Quarterlife crisis

This may seem somewhat off-topic to some of you, but I get lots of emails from users who are confused about their career, unhappy with their jobs and unsure of what’s next in their professional life.

This post on a so-called ‘quarter-life crisis’ sums it up so well. Although written in the context of the western society / lifestyle — lots of bits an pieces could apply to the indian context as well.

It was too good not to share with all of you.

MeraMaal – classifieds site for Indian cities

MeraMaal is a new site, attempting to gun for the Craigslist of India. It has the usual fare that you’d expect from a classifieds site with various sections categorized by different Indian cities.

While launching a classifieds site isnt too difficult, the main challenge they will have in execution – how to attract users to post classifieds. Currently, they have very few listings on the site and till they solve the classic ‘chicken and egg’ problem, they’d fast fade into oblivion (as is the case with any classifieds site).

Proto.in scheduled for July 25th at Pune

The next edition of Proto.in, India’s biggest startup event,  is scheduled for July 25th at the Dewang Mehta auditorium, Persistant Systems in Pune.

This edition of Proto intends to take a solid leap and focus on policies that support Start-ups both in IT and non IT sectors. The start-up community at Proto.in will analyze and understand how best to leverage the existing policies and in what ways it can get involved with key stakeholders such as the government in strengthening the policies further.

Book your tickets to the event – further details on their site.

The art – science – voodoo of community building

Building (read- coding and designing) a website or a social network is the easy part.  How you build a loyal, active community of users is the hard bit.

Here’s an interesting post that provides an awesome example – definitely worth a read.

EduCell is a startup by IITians for aspiring IITians

EduCell is a startup founded by IIT currently enrolled IIT students with the goal of mentoring students who hope to ‘crack the IIT- JEE’ exam. Around 200 IIT students provide mentoring sessions to IIT aspirants and guide them through their preparations. The USP being that having ‘been there, done that’ in the recent past, they’re in a much better position to guide and mentor other students.  All registered students get personalized guidance from current IIT students and also are provided with sample tests, study material and motivational CD’s.  You also get notes used by JEE toppers, with the hope that the notes help you to score well at the JEE.

Other features on the site include tips-tricks via mobile, video sessions by IITians, live chat with IIt students and discussion forums.

I think this is an amazing idea – with their unique USP, they definitely have the ability to stand out in a crowded market. The market size for IIT-JEE preps is huge – and even if they make a tiny dent in it, they stand to make some solid gains of it.

I guess some from the IIM’s needs to get inspired and needs to port over this brilliant idea to the CAT exams as well — I’d say that’d be an even bigger success story (I believe CAT exam market / test preps is more larger and lucrative – but dont quote me on it).

India not the ideal place for online, mobile entrepreneurs

In an insightful post, Deap Ubhi, co-founder and CEO of Burrp, says that India is not yet ready for online or mobile entrepreneurship.

this is where india diverges a bit from many other countries that are currently cultivating some great startup ideas. why is india different? my theory is simply this: the delta (or difference) between what many consider to be india’s market size and its addressable market size is vast.

the mobile market in india is closing in on just below half a billion. that’s almost twice the entire population of the united states. how many of those mobile subscribers are on prepaid plans? how many of them are below the poverty line? how many of them are unemployed? qualitatively, how many of them are just struggling to get a 4th grade education, can’t afford medicine for their illnesses, and frankly, don’t give a shit about anything except making sure their mobile allows them to talk to their circle

The post definitely gives us some food for thought. Deap has had the experience of running Burrp for about 3+ years now and it’d be foolish to dismiss his opinion as lame.

I had touched upon a similar topic way back in 2007 — even though India’s potential seems huge (1 Billion), actual figures are pretty dismal.

iTweet2Win lets you run contests via Twitter

iTweet2Win is a new startup from the founders of Pringoo, and enables users to run contests via Twitter. Once you sign up, you can create your contest, the questions and decide the prizes. You get a url to the contest on the iTweet2Win site and you tweet that url to your followers. Contest participants can indicate their participation by tweeting your custom message in their twitter stream.

They offer a free basic version as well as a premium version for $9.99. For the paid version, you can customize your content look / theme and brand it as per your requirements. You also get advanced analytics about how your contest is being received by other Twitter users.

Once the contest end date is reached, you can select the winner by going to the contest page on their site.

You can take a look at a sample contest here.

I think if they can get the word out there, they’re onto something here. Leveraging Twitter’s massive user base and its inbuilt virality might just work great for iTweet2win.

Airtel to sell unlocked iPhones

Apple has authorized Airtel to sell unlocked iPhones to customers, enabling an user on any operator to get and use the iPhone.  No word on whether Vodafone, the other iPhone provider in India, has been granted similar privileges or not (seems not).

Its not clear yet, on how much Airtel will charge extra for the unlocked iPhone (’locked’ iPhone costs Rs 36,000 for the 16 GB version). Unlocked iPhones are already available at various retailers, if you know where to go. Additionally, the iPhone 3GS will be available in India on August 9th.

Is Apple making this move to get more iPhone customers in India ? From the very start, iPhone has not performed well in the Indian market — is Apple hoping to change that with the unlocking strategy ?

via BS

The Rediff redesign – a step backward ?

Rediff has gone live with a redesign of the Rediff India Abroad page (targetted towards NRIs) for the past few months now. The reason they cited for the redesign is that majority of the usage for their site happens from mobile devices. And the new design makes things more accessible from a mobile usage perspective.

Now I dont know what the Rediff guys were really smoking, but I think that the redesign is a big step in the wrong direction. In order to accomplish their goal of making the site more ‘mobile friendly’, they have managed to horribly destroy the online user’s experience.

For a content heavy site like Rediff, the focus of the site needs to be on content – promote and easily allow the user to discover good content and thereby increasing the user’s engagement with the site. The new design not only makes it incredibly difficult to discover new content, but the landing page fails to excite the user with any eye candy as well.

I’m no usability expert, but based on the strategy / redesign, it seems that the Rediff guys who were in charge of the task arent either. What I dont understand is — why not provide a different url for mobile devices ? Or, why not determine the client at runtime and if found to be a mobile device, why not redirect to the mobile section ?

In an effort to make things uncluttered, Rediff has lost its mojo — I wont be surprised if this impacts the visitors / pageviews metric for the site.

What do you think ?

Centilian launches Bollywood streaming app for the iPhone

Centilian, a Silicon Valley based startup, has launched a new application – Bollyhood – for the iPhone, which brings streaming Bollywood content to the iPhone.

Bollyhood enables users to stream free movie trailers, behind the scenes footage, interviews, news, gossip, music videos etc straight to their iPhone. Users can also rate the content, share it with friends on Facebook etc. They have tied up with Eros, to power a lot of the current content for the app and are working with other studios to bring full length movies and TV shows to the iPhone as well.

Their goal is to start with the iPhone and gradually become the one stop source for Bollywood video content on all mobile devices.

If I were an iPhone owner, I would definitely try out this app — considering that I dont subscribe the various Bollywood TV channels – hopefully this app could keep me in touch with the new movies/ songs etc.

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