Proto.in Summer Edition: Internet and Web2.0

The first to be called on stage was Pramati Software as they experienced setup glitches, BriteSoft took the stage. To quote from their website:

BriteWorks

The BriteWorks platform enables users to create enterprise applications in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional development methods. Applications are not developed from scratch, rather they are initialised with BriteWorks, a fully functional skeletal application out of the box that has all the functions and algorithms for processing transactional, interactive applications. BriteWorks comes with a host of runtime features and all the plumbing and infrastructure for n-tier deployment, thus removing this concern completely so that developers can focus on the business domain. The promise of the long awaited industrialization of software development is here.

They want zero coding application development, and they want to be powerpoint like for application development. BriteWorks can do well than just make lukewarm presentations events. They must evangelize and engage an active developer community. It is not enough to have a nice product, you need community and engaging the community is getting easier by the day.

Then It was Vijay Pullur of from Pramati showcasing Dekoh.
Rajesh Setty of Life Beyond Code has an excellent interview with Vijay:

RS: What is the need for a product like Dekoh in the marketplace today?

Vijay: Dekoh is a Rich Internet Application and Social Media platform on the desktop. Today desktop and web applications work as silos. Look-n-Feel, installation, access and technologies used to develop these applications are very different. Dekoh bridges the gap between desktop and the web. The “Rich” in RIA refers to richness in user interface (Flash and AJAX), richness in functionality (desktop and web) and richness in availability (online and offline). Providing a seamless user experience for applications on desktop and web in both connected and disconnected mode is the goal. This is the next frontier for internet applications.

Again from the same interview…

RS: Life is going on fine without Dekoh or Apollo or Google Gears. Some people may say you have a solution waiting for a problem. Your comments?

Vijay: Think about it, people said the same about telephones! I am not saying Dekoh is comparable in proportions to that, but Dekoh offers some unique features that can dramatically improve web experience of users. Offline is only one part of the story. The bigger thing about Dekoh, is it can change the request-response model of the web. For example, today users have to manually click to go to a website and look at new information or use the service. Dekoh can help users make time on the internet more productive by pulling content on their behalf. For online services, this is a platform to provide valuable user specific information even when the user is not on their site. This is a new paradigm.

I love the open source approach. Pramati must not just participate as a starup. They can play a bigger role in such events so that they can reach out to the developers more effectively. All the above aspects did not come out well in the 6-min presentation. The much talked about tag-cloud widget in action I’m not able to see in action. Its source, documentation and gory details of its inner workings are all available. No working tag cloud in sight. May be I’m too short attention spanned!

On Web2.0 the key frontiers are desktop and API publication(Dekoh.org API, Formats page is empty now!). If it is covered in a neat way with a single opensource tool it will be a winner. When that happens, Dekoh will be an example of the social media induced paradigm shift from making money ‘with’ to ‘Because of’.

Next on stage was InAsra Technologies presented by young and passionate( with ‘will take it to completion’ despite all odds, I love my India’ attitude) Yogendra along with COO Rupal. InAsra offers hotel booking from real lowend( Rs 95/night) to real high end. It takes a lot to get your processes working with low-end hotels. It is a relationship business. With more than 2 years of battle hardening( as Yogendra puts it) they have got the backend and process right. Now it is time for scaling and brand building. From the website:

We are a young and vibrant company motivated by ideals, excellence and perfection, backed by tons of youthful zeal, striving to make traveling as easy as having an ice-cream (and just as delightful). We know that your time is most precious, so we keep things as simple as it can get.

Cheers to them and They Will Be Successful. Period.

Next on stage was TolMolBol presented by Amit and Nitesh. The fine features of TolMolBol are explained through a conversation style dramatization. Earlier they gave an handout to everyone in the auditorium. I couldn’t help asking my designer friend Vasu from Universal Print System( who designed the proto booklet) if the handout was well designed. He suggested couple of quick repositioning to reduce the clutter and bring out the clarity.

TolMolBol is community driven local content that is mobile enabled. I saw a review of CreativeAxes who contacted individuals who participated in the proto.in event. From the review I see that proto.in works and so is TolMolBol! The About page of TolMolBol is interesting and says it all:

The People:
Anand Morzaria – The Ringmaster
Anand leads the business development and partner relationship functions for tolmolbol. He completed his masters in finance from BITS, Pilani, where he was also president of the university students’ union. Some of his pastimes include trekking, experimental cooking and amateur bar-tending.

Rithesh Prasad – Ideasmith
Rithesh drives all aspects of tolmolbol’s operations, data management, product design and strategy. He has 3 US patents pending and holds a B.E. (Hons) degree in computer science from BITS, Pilani. Outside of work, Rithesh enjoys spending time teaching computer skills to children and catching up on the latest blockbuster flicks.

Venkat Polana – Wizard of the Dark Arts
Venkat spearheads the technology development team of tolmolbol. An expert on the Java platform, he graduated from BITS, Pilani with a masters in finance. Apart from computers, Venkat is passionate about card games and astronomy.

Anshuman Dimri – Cool Vibes Generator
Anshuman is responsible for building the tolmolbol network of city-zens. He graduated from BITS, Pilani with double masters in general studies and software systems. In his free time, he dreams about sky-diving and that’s probably the closest he would ever get to doing it.

Amit Thakral – Cool Vibes Generator
Amit guides the community as well the business development activities behind tolmolbol. He holds a bachelor in chemical engineering from BITS, Pilani. A keen dramatist and dancer, Amit is also the co-founder of the NGO, Sparsh – A Healing Touch.

So Web2.0ish: design, people focus and differentiation all ingredients of success. How well they scale and how well they engage the community are the deciding factor of their success. I Wish them success!

Next on stage was TyRoo presented by Aditya Khanna. It is an Google AdWords/AdSense like service but more targetted and localized. They used double O in their name for good omen of such successful ventures. While google is a longtail company, TyRoo is targetting the longer end of the longtail too – interesting. Mindshare is what they need and they need to do more than present their case on stage. They have to go all out and make small time bloggers and small business talk loud about their service. Step on the marketing and evangelizing gas!

Next it was Pavan Kachibhatia and Chitra presenting about Cricko – a cricket based legal betting venture. Again mobile enabled to engage the aam admi(common man) in the street. Hey we are getting into really inclusive development here. Once one use case gets established, extending it to other services becomes easy. Cricket being the passion of everyone using it as a bulldozzer to make inroads into the the minds and hearts of the common man makes a lot of sense(both socially and biz wise). Another interesting trend in the Online gaming ( like SecondLife) is creating virtual goods and a virtual currency to facilitate transactions on them. Cricko has a lot of potential to play a role in the virtual goods/virtual currency space. A mobile based micropayment for goodies not linked to Rupee will potentially change the face of economy in India. When it is ubiquitous, beggers in India will get alms in virtual cash! Interesting venture – I wish they get them self a good ethics governance adviser on the C-Suite. Otherwise they falling prey to the criminal/underworld nexus is imminent. If it were to happen it will be a tragedy of a social/inclusive development( masquerading as vice at the first look) opportunity lost.

Next on stage was RouteGuru represented by Avinash Agrawal. Maps available in developing countries is their mission. The general tone of Web2.0 presentations at proto was all about local. And Maps is the basic building block for local services. Having said that, monetizing is maps/GIS information is not obvious. Especially when giants like google can disrupt the landscape at blink. RoutGuru’s approach of driving directions based on landmarks not just solves the India/developing country specific problem. There lies the proprietary component for building a business model. I recommend Amazon Web Services Mturk for sourcing data to power their RouteGuru. In the process they would have bootstrapped work at home/students Mturk workers earning extra cash with their PC and broadband connections. Trouble with Mturk is it is not already populated with workers, I’m doing something to cut the chicken and egg situation. There is literally a world to conquer for RouteGuru, profile of the people behind give me a hunch that they will ravel in the challenges. Wish them Godspeed to emerge successful.

Next on stage was Delip Andra Gaurav Bhatia of MineKey. MineKey is a content recommendation service that will recommend contextual content and deliver the recommendation through the MineKey widget. It is Silicon Valley based and VC funded and located at IIT Khargpur. It is interesting in the Web2.0 kind of way like yet another social network. Adoption and what they do with the community is the key. I wish them success before the web2.0 bubble busts. What is the exit strategy of MineKey – I am interested.

The last to go on state in the mobile segment was Deepak of Genie Interactive. Their offering is Voiee a voice based platform. He demonstrated the ease of use of the integrated voicemail use case. Simply, it is a gateway from POTS network to web. There are many uses for it. I can think of running commentary like podcasting using the mobile phone. Subscription based and ad based revenue models are possible. Tie-up with telco will be a big advantage – but that is like belling the cat. The voice comment he left in the demo is still there in the Voiee blog( through their widget). They need to go beyond fear of technical murphy and embrace the user base. Step on marketing gas!

Proto.in Summer Edition: Mobile

I was busy with other things so I was not able to complete my featuring of other proto.in presentations.

The first one to take up the stage in this segment was RareFind and their product is called MoCoDile. They threw in a good dollop of dramatization which was refreshing. Mobile is a space where style and substance go hand in hand!
Mocodile is an interesting offering for sharing content like documents, powerpoints, pictures, music. The selling point is, no special software install necessary! They keep track of the Content’s destination’s handset model details( GPRS phone is needed, some limited SMS based services are also in pipeline), and based on that information, MoCoDile sends an url that can be opened by the handsets default browser.

MoCoDile is interesting in several ways. One it solves a pain point in a neat way. There is a lot of control possible given that it is server based. Having direct access to customer base with little dependence on the telco is a huge attraction. All this positives can work for them depending on how fast they increase their user base and how fast they become a defacto standard. And the telcos will be happy with the data traffic in the near term at least. A look at the Customer page of the web site is very promising. They have 1000+ customers in 60+ countries. The must invest more on marketing in an influential market and somehow make MoCoDile a defacto. All the best for Ajay and Ganesh in their pursuit.

The next company on stage was WinFin Technologies presented by Raghavendra Prasad. They say in Role Playing Games(RPGs) – speak softly and carry a +9 mace – translates as ‘be polite and carry a powerful weapon’ – for the RPG challenged. The Mobistream product makes your mobile a powerful secure trading terminal with all the information needed make the decision to trade. I think they have to make it more dramatic and relate it to consumer usage situations. The possibility of how an accounts clerk in a SME with a long train commute can become a millionaire through financial data based trading during her commute. How such a mobile terminal can deliver e-commerce/banking/insurance services to the under served. ( When I tried their website is down, so not able to get more info about their other offerings etc)

Ziva – Mobile Social Answer Engine was the next company to be featured on stage presented by Ajay Sethi assisted by Sidharth, and Sameer. There is a lot of money to be made in making people live with the restrictions of the mobile device. When you are searching from your mobile, you dont want to search every thing in the world( as Google does). Just by eliminating the How and Why type of questions from the search increases the relevance of content for mobile. That is exactly what Ziva is attempting. Add in a good old yahoo like Directory structure you get finer search results. Add in social networking with rating, friends, friend’s recommendations, location based filtering the search becomes even more sharper and relevant. Ziva/Zook has some patent pending stuff and is VC funded. They are scouting for partners that will add value to their Answer Engine Platform. Their website needs to give out more information than what is presented, unfortunately I was not able to cross check my understanding of Ziva in Ziva’s website. And they need a registration-less demo on their site too.

Next on stage was BuzzWorks by V C Karthic. Who was quick to add that the V C in his name has nothing to do with Venture Capital As I understand it is a very local mobile based yellow pages. It is voice based too. Karthic illustrated the usage situation with the problem of finding someone who will Iron/press his shirt at 7am in T Nagar Chennai. Interesting aspect of it is it is a User Generated Content based local yellow pages. Sort of a mobile based Wiki with local yellow pages information. The service is targeted towards unsophisticated( and possibly illiterate ) local service providers like plumbers, electric appliance repairman/installer, gardener etc. In terms of technology choice, in their voice recognition engine, they steered away from speech to text and choose speech to phoneme. And the voice engine is based on open source. I get inspired by any idea/venture that uses technology to enable equity( as in everything for everyone), inclusive development. Too bad they dont have their website up yet. In the days of google apps with which one can setup a website/mail/calender in no time, finding website under construction is bit amusing. Yet, that is the reality.

Kallol Borah of Aumega Networks second time participant at Proto.in was next on stage demonstrating the Lukup product. Since the product is still not released, there is no mention about it in the website. When you are mobile there is a major need for frequently updated information viz., updated flight schedule/expected delay etc. Serving the information in an accessible and reliable way will not only save customer service cost for the serving enterprise, but also for partner organizations. And the informed customer is a potential happy customer. The Indus backend and the Lokup mobile/browser based front end to the frequently updated data by Aumega addresses this requirement and positions itself as information dis-intermediation platform. Kallol’s presentation needs to be less geeky and illustrated with use cases that common man can relate to. No one whats to know you are generating feeds out of your database at break neck speeds. Give what I want in my reader thingy and I will forget about you is the general drift of attitude. As they mentioned they are looking for partners and feedback here is my 2c: they can invite the geeky community of proto.in to play with their platform, lokup and come up with interesting mashups( that highlight the differentiators of Indus/Lukup) like google widgets.

Proto.in Second Edition: Enterprise Solutions

Proto.in India startup action event started with an ‘Invocation’ – video featuring Amithabh Bachchan on the theme India Poised( by Times of India).

Ravi Naraina kicked off the session by drawing parallel between Proto.in and Woodstock
.

Vijay Anand, the Key Organizer of Proto.in introduced each segment and each startup in the segment.

The first company to present was TISS – TISS MSC SDN BHD from Malaysia. They offer data security solutions for enterprise equipment like laptops. Their USB stick(T3) based group sharable access key provides:

PC Ignition and Lock-down so the T3 SecurityKey-holder can leave his/her active pc in safety and prevent and track unauthorised access

They are at proto.in seeking partners for expansion and Venture Funding.

The next company to go on stage was AuthMe. Aditya demonstrated the one time PASTCODE based authentication method that uses SMS to deliver part of the (one-time)authentication password. The biggest challenge I see is proving that the method is hole free. At implementation level, scaling up and maintaining acceptable response time for authentication cycle might be an issue. My take is, interesting enough to dig deep into the technicals. Business wise, identity increasingly will play a central role in all kinds of human interactions, and it is unlikely that single method of authentication will emerge as the only way. There is need and space for alternative methods of managing identities and authentication is one important aspect of identity management.

MDT ( Multimedia Display Technologies, SDN Bhd) was next on the stage. Liew Choon Lian started off saying that RFID is the sexiest lady in stock markets worldwide. After getting the attention, he quickly added that MDT will soon release one cent RFID tags and sub ten dollar RFID readers. Wow! How is it possible? Choice of material and process – Simple! They have perfected a (patented) ink based process rather than silicon wafer based fabrication prevalent with RFID tags in the market. The Tx/Rx logic( the main Intellectual Property) is built as BGA( ball grid array) so that it is ’safe from Chinese and Taiwanese’ Choon added with a sheepish smile admitting that he is Chinese!. Sub one cent RFID tag is the holy grail of AutoId industry and MDT is seeking funding for manufacturing and business expansion. And also seeking application development partnership. Very interesting. [ Note to self: Perhaps this will complement/augment my paper file tracking very well. ]

The next company to go on stage was ALTRION. Badri talked about how his product Altrion Business Performance Suite ( ALTRION BPS) offers business performance whereas SAP sells complexity. As I understand it, the software product will go well with what ever self deception ‘Best Practice’ the enterprise chooses viz., TQM, TPM, Sig-sigma, Balanced Scorecard, etc. Interestingly, the product is built on top of opensource so that the total cost of ownership is less( is it really true that opensource will reduce the TCO?) I’m curious to know how these plays compare well with (apparently)more disruptive offerings like Thingamy.com. ALTRION is looking for alliances and exposure( mindshare I guess – This is on reason I want Altrion to be benchmarked against Thingamy)

Proto.in SE in SecondLife: unconference within a conference

Proto.in is a serious initiative by fun and energetic techies of The Knowledge Foundation. With Proto.in Secnd Edition, the TKF folks are all set to excel their high standard of fun and useful event by several orders of magnitude. Given the accelerated startup action and the high expectation, it is no surprise that the the event got sold out in no time.
I am happy to be part of UPSL team coordinating the Proto.in coverage in SecondLife. Events and unconference are a very compelling use-case of secondlife, and I look forward to learn practical aspects of it while proto SE is featured.

Coverage in SecondLife makes it possible for people who are at a different geography to attend the event as if being there. The structure of proto.in itself is more like a formal conference. This is a big barrier for TKF event regulars, so used to the unconference format. While in the physical event cannot be made into a unconference mode, the virtual event can be in unconference format. I invite you all to participate via secondlife and bring out the unconference in Proto.in SE.

The coverage is at Petrel(http://slurl.com/secondlife/Petrel/165/80/24/)
there will be opportunity for SecondLife antics too. Be there.

Mashing SecondLife and Amazon Web Services: SHA1 in LSL

Mashing up SecondLife and Amazon Web Service must be easy. Or at least that is my conventional wisdom. Yet when I attempted it, I found it more involved than what I bargained for. First, Linden Scripting Language(LSL) does not have SHA-1 support. It can do only MD5. And Amazon Web Services(AWS) needs signature calculated( based on AWS account Access Key, Secure Key) with SHA1. Hmmm.

I was happy to find a javascript implementation of the AWS call at geekhappy.com. When I looked at the code my head started spinning. I knew I will get sucked into debugging infinite loop when I did the porting to LSL. I thought it will be a good challenge for a student in communication. The limited resource of LSL is to be reckoned with. So I entrusted the coding to Mukundan Madavan, an accomplished communications engineering student with a lot of math fondness. I know he does not know javascript, leave alone LSL. I was confident that he will pick it up in couple of hours. His adventures with limited memory Texas Instrument chip sets, robot building/programming expertise, and love for math will come in handy in the job to be done.

For now, the HTTPRequest route with having your own server is the only way out. When SHA1 functionality is available, a lot of interesting mashups of secondlife and AWS is possible. How about connecting a whole bunch of EC2 instance to a bunch of objects in SL?

If you think about it, the lack of SHA1 support speaks volumes about the state of LSL and it is high time Linden Lab overhauls the programming platform.

Update: Mukundan has uploaded code at google code, It works fine in LSLEditor. But in SL as expected gives Stack Heap Collision.
Update2: Mukundan is blogging about the LSL implementation of SHA.

Update: A working but very slow code is available at Google Code LSLSHA

MMA:Subroto Bagchi: High Performance Entrepreneur

At the Madras Management Association meeting today, Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer of MindTree Consulting presented an excellent talk on The High-Performance Entrepreneur. It was refreshing for me to see entrepreneurship from a COO’s lens. Process, and Play By The Book were there all over, both in the content and the presentation. Speaking of playing by the book, he walked the talk about focusing on Paying Customers by effectively promotingselling the book by him with the same title. In a very captivating style, he listed out several steps and factors to be taken care about business and also the business of the business. I was very impressed by the emphasis on DNA crafting through sinciere and systematic business plan writing, the importance of pretending to be a big enterprise especially in the early startup phase, the wonders of the abundance mindset, and the way he employed the word ‘budget’ couple of times.

The context of the lecture class, was set by screening a short film that featured Sidhartha of Cafe Coffe Day, Capt. Gopinath of Air Deccan, and Kiran of Biocon on the ideation that went into these success stories. It was an inspiring film with Subroto summing up the theme as Vision and not details is the key, and Vision could be shaped by ‘present-forward’ and/or ‘future-backward’ approaches. In the film and in the presentation, Subroto’s uncomfort in dealing with the lack of universal working method to arrive at the Vision was evident. Hmmm… COO karma!

My take on the ideas presented is rather dramatic: Subroto’s talk and his book(with sub-title:Golden Rules for Success in Today’s World) are late by a few years. To to point of being irrelevant. Today with social media/social software, it is all about dismantling the Enterprise. I will be interested in Golden Rules for Success to build high performance small businesses that will need no VC money/max head count ever less than fifty, and yet create much better impact than Enterprise of recent times. Interesting to note the mention in passing that nowadays VC/investor money is chasing ideas rather than the otherway around. Which I read as inflection point in the business building industry – a shift from scarcity based economy to plenty based economy. Good enough reason to abandon the metaphorical Enterprise ship and opt for a more agile boat.

Escaping Vishnu Trap, Embracing Bhrama Vishnu Shiva Cycle

Slowly the discourse in blogosphere is touching on the parallel between a live human and a live biz.

The holy grail of biz being excellence, borrowing a few percepts from Religion/Spirituality(as in the pursuit of the highest in life) is inevitable in the discussion. JP of ConfusedOfCalcutta talks about the Shiva and Shiva number in the context of decommissioning software system in enterprise:

The cost of creating, preserving and destroying apps has begun to go down sharply. Which can only be a good thing.

I was struggling with the parallel of Zen( as in path less path) and what Sig is attempting with Thingamy – a biz modeling software to conquer the ‘unstructured’/'ad hoc’, ‘one off’ realities of any biz.

Suddenly JP’s post brought to the foreground what was nagging me at the back of my mind. The trouble/obsession of businesses with preservation( or status quo, or Vishnu in Spiritual terms). This is very much, identical to ones stagnation in spiritual path due to obsession with well being. This is what I call being stuck in the Vishnu Trap.

Technology is adding its interesting twist to biz environment by reducing the cycle time/cost/shelf life of biz, etc. Add ‘Geography is History‘ to it and what have we got? One thing for sure is there is no rock solid ‘Land’ below feet. Rules of living in static, slow changing landscape is gone forever. Technology is dramatically reducing the half-life of biz in Vishnu trap.

Google and MSFT are good examples of interesting tech companies stuck in the Vishnu trap.

Added to the complexity is purpose of every biz at the outset is to hit a comfortable Vishnu Trap. Startup biz plans are all about long stay in the Vishnu Trap. Just like, much about individual life is about perusing wellbeing/comfortable life.

The new game is more close to embracing the natural cycle of Creating, Preserving and Destroying or being in tune with the multi-faceted simultaneous cycles of Bhrama, Vishnu and Maheshwara.

If you are still reading this up to this, I salute ye!
If you are asking what should businesses do in these interesting times? My answer is:
Just Add Zen!

Update: The disruptive technologies and disruptive startup plays have the concentrated power of a bomb which in spiritual terms is called Shiva the destroyer. Remember the a seed gets destroyed to pave the way for a seedling. Just like tech industry there is a worship/celebration holding in primacy the disruptive technologies, on the spiritual side Shiva’s primacy of the three is evident from the Mahadeva( the prime lord) status.