I am a self confessed Fan (yes with a capital 'F') of Google and its products - my GMail remains open on my laptop as long as it is switched on; I visit Google to reach every 9 in 10 websites I visit; I save most of my documents as GMail attachments or Google Docs; all the websites which I manage are managed through blogger.com; and almost every time I drive to a new place, I use Google Maps ! The resolution and detail on Google Maps for India has improved a lot since I first blogged about MapMyIndia version of Indian mapping software (incidentally, the makers of MapMyIndia now power Yahoo! India Maps ). However, Google Maps has forged far ahead of Yahoo! Maps or MapMyIndia thanks to its colaborative features - most of the landmarks and addresses which I find on Google Maps are tagged or identified by users themselves. This kind of crowdsourced mapping info makes Google maps an ideal tool to find anything from businesses (say CD Shop in Powai) to picnic spots and weekend getaw

Found this awsome list of statements on motivating employees here . people don't do what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward positive reinforcement is the most effective way to motivate people [Note that in a technology company, a reinforcer might be the freedom to spend some time working on a side project or a pet feature; reinforcement is broader than money or praise; it can be anything that the employee values.] reinforcement works best when it is immediate, certain, and frequent (Daniels points out that kids that our public schools diagnose as having an ADD learning disability are able to concentrate for hours playing video games that provide 85 positive reinforcements per minute) reinforcement doesn't work if followed up with a "but, you need to improve X, Y, Z" monthly reinforcement only provides 12 opportunities per year to shape someone's performance; weekly is the minimum (the annual review and bonus is a joke, as far as Daniels is concer

Image Credit: deen I took about 2½ hours to reach office today. Apparantly some truck has oveturned near Chembur and hence all traffic from the Sion-Trombay highway has been diverted towards the Suman-nagar flyover (where Eastern Express enters the Island city). This has resulted in a huge traffic jam at Sion. The small incident explains how fragile the infrastructure demand-supply equilibrium is in Mumbai. The roads are just about sufficient to support traffic. So, if it rains or a truck/bus stranded on the road side - it creates queues of traffic kilometers long. Image Credit: Marc van der Chijs This is because of multiple reasons - first of course being that road-space is narrow. The others are like: There are no alternate routes to reach the Island city apart from the arterial roads. The JNPT road remains unutilized even at the time of the traffic jams and natural calamities like water logging. The Highway Maintenance services such as towing trucks to clear stranded vehicles are n

Image Credit : Abhijeet Rane I took the Bandra-Worli Sealink to work today and as I started on the Sea-Link the song "Yeh Tumhari Meri Batien" from rock-on started playing on the Radio. Reached office from Borivli to Lower Parel in flat 40 minutes - the day could not have started better. Mumbai's infrastructure has been improving by the day. This city which looked "more like a conglomeration of many small cities from Ghatkopar to Andheri joined together" [ ref ] is now starting to take shape of a real megapolis. In the past 5 years, almost all roads have been cemented, pavements redone and flyovers has been made on most major traffic signals. To add icing to the cake we have the first phase of Metro (Andheri-Ghatkopar) coming up by 2010-11 and at least 3 monorail (Bandra, Santa-Cruz, Borivli) coming up by almost the same time. But a lot of this good work is undone by - hawkers who still occupy the pavements and footpaths (and often uproot the tiles on them to s

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Continued from Environmental factors (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part V) We are confident that we will get customers and we will be able to multiply our customer base fast once we cross the incubation stage. But reaching that stage needs massive amount of research and development effort. And that cannot be sustained by us on our personal savings – and definitely not without quitting our corporate careers. And to do all this we need Seed Funding – it’s a vicious circle which probably every entrepreneur faces. Most entrepreneurs overcome this phase by sheer determination of cutting through the hardship – even borrowing money to run their dreams. We would probably have done the same – if this was a smaller venture which could be incubated on less money, but we don’t think it is like that. And so the wait is on – for the VC who would help in Seed Funding and kick starting. Till then – we reminisce on the mistakes we committed and try to learn from them. May be for this venture

Continued from Product Development Mistakes (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part IV) We probably still would have survived, because at the end of the whole charade – we still had a working prototype*, a proof of concept and most of all a revenue model – which hardly any online startup in those days had. But unfortunately for us – recession had to set in just when we were readying our b-plan and reaching out to investors. In the months since October 2008 and today – we have heard responses from umpteen VC’s^ that they are not even considering investing in seed stage startups till the recession goes away. Most of them of course camouflage their response by saying that they would have invested if we had customers (essentially saying no to Seed Stage and asking us to reach beyond that stage). Unfortunately for us, personal lives are at a cornerstone where we could not have risked our personal savings (beyond what we already had) in taking this concept beyond the seed stage. We kne

Continued from Product Vision mistakes (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part III) If the service is not ‘personal data service’ (like email), then one should try providing as many features as possible, without requiring users to log in/register. Registration and Login is a big barrier in enticing new users (especially non-techies) to try the service out. If you cannot provide the service without registration, try to provide screencasts and previews or even better, guest logins (slideshare does that!) for new users. Its important to get at least one section of your site work completely and bug-free than have your complete set of services rolled out but all in a half baked shape. While it is true that beta users are usually tolerant, but they can't be tolerant towards a product that looks full blown, but doesn't work even for some basic requirements. They would rather have fewer sections - but those few work well. Project Management lesson - make sure you get your priorit

Continued from - The Concept (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part II) ‘Identify a need’ – it is said. We did exactly the thing – the need was clear: information overload requires an aggregator (or segregator as we called it); we wanted to build one. But call it limitation of technologies of the times (2004-6) or our inability (ignorance?) to harness them, but the concept of aggregating feeds based completely on automated algorithms did not appeal to us. Instead we decided to develop a Feed Reader for users which would be our means to enabling aggregation. However, once we set out to build an RSS reader – we got too engrossed in it. The means became the end – we got lost in the barrage of features which we needed on the reader to make it more user friendly to our users. Even worse, unfortunately for us, we came up with a RSS reader just when RSS reader usage peaked and was just about to start its decline [ RSS is dead ]. Being at its peak, the major user share was taken by the

Continued from Bloozle – the Startup that never was Bloozle is an information segregator (our own twist over the rising din of ‘aggregators’ online) which would allow the user to surf through the sea of blogs according to his/her tastes. The idea is simple – also a clever combination of various existing concepts like Social Bookmarking, FriendFeeding, RSS Readers, news rivers, co-ranking (digg/stumbleUpon): Users would subscribe to their favourite blogs in our custom developed feed reader. They would read their regular blogs and would rate and tag blog posts they read Incoming blog posts would also be automatically tagged based on the labels/tags which the authors attach them when posting. Going forward the system will also perform intelligent tagging based on factors like source, number of times a word appears in the post body, words in the title etc. The rating and tagging would be aggregated by our server and then blog posts would be rejigged (segregated) – grouped under tags and or