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?

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.

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?

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.

1. You should have a burning desire to start something on your own. Of a kind where you really don’t care about the outcome, but be prepared to go into it, just because that’s the life choice you want to have work wise. And thinking ahead, you are okay with the outcome of ‘tried and failed’ rather than ‘entertained the desire and not tried’. So at a very basic level, if you are mentally geared up with these kind of thoughts and preparedness, then you will automatically know and jump into it.
2. Reading up a lot on lot of Entrepreneur/Tech blogs helps a lot to attain a level of mental preparedness. The main thing it helps you with is, by contributing towards keeping you motivated and energized. Also it helps you especially on your downs. As so many others have said, entrepreneurship indeed is a roller coaster journey. So if you really absorb the experience shared by the ‘have been there and done that’ kinds, you can really do a lot of things in the right way.
   Since this point is about reading, its best to leave you with some good pointers to some people whom we like to read. To name a few: Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Marc Andreessen, Derek Sivers and last but not the least in any way, Dharmesh Shah. All of these guys have three things in common:
   1. They can code (emphasis on can)
   2. have all started companies and succeeded and
   3. also have decided to share their experiences.
3. We can write a lot of other points if we try to. But since the earlier point led us to point you to these wonderful people who have really captured a lot, which we will end up repeating, so we suggest you do read up what these gentlemen have written.
4. But finally, remember to also limit (and adapt) the extent to you want to follow these great guys. Because somethings you should do which you really believe in, irrespective of what anyone says for that matter. Remember you have decided to be an Entrepreneur! :)

Note: This series is in no way related to my work at Infosys

[thej]As of today there are quite a few players in this field from Google to mapmyindia. How do you place yourself?
[sud] Yes we looked at those players before we started. We felt it is possible to build a good user base nevertheless.

[thej]Why SMS? Do you think sms will still be big as data is becoming cheap?
[sud] Oh we just chose SMS as our first offering. User uptake proved it was a good choice. Other channels are in the lab now.

[thej]Future plans?
[sud] Help people on the move better and better. Expand to other cities.


[thej]I know you use AWS, what other technologies you use?
[sud] We initially thought we will reuse existing content, technologies and frameworks. But in the end we figured we had to create most ourselves. Majority of the systems are custom software using c++ on linux. There is also Java, perl, etc.

[thej]What blog and books do you suggest for others?
[sud]Others, who? Other startups? Then www.paulgraham.com anyday :-)

Note 1: BTW they have pretty decent size of 15 now are looking for great web developers. Dont forget to send your resume.

Note 2: OnZe expands to One and Zero. This is the name they came up with when they were trying to find a neutral tech name.

Note 3: As of now LatLong works in Bangalore and Chennai. They are working to add more cities.

I personally know many but there could be many more, who would have left Infy before I joined Infosys. So I need your help to get in touch with them. Help and expect a great Outfoscion every week starting this monday.

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