Indimingle

I got a message from somebody I knew from boarding school in Switzerland (good times!) on Facebook.  I don’t use Facebook that much.  Come to think of it - I don’t use ANY social network that often.  I say the word “use” because I can’t think of a better way to describe the activity.  “play” and “browse” are other words that interchange with “use” but at the end of the day - it’s just “use”.

While on Facebook, I noticed a few things that I think are reasons why it is so wildly successful:

[1] Things are so intuitive - from how to add a friend to how to search for them; things just make sense.

[2] The thing feels so polished - yet so “hacked together”.  They are using PHP and they don’t care about hiding it (like a whole bunch of other sites that feel some kind of envy from the Ruby-on-Rails crowd that they have to keep the extension from showing in browser URLs).  They don’t mind having simple querystring’ed URLs to fetch data because it just works. 

[3] Things feel so open - yet so closed.  If you’re friends with somebody on Facebook, you get a magnifying glass into their profile.  However, if you don’t know them - you’ve got to earn your way in.  That makes the experience much more intimate than voyeuristic (which is what Myspace is all about).

Okay so that’s just 3 things above but I believe they are worth mentioning - so many sites out there OVER-engineer products and services when, at the end of the day, it all doesn’t matter!  Case in point: Myspace works so well because it’s so stupid and simple.  Who knew people would learn HTML to snazzy up their profile pages?  Myspace themselves didn’t after admitting the HTML “feature” was an accident. 

I’m not a platform zealot - but I really wonder about the hoopla with Ruby-on-Rails. I read the “Agile Web Development” book and respect the folks behind Ruby/Rails but I think they came out to be VERY lucky to surf the Web 2.0 wave and essentially become “synonymous” with this period. Granted they preach a MVC-oriented approach to web application development and that while the RoR following grew, PHP didn’t encourage MVC practices through any particular framework - it’s not the case anymore with new frameworks like phpmvc, symfony, CakePHP, Zend, and CodeIgniter available today (all with their loyal followings).

The folks at Twitter recently expressed their difficulties in scaling with RoR - check this and this. They faced moderate backlash from the RoR development community and I consider that to be fairly childish and immature. In general,most members of the community regard the language/platform as the best thing since sliced bread!

The fact is: RoR is relatively new and not enough applications that have grown to the level as Twitter have been built on it to regard it as “enterprise-friendly” - yet. PHP on the other hand - however sloppy it has been in the past - has slowly built itself into a super fast, rich, scalable, integration-friendly language that has a large developer following but not as “connected” to the Web 2.0 phenomenon we’re facing today.

Call me a PHP zealot to balance the playing field out but I think both Ruby-on-Rails and PHP have their boons and brays. However, the long of the short is: RoR is young, sexy, standardized and lucky to be married to Web 2.0 while PHP extendable, flexible, and with a bit more freedom.  With Ruby - Rails is the framework you use.  With PHP, you’ve got a handful to choose from all backed by their own development communities. 

We’re seeing the same thing happen with Javascript frameworks (Prototype, Dojo, jQuery, YUI, etc) and with platforms too (OpenLazlo, Apollo, Etelos, and the soon-to-be-launched BungeeLabs). 

Munjal Shah’s startup is pulling out of Bangalore.

Who is Munjal Shah?  He started Andale during the first dot-com boom and sold the company to eBay for a handsome profit.  Then, he came back and started Riya/Like.com which he operates today.  He used to have between thirty and forty employees working in their Bangalore/Bengalooru office before pulling out a last week it seems.

It was a courageous decision on his part to close down the Indian office and even more so to blog about it.  If you look at the comments after his post, you’ll notice he’s facing a lot of backlash (primarily from Indian folks).  There’s a lot of merit to his argument as well as those presented in the comments.  Allow me to express my view:

* India is not Bangalore - there is talent in other parts of India that can be recruited.  Not everybody wants to move to Bangalore instead turning to their own regional cultural values as a reason to stay put wherever they were born/raised.  Like.com is a RESEARCH-oriented company and as a result it required top-notch talent working on cutting-edge stuff.  However, there are many startups involved in products/services that are not as groundbreaking (technologically speaking) that can be built from above-average programmers who have the battery of skills that you would find in a candidate in the US. The US is not Silicon Valley but there are hotbeds of talent in other pockets - Austin, North Carolina, the entire North EAST!

From an infrastructure perspective, there are other parts of India that have relatively better broadband connections, power and roads.  My company is in Kolkata, India where we rarely have power outages and we’ve beefed up our internet connection with multiple wireless routers each serving 512kbps.

* If you are going to use India as a source for Innovation - expect to pay because the true innovators are in such short supply that the price on the heads are higher.  I commend Munjal’s efforts in trying to squeeze out innovation in India.  Sad to report but true never-the-less is that most of the “stuff” built in India is “me-too” quality - rarely ground-breaking, mostly imitative in nature.  That’s not to say this value is rotten or anything but there’s a price to pay (literally) for wanting to build innovative “things”.  The outcome of Munjah’s startup is a testament to the idea that America is driven by a knowledge economy.

* It IS relatively more expensive than before to outsource to India contrary to western belief.  Getting good quality stuff done is not $5/hour any more.  Another way to put this: You are not going to get 80% savings from outsourcing to India; it’s more like 40 to 50%.  I’ll touch up on this a little bit more in a later post.

What we learn from this is:

* India needs to produce more innovators in general; also some self starters; When innovators and self-starters are in such low supply, those who ARE can and will demand high salaries (rightfully so).  True you cannot just breed innovators - but that’s not to say that the education system must inspire young people to go out there and build stuff because they want to and because they enjoy it.  Instead, most Indian workers are motivated by where the money is at: Learn Java because I hear I’ll get a great job with this.  Get a CCNA certificate because it’ll boost my career by 5K.  There’s no harm in wanting to enhance your career prospects - but it’s much more than getting a vocational degree!  (We’re seeing a slowdown in brain-drain in India nowadays but it’s still not necessary good enough when you think of how many graduates are entering the workforce every year.)

* Any company that is really interested in an offshore development center should *really* think about setting up shop somewhere else other than Bangalore; It’s a catch 22 situation since Bangalore is where all the innovators go (partially because that’s where the action is) but also because it draws the highest salary.  The myth is that you need the smartest engineers - I suspect that because Bangalore is where they can be found, companies flock there (demand) and the few who are real innovators (short supply) flock there too.  The “smarter” companies will give up the dreams of 80% cost savings from shear salary savings, invest some of this in a Project Manager dude who writes brain-dead specs all day and “translates” them for the Indian team, and still see significant savings.

I could go on and on - but I have a habit of running off-course so please forgive me if you feel that way after reading this!

Gosh, I never thought I would say this but...BSNL Dataone is pretty amazing stuff!  (Well, don’t include the fact that thunderstorms cause it to go out.)

I’m not trying to be sarcastic here though.  I really mean it.  Here’s my reasoning:

* It is the ONLY ISP providing broadband to our area in Kolkata - Rajarhat, New Town.  It does this by having a TRUE DSL set up.  If you have a BSNL phone line, you can get broadband.  Tata Indicom on the other hand is one lazy provider out there scratching their...*ahem*...head.
* They REACT.  Yesterday we had a thunderstorm - a few lightning bolts here and there and *poof* - our Internet is gone and our phone line dead.  Granted there is no 24x7 customer service line, I actually don’t CARE about that.  Why?  Because if they can’t really do anything about my problem when I call them, then they shouldn’t waste my time.  Tata Indicom has “babysitters” waiting at 2am to basically tell customers that the problem is probably at the customer’s end and if it’s not, then they should wait until morning anyhow since all the real technicians work then.  In BSNL’s case, calling in the morning put us in touch with a real human who told us there was a problem and they were fixing it and that we should call him at his office again if we needed any more updates.  (This is important because *most* of the time, people keep pushing you to another division because they don’t want to deal with you. It’s not just India - it’s just Customer Service in general.)

BSNL declared 2007 the year of broadband - and I sincerely hope they push for more than just a year.  Long live the Internet!

I’ve never seen any value in tag clouds - big fonts, small fonts don’t make a difference and sometimes the small ones are so tiny, they are unreadable.  The large “tags” just indicate that it’s been talked about more than other ones.  Bear in mind that the concept of “tags” is great and helps keep things organized.  Tag clouds don’t make any sense.

I just read this post from The Indian Economy Blog and got inspired to right my own piece on the same subject.

Reading a comment on the post, I discovered that Tata Indicom has launched their 512kbps unlimited option for just INR 1850 a month (in our neck of the woods at least). 

So - what bothers me is not necessarily download speeds but consistency in the delivery of service.  Connections must go out for a few minutes a day at the very least.  If you’re running a download or upload and the connection breaks, you could get royally frustrated with an incomplete transfer when you walk in the office the next morning.  I haven’t come across one provider with reliable service (including Reliance - pun intended).  Thinking about this in greater detail, I believe the reason for this is how connections are set up.  You have a sea of snaky cables looping and swooping from building to building until it terminates outside your window to a no-name brand switch hanging upside down from the ceiling distributing Internet to not just your computer but to a handful of others in the house next door and perhaps across the street.  Argh.

What is interesting is one point on why bandwidth is considered so expensive in India: most of the content is coming from the US because the language Indians reading is English!  Colonization by the British got Indians speaking English as a second language and then the unintended side effect of this was that Americans could outsourced customer support/service to India.  The cascading effect of this: English-literate Indians imbibing content from websites located on servers in the US creating a connectivity bottleneck. 

This means: even if bandwidth options were increased, that would choke the cables connecting India to the US (where so many datacenters operate). 

I’m thankful always-on broadband exists at all - there’s just a long way to go for it to rival the options in other countries.  I recently moved to a developing part of Kolkata called Rajarhat/New Town and reside in a high-rise building.  Rajarhat is touted as the Next Big Thing in Kolkata with IBM already setting up shop in a DLF technology park next door to my building.  The area has planned water, sewer, electricity, foliage (trees and shrubs), and mass transit.  But there is absolutely no planned broadband. It’s just not important enough. 

I’m using an Airtel GPRS connection - tethering a Nokia cellphone my laptop getting blazing connectivity at 5Kbps; that is, if the domain resolves in the first place.

Salon.com is like an Internet form of Reader’s Digest.  Good material (sometimes very opinionated and liberal in nature) to read when you have a few minutes.  From this, I stumbled onto an article by Andrew Leonard in his How The World Works series referencing a speech given by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen at the NASSCOM 2007 India Leadership Forum in Mumbai on 7 February 2007. 

The transcript of his Keynote Address can be found here and is well worth the read for any entrepreneur (or any IT professional for that matter).  Heck: every Indian should read it!

My additions to what he so eloquently describes include:

* Indian IT is getting spoiled and arrogant.  Knowing English has been the KEY strength and other countries are catching up.  China, Russia, Romania, Estonia and other nations are gearing up their workforce to communicate with English clientele.  And competition (as Sen says in Chapter 4 of his Address) will indefinitely become more fierce.

* The average IT worker in India is extremely self-deluged and is primarily focused on earning more for himself and his family.  That’s not a bad thing per se since everyone is entitled to personal betterment based on experience and growth.  However, frequent change from one employer to another to inflate salaries is going to eventually hurt when you pair with my first point. 

While on the subject of Obligation of the IT industry as a whole, it’s Entrepreneurship Week in India (February 24 to March 3)! 

I’m reading about JetBlue’s recent problems with customer satisfaction. Think: JetBlue is to America as Kingfisher is to India

Points:

* For a long time, PayPal had just email-based customer service with a 48 hour turnaround time.

* JetBlue was a posterchild for the “new airline” - it looked like they could do no wrong.  What they ended up doing was spoiling customers with the notion that there WAS a better way to fly.  My completely amateur take is that it’s a bout of growing pains they’ll have to handle and play more defensively/prudently. 

* What do you take away from this story other than the hallmark rule: underpromise and overdeliver?  Ultimately, the auxiliary principle of delivering on the basis of consistency even through hypergrowth periods.  We didn’t think Microsoft could drop the ball but they did/are.  Most recently, Google is doing the same. 

I apologize for this post having virtually nothing to do with India - but I think we can all learn from cases like this. 

Bandwidth is expensive in India.  A corollary: Bandwidth in India is nowhere close to that of the US. (The US is nowhere close to that of Japan but, to be honest, that really doesn’t matter since it’s pretty fast in both regions.) I’m surprised that more wireless routers aren’t used in office environments.  Our company “optimizes” bandwidth usage using WiFi and here’s how.

We have three Tata Indicom lines delivering 256kbps each.  One is connected directly to our VoIP line so we can make US calls without having to spend a bundle.  We could add another VoIP line to this connection and it’d still be alright for phone conversations. 

The other two are connected to two wireless routers and one access point.  Each of our desktops are outfitted with a 802.11b (or higher) wireless adapter.  If one line is “out” for any reason or the bandwidth is being choked by another user transferring data (such as a large PSD file to a client’s FTP server), another user on that line can jus switch networks by changing his SSID.  Voila just like that!

For every connection you order, hook it up to a wireless router and you can criss-cross your connections and deliver bandwidth on demand!  (We’re hooking up Reliance Broadband in a few weeks for redundancy.)

The other way to do it (that we haven’t yet implemented but are thinking about) is to use NIC teaming to deliver one large “pipe” to your users so that everybody is on the same LAN (and possibly the same network domain).  In this case, you would have all ISP connections terminating on the same machine running some flavor of Linux that supports NIC teaming and then route the connection to an access point and all machines connect to the same access point.  In this case, the burstable bandwidth is still the highest on one connection but it’s distributed by your Linux-powered LAN server.

Wow - the geek in me speaks!

Wow - today I interviewed about five candidates for a BPO “voice process” position tailored for a local client and it was a trip!  The enthusiasm and confidence I observed was amazing and refreshing.  I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for web programming/designing and systems administrator positions and it was difficult to determine interest levels because most were drab in their responses and just plain lacked enthusiasm. 

It seems that all that interaction with clients on the telephone (both in-bound and out-bound) caused these people to form thick skin and generally feel confident about being able to take on any task.  (It’s true that some of this confidence was plastic and shallow but, heck!, that’s the kind of spirit we need sometimes!)

I consider myself to be quite the evangelist when running my little company and I could definitely feel the connection with some of these folks.  Anyhow, maybe I’m just generally on a high. 

As most of the Internet is reporting, the iPhone was presented at this year’s MacWorld by Steve Jobs.

My take?  Nice looking machinery.  For some reason, I think that an iPhone launch in India would be pretty successful because phones are a social statement by Indians.  It’s not uncommon to see a BPO worker roaming around with a cellphone two to three times their monthly salary (somewhere in the range of INR 15,000 to 22,000).  Seeing that the iPhone is speculatively priced at about $500, that’s just on the higher edge and I presume many would cough up the extra few grand to get their hands on one of these puppies. 

I’m happy with my Blackberry 7290.

I posted the following as a comment on a blog entry by Amit Ranjan on Webyantra.net.  (I didn’t proofread for spelling mistakes but caught them here - stoopid me.)

I was debating whether or not to attend (from Kolkata) but here’s my problem.  It’s just not organized enough and it’s jut too suspenseful (I say this sarcastically) to want to actually spend the money and go.

That may seem nominal or a bundle but either way, the question is: Is the money worth it?  I could be the guinea pig but I choose not to be.  I apologize for the crassness.

Dharmesh Shah who writes the OnStartups.com web log (a fantastic one in my opinion) did a piece on why there are not more Products startups in India and why most companies stick to Services.  Read it here.

Have a look if you haven’t already.

Needless to say, this has little to do with India but I thought I would mention that the Techcrunch Forums (called CrunchForums) is up at http://forums.techcrunch.com. 

TechCrunch is a web blog that tracks technology startups and entrepreneurship primarily of the Web 2.0 flavor.  I’ve been waiting for an online discussion board active with entrepreneurs and technologists and am glad this community finally exists. 

C|Net has a story on Google’s new offices in New York. 

At our company we have a fairly lax working environment - non-restrictive smoke breaks, lunch at the hour you please, and a few other facilities we’re brainstorming up.  What’s the idea behind this strategy and why is it so important?

The thought is - you can’t rush creativity and it takes a lot of energy for workers to get “in the zone” with a productive mindset.  Once focused concentration is achieved with channeled activation energy, it’s easy for it to be broken.  Traditional companies would exclaim that the idea behind having standard cubicles and consistent working hours is precisely to achieve this kind of concentration.  However, if you think about your own behavior as a human and what it takes for you to do something productive - chances are, it’s when you are most comfortable.  (I’m blogging this entry with my laptop propped up on a pillow on a bed *surprise surprise*.)

Chances are that companies like Google and participants in the days of Web 1.0 had to find a way to lure top talent from other companies and couldn’t do so without having “perks” that were wild and wacky enough that workers would be willing to leave posh, high-paying jobs for another at a company with no proven-business model operating out of an executive suite in suburban US.  The end-result - a new standard of work environments. 

In India - this trend is young and needs to speed up. Why hasn’t it caught on?

My theory is: Companies can’t measure “productivity output” when such relaxed standards are in place (to a point where you can even call them standards at all).  And most companies are so concerned about measuring these kinds of statistics - especially when you have droves of BPO workers or armies of consultants and coders at an organization.  Further to this, it seems that the average tech worker also doesn’t necessarily mind (and in some cases endorses) restrictive, white-collar, punctuality-driven workplaces.  They feel like they are working a real company.  It’s easy to mistake all the perks that new generation BPO providers are offering to employees - on-site gyms, clubs, and restaurants are commonly being found.  The reason though is primarily to serve as a competitive edge over another employer down the street with a similar offering. (Ah, the forces of free-markets!)

That’s not to say that things aren’t changing at all of course.  I’ve already had an opportunity to meet a few talented individuals running innovative startups in India and while off-beat working environments are not necessarily what are preached - the kind of people they are looking for would endorse such an environment.