Package and start it comes with a simple package. Nothing special in it. I had struggle to find out the battery package. Once I did it, everything was piece of a cake. I just added my Google Apps account, it pulled out all my mails, contacts, calendar events, talk and tasks etc. Once I added the FB details, my FB friends were also synced up into my contact list. I just love contacts application and the way it has been integrated into various online services. It connected to my home/office wifi easily. Nobody at airtel had any clue how to send the edge details to my phone. I had to do it manually. Once done it worked with out any problem.

Camera I have taken pictures only in well lighted environment. It takes decent pictures. I am happy to use it as a camera.
I love the photo editor application and you can enable GPS location tagging for pictures. I did few live video transmissions too. The video capture is not bad. But I can’t zoom when I am capturing. Which probably will be fixed in next software upgrade I guess.

Battery Lets be clear. We use smart phone through out the day. As of now I have to charge it everyday. The biggest power consumption is by (Settings -> About Phone -> Battery status) screen (43%) and voice calls (30%) for four-day average. I have seen battery losing juice when GPS is on. So I tried to turn off the screen as soon as I am done with playing and keep the brightness to lowest level when I am inside a building/car. Turn off GPS/wifi when not required. With all these changes I could increase the batter life 30 mins. When I am listening to music, using navigation in sunlight with few apps in background. It dies with in 6hrs. It just tells how bad the battery life is when it’s used as smart phone. Also I have noticed it generates lot of heat in such situations. Google and HTC has to work on it. In the mean time I am searching for an extra battery,

Memory It comes with 512mb ram, 512mb flash and 4gb micro sd card. The external memory can be expanded upto 32GB. I am still searching for 32GB. Let me know if you know any store where I can buy one. No problems faced with memory until now.

Screen Its 3.7 inch (diagonal, 800 x 480 pixels resolution) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen. It’s an amazing screen to watch videos and browse. I haven’t faced any problem with the screen, I am happy with screen.

User Interface and Operating System UI is simple, clean and usable. As soon as I connected it to the internet, the OS got upgraded and that needs a reboot. But then after that everything went pretty well. I guess that update installed multi-touch. Multi touch works as expected :) Like most of the users, I like pull down notification screen and dot puzzle to log into the phone.
Every text box is enabled with STT (speech to text). It doesn’t work that well with Indian accent :( Probably they will have one, once they officially start selling in India. OS is pretty stable and hasn’t crashed yet. It’s truly multi-processing.

Applications I have installed quite a few free apps. Installing an app is quite a breeze. Launch the market place application, choose the app and click on the install button. Upgrade too works in similar fashion. When ever there is an upgrade to the installed app, it shows up in the notification area, from there its pretty simple. Sadly I couldn’t find the call recorder which is supposed to be pre-installed. Do you know any good call recording app?

Phone works as expected. The contact application is just awesome. It integrates my phone, google contacts, gtalk, facebook. Is there any way to integrate calendar and twitter into the contact app?

Update
Music: Oh, how could I forget. Nexus comes with pretty decent music player. All you need to do is copy paste your music into the micro SD card. The app scans the music and catalogs them using mp3 tags. The app has all the standard features. I haven’t tried other music formats. But I guess there are apps for playing ogg. It also comes with a pair of 3.5 mm earphones. For me its going to be a major audio book reader.

Overall I am happy. But HTC and Google needs to fix two things. 1. Battery life 2. Start selling in India.

Let me know if you want to know anything in specific.

1. Suvarna Bengaluru Pranalike:
   On Friday, 19 March @ Town Hall, JC Road (near corporation). The event will start at 6pm and three major parties are represented. Here is the copy of the invitation
2. TweetUP: I am with the help of other friends, organizing a tweetup on saturday.
   4pm to 7pm, @Matteo cafe, church street,
   
   
3. KYC: Citizen matters with Resident association is organizing Know your Candidate event
   On saturday, JPNagar
   On Sunday , BTM
   Check the invite for details

BTW I am interested in knowing

Ever since I launched it, I have been thinking about its success. Is it number of page views? or news paper coverages? or is the number blood requests? But then I thought number of blood donations made due to tweet4blood is the right measure. Even though I couldn’t track it properly, followers of tweet for blood were very kind to send some responses. I am pasting two such mails verbatim here.

1. First Response
“I am a regular blood donor. I always look for opportunities to donate blood the moment three months pass since my last donation. I have registered with multiple blood banks and websites to alert me whenever they need blood of my type in the vicinity. But such systems have turned passive and I started visiting blood banks to donate blood instead of donating it for a person who is in immediate need, admitted in a hospital.

Few months back I came to know about tweet4blood. It is the twitter way of spreading the message for any blood requirements. Since people tweet with blood type, location and phone number, it becomes easy for me to get in touch with the patient and do my best. Earlier, I remember, I used to receive bulk mails for blood donation requests. But things such as tweet4blood have made things easier. My only concern is, India’s poor, who are not exposed to communication channels like emails are twitters may be suffering. We need to address this concern.
- @sharadaprasad
”

2. Second response
“Social networking is a lot of hype and little substance. It is difficult to find a functional application of a social networking platform that does not include a heavy dose of self-aggrandizement. @tweet4blood on Twitter stands-out as an exception. It is functional and practical.

How have I used it?
- As a donor, on three separate occasions I have called a mobile number that was RT’d by @tweet4blood
- On all three occasions I was late, despite calling within a few minutes of receiving the tweet!!
- In other words, the person who answered, said the equivalent of “I appreciate the call. We are covered. We have been flooded with calls from donors.”

I rest my case!
- @anand_bala”

I know it’s not a popular site but I think even if it has helped at least one on this planet earth. It’s successful. What do you think?

This year is an year of crazy experiments. One of the craziest idea is to work for different types media, mainly print and audio. So this is where it starts. Lets see how it goes.

Let me be clear. The article is not a master piece. If it is in a good shape then its the effort of editor (or is it Desk?). Thanks to them.I am sure I will improve over time. And of course thanks to UT for the tip.

Imagine raw data you will get to play around, its programmers heaven. Imagine the kind of mashups we can build with election results and geo data. As of today even though we have some kind of data on-line. Its very distributed, not open and of course not developer friendly.

What we need today is an open data initiative, where GOI and state/local govts can publish data in a developer friendly format. Even though I am not an expert, by developer friendly I mean, open standard, online, search-able, semantic data. Unfortunately in India it might take years for Govt to come up with such a plan. So as active citizens, how can we force the govt to that? or should it be taken up by an NGO or Society? or should we the citizens start a simple community project of collecting and publishing data?

Btw as an interim solution I am bookmarking all the Govt related data on delicious with #open-data-india. Feel free to tag/comment more about available data.

When I was in Infosys, I renovated my father’s house and constructed few new rooms. Since I was very good in Engineering Drawing, I used that trait to plan every inch of my my house. I was inspired by US buildings (when I worked there) and Infosys’ building quality. I used the same concept for my house. After building it, I realized that to build such a good quality house, it is not that expensive and by proper planning, we could get almost all the functional features that are needed for the house. Since the Indian Customers are not aware of many things about quality, I thought of sharing my experience with them through HomePlanGuru.com and make Indian homes on par with developed countries homes.

2. Are you an architect/civil engineer?
Fortunately, NO. (Had it been yes, then the concept of HomePlanGuru.com wouldn’t have come)

3. Did you plan your own house? Did HomePlanGuru came out of it?
Yes!

4. How do you use your past experience in your present work?
My IT Knowledge & experience helps me a lot in my venture. This is how it is:

• I use IT processes for everything starting from ‘Requirements gathering’.
• I use technology (free softwares like OpenOffice, Google Sketchup, etc) for planning and Email & Online Chat for communication.
• I developed my own website which wouldn’t have been possible had I not been in IT.
• I’m in the process of developing a product for Builders & Customers for which I’m using my IT skills.

5. Indians or at least the middle class doesn’t spend much on planning the house, how do you sell yourself to them?
My charges are highly affordable and are also transparent (i.e. all our charges are available in www.HomePlanGuru.com/services.php ). For a 2D floor plan (Basic), I charge just Re.1/- per sq.ft. For 3D Plan (Basic), I charge just Rs.3/- per sq.ft.

Initially, I used to charge Rs.20/- per sq.ft for all the plans and it was a bit expensive for middle class. Now I’ve split that into these various ‘Basic’ plans so that if people want to do just 2D & 3D, they can pay just Rs.4/- (= Re1 for 2D + Rs.3 for 3D) per sq.ft. Thus it is highly affordable.

It is tough to sell a new concept to any customer. But by showing them the benefits of planning and making it highly affordable, I’m able to sell my services.

6. How are you different from other architects/civil engineers?

Many people ask the same question and for the same reason I’ve given the title of a book that I’m preparing now as “Architects don’t tell; Builders don’t do; Customers don’t get and Dream Home: still a Dream?” (see attached image for full title of the book). It will have a detailed answer to this question.

To make it short, HomePlanGuru.com provides Usability & Functional plans from a Customer perspective which (to my knowledge) is not provided by Architects / Civil Engineers. They provide plans that are ‘technical’ and ‘aesthetic’ in nature which is mostly useful for the builder and not for the customer (but for the aesthetic plan).

If your next question is “What are Usability & Functional Plans?”, then you have to read all the FAQs in our website (http://www.homeplanguru.com/faq.php) or wait for the book to be released. Again to be short, they are the plans that define usable and functional aspects of a home which is much more important than the aesthetic aspect of the home.

7. What do you want suggest to other starters?
I’m not that great to suggest. But this is what I think for myself:

• You should be extremely passionate about what you do.
• You should be first convinced about the fact that you are adding value to your customer through your product/service.
• You should first get your family support (especially from your spouse) if you are a first generation entrepreneur.
  Before you quit your regular day job, you should make yourself debt free and have enough savings to face any adversity in your life.
• The most important one that gives me energy is: “Never worry about what others will think about you if you fail. You are better than other people who never tried anything of their own. It is not the end result, but the journey that matters a lot not only in entrepreneurship but also in our life”

But the true single sign on for the web doesn’t exist yet, but bigger players on the web have so many users that, we can consider them as sso providers. Allowing our users to use one of the established service providers userid/password pair gives us the advantage of converting their users into ours. It also reduces the pain of creating Yet Another User Id/Pw for the user, reducing the entry barrier for our users.

In my personal experience at ubuntuAtWork.org, I have seen 45% increase in registration after we opened up register/login using FB Connect. There are many other success stories.
Solutions:
In the market we have three big compitators

• OpenID : Platform and vendor independent. Standards set by an open standards committe. Big internet companies like Google, Yahoo, etc are supporting them. OpenId is a distributed identity provider and has the biggest user base in the world. The usebase also includes the users of gmail, ymail, wordpress, LJ etc
• Facebook connect: Facebook is worlds biggest social network as of today. It has free APIs for the usage.
• Google Friend Connect: is the compitator to Facebook connect. It has bigger user base in India considering the people on orkut and people using gmail (yes, gmail over took Yahoo recently in India)

Integrated solution: Combination of OpenId and facebook connect will give us bigger advantage. It gives us a large internet users we could target. Drupal the platform used by many communities by default supports OpenId at core. And its not difficult to use it on the wordpress and Joomla. Facebook connect is a simple API, the required modules exist for drupal to implement this.

If the user still wants to cerate pw, he can still do it. (anyway he needs to setup a userid).

Challenges: Challenges of implementing SSO is not in technology but in user interface. Making it easy for the user to register or login is big challenge. Some of the widgets/present implementation can help us in this regard.

References:

• ID selector widget https://www.idselector.com/
• http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php
• http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
• http://www.oxfam.org/user/
• https://openid.org/home
• List of sites using FB Connect http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-connect-sites/
• List of sites using OpenId http://openiddirectory.com/

Image Credit: Idselector.

[thej] What has been the most challenging part of setting up and running the potluck?
[Birla] I guess the most challenging part has been in the mind. We do not come from a business family and the concept of doing business is alien to us. Initial decision to start restaurant was full of days of extreme self doubt to days of unlimited excitement and ideation. The next challenge was that we were venturing into a totally unknown area. We had no idea how to setup a restaurant kitchen, price food, get licenses and many more such things. We had to learn all this on job and obviously we did enough mistakes also.
In the operational phase with two start-ups in hand time is always a constraint. You might see me operating my billing machine in restaurant and also do my work on laptop ( including writing this ). Besides this Indian cooking is a very human dependent process and it is very difficult to maintain quality and consistency. Unless I monitor it closely, it can go out of hand at any point.

[thej] Why only North Indian? Why not Chinese or south Indian? or the best multi cusine?
[Birla] I guess the choice was between being master of none or master of one. I strongly feel that food is something you need to grow up with to understand the finer nuances. Our family is a multi cultural as my wife is a Tamilian born and brought up in Bihar and I am a UP guy living in Bangalore for past 15 years and our kids speak 4 languages – Hindi, English, Tamil, Kannada. I have been lucky enough to have home food from various parts of India on a regular basis. I also realize that no point in expecting a Delhi guy to understand how to make a good Bisi Bele Bhath and a Bangalore guy to make good Phulka. Unless you have grown up eating that type of food it is tough to get it right. My forte was North Indian food and I decided to stick to my strengths. But overall we are open to start a pure South Indian place but we will prefer to set that up in north.

[thej] Why the name potluck? Is there a story behind it?
[Birla] Oh Ya! There is a story. I used to organize monthly Potlucks in Amazon and they used to be real fun events. Almost everybody used to cook and bring stuff and we used to have a great time eating together. Lot of non cooks got inspired to learn cooking and I enjoyed the entire experience of organizing this. I even started awards in these Potlucks and we created innovative awards like Ma Ka Lal award for somebody who’s Mom cooked for the Potluck and a Desperate Housewife award for somebody who was over eager to feed other the stuff she cooked ( and ya I got beaten up by her after that ).

[thej] So what kind of preparation do you need to start with this venture as this was not your main strength (considering technology as ur main strength)?[Birla] I was totally new to this domain and doing the business is not something me or my family have a history of. We did pretty much all the mistakes which are possible in this domain. I guess the first step has to talk to people in this domain. Lot of restaurants do close and this is not an easy business. Lot of people have a wrong notion that any food business will run. They do not understand that food business just like any other business has a good probability of failure also.
I should not talk about my preparation as I was certainly not well prepared. I do advise few budding entrepreneurs now so that they can learn from my mistakes instead of learning it after doing them.

[thej] Anything you want to suggest to our readers who want to start a venture?
[Birla] My suggestion would be to first make up their mind. Starting ventures do require you to go through both good and bad times and you need to take both of them in your stride. Some of the assumptions entrepreneurs make do not span out as they might want it to be so you need to be flexible but then there are some areas where you need to go through those dark tunnels and you got to hold on to your beliefs and hard work.

Another important aspect is that you should be ready for learning as well as unlearning. Both might be needed equally to respond to the challenges you face as an entrepreneur especially when you venture into an unknown domain.