From Neurons to Electrons ...

Should you be "Doing It Yourself?"

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:58:00 +0000

"Do It Yourself (DIY)" is the most strongest urge that every entrepreneur faces several times in his career and it is one of the hardest ones to get past.

Necessity breeds the DIY attitude. When we started Wirkle we had a tendency to try and do everything ourselves. Going back to good old days we were doing all those things that were needed for a successful start of any good product development company. Varun and Sunil were coding as we did not had enough money to hire fulltime programmers. I was busy learning and writing patents as we did not had money to pay lawyers. Starting from "Studying Technologies" to "Developing Prototypes" to "Learning HTML for designing our website" to "Preparing Business Plans" to "Finding Leads" to "Pitching VC's" to "Finding Office Space" to "Depositing Phone Bills" to "Opening Bank Accounts" to "Managing Finances (almost upto a point of being a charted accountant ourselves) to atleast 50 other things that are hard to count were all that the three of us were doing that because at that point IT WAS NECESSARY.

Sooner than later, as we began to grow: these things started to grow on us and we had an exponential growth in the amount of things that needed to be accomplished by the 3 of us...so we hired programmers, system administrators, HR executives and hence the team began to grow. We are still involved with several day to day activities of the company and more often than not find us getting trapped into the DIY. If some bills are pending we are like okay we will do it...if a new project manager need comes we are like okay we will do it ... if an office space need to be found we are like okay we will do it, so on and so forth. Now some of these tasks are certainly unavoidable and we certainly have no alternative but to do it ourselves, yet there are zillions of them which we shouldn't be doing but we still always have a tendency to "DO IT OURSELVES"...

For growing to the next level this is one of the most important lesson that I have learnt ... Don't think that you can do it all...rather figure out the next move and outsource it to someone who can do it better (for CA can almost always better manage accounts and lawyers can write patents better)

Thoughts?

It's my wedding time

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:33:00 +0000

Well, well, well... I am getting married. Come along, I'm serving cake! And a lot of alcohol!!

PLEASE COME AND TRY TO STOP ME PLEASE !!! REALLY I'M NOT PLAYING

Do check out the invitation its really an awesome work done by my brother "Sonal" and myself.

And the website done by my would be wife "Ashi"

Click here to Download Invitation

Wirkle nominated as a finalist at Global Peer Awards 2007 at 3GSM

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:59:00 +0000

Yes! you heard it right. We have made it to the finals of Global Peer Awards 2007 being held at 3GSM Barcelona.

For those who don't know what they are here is a primer straight from the MoMo's website:
"Global Peer Awards 2007 is a competition open to the best-in-breed start-ups who have demonstrated exceptionally innovative mobile technologies."

A complete press release at our website: www.wirkle.com

All the best team Wirkle for the finals!

Social Networks: A marketplace for the future

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:14:00 +0000

The last 3 years have been all about social networking. The term became so significant that the entire world wide web had to be renamed to "Web2.0", primarily to depict the emergence of social networks.

Brief fact sheet of social networks

Friendster is widely known to have pioneered the phenomenon, but it was mastered first by MySpace, the site that grew to 100+ million users in some 2.5 years. In a matter of months the site was acquired for $650 million, which everyone in the current setting looks as one of the smartest bargains. And who wouldn't, when a much newer website YouTube which primarily leveraged the MySpace phenomenon to warrant a $1.6 billion acquisition by Google.

Orkut, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace are a few popular social networks geared towards youngsters where several million users interact with each other almost daily. Similarly LinkedIn and Ryze are extremely popular for professional networking.

We at Wirkle have a mobile social network LinkNSurf focused around sharing mobile content with your network.

Why do we need social networks?

10 odd reasons according to me:

- Meet new people
- Find long lost friends
- Organize our contacts and easily communicate with people
- A past time hobby
- Find leads for our business
- Find Jobs
- Find answers from a expert group of people willing to answer our queries
- Discover new entertainment like music, videos, etc.
- Create our online/mobile identity (An open diary of sorts or better its like your real estate which you keep on decorating with the stuff you like)
- Just because everyone else in the damn world is doing it ("If you are not on MySpace you don't exist" phenomenon)

Now where is the money? (or rather who should be making the money)

Web 1.0 approach towards this: "I am MySpace. My site has 100 million users. All the advertisers will advertise on my site, I make all the moolah. Period."

Web X.0 approach towards this: "I am MySpace. My site has 100 million users. I have the largest shopping mall on the planet. I allow people to build and promote their shops in my shopping mall and enable them to make money from my site (of course in turn I make money by charging them for the transactions that happen)"

Let me elaborate a little more on my analogy:

Look at a typical shopping mall today, it has dozens of shops (some more popular than others). These shops are not inherently different from one another, in essence everyone has one objective "Make themselves more and more popular, sell more and more stuff and pay rent/profit share to the mall owner)". Now even malls can be specific e.g. GoldSouk (focused just around selling gold) or Generic e.g. (One's that should have a Movie theater, Book bazaar and Nike store at a minimum). At max even the biggest mall would have provision to accommodate only a few hundred shops.

Now think a social network like "MySpace" or "LinkedIn" or "LinkNSurf". Could these be the biggest digital marketplace of all times? You host your stores to
- Sell your videos (think movie theaters). Again some stores are more popular than others so maybe the CNN hosting videos is popular than your user generated one but you can make a lot of money by posting a cool user generated video
- Give expert answers (think consultants), so you as a wireless expert can answer people's queries and get paid for it.
- Resell popular music, videos, art, furniture and what not (think Best Buy). The more popular your profile is the more people visit your store and buy more.
- Even Google Ads on your profile should pay you cos you are making more money for the social network than a person who barely opens his account.

This is just a small food for thought, maybe there are a dozen different possibilities of how creatively you can utilize your profile(a.k.a shops) to sell stuff like e-cards, ringtones, class notes, etc... the possibilities are endless and the proposition is simple "You make money and hence your hosting social network makes money"

So what do you think, by catering to the long tail of people ready to sell stuff will social network be the biggest marketplace (or in a more polished language the mother of all marketplaces) ever known to us?

Mark your calendars: MoMoDelhi is back in town - Jan 20th

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 13:20:00 +0000

To all the mobile enthusiasts in and around NCR, please mark your calendars for the next Mobile Monday event on Jan 20th at Impetus, Noida.

Venue: Impetus Infotech Pvt Ltd,
D-27, Sector-59, Noida.
Phone: +91-120-4363300

If you plan on attending please register here

Thanks to our sponsors: Impetus for providing the venue and One97 communications for sponsoring this event.

So what's the big fuss about Indian Telecom Space?: Hutchison Essar Bid

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 08:44:00 +0000

"The battle over Hutchison Essar has emerged as the largest corporate takeover battle in Indian history. What is today the fourth-largest mobile provider in India will, overnight, become one of the largest firms in Asia should it fetch the expected valuation of $16 billion to $20 billion." (Source: International Herald Tribune)

In a country dominated by the missed call syndrome (India probably holds a record for the maximum number of missed calls in the world), what is it that is driving the Vodafone's, Ambani's, Hinduja's, Essar's of the world backed by big private equity firms like Blackstone, Texas Pacific, Citibank, Morgan Stanley etc. (rumors for bidders also include Verizon Wireless in the United States and NTT DoCoMo of Japan) for taking over not the first, not the second but the fourth largest mobile telecom operator in India at a valuation of anywhere between $16-$29 billion?

While the ARPU for the Indian consumer stands at around a meager $9/month as against close to $45-50/month for the operators in the US or Western Europe. The average price per call on the Hutchison network is close to 2 cents a minute as compared to over 40 cents on NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Even Sunil Mittal of Airtel the Indian telecom giant in a interview with business standard quotes "`Hutch-Essar buyout is too expensive`". With such facts at hand it doesn't seem a profitable business to be in at the first glance.

So why is at that everyone in the world seem to be hoarding to take over the Indian telecom space?

A: While India lacks in the ARPU, it makes up for it with volume and the highest growth rate in the world.

International Herald Tribune has an interesting comparison between Vodafone and Hutch:

At first glance, Vodafone seems the more enviable enterprise. Vodafone reported 16.3 million subscribers against Hutch's 15.4 million in the first quarter of 2006, and it generated £1.2 billion, or $2.3 billion, in revenue to Hutch's $436 million, according to Wireless Intelligence.

It took Hutch four customers to make as much money as Vodafone earned on one.

But for Vodafone, and for mobile providers throughout the West, the future looks ever bleaker. Over the one- year period through March, 2006, Vodafone U.K. signed up 1 million new customers, as Hutch added 7.6 million. And even with its pared-down prices, the Indian company has been running a pre-tax operating profit margin of 34 percent, just higher than Vodafone's 32 percent.

B: Mobile probably is the only potential medium to bring broadband (and hence long term money) to a potential population of over 1.1 billion

Broadband over mobile (3G) will play a significant role in Indian scenario. Since it is impossible to deliver broadband through copper or fibre everywhere in India especially the rural segment, 3G will help deliver these services. Even the most rural parts of India will have people seeking basic information services such as farmers looking for the market prices of grains or fisherman for the weather data; mobile will become the default channel for the same.

C: Potential billion+ customers

Mobile probably is the only medium with the potential to reach over a billion people and hence brings in the most lucrative proposition for advertisers. Targeting the right segment of people on the basis of location, household income, spending power could never have been easier.

Not only these mobiles in a Indian scenario opens the door to a number of visible possibilities such as mCommerce, Microbanking, etc. (and several which we cannot foresee at this stage), each of which would be a topic for independent discussion which I will try to write out later.

Startups and India

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 04:32:00 +0000

This came up while discussing this with my friends..

"Living in India is lot like working in a startup!"

Interesting point if you come to think of it.

While I was in the US everything was so developed, all the process were very organized. You woke up in the morning and you knew you won't have to worry about hot water... Get into your car and thanks to mapquest you can almost always knew how much time its going to take you in going from one place to another. Even while driving you don't have to think and you can simply assume an Autopilot mode because everyone else will just follow their lanes and won't be of any trouble to you as such.

On the other hand, in India you are still on the defining stage of all these processes. The infrastructure is being setup so a hot water bath cannot be guaranteed unless you wake up a little early and switch on your geysers :) ... Highways (a.k.a Freeways) and metros are being built so it might take you anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to travel between the same places. And never dare to take a AutoPilot because the traffic rules are still under development. Everyone must be wondering why is it still a fun to live in India? Well, its pretty much similar to the fun you get while working in a startup environment.

US according to me is more like a corporate blue chip company where everything is almost exactly the way it should be. Nice infrastructure, well defined best practices, planned processes for everything..things that symbolizes a blue chip also represents America.

Today's India is more like a startup where every process is still under development. Developing processes, not the best of offices to work in, highly spirited team, a vision to change the world, visible growth and changes around you... things characteristic about any good startup represents India.

The phenomenal rate of around 10% at which our GDP is growing will probably make India as one of the richest nations in the world in the coming 30 years. With an economy of some $700 billion today, India is expected to scale to around $40 trillion during this time. Everything is under development, everywhere you go things are changing for good. New bridges are being built, new airlines are making way, new business models are being established. Now who wouldn't want to be a part of such change?

Microfinancing early stage startups

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:43:00 +0000

Rajesh Jain has a very interesting idea about a stock exchange for early stage companies.

Being an entrepreneur myself I couldn't agree more with the need for investors willing to invest in early stage companies. Micro financing the startups will not only dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for starting up a company fostering more and more innovation but will also bring self confidence to people making them more capable of taking risks. Some of the things that come to my mind:

- Investors should be aware that startups take a comparatively longer time to bring in return on their investments so patience is the key here. Instead of worrying about the short term quarterly profits they need to stay with the team.

- I hate to say this but the fact is "Startups have higher failure rates", thus, anyone investing should be very well aware that its a high risk --> high gain game.

- I would also propose the need such investors to play as mentors/advisor's for the startups they have invested in.. depending on their expertise in the domain. This will keep them more involved with the companies and probably give them a better handle on their investment, something that is not possible while investing in the blue chips. However, the final decision making should always be in the hands of the startup's management team lest small investors might bring in more trouble than good.

Any other thoughts?

TiE Delhi: Working with your Core Incompetence?

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 05:34:00 +0000

I was at a TiE workshop at India Corporate Center, Delhi on Saturday with Varun: "Being an Effective CEO: How to work with your Core Incompetence?" by Dr. Prasad Kaipa. Prasad did an excellent presentation and brought across with a very valid point that "Your most treasured strength is what becomes your biggest weakness and hinders you from getting to the next level." I was only partially at agreement with him when I had left the conference but as I continued thinking I started getting more and more inclined towards this point of view.

Some of the things that I had thought:

- Family system in India: We in India have strong family ties, something which most of us consider to be our biggest strength that supports and ensures success in our lives but after a point the same thing affects our ability to take risks. I personally have been really lucky on that front and I have always found motivation from my parents whether things have been good or bad at Wirkle. That though is not usually the case and most people even fear the risk of say joining a startup.

My colleague Sunil had written this a few months back in his post "Is joining startup really a Risk?"
Sunil wrote:

I remember once I was talking to this American lady in front of me, standing at the luggage check in queue at the IGI Airport. She was I guess a teacher and a painter by profession. She said you Indians are a lot lucky, you have such a strong family background especially financial stability provided by family networks. There in America, once you are 18 you are independent and you have to think all by yourself. She told me about an Indian guy in America whose mother had come to US and used to prepare all meals, bedding etc. for the guy, while the guy studied hard for his exams. Americans, she said are a lot insecure.

My response was, although Indians have strong family traditions but the same traditions make them less matured and mentally weaker. My personal belief is people in US or Europe are mentally more stronger than Indians and take more risks. On the contrary, the strong family background should have made Indians taking more risks! It might be I am just looking at a small spectrum of people, but that's what I got when talking to engineers in my last 1 year.

- Education: I think education provides us with a cushion and ensures that we will be able to earn well in our lives ahead but the very same thing may bring in a sense of undue security making you less susceptible to take any risks. Why is that most of the Harvard, MIT graduates are happy working for $200-$500K/year while some dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, etc. have been able to rise much higher?

- Flexibility: Lot of companies have a flexible vision and they take a path that allows them to adapt to the market. We at Wirkle do that, Yahoo does that, Microsoft does that..think of any company and most of them fall into this category. If a company is flexible then their vision/goal keeps on changing and you have to do a whole lot of new learning (bigger the learning curve bigger the time to actually perform) to succeed in the new marketplace. But again that doesn't mean you have to inflexible (Had Microsoft learnt that earlier there wouldn't have been a Google today)

In my opinion my core strength is to build strong relationships with people and continue those relationships. I have several people I know and always like to really spend time with them. Yet, this becomes my incompetence because when you know too many people you have only so much time to give to everyone (shrink it a whole lot if you work in a startup ,thus, leaving most of them complaining.

So what is your "Core Competence" and how does at times it becomes your "Core Incompetence?"

Mobile: Potential to revolutionize advertising?

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 13:39:00 +0000

In its very fundamental terms ideal advertising is about giving the person what he wants, when he wants. Google made billions of dollars by make a leap towards this, offering people what they were searching for. Something seemingly as simple as narrowing whom to target upturned the whole online advertising marketplace and allowed Google to something that is producing several billion dollar annually and is growing at an even phenomenal pace. But lets consider for a second, "How big is the online marketplace as compared to the physical marketplace?" Without even thinking twice anyone could come up and say "really small". How is any company supposed to upturn this industry by allowing advertisers to give physical shoppers what they want, when they want? The only answer I can think of is some set of services accessible via a mobile phone.

Mobile is the only device that allows a person to always stay connected with the networked world all the time, everywhere. In other words, it is the only device with a potential to connect the physical world to the smart virtual world full of tons of information, relevant advertisements and what not. Being a doorway to access information also makes it the doorway for advertisers to offer relevant adverts to potential customers in a purely physical setting. For instance, my friend Lisa sitting in her car and looking for a "Gas station", can simply search for that using her mobile phone and can be pushed relevant advertisements such as from shell offering her a discount of 5%, if she takes the effort to drive an extra mile to get his/her tank refilled from their Gas station on Broadway. She reaches the station snaps enters her discount code and gets the promised discount, additionally, she also gets 100 points for the purchase and is now a part of the Shells customer loyalty program. Lets consider another example: I enter best buy planning to buy a TV, my phone can start pushing me a comparative specifications for each TV set as I pass them and offer special adverts making me wanna buy one particular TV set vs. the other. Furthermore if I want to do compare amongst the 5 sets of TV I like, I can simply give a print command and can visit the customer service counter to collect a table showing the feature set comparison of those (very similar to what I can do on Amazon today). Extending this example slightly further, consider the possibility of my phone being like a wearable internet which offers me the relevant services wherever I go, for instance in this case an application can automatically start showing me the details of deals available in the store when I enter and stops showing that as soon as I leave the store.

There are hundreds of possibilities for entrepreneurs to take this challenge and make something that is several times more stronger than what Google did to the online advertising world. The biggest challenge in my opinion is to make such compelling applications usable on this small device such that it doesn't look like a spam but a service. Any takers?

My First Post (Previous entries at lomesh.blogspot.com)

noreply@blogger.com (Lomesh Dutta) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 05:35:00 +0000

10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1..Launched