India - Swaroop CH

Met Lakshmi Rebecca of “Chai With Lakshmi” fame

Ten months ago, Lakshmi Rebecca emailed me about her online talk show Chai with Lakshmi. I acknowledged her email and gave my standard reply of how this is a personal blog and I don’t do product reviews of any kind. At the same time, I forwarded the website to

India

Micro targeting

Recently the Obama re-election campaign employed similar population-wide behavioral analytics to micro-target voters to ensure his re-election. There is no reason why we in India must not look to technology to devise ingenious methods for near real time data collection and population-wide analytics of social performance. This will not only

Books

Book review: Thoughts from Jaya, a retelling of Mahabharata

The world around me is very unsettling. First, we have the incompetence of the governments of the day, and then the startling realities highlighted by Satyamev Jayate show, even if it is not the whole truth, and so on. And these strange behavior of man to hurt and not help

India

Inspired by companies incubated at RTBI, IIT Madras

I am here at IITM, Chennai to help out NextDrop in some technology discussions, and have been blown away by the kinds of companies incubated at the Rural Technology Business Incubation facility (RTBI). For example, consider Stellapps which is developing an automated cow milking system! To get a taste of

Business

Leaving Infibeam

Today is my last day at Infibeam. I’m going to miss working in this environment because I learned a lot about ecommerce and online buying in India. For example, I was surprised to know how much sales go up during Diwali (in hindsight, not so surprising, of course) and

Business

Statistics to wow non-techies about digital future

A common question I get from non-techies is “Is ecommerce for real? Do people really buy online?” My line of argument is that the future is digital, and hence buying online is a natural consequence of that. However, just saying that was not convincing enough. So I gathered some statistics

India

The real reasons why Indian startups struggle to hire

The last article on difficulty of hiring for startups in India generated a lot of discussion (also see the HackerStreet.India discussion about this article). I was surprised to see so much response within 24 hours. I guess it shows how much of a pain point it actually is: Ramjee

Business

Why is no one talking about the difficulty of hiring for startups in India?

We’ve all heard about how startups are key to the future economy of India and we’ve heard about how hiring should be a top priority for any company – then why is it that hiring is NOT a majorly discussed issue in startup events in India? I ask this

Business

How to get funding from Government of India

I will be speaking in a panel at the HeadStart Conference, Hyderabad today regarding what is the funding that was granted by the Govt. of India to my ex-startup, and how you can apply. I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

Business

Joining InfiBeam

Update: As of 22 June, 2011, I’m no longer with Infibeam. Thanking the community First and foremost, thanks to all who encouraged me, and offered support and help when I wrote about leaving my own company. Many people, without any personal benefit in mind, connected me to very interesting

Business

The 5-year limit to being a coder in India?

Let me start with a story I had heard about long ago when I was at Adobe. There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit

General

The magic of foss.in

Why do I keep going back to foss.in? Because I’m the kind of person who needs extrinsic motivation. That’s why having a good circle of friends with a positive attitude is so important to me. And that’s why the foss.in community is so important to

Business

Mobile App market in India

Thinking from an entrepreneurial angle, it seems to me that there is almost no mobile app market in India today i.e., it is not a startuppable market. All the successful apps that are making money are transaction-based. For example, ngpay takes a cut from every movie ticket you buy

India

A few statistics about India

From President’s speech in 2007: * “Today, the average age of India’s population is below 25 years. Approximately, 77 crore of our people, or about 70 percent of the population, fall below the age of 35.” From Tracking The Growth of India’s Middle Class: * “Over the next 20

India

Vote for the Candidate

I attended a Bangalore South Lok Sabha Candidates’ debate yesterday, this time held at NMKRV Jayanagar and organized by the Rotary Clubs of South Bangalore. Only Capt. Gopinath (Independent) had arrived on time. Ananth Kumar (BJP) arrived a bit late but immediately greeted each and every individual in the hall

General

Thought for the Day

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from

Business

Where to find startup jobs in India?

If you want to find out what jobs are available in startups in India, then there are myriad resources to check: * VentureWoods * Pluggd.in ‘coffee’ forum * Pluggd.in ecosystem section * Hello Intern * Sutra Jobs * Indian Jobs board at ‘Joel On Software’ * Barcamp Mumbai Startup Jobs section * NEN Startup Jobs section

Business

Ideas are Cheap : Kannada Word Lists

Continuing the “Ideas are Cheap” series, here’s another simple idea that I would personally find very useful but would be difficult to execute in terms of content. These days I’m finding it hard to read Kannada newspapers because my vocabulary is clearly lacking, and consequently I would probably

Business

Product for the future

My favorite session at proto.in 5th edition was by Atul Chitnis who reinforced the basics of business. He made one remark which seems obvious but something that we don’t put in practice: “Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready just in

India

Water Sports in Sharavathy Valley

Last weekend, I was back in Sharavathy Valley in Shimoga, but this time for some water sports. Here’s a photo essay of the trip: When we were reaching our camp area, the entrance itself was impressive, and I was excited by such clear blue water. We had Breakfast and

India

Bangalore Ultra Marathon 2008

Sunday was the day of the second Bangalore Ultra Marathon. Had to get up at 3AM in order to reach Cubbon Park at 4:30AM for the buses to take us to ‘Our Native Village’ resort in Hesaraghatta. We reached early at 6AM and were waiting for the day to

Business

Internet usage in India

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

India

Mullainagiri, third time lucky as well

This weekend, we climbed Mullainagiri and Bababudanagiri. Even though this is my third visit, it never fails to delight me on its beauty. Mullainagiri and Tadiyandamol are my favorite trekking spots in terms of scenery. In the 3-4 days before the trek, we didn’t spend enough time on the

General

Common activities means better friends

If you want to make new friends, there is no use in just saying hi to people, something of value should be exchanged or there should be a common activity. That’s when they become friends. Real friends. I’ve added a page on my wiki to list the type

India

Are electric scooters viable?

I finally had to give away my old Suzuki Samurai bike. It was a 1999 model, which makes it 9 years old. I used to call it ‘The Last Samurai’ because it is one of the few Samurai bikes that I could see on the roads. Sigh. It feels like