised everytime in a conference and people actually cheered him! I liked the way he stressed “No one can tell you no” … Cowie has put up the talk slides online.

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Then, I attended Till Adam’s talk on Kolab and got to know how a German ministry funded Kolab 1 and subsequently how Kolab 2 has become a real viable alternative to the Exchange/Outlook combination. The technical bits were interesting, like how Kolab just reuses Cyrus-imapd for everything and treats all the information as just imap mails, including memos and calendars, etc. Since Cyrus-imapd is very scalable and kolabd is a lightweight daemon, Till said that many deployments of Kolab had scaled really well.

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Then, I caught the last few minutes of Dr. George Easaw talking about Moodle. He was very enthusiastic about Moodle and is using this course management system in their college.

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The FOSS in Agriculture : OSCAR talk was very interesting. OSCAR stands for Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas and has been sponsored by the French Institute of Pondicherry. OSCAR has a database of plants and images of the different parts of the plant. Once a farmer selects how the plant looks like, the list of species that match it are shown, and the correct species can be selected. In the species page, many details are present such as the names in local languages, whether it is a weed or a plant, whether it is good or bad, etc. They have developed this software in conjunction with teams in the field coordinating with farmers. Apparently, they want the software to reach a certain stage of completion and then open source it, which would likely be around March of next year.

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Then, Sai Sreekanth spoke about FOSS in primary education. He presented his experience with schools in Kuppam and how freely available software made a difference to the learning of the children. Interestingly, he said that training and English were not the barriers – just having a computer running with all the software loaded were enough and the kids really learn to explore on their own. He demonstrated a few software that were very useful and the audience were quite fascinated by the breadth and depth of the software such as Tux Math Scrabble, Celestia, Anagramarama, edu.kde and many more. There is a whole lot of software out there available for school education that need to be taken advantage of, especially in hinterland areas where good teachers are rare and there are budget constraints. For example, if a school can’t afford a real chemistry laboratory, then ChemConnection is an amazing piece of software where you can mix and match chemicals and see the result of the reactions. Sai pointed to many more resources such as iosn.net, ofset.org, pratham.org and Edubuntu.

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Next, I attended Kalyan’s talk on Web Application Security. He made revelations on how insecure sites can be and how easy it could be to circumvent the “128-bit SSL encryption high-security” stuff and do nasty things. All you need is 10 min to look around the HTML code. In fact, he demonstrated how we can easily get DVD players from Rediff Shopping or Indiatimes Shopping by changing the price from say 2999 to just 2 rupees in the HTML code and then clicking submit… Don’t try this at home, kids. His stress was that cryptography gave a false sense of security, it was easy to bypass the security. What is most needed is common sense and strict input validation is one of the best ways to be secure.

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Then, I attended the Foss in Education : A Panel Discussion. Yes, it’s a recurring theme in the discussions I attended today. Many points were discussed but Atul came in and set the discussion straight explaining the difference of FOSS in education and FOSS as education and why we need to differentiate between the two. The former is using FOSS as tools for education whereas the latter means FOSS becomes syllabus. Obviously, I think the former is a better idea. There were professors and students participating in the discussion actively. Gopi Garge was chaperoning the discussion and summarizing the points regularly.

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Unfortunately, attending these sessions meant missing Kaustubh’s podcasting talk and Mrinal’s FOSS Studio talk as well.

Finally, I last attended the KDE Development Workshop by Taj and Till.

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Outside, people had gathered in groups and were all discussing away. You could just feel the ideas and discussions and opinions whooshing by.

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Update : Philip has put up his notes on why foss in education makes sense.