A very Happy Diwali
Wish all of you a very, very Happy Diwali. To those who hail from Gujjuland, wish you a happy and prosperous new year as well.
Been caught with shit @ work — regular blogging should resume soon.
What makes entrepreneur entrepreneurial ?
I came across this highly interesting paper which tries to uncover what exactly it is that makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial ? Can ‘entrepreneurial thinking’ be taught or successfully applied across all domains ?
As part of the research, the author identifies a set of principles, which he calls ‘Effectual reasoning’, that establish the existence of a form of rationality, which we call ‘entrepreneurial’.
A few excerpts from the paper:
The word ‘effectual’ is inverse
of the word ‘casual’. In general, in MBA programs across the world, students are taught causal or predictive reasoning - in every functional area of business. Causal rationality beings with a pre-determined goal and a given set of means, and seeks to identify the optimal - fastest, cheapest, most efficient etc. - alternative to achieve the goal. The make-vs-buy decision in production, or choosing the target market with the highest potential return in marketing, or picking a portfolio with the lowest risk in finance, or even hiring the best person for the job in human resources management, are all examples of causal reasoning.
Effectual reasoning, however, does not begin with a specific goal. Instead, it begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with.
SIPACON 2008 - Free tickets and discount codes
The Silicon Valley Indian Professionals Association (SIPA) is organizing their annual event, SIPACON 2008, on November 8th at the HP Auditorium in Palo Alto. The theme of this year’s event is “Social Media & the Enterprise“.
Speakers include:
Ravi Belani (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Justin (Founders Fund), Ross Mayfield (President and co-founder at Socialtext), Andras Boross (CTO, Mobile Clarity), Ramneek Bhasin (CEO, Mobio), Mohan Giridhardas (Senior Partner (Director) at Mckinsey) - full roster can be viewed on their website.
I have two free tickets to give away for the event (regular cost is $39). Leave a comment with your name and the email id (first come first serve basis). Others can avail the tickets at a discounted price of $29, by registering on SIPA’s website and use SIPALIANZ as the promo code.
What a Shame
Early today morning, I was reading up on the Jet Airways mess. I’m pretty sure Indian media would have been all over this, with constant coverage of the misery and organizing ‘expert panels’ on news channels.
In case you’re oblivious to what happened, Jet Airways announced layoff for 1900 people to cust costs and align with the current economic scenario. This set in motion a frenzy, with folks protesting outside airports and such and even the political ministers weighing in on the scenario.Ultimately, Jet Airways reinstated the laid off people.
This is a load of BS and Indian hypocrisy at its best.
When the going is good, employees can freely hop on from one job to the other as they please. Now, when they get laid off, they protest and cry foul ? I guess as the Indian market is moving towards a capitalist, consumer driven economy, people need to get rid of their socialist mindset when it comes to getting laid off as well. You simply cant have the best of both worlds. Thanks Nehru, your legacy still carries on !!
Metrics for Online Gaming sites in India
Here’re some metrics for online gaming sites in India:
Reach: 27.4%
Total Unique Visitors: 8,295,000
Average minutes per visitor: 45.4
Average visits per visitor: 4.3
India ranks lowest in terms of popularity of online gaming websites in the APAC region. Additionally the ‘average visits per visitor’ metric also seems to indicate that number of “repeat visitors” is incredibly low as compared other APAC countries.
via release
NearHop finds you the best possible travel plan
NearHop is a Hyderabad based startup, which hopes to provide you the best possible itinerary. Once you enter your trip details, NearHop will discover all possible routes to your destination, which includes travel via air, train and bus. So, for instance, if I am searching for a trip from Ahmedabad to Bangalore, the NearHop engine shows me that I can either travel by air or by a bus-train combination (take a bus from ahmedabad to pune and then take a train from pune to Bangalore or take a train from Ahmedabad to Mumabi and then a bus from Mumbai to Bangalore).
Each itinerary also lists the estimated price and also provides you the option to book the ticket. You can also filter the results by the number of hops you’re willing to take (3’s the maximum). I may need a refresher of my algorithms course, but I think this is an example of the classic Travelling Salesman Problem. And while the engine forms the core feature of the site, the algorithm does need some additional tuning.
Excellent Twitter guide by Amit @ DI
Amit @ DI has an excellent Twitter guide for some very common Twitter tasks.
Seriously recommend adding it to your bookmarks.
Soft economy and the Web 2.0 business model
For the past 4-5 years, Web 2.0 has evangelized the ad supported business model, which seems to have become the norm for majority of today’s startups. The mantra for startups has been - “Get the users and the advertising dollars will follow”. Instead of developing a solid revenue model and building a sustainable business around it, startups seem to have relied on Google AdSense for generating revenues.
With the recent economy crisis, it is undoubtedly going to have an impact on online advertising. Startups will need to uncover new revenue streams or risk the possibility of shutting down. Because in this soft economy, it may not be viable to sustain a business simply on ad supported revenue.
Such a shakeup may actually be good for the Internet, since its time to reinforce the fundamentals of a successful business - consistent revenue generation. This is also good for aspiring entrepreneurs since now they’re forced to think of a sustainable revenue model instead of building “Yet Another ad supported Social Network”.
What do you think ?
Startup jobs galore and looking for a SEO expert
Soft economy ?
No worries - startup jobs galore on our job board. Check out some of the openings:
* Flash programmer at Delhi-NCR
* Software Engineer (PHP), MySQL DBA, Senior S/W Enginner (Java) and other openings at Burrp !
* Rockstar tech lead at InvestmentYogi
* PHP coder at ThinkMantra
* Web designer at FirstPhera
I’m also looking for a SEO expert for some SEO related work. Drop me a line at contact@startupdunia.com.
Locomi nails the local search for India
There are some services which give really give you an ‘aha’ feeling when you try them out. Locomi is one such startup. Locomi has developed a Facebook application, which leverages your social graph on Facebook and marries it with location based search for major Indian cities.
Once you add their Facebook app, you can set your location. With the location set, the app maps restaurants, shopping and other landmarks in the vicinity of your location. You can discover new places and also rate and review places you’ve visited. You can see all the places that your friends have been to and the reviews left by your friends for local places. You can also see other people in your vicinity and see the reviews they’ve left for local places. Additionally, you can add listings and plot them on the map.
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